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Fiscal conservatives like the idea that luck is a minor portion of our current status, but the decisions we make are the real key to any success. Hence the successful person is just the person that made the right decisions and the unemployed person deserves their fate because they made the worst decisions.
That means if you are a factory worker in a factory that gets shut down, its you fault for being a factory worker when you should have been in management.
The fact that there are 100 factory jobs for every management job, and very few openings in the management at any given time is besides the point. Its still your fault.
Which makes me wonder how I am doing compared to one of their leaders--President George W. Bush.
I got excellent grades in a public high school. He got average grades in a prestigious private school, one that my parents could not afford to send me to. Obviously I picked the wrong parents.
He went to an Ivy league school. I went to an Ivy league school. I studied, did my work and got fair grades, but not great ones. He partied, did drugs, drunk to excess, and still managed to pass.
I went to work for one of the biggest corporations in the country, in the new field of computer science, in sales which was where most of the world's millionaires came from.
He was given jobs by his family.
He apologized for his mistakes, failed at some businesses, became President, and retired in wealth.
I am still working in sales.
I have made mistakes, but none seem to be as big and life changing as the ones he made early on, yet he somehow had the LUCK to succeed far beyond me.
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You picked the wrong parents, duh. That was a huge mistake and next time you should do better.
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$100,000 would not make it possible for me to send two kids to an elite university. One, maybe.
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A lot of this conversation sounds like middle class people discussing problems, not people in poverty. And poverty is more than what you make. I lived in poor neighborhoods and have been on government services and while my income might have been low enough to qualify, I don't think I have ever been in poverty. Someone once explained the difference to me the following way:
You go to the grocery store and there are two brands of paper towels. Brand A is 5 for $5 and brand B is 20 for $10. You need toilet paper and you will use it no question. For detail oriented people, you use 5 rolls a month. You have room for storage. There will not be a sale where toilet paper is cheaper than 20 for $10 (it is a great sale). What do you buy and how much of it?
Middle class- brand B, whatever amount comfortably fits in house.
Poverty- brand A- I have $5 in my budget for toliet paper and if I buy $10, I risk an overdraft charge, which means that my great deal on tp actually can cost me over $40 and make my credit even worse than it already is.
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quote:We still hold people responsible for such choices, we just don't use that word. We usually call it "credit."
Dan, What I'm getting from what you've said is that you think that as long as people are free to choose, whatever results from their choices, good or bad, is mostly fair. You seem to be saying that as long as your lot in life is the result of your choices, you deserve what you get to at least some extent. Am I understanding you correctly?
Let me give you an example. Suppose three people, Bob, Sue and Joe, each inherit $100,000 from a wealthy uncle. Joe put the money in a CD that earns 2% interest. Bob and Sue risk the full amount playing roulette. Bob bets on even, Sue bets on odd. Sue wins and walks away with $200,000. Bob looses and walks away with nothing. Do you think that its reasonable to say that to at least some extent they all got what they deserved? How much difference would it make if Bob and Sue had gambled the money playing poker or betting on the NCAA tournament instead playing roulette? What if they'd put the money into a high risk investment? If it makes a difference whether the choice involved any skill, how much skill would you say is needed to conclude that its fair that Sue won and Bob lost?
If you think the outcome at the roulette table was fair and that Bob, Sue and Joe all got what they deserved (to any degree), I think you've stripped the words "fair" and "deserve" of any real meaning. Deserve implies an equivalence between the intrinsic virtue of an action or a person and the reward. To say one persons choices deserve more reward than another necessarily implies that person is, by virtue of their choices, intrinsically more valuable than the other. If the difference between two peoples choices is the result of differences in their character -- things like hard work, dedication, creativity or their willingness to take risks, then saying one chooser deserves more than the other has some meaning. But if the differences between their choices is random chance or the result of factors beyond the choosers control, then saying one chooser deserves more than another is saying that what a person deserves has little or nothing to do with their character.
Fairness implies, at least to me, a level playing field. It implies that everyone has the same options to choose from and that the real consequences of any choice are the same for everyone. It implies that everyone faces the same rewards and penalties for making a "good" or "bad" choice.
Perhaps in this case that seems true to you. Bob, Sue and Joe all risk loosing or gaining $100,000 at the roulette table. But that ignores the very real fact the benefits and costs of gaining $100,000 dollars are not the same for everyone. Suppose in our example that Bob is young and single. Bob's wealthy influential father was able to help him find a job where he earns $200,000 a year and has given him a trust fund worth $1,000,000. If he looses a hundred grand, he can take it out of his trust and he has plenty of time to make it up before he retires. Loosing or winning a $100,000 isn't going to make any real difference in his life. It won't open or close any doors.
Sue has a job earning $50,000 a year, no savings and two kids that are almost college age. A hundred thousand dollars would make it possible for her to send her kids to an elite University. Another hundred thousand would allow her to start her own business, go back to school or save for a better retirement. For her, that money could make a huge difference in her life but without it she'll still be OK.
Joe also works earning $50,000 a year, has two kids and no real savings. One of his kids has a serious illness and has run up $90,000 in unpaid medical bills. Because of that, Joe's salary no longer covers all his bills. Without the hundred thousand dollars, he's facing loosing his house. Just like Sue, an additional hundred thousand would open up lots of opportunity for Joe, but without the first hundred grand his family is going to end up homeless.
