Its silly to ask people to do something thats not in their self interest. The solution is not to change human nature and make everyone into idealistic unselfish recycling yoga socialists. Real actual humans are motivated by self interest.
If you want to change behavior, then change the incentives.
If they want the HIV guy to submit to tests they should pay him.
The red cross should be charging for blood.
There are way too many people who die because they can't get an organ transplant. The reason there are no organs is there is no incentive for anyone to donate an organ not because there is an actual shortage of potential donors.
Is it irrational to want to avoid the time and agony of withdrawal in exchange for a few years of life? maybe for you. Not everyone assigns value in the same way.
...if I simply ask you what you think your life is worth, you may be tempted to exaggerate, so economists judge people based on their actions. Dangerous jobs tend to earn higher pay, while activities such as buying smoke alarms or buckling seat belts carry their own costs as well as bringing safety benefits.
A typical calculation: you might pay up to $6,000 on a safer car that reduced your risk of dying by one in a thousand. Six thousand divided by one in a thousand is six million, so you are valuing your own life at about $6m. This is a typical result for residents of the US.
I'm not an economics major so i am not totally sure, but i always thought monopoly referred to market share. In any case, I'm trying to say that there is a difference between a company with large market share and coercive monopolies:
coercive monopoly: a type of monopoly which arises and whose existence is maintained as the result of any sort of activity that violates the principle of a free market and is therefore insulated from competitive forces that would otherwise be a potential threat to its superior status.
And if you distrust monopolies so much, why advocate creating a government sponsored one? The incentives for abuse are still in place, you haven't changed anything except which people get to do the abuse. If the problem is power centralized within a few people than why centralize it even more by giving more power to the government?
A high switching cost does indicate a natural monopoly and I admit you make a good try there by saying the switching cost is high when trying to switch away from MS Office. But that would justify mandating open standards for documents not setting the price of Windows! (not that I would even agree with that)
Introducing regulation to prevent natural monopolies is ok.
Setting prices is always bad. The amount of damage price setting does is proportional to the amount of market distortion created by setting prices. High prices don't just lower demand, they encourage suppliers to produce.
Setting prices artificially low means shortages and lines because suppliers don't have an incentive to produce -- this affects the poor more than anyone else. See North Korea where price setting has lead to 2 million people starving to death and a black market in human meat (mostly children).
Setting prices artificially high means resources are wasted. Examples are farm subsidies and government buying surplus crops filling vast warehouses with rotting food. And the poor get to pay more for their food.
Rationing is always bad. This is just a variant on price setting. Rationing is an attempt to limit demand. Limiting demand means that producers will see lower prices and won't have an incentive to produce. This means lines and shortages. Its a bad idea in North Korea where they currently do that and it was a bad idea for the UK in WWII. This affects poor people as much as it does anyone else.
High gas taxes in Europe are a variant on rationing -- an attempt to lower demand. That means suppliers have less incentive to find new oil. Unfortunately it also means that Europeans are less competitive in the global market since oil is by far the cheapest way to get goods to market. Its not the main reason unemployment is 15% in France (price setting on labor by coercive monopolies called unions are), but it definately isn't helping any.
Price controls hurt the poor more than anyone. The rich will always get by just fine because they have the means to bypass a broken system, but the poor and middle class get soaked.
North Korea is a basket case precisely because of price controls. North Korea banned ALL market transactions for about 20 years. EVERYTHING was dictated by central planners. It was quite literally Marx's distopia come true. The only reason they didn't have famine until the 90's was due to massive Soviet aid. When the Soviet's stopped funding them, they were forced to allow some market transactions (after several years of famine killed off a few million people).
Darpanet was a total beaurocratic government waste and never went anywhere. Until private industry picked it up and created huge new wealth and used it to change the world.
First of all, since when is the software market a natural monopoly? What about open source, what about IBM solutions, what about Google, AutoCAD, etc, etc.
Having the government set prices is always dumb. See North Korea.
Monopolies aren't a bad thing. If a company performs so well that no one else wants to compete with them then consumers are getting a good deal. If the company slacks off and doesn't perform well then competitors will enter the market place.
If a company breaks the law then they should be punished. But companies should never be punished or regulated just because they are a monopoly.
75 cents might not be worth it to you, but what about the guy in china? it is cheap labor without all the horrible labor rules and regulations that makes doing business overseas hard.
