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0 pointsjs88y ago0 comments

Maybe.. I can completely change a reasonable answer to any moral problem just by adding another maybe.

But it doesn't really matter. The analogy is flawed, that's the point, because it's not how it works in the real world. In the real world, people are not getting 1000000x higher income just because they do 1000000x more of the same work.

The main problem is in how we value things that are collectively produced (via cooperation of different people, especially in different points in time). There are basically two main solutions to the problem, both of them wrong. One is the neoclassical solution, which is to deny that we cooperate. Then there is Marx's solution, which is labor theory of value.

I don't believe it has a good solution.

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logicchains8y ago· 2 in thread

>In the real world, people are not getting 1000000x higher income just because they do 1000000x more of the same work.

You could argue that they get 1000x (1000000x is disingenuous; 1000000x the minimum wage is around $15,000,000,000 per year, practically nobody makes that) higher income because they do something that people value 1000x more. If we assume people pay others for doing this they value, if a developer can't find somebody who values what they provide enough to pay them more than $80,000, while a fund manager can find someone to pay them $80,000,000, some people must value what the fund manager is doing a lot more or else they wouldn't pay him/her.

>One is the neoclassical solution, which is to deny that we cooperate.

How does it deny we cooperate? I have an apple and I want an orange, you have an orange and you want an apple, we exchange those things, how is that not cooperation?

js8OP8y ago

> If we assume people pay others for doing this they value

That's a strong assumption and as a matter of fact, they don't. For example, when I go to cinema, I pay to the ticket seller. I don't pay to the people who actually produced the movie. I rely on some (unknown to me) mechanism according to which those people get paid, but I don't pay them.

> How does it deny we cooperate?

So you can see that in the above example. I don't pay individuals for doing things for me that I value. Instead, I pay to some organization which then redistributes the money. Neoclassical solution denies an existence of such organization. (Which is not quite wrong - I have no idea how to define this organization correctly for all edge cases - as I already mentioned, I don't see a solution. But it is also not correct.)

And it gets even worse! Some people cannot be paid for what valuable they are doing for me, because they are already dead. For example, I am not paying to Beethoven. There are even things that produce things of value without any human intervention; who do I pay then?

So yeah, maybe it kinda works for apples and oranges, and picking strawberries, but not in general.

logicchains8y ago

>For example, when I go to cinema, I pay to the ticket seller. I don't pay to the people who actually produced the movie. I rely on some (unknown to me) mechanism according to which those people get paid, but I don't pay them.

The mechanism is the same; it's transitive. You pay the ticket seller, the ticket seller pays the distribution company, the distribution company pays the production company, something along those lines. If we assume nobody's going around stealing or printing money, then that's the only way the people producing the move could be getting money.

If you don't like all those middle-men, that's why things like Kickstarter are appealing to many people. I wanted the people who made Planescape Torment, one of my favourite games, to make a sequel. I paid them in advance directly, via Kickstarter, as did many others. They made an excellent (at least in my view) game.

>And it gets even worse! Some people cannot be paid for what valuable they are doing for me, because they are already dead. For example, I am not paying to Beethoven. There are even things that produce things of value without any human intervention; who do I pay then?

Payment motivates somebody to give up something and give it to you. If something can be taken without depriving anybody of it, why is payment needed? Some people oppose intellectual property laws for this reason, because unlike physical property, using intellectual property doesn't deprive the creator of it due to text being practically free to reproduce.

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