domain:thezvi.wordpress.com
cjet79
4m ago
There is an economic concept called "perfect competition" I want to be clear that this economic concept is not required for efficient prices.
And I am talking about efficient prices, not "perfect prices". Prices are a process and a search function for an optimal set of tradeoffs. One of the tradeoffs is information. To perfectly know all the inputs of a product, and to perfectly know the desire for that product would be a very costly search process. There is going to be some fudging of prices and that fudging should be expected given that information itself is not free or costless.
[Plumbers]
You've created a very long example that kind of assumes away many of the standard market fixes. I do generally like to use theoretical examples for most economic concepts, but I find that they tend to lead people astray when it comes to the nature of prices.
To me your example sounds a bit like this:
"Geologists say that older mountain ranges tend to be shorter and rounder than newer mountain ranges, because wind and erosion will gradually wear mountains down. But that's not always true, imagine there are two mountains. One mountain is 20k feet and in an old mountain ranges. And the other mountain is 10k feet in a newer mountain range. They are both subject to similar levels of erosion, and neither is a volcano. So older mountains can be taller."
You've assumed your position to be true in your example.
And yes the government is fully capable of distorting prices, or assisting companies in distorting prices. I usually bring this up as a reason why government should not have this power, or should at least have many restrictions on the use of this power. But this is also not evidence that prices don't reflect the real world, instead it is more evidence. After all if a government makes it hard to be in the plumber business we should expect the price paid for plumbing services to go up, because the supply of plumbers has been restricted. It would be strange if the government could intervene and not change prices.
wingdingspringking
8m ago
Why do people protest? At the most fundamental level, it is because a large group of people on some level have done a cost benefit analysis and decided that protesting is more in their interest than not protesting. Their underlying motivations might be different (social status for some, entertainment for others, etc). But everyone needs a reason to be there, and that reason needs to be sufficiently positive so as to overcomes any negatives.
Let's look at a very safe, very "developed" society like SK. What are the positives of partaking or supporting such a movement.
- You get potential concessions from society if the movement is successful (laws guaranteeing more rights for women, more pay, more legal weapons at your disposal, etc).
- You get social status. Protesting for a "good cause" is generally seen as positive by your peer group.
- Personal fulfillment. You feel like you are making a difference/doing the right thing. You feel more in control of your life.
What are the negatives? Almost nothing.
1)Men might be mad at you. But there's not much risk there. Especially for younger women, since said men will still likely make concessions in order to have a chance to sleep with them.
2)The older generation might be mad. But in modern society, many young people are financially independent. So the older generation has much more limited leverage.
Contrast this to a less developed society. What are your benefits? Possible concessions (with a lower probability) and personal fulfillment. That's probably it. Your peer group will probably distance themselves from you out of fear of sharing the negatives, which are:
- Potential violence - both sexual and non sexual. This is the largest negative you can possibly have for most people.
- Ostracization - others don't want to share in your misfortune if something goes wrong.
- Anxiety - Even if nothing happens, the threat of these things always looms.
There are probably many more negatives, but I think those three are probably sufficient to deter most people. So looking at a cost benefit analysis, the choice to protest in SK vs in SA looks pretty clear.
campfire
8m ago
Oh I missed 1999, yeah I can see how the threat of nuclear war captures the same ethos
HPV is one or two doses.
Okay, let's go to the website you read because you're engaging in good faith after you've linked it 10x.
Even with these inflated numbers you only get 71.
Oh yes, even with these "inflated numbers" by actually counting the vaccines in the doses in the shots which are recommended on the schedule. The honest take is when you ignore 2/5ths of the shots on the schedule. Hiding the ball is disagreeing between 73 72 and 71 doses.
thanks for the dialogue
RedRegard
22m ago
If you focus on Korea particularly those might seem like likely causes, but every capitalist country is suffering low birth rates and it's always concentrated in those urban centers that are the centers of economic growth. Capitalism is what suppresses birth rates by optimizing for short-term wealth accretion over other values. Women are incentivized to work rather than reproduce, and both sexes are incentivized to engage in hedonist consumerism, while meanwhile social factors conducive to fecundity, like having grandparents who expected grandchildren, gradually fade away like a strange dream.
gattsuru
24m ago
Most coverage focuses on his alleged sex scandal. Which is lurid, but has the dual problems of being having run too long while, when described in detail (some ludicrous), just isn't damning enough. About the best that can be said there is that Gaetz lacks Kavanaugh's charisma: even if someone tries something really stupid like trying to bring a Mann Act prosecution against him, everyone's just not gonna care.
