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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

@drethelin

It isn’t just government subsidies that are in effect when a company doesn’t pay enough to keep workers alive.

The company can also be indirectly subsidized by draining the social and other capital of families, relatives, kind strangers, and whoever keeps those employees alive.

This is “efficient,” not actually efficient.

The alternative is to openly embrace social darwinism, which also deprives society and the economy in general all future value of the worker based on what their feasible value is right now, which may cause a rather significant net loss.

( @collapsedsquid may know if someone has explicitly studied this )

Making it impossible to fire people isn’t a good idea, but letting companies free ride on society’s / the country’s generosity isn’t such a great idea, either.  

Now, you may say that direct wage subsidies have to come out of taxes, but those taxes likely aren’t going to come from the scarce poor-families-capital currently subsidizing Walmart, and it significantly reduces the competitive advantage of such behavior.  Additionally, with more jobs profitable for more workers, there is more competition between employers to quit being jerks to the working class, which is currently distorted by the massive power imbalance between the working class as individuals and corporations with their collective bargaining power.  It’s also less expensive than welfare since it stacks public funding with private funding, instead of running a straight loss, and if structured correctly, it still strongly incentivizes these workers to pursue higher-paying, more economically valuable work.

Or we could start billing Walmart for the billions of dollars in public assistance their workers receive, but that would be a much less efficient solution with similar effects to raising the wage floor.

the invisible fist

More you might like

the-grey-tribe

You Can’t Have It All (even in communism)

thathopeyetlives

In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible. 

Today things are… different. 


It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution: 

1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody. 

2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment

3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology


I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on. 

Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last. 

(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)


If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure. 


I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags. 

rendakuenthusiast

Endorsed.

Source: thathopeyetlives politics the invisible fist mostly endorsed the red hammer
argumate
argumate

“Movies will be free after the revolution!”

Movies take the work of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people. How will we decide where to allocate our resources for the best results?

shlevy

Centralized committee!

argumate

Yes! The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television smiles upon you!

mitigatedchaos

shtpost visual shtpost the mitigated exhibition what even is this blog the invisible fist the iron hand the red hammer
mitigatedchaos
mitigatedchaos

@argumate @collapsedsquid

The thing I like about the idea of mandatory safety insurance is that it introduces a new actor with new incentives into the problem.

Let us return to aircraft.

The State has determined that every airline company must carry two million dollars in insurance per passenger per flight, to be paid out in the event that the plane is destroyed and they die.  It has set certain rules, for instance that the insurance company must be sufficiently well-capitalized and it can’t just waive paying out because the company did something stupid.

Executive Todd has plans to reduce the maintenance on Tumblr Airlines aircraft.  He will be at the company for five years.  There is a 90% chance that if he does this, there will be no crash, and he gets a million dollar bonus and leaves.  There is a 10% chance that a plane will crash before he leaves and he’ll only have a personal fortune of ten million dollars and a mansion on Hawaii left, which he can retire to.

So Todd orders that the maintenance should be cut.

However, Blue Hellsite Insurance, Inc., Tumblr Airlines’ insurance company, depends for its funding entirely on carefully calculating risk and then charging a bit more than that, on an ongoing basis.  To do so, as part of their contract (and thanks to provisions passed in law by the State), they can set insurance agents out to inspect processes, planes, and so on.

BHI’s reaction to a plan that results in a 10% chance of a plane crash is “you WHAT?!”  Whereas the risk isn’t necessarily quite so visible or quantified to all others in the organization, or else they may have motivations to ignore it for the same reason as Executive Todd.

So BHI come back and say that either Todd’s plan isn’t going to fly, or the insurance rates are going to go up.

So what was an invisible cost that could have gotten kicked down the road to a successor is transmuted into a stubborn operating cost right now.

Tumblr Airlines makes less profit (upsetting shareholders), raises ticket prices to compensate (thus pricing the risk into the market and making them less competitive), or else doesn’t go through with the plan.

The State could even require that the portion of the cost which is the risk premium is printed on the ticket, informing consumers of roughly how dangerous a given flight is.  This is actually an enormous information gain by consumers, who as non-experts find it very difficult to not only judge airline safety, but obtain inside information about aircraft maintenance procedures.

mitigatedchaos

@e8u What about Todd the Insurance Executive?