I think there is some hysteria here. Hosted solutions are popular because syncing your data between your cell phone, pda, ipod, laptop, home desktop, and work destop is a pain. Not because of a corporate conspiracy. Prices and solutions will work themselves out if there is competition in the marketplace (which there is -- especially when you consider that Microsoft's OS advantage is not there on the internet).
Despite doubts about whether or not purple ducks from pluto are about to invade, we still have the responsibility to prepare for it. Until we can be CERTAIN that we are not taking the risk of being defenseless against the alien purple ducks invasion, particularly given the haunting spector of them having red hot gamma laser photon canons, we need to proceed with caution. Even if it means we all have to live like Native Americans in teepees and burn buffalo dung for heat.
The probability of the even coming to fruition has got to be taken into account along with the damage to people in preventing it. Its reasonable to debate over what the risks are and what might be a reasonable action to take in light of the costs and benefits. But we don't just say, "I don't know but to be safe, lets send the economy back to the stone age."
What about every engineer in the world? Or are only professors, scientists? I think professors get a really great salary. The benefits are incredible -- for one thing they can never be fired. They work 6 months a year. One month of for christmas. An office on a beautiful campus. Compare that with pumping gas!? You've got to be kidding. I'd take the professor's salary and benefits any day. Thats got to be a $40,000 gap (wild guess). People take jobs as professors, because they can make money that doing it.
Yes, tenure sometimes means unproductive dead wood is kept around, but it also means that academics can't get sacked purely because their research discovers conclusions that the university finds unpalatable.
A researcher who is supported by private funds, can sell his ideas elsewhere. A researcher who is supported by government funds is at the whim of the politicians.
If business doesn't fund "basic research" then I am not sure why anyone else should. If your idea is not profitable, I, as a taxpayer, don't see why I should pay for it. If its not worth any money, then its worthless and we shouldn't spend any money on it.
Has tenure prevented creationists from pushing their agenda into schools? Has tenure prevented sanitized versions of huck finn and tom sawyer from going into class rooms? I'd say that tenure has failed to prevent political intervention.
You are right vouchers wouldn't help make schools politically independant. And I think you are right that private schools will raise prices when vouchers come in. Vouchers would give poor people more access to better schools though.
But you are right, I have to change my argument. Less political intervention can only be achieved through less federal money. Its the nice thing about being private. Things get judged on merit rather than popularity (ie politics).
Its true that a school in a less affluent area will probably not be as good as a school in a more affluent area. But is that any less true right now? Currently we encourage bad teachers by refusing to fire them, and we encourage bad schools by giving them even more money. The only way to get good performance is to reward it. Competition will raise the quality of eduction in bad schools. It also gives poor people who can not afford to live in an affluent neighborhood but can afford to send their kids to a school in an affluent neighborhood a way out. The current system traps poor people in their bad neighborhoods and prevents them from going to better schools nearby. Elite schools who are looking for good students will provide scholarships to poor students in the same way that universities do -- in order to have better statistics to advertise.
I think your worries about a monopoly are unfounded. If another company comes along that can provide a better education at a lower price, then the bad old school will go out of business. As long as there is a profit to be made there will be competition for that profit.
I also think we should pay kids for performance. They would be a lot more interested in school if they made money rather than just got an A. And I mean a real significant salary, not just 50 cents.
I'm not sure I agree that tenure promotes (big T) Theories.
I agree that removing tenure would raise salaries. It could be argued that really top scientists who can get top salaries will go for the money instead of tenure. So the top scientists who produce Theories will not be tenured.
Einstein didn't have tenure. He was working in an office and doing science on the side. It depends on what you count as science which adds value to society but, the guy who came up with transistors was employed by Texas Instruments and Steve Jobs wasn't tenured either. Thats only a few examples, but I have to wonder if you profiled all the Theories that people have come up with and counted which ones were by tenured people and which ones were from untenured people, what kind of numbers you would come up with. I don't think there is an obvious answer, but I would bet science is helped by high salaries more than tenure. which is a bit confusing statement, since tenure is a form of compensation. But I think raising scientists salaries would be more effective than keeping tenure.
Tenure isn't a good way to prevent political intervention. It not only doesn't work very well, but it means bad teachers get to hang around forever. Vouchers and more private schools would be a more effective way to have schools be politically independant.
There are many kids who are 16 and 17 and not doing anything in high school. They should be moved out into the work force where they can be productive. They can always go back to school later. I don't think the parent poster was talking about 2nd graders.