The other side is that he's actively uncharismatic enough that I could see him having a tougher time getting confirmed than RFK. Gaetz is hated, and he's an easy man to hate.
More critically, my impression's that he hasn't shown the competence or leadership skills necessary to do much more than take a few retirements out at the belt. My opinion of the DoJ is low enough that 'wrecking ball' might well be an improvement over BATNA, but I'm skeptical that it's the only or best option available. We know what happens when Gaetz demands someone do something and they refuse, and it didn't work out great for Gaetz last time, and it's gonna be every single day at the DoJ. Maybe he wakes up once shoved into the role -- if the conspiracy theory is right and that sex scandal above was being assisted by the DoJ, he'd have a lot of reason! -- but my bet is no. He might be vengeful enough to do a Nunes, but it takes more than a grudge.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
27m ago
Everybody's got a bomb
We could all die any day, aw
But before I'll let that happen
I'll dance my life away, oh-oh-oh
They say, 2000-00, party over
Oops, out of time
We're runnin' outta time
So tonight we gonna party like it's 1999
I dunno, I think the sentiment is pretty clear.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
28m ago
impossible to determine which comments may be valuable on ACT, for instance
That's just because Scott doesn't want likes, the rest of the blogs have "Top" sorting, and you can see who liked the comments, if "total like count" is not a relevant metric to you.
hydroacetylene
32m ago
Try Into Great Silence about the Carthusians.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
35m ago
Watched the Conclave (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20215234/) at the cinema the other day. Visually well made (although it is just difficult to portray Catholicism without some impressive visuals), somewhat okay but uninteresting story with no clear point and an incredibly disappointing ending. Couldn't stop comparing it to another depiction of a Catholic conclave, from 2011's Borgia (the European made one: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1736341/)
Which made me realize that I am not sure if I have ever watched a movie that depicted a modern religious institution well. Not about some humble believer of the religion, not a sob story about how the religion doesn't match up to modern liberal sensitivities etc.
I am looking for a well-made movie about modern-day Japanese monks, or Latin American/African evangelizers or Iranian Mullahs or whatever is out there. Does anyone have any recommendations for me?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
37m ago
It’s more than just the architectural style, it’s the lighting and shadows and saturation. I don’t know how to articulate it but it’s kind of like this. I was watching the HL2 documentary and the artists talked about spending years finding real life material for the game models, visiting abandoned areas etc, and that definitely rubs off in the aesthetic dimension that is different from other shooters that try to be “gritty”. There’s something dreamy and interesting about source engine aesthetic
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
47m ago
This is outcome based thinking and basically one of the best ways to never truly understand why the world works the way it does. If you buy a game for $1 where a coin is flipped and you get $10 if it's a head then you did the right thing even if the coin flip turns up tails. The real life outcome is not important, what really matters is the expectation.
If you look at the very top Contract Bridge or Magic The Gathering players for example they evaluate their play based on expected values of the boardstate rather than whether that specific time what they did worked out well for them or not. The right play that led you to lose the round is not an issue at all while the wrong play that led you to win that specific time is something you need to fix ASAP.
Sure you can run Yahoo for $150M but for the board it makes more sense to pay Mayer $249M if there's say a 30% probability she ruins the company and a 70% probability she makes it good again vs paying you $150M for a 100% probability of the company being ruined, irrespective of what the final outcome of Mayer's tenure turns out to be.
AvocadoPanic
47m ago
Isn't this a bit, stated preference vs. revealed preference?
2rafa
50m ago
X is full of such garbage and riddled with mediocre grandstanding (even if you prune your followed obsessively), but it remains the place with the most interesting links. The issue is more that midwits clog up the comments for anyone even remotely interesting, misinterpret things constantly, and generally bring annoying.
MathWizard
Good things are good
53m ago
In a perfectly efficient market, this would be the case. But it's easily disproven in practice by the fact that market prices can change by effects which have absolutely no impact on the utility value.
