Money as Reward, Money as Vote

[Ecmandu]

read above post as well

Carleas, if you don’t believe me, read this New York Times article…

google.com/amp/s/www.nytime … s.amp.html

[Carleas]

@Ecmandu

I’m assuming your “negative” in negative 22% was a typo.

That’s a tilde, I used it here to mean ‘approximately’. Good to know it reads as negative, though, and from wiki it seems it has other meanings when attached to numbers. I’ll try to say that in a different way going forward.

@Ecmandu

Have you never heard of tax loopholes?

I have, and I’m sure they’re widely used. But I believe the numbers I provided are actual tax revenue, i.e. they are the taxes actually collected and thus take into account all loopholes.

@Ecmandu

take it from trump himself (who says he pays no taxes)

Trump paid no taxes because he took a bath 20 years ago. His income was significantly negative during one year, and our tax system lets him spread that loss over time. One can argue with the best way to deal with the situation, but permitting people who take on significant risk to spread their losses and gains has merits. For one thing, it’s probably more accurate: if the nature of my business is that I make $200k a year with a 50% risk of losing a $100k, then my effective income over time is $50k a year.

I personally think income is the wrong target for taxation. Instead we should target consumption with a VAT and property or land value tax, which would avoid this problem (though it likely introduces its own quirky edge cases).

[Silhouette]

@Carleas

I find RB to be a better way to level the playing field than BS.

I think it feels less unfair because it’s a little smoother, it’s not arbitrary or unpredictable, and it still requires that racers have some skill to get into the lead.

I agree.
You could distinguish the two approaches as acute and chronic fairness measures.
Shocks don’t work well with economies, especially when it comes to credit/lending.
And psychologically, smooth trends just become something to work around, like entropy or gravity.

I think this “Blue Shell Effect” being applied to Counterstrike is just hyperbolic. I’ve seen other much less dramatic terms being used, such as “Comeback Mechanics”, which mean just the same thing.
I wouldn’t be so hasty to dismiss the economic element of games like Counterstrike as not core to the experience - basically all games involve the management of resources to hopefully give you an advantage towards achieving a goal. The genre is more like the primary manner in which you manage your resources, and what sort of goal you’re looking to achieve + the aesthetics around it. For CS:GO, you use the mechanics of the losing team getting more money to your advantage just like you use the terrain - it’s just another limitation on the game to work around, like not using your hands in soccer unless you’re the goalkeeper, or hitting the ball over the net and inside the lines on a tennis court. Games wouldn’t be games without deliberate rules and restrictions, and with video games they don’t have to be static - they can be dynamic as well.

It’s just not rewarding when the Nash Equilibrium is to not play the game, like with “BS”: if all players opt to stay out of 1st position as soon as someone gets the item, then it’s arguable that everyone ought to immediately race in reverse as soon as a player picks one up (though in reality it’s a weighing of risk that punishes the biggest risk-taker). But RB gets around all this anyway, we seem to agree on this one.

@Carleas

I don’t think this is inherent in a market economy. Our economy is significantly captured, and past winners have structured the laws to make keeping wealth easier than making wealth.

But setting that aside, I think the left (of which I consider myself a part) is often too eager to cut off the nose to spite the face. The difference between a 2% growth rate and a 1% growth rate is enormous over time, and we should be reluctant to choose the latter just because it also means a smaller increase in inequality.

Being “at the top” can mean more than one thing, because people get paid in different ways. People who earn lots of money might also earn lots of disdain. People who earn genuine admiration might not get paid much to do it. That makes sense because people will be willing to accept lower compensation to play a role that pays in admiration, since people like being admired, but will need extra money to compensate for doing unpopular work. That gets back to the original point: lots of unpopular work is socially valuable, and it’s fine to compensate those people more, but in it becomes a problem repeated games with the prickly people who are willing to be unpopular for money get massively more votes in what is valuable.

I agree that our economy is significantly captured. The power of past winners is beyond sufficient to hold the vast majority to ransom to increase the power of past winners more and more. If there’s a threshold where a balance in inequality is kept in check, we passed it.

I think it’s a little generous to think of “people who earn genuine admiration who don’t get paid much to do it” as “at the top”. I’m not being cynical or materialistic, I’m just not underestimating the power that the rich have over the world in all respects, regardless of earning any amount of disdain. No matter how loved you are or how much political influence you have due to the good you do, if you’re not paid enough to place you up there with the disdained rich, realistically your power is only superifical. It’s trade that makes the world go round.

What should be noted about the current situation of the world is where real value lies - and it’s with those who don’t earn nearly enough admiration for the good they do, and whose monetary compensation is practically negatively correlated with contemporary pay structures. The left has always known this. I’m not even sure that rectifying this would actually result in less growth as you seem to fear? But I do know that growth for the sake of growth has a lot to do with merely allowing free markets to survive rather than being necessarily socially important. Funding is attracted through a good return/interest, which is maximised overall by overall growth, and simplified when more funds are in the hands of less people, which is the emergent result of all free trading games anyway. It’s not cutting off the nose to spite the face for the left to want to rectify that. In a lot of ways, growth is bad for us - psychologically as well as socio-politically and environmentally speaking.

