4 ms·

I'd argue for a third category where the new thing addresses a problem that the company themselves is making more problematic (e.g. TurboTax) or where "more eff

I'd argue for a third category where the new thing addresses a problem that the company themselves is making more problematic (e.g. TurboTax) or where "more efficiently" involves cases where costs to the company are exchanged for costs to society (e.g. petroleum companies, cambridge analytica). I think this category represents the majority of economic activity today, which is why I'm skeptical of markets being zero sum. The result is the same though: find was to get more of (1) and less of (2) and (3).

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
The third thing is just the second thing. TurboTax lobbying to avoid free tax filing is obviously rent-seeking. It might even be more accurate to call this category rent seeking through regulatory capture. Fossil fuels would have been trounced by nuclear except that they lobbied to require nuclear to internalize all of its costs (and then some) but not their own, extracting undue rents by handicapping the competition. The closest you get to a third category is Cambridge Analytica, in which case the third category would be criminal enterprises. But these rarely remain listed on the stock market; you won't find shares of the Guadalajara Cartel at your brokerage. It's the companies in the second category that do, because they're doing things that should be illegal but aren't.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I was going for extreme examples to make the point, but look at any modern advertiser: their products are used to target segments of society such that we can be encouraged to either turn against one another or to make some kind of decision which is bad for us and good for whoever is doing the advertising. The perspective you're describing doesn't seem to have a way to classify this activity as unhelpful without going so far as making it illegal. Without that ability, I don't see how we can ever expect the market's notion of value to find itself in line with society's values. The best we can hope for is a random walk within the bounds of "illegal".
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    There are only a finite number of possibilities here. If you're stuck with a machine you don't like that shows you harmful advertising because it has no viable competitors, the problem is with the law, because it's propping up that institution or otherwise failing to enforce anti-trust laws. If that machine exists, even though there are plenty of viable competitors that don't do that, and then you freely choose that one on purpose, it's not obvious that the company is doing anything wrong. You apparently like that kind of advertising. The exception would be for some kind of information asymmetry, like the advertiser is lying to you and you don't find out until it's too late. In which case we're back to needing a law, in that case against false advertising. Now I can tell why you're choosing this one, because it's a sticky one: What happens when they're lying about politics? We can't have the government enforcing a law against "lying" about political issues, because the very thing that makes them political is that people disagree and don't find the other side's evidence to be credible. We can't have whoever is in power at any given time censoring the opposition. The solution we use for this is to put the determination in the hands of the public. The marketplace of ideas. If someone is full of crap, you prove them wrong in front of everybody, and then they lose credibility. This isn't perfect but it works pretty well in the absence of the aforementioned anti-trust problem. Because then instead of a handful of megasites that people get siloed into and fed content like livestock, you'd have a million blogs that intersect like the web. There would be no walls between sites, no way to prevent someone you're trying to mislead from hearing from the other side just because you're in with the site's operators, because none of the sites would be big enough to exercise that kind of power when the average person is getting their information from hundreds of separate sources instead of only one or two. Sometimes companies have bad incentives. Those either get curbed by laws, or by free market competition, or... what's your alternative?
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      I agree that a marketplace of ideas is indeed the solution to the information asymmetry problem. I think we need to change the web so that nobody but the user has authority over which data is displayed in context with which other data such that platforms cannot prevent critical annotations from appearing next to content (or annotations that simply remove that content)... supposing the user has opted into those annotations. I'm working on such a protocol. As for the incentive problem... Imagine that I'm a grocer and I live in a place whose ground water is being poisoned by a nearby mining operation. The mining company employees are showing up in my grocery store and expecting that they can exchange their salaries for food. But it's not in my interests to give them that food because it's going to enable them to stick around and continue poisoning my tap water. Maybe their behavior is illegal, but I can't really wait the years that it would take for the legal system to get around to doing something about it. Or maybe I live in a place where I don't trust the legal system to actually do that, I dunno. Pardon the contrived scenario, it's just easier to talk about hazards like this if you've got characters to reference. So I'm this grocer and my tap water is now poisonous, and there's only so much bottled water in town and I need immediate recourse which ideally doesn't involve violence. So I get together with the other people in town and we track down the entity/loan which issued the money which these miners are trying to use to buy groceries with, and... here's the answer to... > what's your alternative? ...we disable that money for all uses except getting the hell out of town. We just collectively refuse to accept it. It would be like how nations wield sanctions against each other, except anybody can do it. It would be like, a wallet setting or something. It's sort of like how we currently ship operating systems with a pre-populated list of certificate authorities, but maybe we could instead leave it to the user to populate that list based on who they actually trust. Except instead of the validity of SSL certificates we're talking about the validity of money. Instead of certificate authorities it would be governments or banks or publicly traded companies, or cryptocurrencies or issuers of collectible playing cards, I don't know... assets. Being sanctioned by the masses would be a disaster for such entities, so this would create incentives against issuing money-like abstractions to people who are going to use it for evil. It's a way to get the banks to take some responsibility for their actions which does not create incentives to find things that should be illegal but aren't yet and exploit them asap.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

