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The economy is supposed to be a pure meritocracy, where decision making authority is allocated to each person in proportion to the value they produce. Every dev
by dqpb 4y ago
The economy is supposed to be a pure meritocracy, where decision making authority is allocated to each person in proportion to the value they produce. Every deviation from this is parasitic to the system.
- vore 4y agoToo bad the "value they produce" isn't actually quantifiable, though.
- dqpb 4y agoI disagree, I think there are many tools we could use to quantify it. For example, Reinforcement Learning is primarily about quantifying value. Operations Research also has similar tools for estimating value. And of course, markets themselves estimate value, although a huge portion of our economy is not a market. For example, almost no businesses are internally run as a market.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> The economy is supposed to be a pure meritocracy “Supposed” by whom? > where decision making authority is allocated to each person in proportion to the value they produce Seems like a bad idea; if I create a lot of value, all of it for myself, I also get more power to make decisions for others?
- dqpb 4y ago> “Supposed” by whom? It’s fundamentally what a market is. It’s like me saying a sorting algorithm is supposed to produce a sorted set, and you saying ‘“Supposed” by whom?’
- dragonwriter 4y ago> It’s fundamentally what a market is? No, it's not. Fundamentally a market is the aggregate of individual actions to exchange goods at values that seem to make sense based on conditions at the moment of exchange. What you described is approximately a common aspirational view of what hypothetical ideal markets would achieve, not fundamentally “what a market is”. > It’s like me saying a sorting algorithm is supposed to produce a sorted set, and you saying ‘“Supposed” by whom?’ If a “sorted set” was not a well-defined, or even practically operationalizable concept, but merely a thing about which people had conflicting intuitions, and instead of an abstract ideal an “algorithm” was a class of real things that exist in the physical universe, and the ones that you named did not, in fact, produce anything that met most intuitions of what the might fit the ill-defined concept of a “sorted set”, your analogy would be spot on.
- gnulinux 4y agoClaims like this are in general not well-founded. There is no objective way to determine the value of a thing outside of the economy. If there were, and if it were meaningful such that $ value converges to the "real value" economy would be a trivial game. So, really what you propose cannot exist.
- dqpb 4y ago> There is no objective way to determine the value of a thing outside of the economy. Claims like this are in general not well-founded.