Ie, suppose we have a city with a bunch of plumbers, all of equal plumbing skill/ability, and a company that hires them and manages their distribution to clients, and pays between $80k and $120k depending on how skilled and aggressive the plumber is at negotiating (aggressive meaning they demonstrate an ability/willingness to quit and do a different job instead if they don't get the salary they want). We've assumed by axiom that they provide the same value, and yet get paid different amounts, let's assume the frequency is evenly distributed across this range, such that the average plumber is paid $100k. I suppose you could say that the "utility value" is the highest the company is willing to pay, $120k, and anyone being paid less is simply a bad negotiator, but I'm not sure if you'd say the "market value" is $120k given that most of the plumbers aren't earning that, and a new plumber entering the field is unlikely to get an offer that high.
Suppose then that the plumbers unionize and negotiate that all of them will receive the same pay of $110k. That's now the market value, unambiguously, that's what the market, as created by this single local monopolistic company (which is the only company offering reliable and consistent pay for plumbers in this city) and this one union (which all employees of the company must join) will pay. And yet the utility value of plumbing has not changed, because the union doesn't impact plumbing skill/ability in any way.
Suppose that the company actually takes in revenue of $140k for each plumbing employee it has, and keeps the difference as overhead/profit. There's a sense in which the utility value of a plumber is actually $140k since that's what clients are willing to pay, although if the overhead is necessary then I suppose the utility of the plumber themself is lessened by that. However if a plumbing emergency happens and the company gets a lot more business, earning $150k per employee one year, but takes the extra as profit and changes no salaries, then the utility value of plumbers goes up that year, the market price (from the client and owner's side) goes up, but the market price (from the employees side) remains unchanged.
And suppose that the employer uses local regulations, an army of lawyers, and relationships with local politicians to crush any new plumbers that try to form their own company or go independent in this area. It is not a free market, it is effectively a local monopoly. If you want to be a plumber, you negotiate here, or you leave the city and pay whatever transition costs it takes to uproot your life and your family and be a plumber somewhere else. The fact that this changes market prices but doesn't change the utility value of plumbers should clearly demonstrate that market prices are distinct from utility prices, even if an ideal perfectly efficient and free market would cause them to be equal. In practice, no market is perfectly free, therefore we should expect deviations in precisely the areas where these imperfections drive them apart.
cjet79
1hr ago
So everyone wishes they were a monopolist with respect to their own jobs. No surprise, but we need to treat these requests as the selfish self interested lobbying that they are, rather than some generous societal oriented philosophy.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
Market prices reflect real resource shortages and tradeoffs. "Important" jobs are often paid low because many people can do it.
Or as Dr. Kersten points out, there are many positions which are necessary but not important, like a gear in a watch -- vital yet easily replacable.
I think what Corvos is calling "utility value" is price at which consumer surplus reaches zero. That's definitely different than (and much higher than) "market value".
Quantumfreakonomics
1hr ago
What do you guys think of the Matt Gaetz pick specifically? This seems to be a high-variance pick from a high-variance administration. Attorney General is IMO the most important cabinet position for domestic policy. As we all learned in high school, the executive branch enforces the laws. The Department of Justice is the agency tasked with boots-on-the-ground execution of that constitutional mandate. If nothing else, the Gaetz pick puts the fear of god back into a lot of people in Washington.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
There is nearly no interesting discussion on Reddit now, the vanishingly rare interesting post on 4chan is extinct (and will probably be posted on X anyway), substack is fine but most blogs are found and marketed on X and the comment system sucks (impossible to determine which comments may be valuable on ACT, for instance), tik tok is probably interesting for viewing memetic culture but obviously has no discursive value…
For quality discussion on popular sites, this just leaves X, then?
zoink
1hr ago
How much of this is two neurotic people being neurotic and bouncing off of each other? I don't always trust neurotics perception of reality.
zoink
1hr ago
One issue is grandmas getting older. At the more extreme end but probably not incredibly uncommon in the past a grandma could be in her low 30's certainly 40's. My mom, who is now a grandmother to my toddler is in her early 70's.
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
Obviously overpaid. Marissa Mayer ruined Yahoo for 239 million dollars, I would have gladly ruined it for 150 million. And there are people that would run it into the ground for a million and some for free.
cjet79
1hr ago
The idea that utility value and market value are different is a fundamental economic misconception.
Market prices reflect real resource shortages and tradeoffs. "Important" jobs are often paid low because many people can do it.
Gaetz is gonna have some radicals in his staff that are much more competent, I’m pretty sure.
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