3 ms·

Don’t conflate “allows the owner of the means of production to extract the most surplus value” with “market efficiency”. This sort of shit has negative economi

Don’t conflate “allows the owner of the means of production to extract the most surplus value” with “market efficiency”. This sort of shit has negative economic and societal consequences. I’m sick to death of naive tech bros thinking that every other field is so easy that their sheltered intuition is enough to understand it.

Wolfenstein98k 3y ago
Price discrimination is efficient. You don't have to like it, but you can't claim it isn't. Your claim that wages being below someone else's is "societally harmful" requires some proof beyond your intuition. This is not a method of cutting all wages in the country, it is a method of directing wages to higher productivity workers. It only shifts relative amounts. Just as we expect a cleaner to be paid less than the software engineer whose cubicle is being cleaned, there is no "societal" objection to the 3x engineer being paid more than the 2x engineer.
- et-al 3y ago
  Following your example, we should make wages transparent. So that way the 3x engineers know they're being correctly compensated by management, right?
  - fn-mote 3y ago
    I can't tell if this is a sarcastic suggestion or not. This might be controversial in the private sector, but wage transparency is the norm in the public sector in my area of the world... and many people are employed in those positions.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  When it comes to splitting up surplus value in a transaction, being efficient for one party means being inefficient for the other party. So I absolutely can claim it's not efficient, by not implicitly favoring the employer over the employee. And we're not changing the number of transactions here with these wage calculations.
  - abigail95 3y ago
    > changing the number of transactions you absolutely are, that's the whole point of it being more efficient. the pie grows and everyone wins. you are also starting the story in the middle. there is no two parties haggling value. there is a market of providers and a market of sellers. Uber/Lyft/DiDi all compete for drivers by offering bids to drivers. Drivers pick the highest bid. What's the inefficiency here? the value from gig work and ride sharing, like nearly every single normal economic act is not fucking zero sum.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      If you manage to always offer drivers the minimum they will accept, you don't grow the pie, you just take more of it. > Uber/Lyft/DiDi all compete for drivers by offering bids to drivers. Drivers pick the highest bid. What's the inefficiency here? The inefficiency is when there aren't plentiful rides from multiple platforms, so the competition part goes away. > the value from gig work and ride sharing, like nearly every single normal economic act is not fucking zero sum. The value of the work isn't zero sum but the way the surplus is distributed is often zero sum. Though if a worker is aiming for a specific amount of profit, and you manage to cut their pay to get more hours out of them, it's not zero sum but the effect on the worker is even worse.
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
> I’m sick to death of naive tech bros thinking that every other field is so easy that their sheltered intuition is enough to understand it. There are two problems here: 1. People learn the simplest toy models in some subject area - here, the economics of perfect competition markets - and then apply the results of it to real world scenarios that don't even remotely satisfy the assumptions of the toy model. 2. The ethics in some subject area is almost always a separate theory from the mathematical theory. Introduction to economics assumes humans are utilitarian because it makes the maths easy. But then, people use the metrics derived from that "utilitarian" econ theory, and again apply it to the real world scenarios, not realizing the humans not utility maximizing agents. Hence, what is "right" or "just" can't be derived from the simple econ theories.
- abigail95 3y ago
  > Introduction to economics assumes humans are utilitarian explain who teaches this, explain why it is wrong, and explain the correct way to describe it. > not realizing the humans not utility then ubers algorithm will not work at all. and no pricing system would work either.
abigail95 3y ago
Explain the negative consequences of paying someone exactly their MPL? List negative economic outcomes in terms of consumer/producer welfare, deadweight loss, supply and demand.

Wolfenstein98k 3y ago

Price discrimination is efficient. You don't have to like it, but you can't claim it isn't. Your claim that wages being below someone else's is "societally harmful" requires some proof beyond your intuition. This is not a method of cutting all wages in the country, it is a method of directing wages to higher productivity workers. It only shifts relative amounts. Just as we expect a cleaner to be paid less than the software engineer whose cubicle is being cleaned, there is no "societal" objection to the 3x engineer being paid more than the 2x engineer.

et-al 3y ago
Following your example, we should make wages transparent. So that way the 3x engineers know they're being correctly compensated by management, right?
- fn-mote 3y ago
  I can't tell if this is a sarcastic suggestion or not. This might be controversial in the private sector, but wage transparency is the norm in the public sector in my area of the world... and many people are employed in those positions.
Dylan16807 3y ago
When it comes to splitting up surplus value in a transaction, being efficient for one party means being inefficient for the other party. So I absolutely can claim it's not efficient, by not implicitly favoring the employer over the employee. And we're not changing the number of transactions here with these wage calculations.
- abigail95 3y ago
  > changing the number of transactions you absolutely are, that's the whole point of it being more efficient. the pie grows and everyone wins. you are also starting the story in the middle. there is no two parties haggling value. there is a market of providers and a market of sellers. Uber/Lyft/DiDi all compete for drivers by offering bids to drivers. Drivers pick the highest bid. What's the inefficiency here? the value from gig work and ride sharing, like nearly every single normal economic act is not fucking zero sum.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    If you manage to always offer drivers the minimum they will accept, you don't grow the pie, you just take more of it. > Uber/Lyft/DiDi all compete for drivers by offering bids to drivers. Drivers pick the highest bid. What's the inefficiency here? The inefficiency is when there aren't plentiful rides from multiple platforms, so the competition part goes away. > the value from gig work and ride sharing, like nearly every single normal economic act is not fucking zero sum. The value of the work isn't zero sum but the way the surplus is distributed is often zero sum. Though if a worker is aiming for a specific amount of profit, and you manage to cut their pay to get more hours out of them, it's not zero sum but the effect on the worker is even worse.

abdullahkhalids 3y ago

> I’m sick to death of naive tech bros thinking that every other field is so easy that their sheltered intuition is enough to understand it. There are two problems here: 1. People learn the simplest toy models in some subject area - here, the economics of perfect competition markets - and then apply the results of it to real world scenarios that don't even remotely satisfy the assumptions of the toy model. 2. The ethics in some subject area is almost always a separate theory from the mathematical theory. Introduction to economics assumes humans are utilitarian because it makes the maths easy. But then, people use the metrics derived from that "utilitarian" econ theory, and again apply it to the real world scenarios, not realizing the humans not utility maximizing agents. Hence, what is "right" or "just" can't be derived from the simple econ theories.

abigail95 3y ago
> Introduction to economics assumes humans are utilitarian explain who teaches this, explain why it is wrong, and explain the correct way to describe it. > not realizing the humans not utility then ubers algorithm will not work at all. and no pricing system would work either.

abigail95 3y ago

Explain the negative consequences of paying someone exactly their MPL? List negative economic outcomes in terms of consumer/producer welfare, deadweight loss, supply and demand.