An astute observation.  I actually left off that part in order to conserve length.

This entire scenario still depends on state intervention, which is why AnCaps and most Right Libertarians will not be in favor of it, even though it loosens the details of regulation to the markets and allows riskier behavior (but just prices it more).

Here’s what the State needs to do to cause this to happen:

  • Require mandatory insurance on certain classes of products.
  • Determine the rules governing the insurance so that the insurance will actually pay out.  
    • For instance, wrongdoing on the part of the airline does not get the insurance company out of paying the insurance.  (It could, however, allow them to pursue damages against the airline without breaking these necessary conditions.)
  • Ensure the insurance companies are sufficiently well-capitalized, so that it does not become common practice to make insurance shell companies which immediately fold rather than pay out.  Criminal liability may need to be introduced here.
  • Create a court system in which it is reasonably feasible for regular people to actually collect the insurance payout.  (It isn’t necessary that they collect the full payout, just enough that they’re willing to initiate and complete the necessary legal procedures.  Some money could go into an ethical offset fund instead.)

I would say that there have to actually be enough competing insurance companies, but the market will take care of that, since this should be a reasonably profitable field.  And the insurance company itself is a longer-term investment vehicle than the airline, since its practice of distributing risk changes when investors will get paid.

So, the question then is, is a system of competing insurance companies with competing insurance regulations more or less efficient and effective than a system of top-down, politically-driven regulation where government decides the details of regulations?

And that question is an empirical one.  In systems as complex as economies, we can’t just assume the efficient market hypothesis.  After all, this plan is in many ways in response to the existing market distortions of limited liability corporations and destruction of value being easier than creation of value.

Do it right, however, and you can also chip away at information asymmetry - the risk pricing by a moderately profitable insurance company that actually has to pay out if the product is dangerous or defective, as a share of the product’s price, communicates a lot of information that the customer previously often didn’t have.

the invisible fist the iron hand
argumate
quasi-normalcy

Brand loyalty is such stupid nonsense though. Like…we know you’re not a real person, McDonald’s™; we’re not going to swear an oath of fealty to your shitty ass hamburgers.

argumate

teens in unison: today we will cast off the corporate shackles

mitigatedchaos

OP may not realize what practical brand loyalty is. It isn’t about swearing fealty, but about not putting in the effort and risk to try another brand. Not a big deal for hamburgers, but, say your family had major issues with a Ford minivan and started exclusively buying all their cars from one Japanese company…

Source: quasi-normalcy the invisible fist
wirehead-wannabe
soundlogic2236

That feeling when you have been clothes/shoe shopping and you want to shout in the middle of the store

Just give me a freaking nanofab already!

vessel-haver vessel-haver

I want to pick some shoe designs, scan my feet, and have a computer deal with everything else.

mitigatedchaos

You don’t need nanotechnology for that, and it’s only going to be about 20 years before it starts to become mainstream.

Source: soundlogic2236 mitigated future the invisible fist

Markets don’t actually work efficiently when people don’t have practical alternatives, don’t have access to information and the ability to process it, or just don’t go through the work of comparing. Obtaining information is NOT free! It has major opportunity costs! And the vendors will fight against you doing it!

the invisible fist
collapsedsquid
xhxhxhx

I was bored so I wanted to do a ballpark estimate for the excess deaths resulting from the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, assuming that a counterfactual Nationalist China would have the crude death rates of Taiwan rather than the crude death rates of China between 1953 and 1979.

It’s about 158 to 161 million.

Now, that isn’t appropriate or fair. It’s not appropriate because CDRs aren’t comparable across populations with different age structures – once you get to the 1980s It’s unfair because Taiwan had lower CDRs than Mainland China when the comparison started. 

We can also ask the question of how rapidly the Nationalists and Communists reduced its mortality from the same starting point. Because the Nationalists had 18 deaths per 1,000 in 1947, we might as well start there; the Communists had the same death rate a decade later, in 1957. So what happens if we start the clock running in 1957? How does that look?

Not great for the Communists. The Communists still have about 80 million excess deaths between 1957 and 1979, of which about 39 million are from period between 1958 and 1961.

