Democratic Presidential Primary Poll: January 15

[otatop]

@boredsocial

You deciding to not own XOM slaves doesn’t have the slightest impact on XOM slavery because there are literally millions of other people who will.

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[boredsocial]

You might want to use a problem that didn’t get solved with a political solution as your example there chief.

And to make my point even harder it didn’t die in the north for moral reasons… it died because it wasn’t economically viable. Only after that had happened did abolition become something people were willing to contemplate. Very few people whose net worth was tied up in slaves were at all open to the idea.

[hokie]

@boredsocial

You might want to use a problem that didn’t get solved with a political solution as your example there chief.

Hold up, so slavery was OK until the “political solution” came around? Huh?

[boredsocial]

No slavery was rampant until a political solution came around. I’m not talking about morality here. I’m talking about what happened.

Hell slavery didn’t even really end in the South with the Civil War. To this day the southern states real economic strategy is to keep labor costs as low as possible so that their rich people can profit.

Jesus Christ. You guys are liberals. That’s supposed to mean you’re for the government solving at least some % of problems. Tragedy of the commons situations and situations where doing something awful is hugely profitable are two of the absolute best use cases for government power.

[smrk4]

Sorry to interrupt but I just sneezed violently on the phone and it hit a +1 to a post

[MrWookie]

Wanting the government to be better doesn’t absolve me of also doing what I can.

[hokie]

I feel like we’re talking past each other a bit. I’m continuing the discussion on whether we should judge Tom Steyer for investment decisions he made earlier in his life. I and others posit that yes, we should be judging him for that. You have been arguing that no, he shouldn’t be judged, and have offered a couple reasons that I’ve tracked:

• If he didn’t do it, someone else would have
• It doesn’t matter what individuals do, nothing matters until a political solution is introduced

I disagree with those statements, and think the thought exercise of slavery is a valid comparison. His history of decisions matter, and he could have and should have done better.

[boredsocial]

I think he should be judged somewhat for it. But I also think that you could easily judge most of us in similar ways… particularly at work.

I think if you absolutely positively have to be a billionaire Steyer has found one of the cleanest ways to do it. That doesn’t make him an angel lol.

[hokie]

@boredsocial

I think he should be judged somewhat for it. But I also think that you could easily judge most of us in similar ways… particularly at work.

I think if you absolutely positively have to be a billionaire Steyer has found one of the cleanest ways to do it. That doesn’t make him an angel lol.

Sure, I certainly judge myself for my lackluster efforts at making or supporting change. But I’m also not running for president.

And whether or not your last statement is precisely true, it’s a pretty damning indictment of billionaires and is why we shouldn’t be electing them.

[boredsocial]

Yeah all other things being equal I’d really prefer the president wasn’t a billionaire. They aren’t really equal though… a Billionaire has resources to campaign with that can help us win.

I’d prefer Steyer to Biden/Pete because I’d rather the man behind the curtain just come out and run the show rather than hiding and using fronts.

[Lawnmower_Man]

@boredsocial

I’m super skeptical of pure econ people because their theories very nearly never work IRL. There are basically no economic theories from the last 50 years that have held up at all because they are all based on the idea that people are rational to some degree or another.

Principle-agency, information asymmetry, contract theory, auction theory

just to name a few. Also, your ending idea that theories will eventually be shown to be wrong is called science.

@boredsocial

The problem is that the econ people got very obsessed with math IMO.

What evidence do you have that this is “the problem” with econ people?

@boredsocial

Things econ PhD’s have told me include the efficient market hypothesis, the idea that the long term profit of firms is zero, that markets tend toward perfect competition, and numerous other things that are just hilariously wrong. Often they told me these things while acknowledging that they didn’t work, but still maintaining that the theories they had built on top of them did work. It turns out that when your assumptions are stupid it doesn’t matter how pretty the math you build on top of them is.

The first three examples you mention are results from the most basic models of neoclassical economics that are at least one hundred years old. The assumptions (namely expected utility theory and its variants that include bounded rationality) are still alive and well. I mean, if anything, those models fail to produce believable results in part because they underestimate the rationality of the actors: for example, the robber barons aren’t just producing widgets and hiring labor, they are reinvesting the profits into politicians and media to rig the entire system in their favor.