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I can guess from where this sort of, seeing the market as a moralistic play, comes from. Macroeconomics can, via some stretching of the perfect-markets hypothes

I can guess from where this sort of, seeing the market as a moralistic play, comes from. Macroeconomics can, via some stretching of the perfect-markets hypothesis, be transformed into this almost-Calvinist cosmology, where the virtuous labourers will be blessed with an eventual retirement, and the sinful free-loaders will be punished with the sin of contentment. I guess you worked hard all your life, too. It's the classic "I think I made it without help so fuck everyone else", plus some missionary fervour, Saint Theresa style: "don't give them free stuff! They must earn it or else they won't see the light!". First, nobody can pull ten million jobs from their ass. Like, what the fuck do you propose they work on? Should we hire ten or twenty Indians to make us sandwiches that we won't eat? To farm more food that nobody will eat? There's simply not enough demand for labour today. If those people that were starving today were instead fairly rich, and could buy something, yeah, sure, there would be more demand for that labour that could create that something. Second, we are talking about, like, giving them food. It's not like the developed world sat and decided to give each beggar a Mercedes. Apparently you think barely feeding them for a while will turn them into lazy asses without no ambitions such as, I don't know, an apartment, a car, a 40" TV screen and two or three kids. Maybe so. I don't see how it follows.

genwin 14y ago
I think there's plenty of evidence that free food does more harm than good in the long run, outside of emergency situations that couldn't reasonably be planned for. In the long run millions of beggars wouldn't have been born in the first place if free food hadn't been available. (That's not to say that beggars are always caused by free food.) Humans aren't much different than ducks in this regard.
- anu_gupta 14y ago
  > In the long run millions of beggars wouldn't have been born in the first place if free food hadn't been available. You're right, of course, because their parents would have starved to death. A civilised society does not allow its citizens to die of starvation. In the long run of course it would be preferable to not have to give out free food, but until there's a viable alternative, that's what a civilised country does.
  - genwin 14y ago
    Or, the parents wouldn't have had kids they couldn't feed. The parents wouldn't have starved because, without too many kids, they weren't overly dividing the available food. I think a civilized society should hold parents responsible for their own kids, outside of true emergencies.
    - scarmig 14y ago
      Sounds great! Except all too many parents are incapable of being responsible for their own kids, either out of apathy or economic inability. So when you do that, a perfectly well-meaning but stretched family might decide to, say, live in a house with heavy lead contamination. Which, aside from the heavily detrimental effect on the kids, has very large externalities, as children who have been exposed to lead in high concentrations are much more likely to become criminals.
      - genwin 14y ago
        This assumes there are no consequences for such parents. Add strong enough consequences (e.g. loss of freedom) to deter others. A "well-meaning but stretched family" is more likely a set of parents who didn't responsibly plan their family. If that's the case the parents should be punished. (In the US, even the poorest parents can be punished for exposing their kids to lead.) If we make parenting a birthright (as many people support, esp. for the poorest for some reason), mass starvation is the inevitable result.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - anu_gupta 14y ago
      [edited] OK - I've gone through your comment history, and can see that you would rather people starved to death than give them food, so I'm not sure there's any point in wasting each other's time in continuing this.
      - Variance 14y ago
- Ygg2 14y ago
  In the long run, having so called "Jokers" i.e. people that cause havoc in a given system is a net positive (think murders, con artist, psychopaths). Law still tries to stop them. OTOH in the very long run, people from India are likely to emigrate and provide cheap labor.
Variance 14y ago
Regardless of whether you want to make the market as free as possible, or whether you want as many people to be as well-fed as possible, the long-run solution is the same for both [1]. The more the market is allowed to work, the better off people will be, and the more food they will be able to buy. Welfare systems offer a temporary solution at the expense of long-term growth, and so are overall negatives to making sure as many people can be as well-fed as possible. Importantly, efforts to artificially solve the high unemployment rates will similarly just increase poverty. This reasoning is separate from the effects of welfare dependence. While they are also important considerations, they are hardly the only ones. The core consideration is as above: there exists a fundamental problem in the market, and throwing money at those most affected by it doesn't solve it, but instead just prolongs it and distributes the issue to those whose money is being thrown. In the long run, things get worse. India's growth is not helped by its programs, but hindered by them; its growth and its poverty levels would be better, not worse, without the programs. So basically, there's no part of any of the calculus that involves ethics or anything. It's purely that we find, scientifically, that if you want the most people to be the most well-fed, market policies and low/no subsidies are the way to go. See: the Washington Consensus point 2 [2]. [1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4449397 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4449397 [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus#Original_sense:_Williamson.27s_Ten_Points http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus#Original_s...
- tsotha 14y ago
  While that's all true, sometimes you have to accept some drag on growth to get from here to there. Market solutions take some time to settle out, and people who are hungry today aren't going to wait. Revolutions are a problem when you're trying to construct efficient markets, so as long as the growth arrow is going in the right direction it's probably wise to leave these kinds of programs in place. Presumably as the Indian economy modernizes they can be phased out.
  - Variance 14y ago
    This is a good point, but a contrasting point is that people who are hungry today aren't going to wait until tomorrow to get a job. It is incredibly valuable to be able to cut the benefits, so any cuts that can be made should be taken. Revolutions would happen if a dramatic change came about, such as the welfare programs disappearing overnight; but by market logic, the poor would not riot for welfare if the welfare had never existed, giving them no expectation of it, and giving them a lower likelihood of being poor in the first place. Chances are very high that these programs will never be phased out, and likely never cut in size over time--in the long term, welfare expands to fill the gap of how much the rest of society can afford to comfortably pay. But if they could be phased out, say over a 10, 15, or 20 year period, my judgement is that it could be sociologically workable. That is to say, if there is a level at which people switch from not rioting to rioting when their benefits are cut, you just cut near that level continually until you're close enough to find creative ways to stop sending checks altogether without them noticing.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