The third thing is just the second thing. TurboTax lobbying to avoid free tax filing is obviously rent-seeking. It might even be more accurate to call this category rent seeking through regulatory capture. Fossil fuels would have been trounced by nuclear except that they lobbied to require nuclear to internalize all of its costs (and then some) but not their own, extracting undue rents by handicapping the competition. The closest you get to a third category is Cambridge Analytica, in which case the third category would be criminal enterprises. But these rarely remain listed on the stock market; you won't find shares of the Guadalajara Cartel at your brokerage. It's the companies in the second category that do, because they're doing things that should be illegal but aren't.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I was going for extreme examples to make the point, but look at any modern advertiser: their products are used to target segments of society such that we can be encouraged to either turn against one another or to make some kind of decision which is bad for us and good for whoever is doing the advertising. The perspective you're describing doesn't seem to have a way to classify this activity as unhelpful without going so far as making it illegal. Without that ability, I don't see how we can ever expect the market's notion of value to find itself in line with society's values. The best we can hope for is a random walk within the bounds of "illegal".
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  There are only a finite number of possibilities here. If you're stuck with a machine you don't like that shows you harmful advertising because it has no viable competitors, the problem is with the law, because it's propping up that institution or otherwise failing to enforce anti-trust laws. If that machine exists, even though there are plenty of viable competitors that don't do that, and then you freely choose that one on purpose, it's not obvious that the company is doing anything wrong. You apparently like that kind of advertising. The exception would be for some kind of information asymmetry, like the advertiser is lying to you and you don't find out until it's too late. In which case we're back to needing a law, in that case against false advertising. Now I can tell why you're choosing this one, because it's a sticky one: What happens when they're lying about politics? We can't have the government enforcing a law against "lying" about political issues, because the very thing that makes them political is that people disagree and don't find the other side's evidence to be credible. We can't have whoever is in power at any given time censoring the opposition. The solution we use for this is to put the determination in the hands of the public. The marketplace of ideas. If someone is full of crap, you prove them wrong in front of everybody, and then they lose credibility. This isn't perfect but it works pretty well in the absence of the aforementioned anti-trust problem. Because then instead of a handful of megasites that people get siloed into and fed content like livestock, you'd have a million blogs that intersect like the web. There would be no walls between sites, no way to prevent someone you're trying to mislead from hearing from the other side just because you're in with the site's operators, because none of the sites would be big enough to exercise that kind of power when the average person is getting their information from hundreds of separate sources instead of only one or two. Sometimes companies have bad incentives. Those either get curbed by laws, or by free market competition, or... what's your alternative?
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    I agree that a marketplace of ideas is indeed the solution to the information asymmetry problem. I think we need to change the web so that nobody but the user has authority over which data is displayed in context with which other data such that platforms cannot prevent critical annotations from appearing next to content (or annotations that simply remove that content)... supposing the user has opted into those annotations. I'm working on such a protocol. As for the incentive problem... Imagine that I'm a grocer and I live in a place whose ground water is being poisoned by a nearby mining operation. The mining company employees are showing up in my grocery store and expecting that they can exchange their salaries for food. But it's not in my interests to give them that food because it's going to enable them to stick around and continue poisoning my tap water. Maybe their behavior is illegal, but I can't really wait the years that it would take for the legal system to get around to doing something about it. Or maybe I live in a place where I don't trust the legal system to actually do that, I dunno. Pardon the contrived scenario, it's just easier to talk about hazards like this if you've got characters to reference. So I'm this grocer and my tap water is now poisonous, and there's only so much bottled water in town and I need immediate recourse which ideally doesn't involve violence. So I get together with the other people in town and we track down the entity/loan which issued the money which these miners are trying to use to buy groceries with, and... here's the answer to... > what's your alternative? ...we disable that money for all uses except getting the hell out of town. We just collectively refuse to accept it. It would be like how nations wield sanctions against each other, except anybody can do it. It would be like, a wallet setting or something. It's sort of like how we currently ship operating systems with a pre-populated list of certificate authorities, but maybe we could instead leave it to the user to populate that list based on who they actually trust. Except instead of the validity of SSL certificates we're talking about the validity of money. Instead of certificate authorities it would be governments or banks or publicly traded companies, or cryptocurrencies or issuers of collectible playing cards, I don't know... assets. Being sanctioned by the masses would be a disaster for such entities, so this would create incentives against issuing money-like abstractions to people who are going to use it for evil. It's a way to get the banks to take some responsibility for their actions which does not create incentives to find things that should be illegal but aren't yet and exploit them asap.