To me, saying the outcome of this scenario was in any way fair because everyone had the same options ignores the fact that these people were absolutely not faced with the same choice. The consequences of winning or loosing were not the same. The rewards of winning and the penalty for loosing were not equal for these three people. Even if all three people have the same basic willingness to take risks and the same understanding of the risks, they aren't faced with making the same choice.
Their choices are going to say more about their circumstances than their character, and that is the opposite of what I mean by "deserving" and "fairness".
Part of the problem here is that "fair" and "deserve" are both words fraught with lots of conflicting connotations.
You talk a lot about consequences of failure being different for different people, etc. And that's all true, but I don't precisely see the point. The consequences of any given decision will be wildly different for any other person making that decision. People are unique, and their situations are unique, and their knowledge is unique, and their goals are unique. So the best possible choice will be different for each person.
I think people should be free to choose from whatever options are available to them , and if we want to criticize their choices to decide if they decided well or poorly, it's essential that we do so by their lights.
If you assume everyone has the same goal (say, accumulate ten million dollars), then some people will, through luck, be more able to accomplish that goal than others. It seems like you think that is unfair. But this assumes homogenous goals across all people, which is a bad assumption, because people can and do have varying goals.
Presumably the solution to these people being in different financial situations is to put everyone on equal footing, taking money from those with more and giving it to those with less, etc. until everyone is equal. This assumes that homogenous beginnings would be beneficial, which I also think is false, and impossibly utopian to boot. (It also assumes it's moral to use coercion to take from people, but I'll leave that one alone.)
I think expecting or desiring homogeny in either of those areas is a completely wrong way to approach it. Perhaps if absolute homogeny of beginnings was intrinsic (as opposed to requiring extensive force), then homogeny of goals would make sense. That is, if we all were born in exactly the same place, with exactly the same money, parents, physical form, etc. then it would be logical that the best goal for each of us would be identical.
But we aren't. And that sounds sort of horrifying to me anyway. Heck, one of the only areas where we do have homogeny (we have brains capable of universal knowledge creation) most people aren't interested in setting good goals (learning to think critically, be rational, etc.)
When it comes to financial and educational and similar areas, we have different goals, and should. And, the same way some people make bad choices in achieving their goals, people also make bad choices in setting goals.
I think that "Deserve" in general is a terrible word for this discussion, because of some of the implicit moral judgments you (and probably others) see connoted by it.
You said: "To say one persons choices deserve more reward than another necessarily implies that person is, by virtue of their choices, intrinsically more valuable than the other. "
To the extent that this is true, and you want to attribute "deserve" language to things like your example scenarios, I would say that both Bob & Sue "deserve" to lose their money, since they gambled it on a chance-based game. That Sue did not was a lucky happenstance for her, that Bob did was unlucky for him, but their luck doesn't change the fact that they made bad decisions (well, unless they think that playing Roulette is $100,000 worth of fun, in which case their decisions were okay I guess, though I think they made the wrong decision elsewhere in their life when they decided that Roulette was fun.)
If they'd played poker or some other largely skill based game, they would "deserve" whatever they won or lost, because they chose to put their money on the line in a game of skill.
You say: "But if the differences between their choices is random chance or the result of factors beyond the choosers control, then saying one chooser deserves more than another is saying that what a person deserves has little or nothing to do with their character."
Except that they both chose to enter a game which involves factors beyond their control! They chose to leave it to chance! They didn't have to do that, right? They weren't coerced into gambling their money.
Your analysis of the financial status of Joe, Bob, and Sue seems to relate back to what I said earlier about people being unique, with unique goals.
Even before I knew their backgrounds, I thought Joe made the best decision of the three of them (though certainly not the best decision he could have possibly made). Now that I know more, this is largely cemented, although I wonder about putting the money in a CD if it's most going to be taken out immediately to pay medical expenses. I'll go on the charitable assumption that Joe found a risk-free CD and this all happened a few years ago so that a 2% rate is within the realm of possibility. (As an aside, with the background it's now even more clear that Sue is particularly bad at decision making.)
You said: "Even if all three people have the same basic willingness to take risks and the same understanding of the risks, they aren't faced with making the same choice."
Exactly!
It goes so much deeper than their current situation, too. You can keep tracing their choices back and back and back. Was having two kids with no savings the best thing for Sue & Joe to do, respectively? Did they get complacent once they made $50,000 because that covered their expenses, instead of striving to make $55,000? And on and on and on.
Whether or not any given choice they made is/was the right choice needs to be determined based on their situation.
If Joe spent his $100k on medical expenses for his son, Sue spent her $100k building a startup she'd been planning for years, and Bob spent his $100k on investments, then it's totally possible that they each made the best possible choice they could make by their lights.
And you could say, well, Bob's investments will have huge returns, so that's unfair. Or you could say Sue's startup will get acquired by Microsoft and she'll make billions, and that's unfair. Or it will fail and she'll go bankrupt, which is also unfair. And through all of this, Joe didn't get to use the money to make more money at all, he just had to spend it on keeping his son alive and then go back to work, so that's unfair.
But you're not analyzing the choices by the individual's preferences. It seems that you're applying some top-down arbitrary metric of fairness. Fair for who? Each individual? Society? Does Bob's ability to invest his $100 grand somehow harm Sue's ability to make her own business, or Joe's ability to save his son? If so, how? If not, then how is it unfair?
And of course, the big question: How would you make these situations more fair?
