The deep roots of modern resentment • Hacker News Board

Re: The deep roots of modern resentment

#121

Post by candiodari » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 12:06 AM UTC

aninhumer wrote: post #118

candiodari wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forget what profit is. Profit is (the monetary value of) the benefit to society of the product being produced. Now when you say "must optimize on two fronts: money in order to keep itself afloat and" ... that first one is NOT optional. If that first one is not a prerequisite to having the factory than that factory (or company, or ...) is a net loss for the economy, society, for the world as a whole. You seem to i…

>Profit is (the monetary value of) the benefit to society of the product being produced. No. Monetary value is not perfect measure of utility, because market demand is weighted by wealth. A luxury yacht for one individual clearly provides nowhere near as much utility to them as an equivalently priced quantity of food would provide to a bunch of homeless people, but the market prices it as such because the individual…

Again you're confusing some arbitrary ideological measure with utility. Social justice in this case.

Firstly profits of 5% of revenue are considered high, on average. That's what that yacht is paid out of, and that means that feeding many homeless with it wouldn't work in practice.

Second luxury articles provide firms with the rewards of motivation of their employees. Everyone in Silicon Valley keeps reminding us how that's the lifeblood of every company, and while I disagree with that, it's obviously useful, both to that firm and to society. So the yacht has more utility than you give it credit for.

Re: The deep roots of modern resentment

#122

Post by aninhumer » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 7:56 AM UTC

candiodari wrote: post #121

aninhumer wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Profit is (the monetary value of) the benefit to society of the product being produced. No. Monetary value is not perfect measure of utility, because market demand is weighted by wealth. A luxury yacht for one individual clearly provides nowhere near as much utility to them as an equivalently priced quantity of food would provide to a bunch of homeless people, but the market prices it as such because the individual…

Again you're confusing some arbitrary ideological measure with utility. Social justice in this case. Firstly profits of 5% of revenue are considered high, on average. That's what that yacht is paid out of, and that means that feeding many homeless with it wouldn't work in practice. Second luxury articles provide firms with the rewards of motivation of their employees. Everyone in Silicon Valley keeps reminding us how…

> you're confusing some arbitrary ideological measure

Well I'm not using a well defined measure of utility here, but I thought it was fairly non-controversial to say that, at least in immediate terms, food for many people creates more utility than a yacht for one person.

That they're homeless isn't the point, and I should have left out that rehetoric. The point is just that they're less able to demand the food than the rich person is the yacht, despite it providing them more utility.

> luxury articles provide firms with the rewards of motivation

Yes, I said that. Inequality is what drives the supply side, and I agree that this may lead to better outcomes overall, but my point is that it complicates the process, and detaches money from being a raw measure of utility.

The possibility of a yacht may encourage someone to produce food more efficiently, but this is a lot harder to measure. Maybe the level of inequality doesn't matter that much as long as people perceive higher social status? Maybe the inequality reduces opportunities for many potential innovators, destroying more efficiency than it encourages? Or maybe the lack of security discourages people from taking risks even if they have opportunities?

I'm not asserting any of these ideas, just pointing out factors that confound measuring the utility created by inequality.

Re: The deep roots of modern resentment

#123

Post by infinite8s » Fri, Feb 03, 2017, 2:11 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #119

infinite8s wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only because unskilled labor has become much more expensive here (unions, safety regulations, overtime, etc).

No, the need has gone away. Take, for example, moving a few tons of concrete rubble a couple hundred feet. The way it used to be done was to have a group of men hammering it into movable chunks, and another group of men carrying the chunks by hand. Now, you just use a Bobcat. One man can do the work of twenty. Any job that requires a lot of muscle and not much brain has been more or less wiped out. That's a lot of jo…

That's only true where the cost of labor is too high. Go visit a construction site in India and you'll see a lot of tasks done the way you've described above.