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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29662 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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At the risk of being basic, here's a simple example. Let's say I own a restaurant making chicken sandwiches. I have skin in the game. If I serve bad sandwiches at high prices, I will lose money and then go out of business.

On the other hand, consider the DMV. No one gets promoted or fired based on performance of the DMV. People are required to use their services, and they can't go out of business. No one has any skin in the game.

Chicken sandwich restaurants are generally good. DMV's are generally bad.

As a stupid counterpoint, we had a chicken chain try to move in recently. Super Chix. Good sandwiches at high prices. I think they lost out hard to the existing (and ever-expanding) force of Chik-fil-a.

This isn’t an argument against the general principle, but it is a reminder that there’s more than one way to lose money. Whether or not we eradicate a species has less to do with our stated preferences and more to do with its particular habits.

Super chix tried to advertise themselves as the woke version of chic-fil-a at higher prices. Needless to say, paying a premium to get gay chicken was not a recipe for success in the Dallas suburbs even if they did have slightly better fries.

Wouldn’t the same be true of a worker’s coop? This seems more like an example of markets providing the right incentives than capitalism. Many group the two together; not trying to nitpick, it’s fine if you want to group them together, just want to make sure I’m clear.

It would be even more true of a workers' coop when considering the market for the provision of goods. The place workers' coops fails is, ironically, when considering the market for the provision of workers' compensation. Putting your investments in a single business instead of diversifying is in general a bad idea; making that business be the same business you rely on for a salary makes it an even worse idea. Maybe not for the customers, because from their perspective the workers' incentives are now just about as well-aligned as they possibly could be, but when considering the workers or even just considering both together it's hard to beat keeping most wealth in index funds rather than a "pray to God this one company doesn't go under" fund.

For sure. I get paid mostly in shares of stock and it blows my mind that my colleagues will keep theirs instead of selling and diversifying.

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