If it is unacceptable that some people have more than other people, how do you solve this? Through force, or persuasion? Is there a third option?
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quote:Except that they both chose to enter a game which involves factors beyond their control! They chose to leave it to chance! They didn't have to do that, right? They weren't coerced into gambling their money.
Try carrying your take on this analogy over to real life, though. You'll find you can't, because there's actually no risk-free way to live. We are, in a sense, coerced into gambling. The only choice is which risky game to play.
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quote:Except that they both chose to enter a game which involves factors beyond their control! They chose to leave it to chance! They didn't have to do that, right? They weren't coerced into gambling their money.
Try carrying your take on this analogy over to real life, though. You'll find you can't, because there's actually no risk-free way to live. We are, in a sense, coerced into gambling. The only choice is which risky game to play.
Sure, the world has problems and risks, and we have to work around those until we solve them. That's sad, but that seems like a bit of a non sequitur. I'll return to my earlier question: What solution do you propose to solve the risk of, well, being alive?
In the mean time, we can mitigate our risks. The example in question, playing roulette, is choosing to take on excessive (monetary) risk.
Or we can look at non-monetary risk: When a crab fishing boat sinks, and people die, it's tragic, and we rightfully mourn that loss. Nobody says the crab fishermen "deserved" to die. That would be an inhuman thing to say.
But it's not precisely "unfair," either. It's a known risk in that profession. The people who take that job are taking on more risk than people who work at McDonald's.
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quote:What solution do you propose to solve the risk of, well, being alive?
Well, as you probably know given our previous discussions, I have a couple of ideas that I think would help with the problem. Namely, single-payer health care, and (to put it in your terms) rich people being forced to give some of their money to poor people. Or as I would prefer to put it, defining "private property" such that some of what you "earn" ends up "belonging" to the public.
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Dan, you still seem to be labouring under the notion that all options and all choices are available to everyone if they really want to make those choices. It is fine for people to have different goals and for only a few people to want to be billionaires but whatever the goals, people need a clean, safe, decent place to live, healthy food to eat, healthcare, and at lease some education to achieve them. No one is saying that everyone should have (or want) the same things, but some things are basic and too many people don't have those basics.
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quote:What solution do you propose to solve the risk of, well, being alive?
I don't think that we should just sieze all of the resources and then redistribute them evenly, but I do think we should attempt to provide a system in which hitting rock bottom takes considerable deliberate effort or involves events which are beyond our capacity to substantially mitigate as a society. Personal health care issues, for instance, should never be a cause for financial ruin.
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quote:Originally posted by MattP: Personal health care issues, for instance, should never be a cause for financial ruin.
Is there a limit to this principle?
For example, what if that personal health care issue is, say, a complex, aggressive, nearly untreatable cancer for which the only treatment is experimental, unreliable, and costs, let's say, a few million dollars?
Should society still foot that bill? Or is that enough of an edge case that we would expect the victim to pay for most of it, and end up financially ruined? Is it okay for them to be financially ruined in the goal of not dying to that cancer, or is that still unacceptable?
One problem with society or government being responsible for paying for things like that is that a logical extension of this, especially for experimental treatments, is that society can then deny the person that treatment because it's too expensive/unreliable/etc. We already see this in areas that are extensively controlled, such as organ transplants. Right?
And insurance companies do it too, by not covering certain treatments... the big difference between this and a situation where government is denying you is that all insurance companies can do is not pay for it, they can't stop you from going around them and paying out of pocket.
Whereas government (see organ transplants) can say "No, your odds of surviving even with this treatment is minimal and it would cost too much, and it could better help someone else." and then enforce this statement with coercion if necessary.
quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: ... people need a clean, safe, decent place to live, healthy food to eat, healthcare, and at lease some education to achieve them. No one is saying that everyone should have (or want) the same things, but some things are basic and too many people don't have those basics.
I think this is an interesting approach.
What I find especially interesting is that, if we were to look back at a less advanced version of our culture (or perhaps a less advanced culture elsewhere in the world today), we could see a similar statement, but it probably would have been focused on things like enough food to eat and water that wasn't going to give you dysentery, rather than healthcare. (Disclaimer: Maybe I'm wrong, and leftists have been pushing for "free" healthcare for centuries, I don't actually know for sure.)
Why might that be?
I think the obvious answer is that our society was less wealthy (and 3rd world societies are less wealthy), so the goalposts were different. More people were impoverished, so more people were starving, so that was a huge issue. Poverty today is essentially unrecognizable compared to poverty 100 or 200 years ago. Death by starvation is not a going concern in America today, so we can shift the goalpost to something like housing or healthcare (or "healthy" food).
Of course, once society is wealthy enough that healthcare is no longer a going concern for the impoverished, presumably something else will be defined as a basic right. A right that poor people have to do without unfairly, and so we should subsidize or otherwise as a society pay so that they gain access to X new right.
I don't mean this as a slippery slope, "if we agree that healthcare is a right, what next!?" I just think it's going to happen regardless.
As society evolves, more and more awesome services will become so pervasive and expected that we will see them as a "right." My off-the-cuff prediction of an upcoming right is "the internet," in case you're curious.
I think it's great that our society advances in this way, so that we can expect better and better baseline quality of life.
The thing is, the biggest contributing factor to this advancement, to poverty today being so much better than poverty of the past, is that our whole society is vastly wealthier than 100 years ago. Even at the lowest echelons. And I think that going forward, overall wealth and innovation will continue to be the biggest driving force in improving everyone's life.