Teachers have a hard job and work fairly long hours, but then they only work 6 months out of the year. Why do they deserve a saftey net thats any different from the rest of us? Let the market determine their value by getting rid of tenure and allowing parents to send their kids to any school they want.
No one will refuse tenure, but when asked to choose most people will take a high salary over tenure. Since when is not being able to fire someone who is not doing a good job a reasonable way to run an organization? Its crazy.
If you want to remove politics from science then we should eliminate government funding for science. science should be about producing useful research not about whatever the current administration feels like funding this week.
The same goes for schools. Schools should be about what parents want for their kids. Not whatever the current administration wants. That means vouchers and more private schools.
Since when is regurgitation or teacher independence a problem? The problem is that we can't fire bad teachers. Let parents decide if they want to go to a school with ID. Don't legislate what our kids should or shouldn't know. This should be a personal decision.
If a kid fails a class, who gets to decide if it was because he couldn't handle it or because the teacher was incompetent?
Let parents move their kid to which ever school is most effective and we will see bad schools with bad teachers go out of business leaving only the good schools.
So out of all the money you earn each day you only keep $1 a day and you give the rest to charity? Or if you live in the US, I might rephrase and ask if you really only keep $9,827 of your annual salary and give the rest to charity?
I'm guessing you are either in high school or college and don't realize just how long it really takes to make $120,000.
An easy way to increase the pool is to allow more immigrants in. If you are worried about the effect of poor mexicans on welfare rolls, then lets at least let in all wealthy educated people who would love to be here and work legally. Importing talent and wealth help everyone when immigrants innovate and create jobs here in America.
Limiting the number of all immigrants to 500,000 people or whatever is a waste. Personally I'd like to see us take in more immigrants of all kinds, but at the very least lets accept the wealthy and educated.
Slashdot Mirror
Its silly to ask people to do something thats not in their self interest. The solution is not to change human nature and make everyone into idealistic unselfish recycling yoga socialists. Real actual humans are motivated by self interest.
If you want to change behavior, then change the incentives.
If they want the HIV guy to submit to tests they should pay him.
The red cross should be charging for blood.
There are way too many people who die because they can't get an organ transplant. The reason there are no organs is there is no incentive for anyone to donate an organ not because there is an actual shortage of potential donors.
Is it irrational to want to avoid the time and agony of withdrawal in exchange for a few years of life? maybe for you. Not everyone assigns value in the same way.
But there is value in location. Would you rather live in ANWR or New York City?
Unless you can teleport easily. I haven't played the game.
...if I simply ask you what you think your life is worth, you may be tempted to exaggerate, so economists judge people based on their actions. Dangerous jobs tend to earn higher pay, while activities such as buying smoke alarms or buckling seat belts carry their own costs as well as bringing safety benefits.
a lue-of-iraqi-life.html
A typical calculation: you might pay up to $6,000 on a safer car that reduced your risk of dying by one in a thousand. Six thousand divided by one in a thousand is six million, so you are valuing your own life at about $6m. This is a typical result for residents of the US.
http://www.timharford.com/deareconomist/2005/10/v
And if you distrust monopolies so much, why advocate creating a government sponsored one? The incentives for abuse are still in place, you haven't changed anything except which people get to do the abuse. If the problem is power centralized within a few people than why centralize it even more by giving more power to the government?
A high switching cost does indicate a natural monopoly and I admit you make a good try there by saying the switching cost is high when trying to switch away from MS Office. But that would justify mandating open standards for documents not setting the price of Windows! (not that I would even agree with that)
Introducing regulation to prevent natural monopolies is ok.
Setting prices is always bad. The amount of damage price setting does is proportional to the amount of market distortion created by setting prices. High prices don't just lower demand, they encourage suppliers to produce.
Setting prices artificially low means shortages and lines because suppliers don't have an incentive to produce -- this affects the poor more than anyone else. See North Korea where price setting has lead to 2 million people starving to death and a black market in human meat (mostly children).
Setting prices artificially high means resources are wasted. Examples are farm subsidies and government buying surplus crops filling vast warehouses with rotting food. And the poor get to pay more for their food.
Rationing is always bad. This is just a variant on price setting. Rationing is an attempt to limit demand. Limiting demand means that producers will see lower prices and won't have an incentive to produce. This means lines and shortages. Its a bad idea in North Korea where they currently do that and it was a bad idea for the UK in WWII. This affects poor people as much as it does anyone else.
