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> People pay for things because they want them, because it makes their lives better. More often than not, people pay for things because they must. Food is not

by revscat 13y ago

> People pay for things because they want them, because it makes their lives better. More often than not, people pay for things because they must. Food is not optional, nor is clothing, shelter, or health care. For the majority of American population gasoline, auto insurance, and related transportation expenses are similarly non-optional. Similarly electricity and water. For much of the population you can add in child support or day care. There is not much money, if any, left over for discretionary spending. The point is that you seem to believe that all spending is voluntary. This is flatly not true, and smacks of willful ideological naïveté.

randyrand 13y ago
The distinction between want and need and likewise between discretionary spending and mandatory spending is completely irrelevant to the point I was making. I'm not even sure how to respond.
- _delirium 13y ago
  The point is that many people are wasting money on gasoline because they're forced to by the way infrastructure currently works, since you need a car to drive to work and you need to drive to work if you want to eat. Not because they actually prefer spending money on gasoline and hate public transit, say, and this is their vote for "I love cars and buying gasoline". Most individuals have very constrained choices, and the emergent effects of those choices are not in any necessary sense optimal for society. Jumping out of their short-term local optimum ("driving to work is better than losing my job, so I gotta drive") to other preferences ("it'd be nice if I could get to work without owning a car") is often non-trivial and requires large-scale coordination (such as through political or cultural change). On the other hand, they might love driving! But the mere fact that they spend money to drive to work doesn't prove it. If you're interested in complex-systems theory, you can try out implementing various simple simulations yourself. It's actually pretty hard to come up with one, even with hilariously optimistic assumptions, where each agent individually optimizing actually leads to a globally optimal outcome! It's even pretty hard to come up with one that works in any reasonable sense at all: you quickly get swamped by system-endogenous effects and all sorts of weird oscillations and attractors that have nothing to do with the utility function. Fun times living in emergent-effects-land!
  - sanderjd 13y ago
    Sounds really interesting! Do you have any pointers on how to get up to speed on these topics?
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago
  > The distinction between want and need and likewise between discretionary spending and mandatory spending is completely irrelevant... ...when you don't have the mental apparatus necessary to perceive it. BTW, I'm not referring to intelligence.
  - Karellen 13y ago
    It is difficult to get a person to understand something, when their ideology depends upon their not understanding it! (With apologies to Upton Sinclair)

by revscat 13y ago

randyrand 13y ago

The distinction between want and need and likewise between discretionary spending and mandatory spending is completely irrelevant to the point I was making. I'm not even sure how to respond.

_delirium 13y ago
The point is that many people are wasting money on gasoline because they're forced to by the way infrastructure currently works, since you need a car to drive to work and you need to drive to work if you want to eat. Not because they actually prefer spending money on gasoline and hate public transit, say, and this is their vote for "I love cars and buying gasoline". Most individuals have very constrained choices, and the emergent effects of those choices are not in any necessary sense optimal for society. Jumping out of their short-term local optimum ("driving to work is better than losing my job, so I gotta drive") to other preferences ("it'd be nice if I could get to work without owning a car") is often non-trivial and requires large-scale coordination (such as through political or cultural change). On the other hand, they might love driving! But the mere fact that they spend money to drive to work doesn't prove it. If you're interested in complex-systems theory, you can try out implementing various simple simulations yourself. It's actually pretty hard to come up with one, even with hilariously optimistic assumptions, where each agent individually optimizing actually leads to a globally optimal outcome! It's even pretty hard to come up with one that works in any reasonable sense at all: you quickly get swamped by system-endogenous effects and all sorts of weird oscillations and attractors that have nothing to do with the utility function. Fun times living in emergent-effects-land!
- sanderjd 13y ago
  Sounds really interesting! Do you have any pointers on how to get up to speed on these topics?
Florin_Andrei 13y ago
> The distinction between want and need and likewise between discretionary spending and mandatory spending is completely irrelevant... ...when you don't have the mental apparatus necessary to perceive it. BTW, I'm not referring to intelligence.
- Karellen 13y ago
  It is difficult to get a person to understand something, when their ideology depends upon their not understanding it! (With apologies to Upton Sinclair)