So when we look at potential fiat-based solutions to social problems, that create additional tax and regulatory burdens against increasing the wealth of our civilization, I'm very wary.
I think that's a good way to slow down the progress that's going to solve the current problems of our day (and then give rise to the next set of better problems, obviously).
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quote: And insurance companies do it too, by not covering certain treatments... the big difference between this and a situation where government is denying you is that all insurance companies can do is not pay for it, they can't stop you from going around them and paying out of pocket.
In single-payer systems, the government will never stop you from paying out of pocket either.
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quote:So when we look at potential fiat-based solutions to social problems, that create additional tax and regulatory burdens against increasing the wealth of our civilization, I'm very wary.
I think that's a good way to slow down the progress that's going to solve the current problems of our day (and then give rise to the next set of better problems, obviously).
Dan, if you think wealth redistribution is likely to have a negative effect on the economy, does the same go for individual charity? If the American rich started voluntarily giving a larger portion of their income to the poor, having the same effect as a more robust welfare state but without the middle man, would that make us all worse off in the long run?
I agree that there are some good arguments against burdensome regulation, but we're not talking about that.
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I think you're right, by the way, that what the left-leaning thinker is going to count as a right will be relative to what we have the capacity to provide. I stand by that. I hope that someday, millennia down the road, maybe once we have widespread nanotech, people will have a right to whatever material goods they want and the notion of private property will essentially be restricted to real estate.
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: Whereas government (see organ transplants) can say "No, your odds of surviving even with this treatment is minimal and it would cost too much, and it could better help someone else." and then enforce this statement with coercion if necessary.
That is a GROSS misstatement of how the organ prioritization rules work. It is NOT a question of excess cost. It is a question of limited organ availability. The organization that makes those decisions has to allocate organs on the basis or urgency of need and likelihood of surviving. Relative cost is not the issue.
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Sure, but that limit is some distance from the status quo. The single-payer systems around the world that exist now have protocols for these things which we can model ours on or improve upon.
quote:For example, what if that personal health care issue is, say, a complex, aggressive, nearly untreatable cancer for which the only treatment is experimental, unreliable, and costs, let's say, a few million dollars?
Should society still foot that bill? Or is that enough of an edge case that we would expect the victim to pay for most of it, and end up financially ruined? Is it okay for them to be financially ruined in the goal of not dying to that cancer, or is that still unacceptable?
Treatments that expensive aren't a matter of financial ruin - they are too expensive to get in the first place. Those people just get sicker and die if they don't have insurance or assets. It's the ~$100K-$300K proven treatments (and treatments of complications) that I'm talking about.
My wife had to have a section of intestine removed last year. The operation, hospital stay, and follow-up treatments cost the better part of $100K. There was nothing experimental or high-risk about it but the bill would have wiped us out if I wasn't fortunate enough to have one of the ~50% of private sector jobs that provides medical insurance. It's also for a chronic condition that will likely continue to cost us a fair amount of money over the course of her life. It's not a lifestyle-related illness - it has a genetic component and it's specific cause is unknown. I'll likely continue to be able to obtain sufficient insurance because I'm a skilled professional in a field that currently offers it as a matter of course.
But for my lawyer brother-in-law with that same condition that works at a small law firm there is no practical route to obtaining medical insurance because of his pre-existing condition. If he has any major complications he'll be more then wiped out. Not because he needs cutting edge experimental treatment, but because even basic surgery is prohibitively expensive without the insurance that he is unable to purchase.
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So, I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes whether the decision is made by the government, or a private company empowered by the government to make that decision.
I mean, the entire situation is still created by intense government intervention and regulation. How many companies are allowed by the government to manage organ donations? And, more controversially, how many companies are allowed by the government to manage organ sales?
If the answer to either of those questions is a finite number, then at the end of the day the government is still dictating the parameters that determine who gets a transplant or not. Right? Or is that still wrong? (If so, I'm pretty sure you could tell me it's wrong without caps-lock, too, but, that's your call.)
quote:Originally posted by rivka:
quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: Whereas government (see organ transplants) can say "No, your odds of surviving even with this treatment is minimal and it would cost too much, and it could better help someone else." and then enforce this statement with coercion if necessary.
That is a GROSS misstatement of how the organ prioritization rules work. It is NOT a question of excess cost. It is a question of limited organ availability. The organization that makes those decisions has to allocate organs on the basis or urgency of need and likelihood of surviving. Relative cost is not the issue.
So, I said "No, your odds of surviving even with this treatment is minimal and it would cost too much, and it could better help someone else."
And I acknowledge that this is not perfectly representative of the organ situation. Sorry for misrepresenting that! I dunno if it was grossly, though.
It seems to me that if you take out "and it would cost too much" it's still fundamentally a situation where the government (or an organization empowered by the government) is dictating options via coercion.
Even if we take out the cost issue, I generally still think it's bad when the government dictates that people don't have the liberty to pursue whatever medical treatment they deem necessary, which is the underlying fear I was referring to.
Whether that treatment is some hogwash homeopathic remedy, or a toxic experimental drug, or anything in between, is largely irrelevant to me. I still think that people should be allowed to pursue those options. The government already extensively limits the treatments we're allowed to undergo. Concentrating even more power over medical decisions in its hands seems like a bad idea.