Well, I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

argumate

hey you can’t make an omelette without killing fifty million people

collapsedsquid

Like others, Ryan reasonably selects as Exhibit A of the criminal indictment the Chinese famines of 1958-61, with a death toll of 25-40 million, he reports, a sizeable chunk of the 100 million corpses the “recording angels” attribute to “Communism” (whatever that is, but let us use the conventional term). The terrible atrocity fully merits the harsh condemnation it has received for many years, renewed here. It is, furthermore, proper to attribute the famine to Communism. That conclusion was established most authoritatively in the work of economist Amartya Sen, whose comparison of the Chinese famine to the record of democratic India received particular attention when he won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.

Writing in the early 1980s, Sen observed that India had suffered no such famine. He attributed the India-China difference to India’s “political system of adversarial journalism and opposition,” while in contrast, China’s totalitarian regime suffered from “misinformation” that undercut a serious response, and there was “little political pressure” from opposition groups and an informed public (Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action, 1989; they estimate deaths at 16.5 to 29.5 million).

The example stands as a dramatic “criminal indictment” of totalitarian Communism, exactly as Ryan writes. But before closing the book on the indictment we might want to turn to the other half of Sen’s India-China comparison, which somehow never seems to surface despite the emphasis Sen placed on it. He observes that India and China had “similarities that were quite striking” when development planning began 50 years ago, including death rates. “But there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality and longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India” (in education and other social indicators as well). He estimates the excess of mortality in India over China to be close to 4 million a year: “India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame,” 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen).

In both cases, the outcomes have to do with the “ideological predispositions” of the political systems: for China, relatively equitable distribution of medical resources, including rural health services, and public distribution of food, all lacking in India. This was before 1979, when “the downward trend in mortality [in China] has been at least halted, and possibly reversed,” thanks to the market reforms instituted that year.

Overcoming amnesia, suppose we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its reviewers to the full story, not just the doctrinally acceptable half. We therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist “experiment” since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the “colossal, wholly failed…experiment” of Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more since, in India alone.

That’s Noam Chomsky’s point.

collapsedsquid

xhxhxhx:  right, but Taiwan seems to have managed it without the surplus corpses

Do you think that’s because it’s a smaller island with a lot fewer people on it maybe?

mitigatedchaos

Or, just gonna put this out here,

The cultural starting conditions between China and India are not the same.

We’re supposed to consider that irrelevant because all cultures are equal and human beings are just economybots, but… have you observed the records for overseas Chinese as compared to other populations?  

Source: xhxhxhx the invisible fist the red hammer
argumate
argumate

some kinds of common knowledge are a massively valuable public good, and a centralised authority is typically the most efficient way of providing it.

collapsedsquid

It’s related to that idea that we all have time and love to comparison shop between everything.  It’s basically saying “you’re going to get screwed by that crucial detail you didn’t know was important beforehand.“

argumate

and that you have the time and resources and are still alive to pursue damages through the court system against those with deep pockets who have screwed you over.

adjoint-law

I’d be interested to learn more about different models for decentralized accreditation services – consumer safety, etc. You see a little of this with professional guilds and etc I guess? But I’m not sure how much money you’d need to throw at meta accreditation to get good trust levels, or how much duplication of work you get in a free market of accreditation services, etc. It really does seem like a central authority is a good way to go…?

argumate

I think the tricky part is enforcement and incentives. Structural engineers were complaining about the cladding long before buildings started burning down, and fire fighters were shocked when they tried to put out the fires, but in order for that to translate into it not being sold, purchased, and installed on buildings there needs to be someone who says “no” when the architect says “cheap!”

mitigatedchaos

The thing that gets me with the Libertarianism thing and safety regs is that, precisely because of all the losses of information in the process and limited information resources available to buyers, I feel the regulation process really does have to bottom out somewhere with “men with guns come and say no, you can’t do that.”

And I know they hate that, but their plans often effectively give out huge subsidies in the form of unaccounted-for externalities, information asymmetry, and so on, to capital.

“Make them all buy insurance” requires a strong state to come through and force the issue and also make sure that that insurance will pay out.  But if you don’t do at least that, then you allow people to engage in arbitrage against peoples’ lives (more than they do now).  One could argue, even, about smoothing out lifetime earnings with loans to help pay for safety, but financial markets are waaaaaay too frictional for that and the future is too unknown.

So I don’t feel too bad about the building safety codes.

And some of the Asian countries prove you can have the building safety codes and even earthquake standards without the part that causes housing prices to quintuple.

the invisible fist the iron hand
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