genwin 14y ago

I think there's plenty of evidence that free food does more harm than good in the long run, outside of emergency situations that couldn't reasonably be planned for. In the long run millions of beggars wouldn't have been born in the first place if free food hadn't been available. (That's not to say that beggars are always caused by free food.) Humans aren't much different than ducks in this regard.

anu_gupta 14y ago
> In the long run millions of beggars wouldn't have been born in the first place if free food hadn't been available. You're right, of course, because their parents would have starved to death. A civilised society does not allow its citizens to die of starvation. In the long run of course it would be preferable to not have to give out free food, but until there's a viable alternative, that's what a civilised country does.
- genwin 14y ago
  Or, the parents wouldn't have had kids they couldn't feed. The parents wouldn't have starved because, without too many kids, they weren't overly dividing the available food. I think a civilized society should hold parents responsible for their own kids, outside of true emergencies.
  - scarmig 14y ago
    Sounds great! Except all too many parents are incapable of being responsible for their own kids, either out of apathy or economic inability. So when you do that, a perfectly well-meaning but stretched family might decide to, say, live in a house with heavy lead contamination. Which, aside from the heavily detrimental effect on the kids, has very large externalities, as children who have been exposed to lead in high concentrations are much more likely to become criminals.
    - genwin 14y ago
      This assumes there are no consequences for such parents. Add strong enough consequences (e.g. loss of freedom) to deter others. A "well-meaning but stretched family" is more likely a set of parents who didn't responsibly plan their family. If that's the case the parents should be punished. (In the US, even the poorest parents can be punished for exposing their kids to lead.) If we make parenting a birthright (as many people support, esp. for the poorest for some reason), mass starvation is the inevitable result.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - anu_gupta 14y ago
    [edited] OK - I've gone through your comment history, and can see that you would rather people starved to death than give them food, so I'm not sure there's any point in wasting each other's time in continuing this.
    - Variance 14y ago
Ygg2 14y ago
In the long run, having so called "Jokers" i.e. people that cause havoc in a given system is a net positive (think murders, con artist, psychopaths). Law still tries to stop them. OTOH in the very long run, people from India are likely to emigrate and provide cheap labor.

Variance 14y ago

Regardless of whether you want to make the market as free as possible, or whether you want as many people to be as well-fed as possible, the long-run solution is the same for both [1]. The more the market is allowed to work, the better off people will be, and the more food they will be able to buy. Welfare systems offer a temporary solution at the expense of long-term growth, and so are overall negatives to making sure as many people can be as well-fed as possible. Importantly, efforts to artificially solve the high unemployment rates will similarly just increase poverty. This reasoning is separate from the effects of welfare dependence. While they are also important considerations, they are hardly the only ones. The core consideration is as above: there exists a fundamental problem in the market, and throwing money at those most affected by it doesn't solve it, but instead just prolongs it and distributes the issue to those whose money is being thrown. In the long run, things get worse. India's growth is not helped by its programs, but hindered by them; its growth and its poverty levels would be better, not worse, without the programs. So basically, there's no part of any of the calculus that involves ethics or anything. It's purely that we find, scientifically, that if you want the most people to be the most well-fed, market policies and low/no subsidies are the way to go. See: the Washington Consensus point 2 [2]. [1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4449397 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4449397 [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus#Original_sense:_Williamson.27s_Ten_Points http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus#Original_s...

tsotha 14y ago
While that's all true, sometimes you have to accept some drag on growth to get from here to there. Market solutions take some time to settle out, and people who are hungry today aren't going to wait. Revolutions are a problem when you're trying to construct efficient markets, so as long as the growth arrow is going in the right direction it's probably wise to leave these kinds of programs in place. Presumably as the Indian economy modernizes they can be phased out.
- Variance 14y ago
  This is a good point, but a contrasting point is that people who are hungry today aren't going to wait until tomorrow to get a job. It is incredibly valuable to be able to cut the benefits, so any cuts that can be made should be taken. Revolutions would happen if a dramatic change came about, such as the welfare programs disappearing overnight; but by market logic, the poor would not riot for welfare if the welfare had never existed, giving them no expectation of it, and giving them a lower likelihood of being poor in the first place. Chances are very high that these programs will never be phased out, and likely never cut in size over time--in the long term, welfare expands to fill the gap of how much the rest of society can afford to comfortably pay. But if they could be phased out, say over a 10, 15, or 20 year period, my judgement is that it could be sociologically workable. That is to say, if there is a level at which people switch from not rioting to rioting when their benefits are cut, you just cut near that level continually until you're close enough to find creative ways to stop sending checks altogether without them noticing.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]