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The government having the ability to deny care is a separate issue from the government providing all/most care. One doesn't imply the other. The government can say that *they* won't cover a particular treatment, but if the private market wants to provide it it would take a separate government action to further say that no one else can provide the same treatment.
If I tell my daughter I'm not going to buy her Slurpee, that's not the same as saying that she can't get a Slurpee. I'm just not willing to pay for it.
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Dan, how do you think that decisions about how scarce organs are allotted should be made. Highest bidder?
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quote:If the answer to either of those questions is a finite number, then at the end of the day the government is still dictating the parameters that determine who gets a transplant or not. Right? Or is that still wrong? (If so, I'm pretty sure you could tell me it's wrong without caps-lock, too, but, that's your call.)
Since we're looking so far down the road here that indirect government oversight equates to government mandating how many organs may be donated, allow me to apply that style of reasoning to organ donation absent any of that: why do you appear to be suggesting that people should be considered property, Dan? Because if one can pay for an organ transplant entirely on their own without oversight, they are buying human organs. Humans are made up of our various organs. Something that can be bought and sold is generally considered property. Shall we human beings be property, then? Can we sell options to buy our organs to the highest bidder? Let's strip the brakes right off this capitalism schtick we got goin' with our occasional government involvement and get right down to the paradise of free enterprise!
Sidenote: why is it 'the government' controlling something when it's a bad thing that shouldn't be done, but 'the people' when it's a good thing that should be done?
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Rakeesh (and Kate), I didn't say anything about hating the status quo of organ donations and wanting to change it. You should know by now that, while I may argue for what I see as improvements to the traditional status quo, overall I think most traditions do alright, which is why they exist.
All I did here was contend that there is a substantial level of government oversight where organ transplants are concerned (this was just a buffer to a totally different observation, recall).
Whether government employees are the ones making the judgment calls or not, the government is still setting the guidelines for those judgment calls. So far, I still stand by that, though if Rivka wants to yell at me some more and provide more links that prove me even wrong-er, that's cool too.
Rakeesh: Your snark is appreciated, as always. I don't know that I'd characterize our current situation as "occasional" government involvement, but that's a debatable point.
I'll assume your sidenote isn't directed at me, because I can't conceive of how it could be. I'm not sure who it's directed at! I mean, constitutionally speaking, "the people" pretty clearly does not refer to "the government," or things like the first amendment sure do lose a lot of their punch!
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quote:Originally posted by MattP: The government having the ability to deny care is a separate issue from the government providing all/most care. One doesn't imply the other. The government can say that *they* won't cover a particular treatment, but if the private market wants to provide it it would take a separate government action to further say that no one else can provide the same treatment.
If I tell my daughter I'm not going to buy her Slurpee, that's not the same as saying that she can't get a Slurpee. I'm just not willing to pay for it.
Unless you own all the slurpee machines.
It seems like this tangent of the discussion is dependent on precisely how private the health care market remains. I'll certainly agree that the scenario I described isn't a given. Though I do think that concentrating more power in the government is generally a bad way to solve problems.
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Not all emphasis is yelling. But the repeated passive-aggressive slams in my direction do remind me why I usually refrain from responding to you in political discussions.
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I guess I'm trained to see things like italics and asterisks as emphasis, and caps pretty much exclusively as yelling, so that was the way I interpreted it. I really respect your inputs, so I'm glad to find out that I was totally wrong on that front.
And I really did appreciate your correction, because I didn't know the details that you linked me to. And I really would welcome finding out that I'm also wrong about the level of government oversight in organ donation.
To the extent that I was passive aggressive (the only one I see that looks that way in hindsight was the comment about you yelling at me, but I'm probably missing the other ones), I apologize. It honestly wasn't done with conscious intent, but I definitely agree it reads that way. So, again, I apologize.
I like arguing, and there are some people on Hatrack who dish out a sufficient level of snark and sarcasm that I don't feel bad returning in kind, but it's not my intent to make anyone feel bad or attacked.
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I was thinking about this on my way to get coffee a few minutes ago: Rakeesh, since I sort of hedged away from your accusations in my earlier post, i figured I should acknowledge that philosophically I do think that people's bodies should be considered their property, and they should be allowed to do with them as they see fit. It's why I'm in favor of legal drugs, and legal prostitution, and legal sale of your own organs.
The organs of the dead are a bit stickier (ew). If someone leaves instructions in their will (sell my heart to the highest bidder and give the proceeds to my kids), I'm okay with that. If they donate them to an organization, I'm okay with that too. If they leave no instructions, I guess their body should probably go to their next of kin the same way we handle their other property in lieu of a will.
But this is all just headspace theorizing. I'm in no way actually advocating that we push to pass these isolated issues into law today, and if someone else was, I'd want to look good and hard at why, because I'm not sure this is the best place to start scaling back government control. Seems like it's not really a pressing issue, so it's a weird place to start.
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quote:So when we look at potential fiat-based solutions to social problems, that create additional tax and regulatory burdens against increasing the wealth of our civilization, I'm very wary.
I think that's a good way to slow down the progress that's going to solve the current problems of our day (and then give rise to the next set of better problems, obviously).
Dan, if you think wealth redistribution is likely to have a negative effect on the economy, does the same go for individual charity? If the American rich started voluntarily giving a larger portion of their income to the poor, having the same effect as a more robust welfare state but without the middle man, would that make us all worse off in the long run?