@Carleas

I recently learned of the concept of ergodicity, and I think it’s a desirable feature in an economy. In short, a system is ergodic when the distribution of a collection in any instant is the same as the distribution of any member of the collection over time. A fair society would be ergodic over generations, so that the status of ones wealth/class at birth were independent of the status of ones wealth/class as an adult, and the probability distribution for any individual mirrors the distribution of wealth in society.

I haven’t read your Pareto Distribution of Wealth (but I will), but from a quick look it seems similar to this idea (if only in the way it considers the structure of society independent of values and policy).

I had a quick read about Ergodicity. If I’m understanding it properly, it sounds like a measure of consistency and fairness - the average for individuals over a long time matching the average for everyone at any one time, or something similar?
Sounds reasonable.
You seem to be relating it to an aversion to nepotism? Nepotism can and will happen in free markets, which is just another one of the anti-meritcratic consequences of free markets.

Since you wrote this post, I noticed you replied to my Pareto Distribution of Wealth thread - I’ll hopefully respond to what you said on that thread at some point.

@Carleas

I don’t disagree that there is variation, and there aren’t really any human universals, but there are things we should expect the average human to do, and ways we should shape society in light of those expectations. Humans are, after all, not blank slates, we inherit some ‘wiring’ dictated by the circumstances of our evolution. And we can see similar wiring in our closest animal relatives, who show similar preferences on average (despite, again, significant variation).

And of course this is not to excuse that behavior: one way to encourage people to suppress instinctive selfishness is to punish it through law, policy, and culture. But in shaping those, we should be aware of what people will tend to do, what instincts we’ll need to counteract, and what policies will work with those instincts to maximize buy-in and optimize outcomes.

I’d also point out that these ‘wiring’ tendencies are not all toward selfishness. We also see innate cooperative and pro-social tendencies, like a visceral distaste for unfairness and desire to help members of the community. Humans are social animals, and we’ve evolved to be part of a collective, and to support that collective even to our own detriment, and to punish others who don’t support the collective.

The final paragraph in the above quote is exactly what I’m getting at.

There’s just too many people, myself included, whose instincts like those in said paragraph completely nullify the selfish instincts we were discussing before as “human nature” or not - such as the seeming urge to sabotage others even if it includes self-sabotage simply to maintain a competitive advantage: I don’t have any of that at all, except in competitive game situations with negligible real-world impact.

My point is that if many people have one side of their instincts dominating the other, and many other people vice versa, what use is an average? An average just tells us about those in between at the cost of telling us amount far far more than mere minorities/exceptions either side.
That’s my only issue, I know you’re not apologising for the existence of selfish human instincts, and I agree we’re not blank slates.

@Carleas

This is part of why I’ve long been a skeptic of privacy and secrecy as a policy, but to push back a little: many of the factors that make choices rational are opaque from the outside not only because of secrecy of facts, but because a surface-level understanding of the facts doesn’t give an accurate understanding of the dynamics of an organization that an insiders deep understanding provides.

We can see something similar going on when we look at the choices of the poor who live in a state of precarity, who often make choices that are hard for those with more economic security to understand. For example, buying and wearing gold jewelry seems extravagant for someone who lives paycheck to paycheck, but when we consider that choice in light of a lack of a secure place to store wealth (e.g. shared/insecure housing, not banks, etc.), the relatively liquidity of gold, and the social signaling function of displays of wealth, those decisions become easier to understand. Without considering the full picture, it’s easy to conclude that people are making a bad decision and should be punished for their bad choices, but in fact those decisions are the rational reaction to a situation we may not fully understand.

This is somewhat at odds with the goal of “making things obviously fair”, and I’m not sure what the takeaway is for policy makers, other than some humility that we might not actually know what fairness looks like. Indeed, to generate the perception of fairness, we might need to make society deeply unfair.

It’s true that the dynamics of an organisation isn’t something the general populace are going to understand, to give the organisation’s decisions the correct context - so there’s little point in transparency in that respect. There’s going to be a lack of empathy, rationality and sufficient study all over the general populace - especially between people with very different lives to one another, as you say.

That’s not to say that fairness can’t be garnered from it scientifically - when with current privacy in place it can barely be speculated. Though I agree that this is inevitably going to be at odds with the perception of fairness, as you also point out, at least at first. One thing that the current privacy that we have in place has in its favour is that it keeps latent the majority of outcry against it, simmering away relatively calmly as a general political resentment that most accept or at least don’t fight. I would argue though that this is mainly because of general public ignorance, which rubs me up the wrong way on a personal level at the very least. In light of your comments on this matter, I’m not entirely sure how much more transparent things ought to get - purely out of distrust of the public’s ability to deal with it if privacy were removed. Ironically this is no doubt the same kind of distrust that would cause the misunderstandings that would arise if transparency allowed people with different lives to judge one another too harshly… I’ll have to think about this one.