I agree that there are some good arguments against burdensome regulation, but we're not talking about that.
That's a really interesting question!
Overall, I think that yeah, people giving their money to charities, or churches, or their friends, or, hell, blowing it on yachts or similar, is all going to be less effective at accelerating overall wealth than if they were to, say, invest it.
That being said, I don't think it's a huge deal if they do so. And people can have legitimate reasons to want to help other people, and I have no desire to try and stop them.
I certainly don't advocate dictating that people spend their money on investments any more than I'd advocate any other dictates. In general, I'm against dictating the behavior of individuals.
As a philosophical principle, I think that failure to persuade someone that your idea is correct is a terrible reason to force them to comply with that idea. What if you're wrong, and they're right? Better not to force them at all, when possible.
As an aside, to give you a sense of my personal priorities, I'm much, much more interested in active efforts to reduce onerous and lopsided regulations than I am in active efforts to reduce taxation. Regulations create far more barriers of entry, which is a huge problem both for innovation and entrepreneurship.
Here's an example, using the health care issue. I haven't given it a great deal of thought yet, but I wonder if I'd actually prefer a bare-minimum sort of government-controlled tax-funded health insurance system (Single payer? Something put out to compete with existing plans, as opposed to replacing them entirely) instead of the mandate, because it would put less burden on businesses to allocate their resources towards health insurance programs. A greater general tax burden, perhaps, but less burden on businesses specifically.
In general, I have plenty of issues with the way health insurance seems to be structured, but those aren't terribly relevant because neither the mandate nor single payer nor the status quo really address those concerns.
posted
Dan, I think you completely missed the point of my hypothetical. Nothing I said about Bob, Sue and Joe had anything to do with what they wanted out of life or what they considered important. They all basically want the same thing. The differences in their choices was not because they valued different things, it was because they were in different circumstances. The difference in their circumstances was completely the result of luck. Bob was lucky enough to be born to wealthy influential parents so he has a higher paying job and lots of money saved. He hasn't chosen not to have kids, he's just still young. Joe isn't in debt because he cares more about his children than Sue does. Almost any parent would spend everything they had to save the life of their sick child.
Freedom is meaningless unless you options and one of the main points I was trying to make with this hypothetical is that money is one of the most important factors that determines what options we have. For Sue, inheriting $100,000 made her free to do all kinds of things she couldn't have otherwise done, including gambling it all. Doubling the money by winning at roulette then gave her even more freedom.
Because Joe had the bad luck to have a sick kid, the money didn't bring him any new options. It may have saved his family from becoming homeless, but he could not have chosen to gamble the money if he'd wanted too. Parents have a legal obligation to pay their kids medical bills. The bill collectors would have been at his door demanding their cut before he could even cash the check.
For Bob, inheriting $100,000 dollars or loosing it gambling would make almost no difference in his freedom. The options open to a well connected young guy with 1 million in savings, and a high paying job just aren't going to be significantly different if he has 1.1 million in savings.
Because of that, good luck and bad luck have a multiplicative effect. Life is not like flipping a coin where the odds are the same regardless of what happened before. In life, good luck gives you new options in the next round. Bad luck takes options away.
In our society, financial resources (or the lack there of) make a huge difference in our individual freedom and its not a linear effect. For someone in real poverty, $100 dollars at the right time could be life changing. For someone like Mitt Romney, $10,000 is chump change. If increasing freedom is what you want, leveling the economic playing field is going to do a lot more for most people than anything else.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: Because of that, good luck and bad luck have a multiplicative effect. Life is not like flipping a coin where the odds are the same regardless of what happened before. In life, good luck gives you new options in the next round. Bad luck takes options away.
Replace "luck" with "choices" and this statement is just as true.
For example, I think that choosing to have a child is one of, if not the, most monumental and life-changing decisions anyone can make. It can have wonderful or ruinous consequences, from any number of perspectives including financial.
I think only a tiny minority of people who have kids actually give this decision the gravity it deserves. I think lots of people have kids without considering the extent to which doing so is absolutely going to alter their ability to realize their other ambitions. Which means that choice is making it exponentially harder for them to achieve other goals they supposedly have.
This is an example of poor decision-making. Such people should probably hold off having kids, or adjust their other goals.
That's just one example, but it's a big one because so many people make terrible choices by their own lights,. By their stated preferences (say, having a successful career, or saving up lots of money) they're making a decision that drastically increases the likelihood that they will not be successful.
Posts: 3580 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:I was thinking about this on my way to get coffee a few minutes ago: Rakeesh, since I sort of hedged away from your accusations in my earlier post, i figured I should acknowledge that philosophically I do think that people's bodies should be considered their property, and they should be allowed to do with them as they see fit. It's why I'm in favor of legal drugs, and legal prostitution, and legal sale of your own organs.
Ok, that's fine. My point is that you looked at Rivka's remarks about how the organization and methods for organ transplants aren't, actually, government-run except *maybe* in the most indirect, paces removed kind of way. Seeing that, you sum it all up: well, that's government control!
Alright, that's fine too. But if you're going to look that far down the (hypothetical, not at all a given) road in that case, then you cannot reasonably dismiss people when they say that your suggestion would ultimately amount to people having kids to sell organs, pressure people into selling them, importing illegal immigrants to do so, offering reduced sentences to felons for sale of organs, requiring the yielding up of organs as punishment, so on and so on and so on.
I suspect you'd respond a bit unfavorably to that sort of approach, but when it ties into your particular economic outlook it's appropriate, or so it seems. Not surprising someone would add emphasis given that response.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
I worked for a company where the research in one department showed that the company was massively screwed and could never sell the product they were trying to and since this was a small company, they only had one project. At this point, the CEO took his golden parachute and bailed. New CEO came in, cancelled everyone's promised raise, gave himself a big one, read the report and then flat out lied to everyone about what was in it. He said results were the opposite and everything was going good and on the way to production. Stocks shot up, he sold all his and made lots of money. Eventually the lies were revealed, the company was sued for fraud and went bankrupt. The CEO, on top of all the money he had made then went on to be CEO of another company. The scientists meanwhile were laid off with no benefits and now have this company which is known for scientific dishonesty on their resumes that can be a black mark on them (even though it is pretty clear that they never did anything wrong). So, the first CEO got all the info and chose to bail with a large amount of money. The second CEO chose to lie and then ended with lots and lots of money and good jobs. The scientists worked a lot of nights overtime and tried really hard to make this product worked and they end with nothing. On the choice model, it seems like only the CEOs had access to all the information to make the best choices. Also, the choice that was rewarded the greatest was not hard work, job production, skill, etc- it was ability to lie convincingly. I think we need to seriously look at our system when fraud is the best way to success. And the thing is, I don't for a moment believe this was just the company I worked for. From the papers, it seems like it is a general truth- lack of ethics is the best way to succeed in our society. We are going out of our way to justify why Bob made the wrong decision so he should starve, but it seems like we also need to look at how it is justifiable that the CEOs get to make tons of money by lying and cheating? How is that CEOs success fair or acceptable in our world?
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posted
Those scientists and other employees should've done more research and realized the product wouldn't work, and should also have been able to gauge the trustworthiness of their CEOs. Sorry, not 'should've' but 'could have', somehow. If they had gone in skeptical and mistrustful of their CEO, been able to conceal that attitude when being hired, and had excellent research and investigative skills, they could have avoided that outcome. Therefore this is not exactly something that happened to them!
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Those scientists and other employees should've done more research and realized the product wouldn't work, and should also have been able to gauge the trustworthiness of their CEOs. Sorry, not 'should've' but 'could have', somehow. If they had gone in skeptical and mistrustful of their CEO, been able to conceal that attitude when being hired, and had excellent research and investigative skills, they could have avoided that outcome. Therefore this is not exactly something that happened to them!
I really can't tell whether that is hyperbolic sarcasm for effect or whether you actually mean this.
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posted
Cool. It did seem out of character, but I have not slept well and just couldn't tell. My brain is broken. Posts: 9293 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
Normally it would be, but this time it's straight from the heart. I'm not fond of scientists, researchers, or their departments (don't even get me started on scholarette, now there's a derail!), and people who don't live their lives as though they were in an economic death match arena just grind my gears!
So in other words, sincere!
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:Replace "luck" with "choices" and this statement is just as true.
If your choice involves a flip of a coin, choice and luck boil down to exactly the same thing. The odds are the same for the person who gets to choose heads or tails and the one who doesn't.
quote:If they'd played poker or some other largely skill based game, they would "deserve" whatever they won or lost, because they chose to put their money on the line in a game of skill.
It's almost hilariously funny that you point to poker as an example of a largely skill based game. Chess is a game of skill. Poker is a game of luck in which a very high level of skill can slightly improve your odds of winning. In any individual game, skill makes almost no difference, you have to play tens of thousands of games in order for the skill to matter as much as luck. One study of online gambling statistics found that the best professional poker players have to play 35,540 hands before skill overcomes luck. Skill only matters in poker if you play thousands of games and to do that you need more than just skill, you need a bankroll big enough to last through a loosing streak of tens of thousands of games and you need a pool of less skilled players who are willing and able to play that many times.
Even in a game like basketball, where skill makes a far far bigger difference than in poker, in any single game luck is as important as skill. Over a season of dozens of games, the more skilled team is going to have a better record but the fewer games you play the more luck will matter. In real life, people don't get tens of thousands of second chances. Life has a lot more in common with a single elimination tournament than regular season play. No matter how skilled you are, if you have bad luck in round one, you don't get to play in round two.
[ March 25, 2012, 11:29 AM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
Mahjong is a better example of a skill based game, or karuta (100 Poems). Poker is mostly luck and heavily relies much more on its metagame.
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quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: Mahjong is a better example of a skill based game, or karuta (100 Poems). Poker is mostly luck and heavily relies much more on its metagame.
If by metagame you mean playing the players and not the cards, you're making a distinction without a difference. That's an integral part to poker.
And if you think it's mostly luck, you must not be very good at it. There's a reason some people win consistently at poker and that professional players are rich off their winnings, and it's not because they are eternally lucky.
And don't you draw tiles in mahjong?
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: Mahjong is a better example of a skill based game, or karuta (100 Poems). Poker is mostly luck and heavily relies much more on its metagame.
I must be the luckiest person in the world since I've won or been on the final table of 5 of the last 6 tournaments I've played in.
As lyrhawn says, people who think poker is luck based don't understand how poker actually works. There's an element of luck in it the way there is an element of luck in any game that is not strictly turn-based. Poker has an interesting evolution from the opening rounds to the middle and end-games, and even very skilled players can lose very suddenly and very dramatically. Also, an amateur can progress a significant distance based on one or two fortuitous hands, so luck is most definitely a factor. That doesn't mean it's mostly luck. It's not. I've started off games where an inexperienced player has tripled-up almost immediately based on a fairly wild hand. It happens. That person is almost invariably carved up by more skilled players. I've had to excuse myself from returning to friendly poker games because winning was too easy, and I didn't want to make enemies.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: Mahjong is a better example of a skill based game, or karuta (100 Poems). Poker is mostly luck and heavily relies much more on its metagame.
If by metagame you mean playing the players and not the cards, you're making a distinction without a difference. That's an integral part to poker.
And if you think it's mostly luck, you must not be very good at it. There's a reason some people win consistently at poker and that professional players are rich off their winnings, and it's not because they are eternally lucky.
And don't you draw tiles in mahjong?
I think its mostly luck based on studies of the game. As I noted before, professional players don't win consistently. They win only very slightly more often than they loose so that over the long run, they make money. But "over the long run" means tens of thousands of games.
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posted
Pesky math It's amazing (and kind of awesome) how things fall statistically once you have enough data to munge. It can be kind of depressing as well.
I was reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and the first few chapters are all about how everyone in Canada thinks their hockey system is a meritocracy, but statistically more professional players are born in the first three months of the year than in all of the other months combined. This is because of the advantage developmentally that they have over the other kids when they start in the kiddie leagues.
Then he went on to show that kids who repeat kindergarten or start school later/as the older ones in their grade are often at an extreme scholarly advantage that follows them all the way to college. That's when I put the book down and went off to have a good cry for letting my in-laws pressure me into sending my oldest to first grade as among the youngest in the class when I could have easily taken him from a year of private kindergarten to a year of public school kindergarten with no social stigma at all. (While he's been certified gifted and all that, what has stuck with him is the emotional distaste for school stemming from those early experiences. He's becoming a right impressive slacker/elitist. *sigh*)
Circumstances have a LOT to do with outcomes. Every awesome thing that has ever happened in my life has been a confluence of being in the right place at the right time with the right tools to appreciate/take advantage of it. It's not all one or the other.
Posts: 79 | Registered: Dec 2011
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posted
Hold 'em is surrounded by luck but driven by betting and bluffing strategies. Its not like roulette, or even blackjack, where you are facing a static set of probabilities. You can have short term wins and losses that are purely good or bad luck, but professional players don't have good careers simply because they've figured out how to be a "bit luckier".
Posts: 135 | Registered: Apr 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: For instance, one experiment involved a set of stories read by test subjects. They describe a normal social encounter. In the control group, the social encounter ends naturally and the group is asked to talk about the people involved; their conduct and their decision making.
Then a second group reads the same story, but in this story, the social encounter ends with a rape. In this group, the responses to the same questions show the victim of the attack derogated by the readers.
I spent a lot more time on this analysis in the last post, but I'm too burnt out to try and recreate it in full. Here's my best attempt:
I don't know much about the experiment in question, so if my theorizing below is wrong, that's fair.
Studies and experiments don't generally provide explanations for human behavior, they provide raw data. Trying to create explanations about that data is where psychologists often go wrong.
You don't explain how the victim was derogated by the readers. In this case, while there are absolutely awful misogynistic people who will say the woman was "asking for it" or some similar garbage, I'm going to set that aside for now. If they were instead pointing out behaviors the victim engaged in that could have made her more vulnerable (e.g. leaving a drink unattended) then I don't necessarily think this illustrates the just-world perception you think it does.
Their observations after-the-fact are going to be influenced by the most important events in the story. When there is no rape, the priority of observations will be very different than when there is a rape. An unattended drink, for example, is normally totally unremarkable. But if there was a date rape, suddenly it's quite relevant and worth mentioning.
I'm not interested in getting into most of this, but this struck me as a very odd dismissal of the just world studies.
To clarify, just world studies have shown that people will attribute negative moral characteristics both related and unrelated to the situation described to those whom they witness bad things happening to. This tendency correlates with self report and other measures of belief in the just world hypothesis.
As for:
quote:Studies and experiments don't generally provide explanations for human behavior, they provide raw data. Trying to create explanations about that data is where psychologists often go wrong.
I'm not sure what the point is here. You're describing an aspect of the scientific process and then...using it to say that psychology is invalid for some reason. I don't follow the logic.
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posted
Well, maybe I want to get involved a little bit more.
One thing we know as a pretty rock solid established fact is that Americans are very bad at determining the effect situation plays on people. This manifests in a bunch of different ways. One of the biggest has been codified as the Fundamental Attribute Error. This is the blanket term for people neglecting situational influences on behavior in favor of dispositional ones. An extreme, though still common, example of this is showing people a subject forced to write an essay about something. People with high FAE will think that this person must believe in the thing he was writing about, at least somewhat.
When evaluating their own behavior, average, non-depressed Americans will overestimate the role their choices played in their successes and underestimate the role they play in their failures. They will also assume that they have a lot more personal control over situations than they actually do. A classic demonstration of this is to give people a button to push that does absolutely nothing and give them some sort of output. They will come to believe that they have control over that output through the button and will ignore other factors that actually affect the output in favor of positive actions they take. This effect is especially pronounced when they're winning money as part of the experiment.
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It's amazing (and kind of awesome) how things fall statistically once you have enough data to munge. It can be kind of depressing as well.