High gas taxes in Europe are a variant on rationing -- an attempt to lower demand. That means suppliers have less incentive to find new oil. Unfortunately it also means that Europeans are less competitive in the global market since oil is by far the cheapest way to get goods to market. Its not the main reason unemployment is 15% in France (price setting on labor by coercive monopolies called unions are), but it definately isn't helping any.
Price controls hurt the poor more than anyone. The rich will always get by just fine because they have the means to bypass a broken system, but the poor and middle class get soaked.
North Korea is a basket case precisely because of price controls. North Korea banned ALL market transactions for about 20 years. EVERYTHING was dictated by central planners. It was quite literally Marx's distopia come true. The only reason they didn't have famine until the 90's was due to massive Soviet aid. When the Soviet's stopped funding them, they were forced to allow some market transactions (after several years of famine killed off a few million people).
Darpanet was a total beaurocratic government waste and never went anywhere. Until private industry picked it up and created huge new wealth and used it to change the world.
First of all, since when is the software market a natural monopoly? What about open source, what about IBM solutions, what about Google, AutoCAD, etc, etc.
Having the government set prices is always dumb. See North Korea.
Monopolies aren't a bad thing. If a company performs so well that no one else wants to compete with them then consumers are getting a good deal. If the company slacks off and doesn't perform well then competitors will enter the market place.
If a company breaks the law then they should be punished. But companies should never be punished or regulated just because they are a monopoly.
75 cents might not be worth it to you, but what about the guy in china? it is cheap labor without all the horrible labor rules and regulations that makes doing business overseas hard.
i think this could be brilliant.
I think there is some hysteria here. Hosted solutions are popular because syncing your data between your cell phone, pda, ipod, laptop, home desktop, and work destop is a pain. Not because of a corporate conspiracy. Prices and solutions will work themselves out if there is competition in the marketplace (which there is -- especially when you consider that Microsoft's OS advantage is not there on the internet).
so encrypt it then
yeah you can't use your laptop on a bike or while you are walking either. those things are so useless.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
Despite doubts about whether or not purple ducks from pluto are about to invade, we still have the responsibility to prepare for it. Until we can be CERTAIN that we are not taking the risk of being defenseless against the alien purple ducks invasion, particularly given the haunting spector of them having red hot gamma laser photon canons, we need to proceed with caution. Even if it means we all have to live like Native Americans in teepees and burn buffalo dung for heat.
The probability of the even coming to fruition has got to be taken into account along with the damage to people in preventing it. Its reasonable to debate over what the risks are and what might be a reasonable action to take in light of the costs and benefits. But we don't just say, "I don't know but to be safe, lets send the economy back to the stone age."
What about every engineer in the world? Or are only professors, scientists? I think professors get a really great salary. The benefits are incredible -- for one thing they can never be fired. They work 6 months a year. One month of for christmas. An office on a beautiful campus. Compare that with pumping gas!? You've got to be kidding. I'd take the professor's salary and benefits any day. Thats got to be a $40,000 gap (wild guess). People take jobs as professors, because they can make money that doing it.
Yes, tenure sometimes means unproductive dead wood is kept around, but it also means that academics can't get sacked purely because their research discovers conclusions that the university finds unpalatable.
A researcher who is supported by private funds, can sell his ideas elsewhere. A researcher who is supported by government funds is at the whim of the politicians.
If business doesn't fund "basic research" then I am not sure why anyone else should. If your idea is not profitable, I, as a taxpayer, don't see why I should pay for it. If its not worth any money, then its worthless and we shouldn't spend any money on it.
Has tenure prevented creationists from pushing their agenda into schools? Has tenure prevented sanitized versions of huck finn and tom sawyer from going into class rooms? I'd say that tenure has failed to prevent political intervention.
You are right vouchers wouldn't help make schools politically independant. And I think you are right that private schools will raise prices when vouchers come in. Vouchers would give poor people more access to better schools though.
But you are right, I have to change my argument. Less political intervention can only be achieved through less federal money. Its the nice thing about being private. Things get judged on merit rather than popularity (ie politics).
Its true that a school in a less affluent area will probably not be as good as a school in a more affluent area. But is that any less true right now? Currently we encourage bad teachers by refusing to fire them, and we encourage bad schools by giving them even more money. The only way to get good performance is to reward it. Competition will raise the quality of eduction in bad schools. It also gives poor people who can not afford to live in an affluent neighborhood but can afford to send their kids to a school in an affluent neighborhood a way out. The current system traps poor people in their bad neighborhoods and prevents them from going to better schools nearby. Elite schools who are looking for good students will provide scholarships to poor students in the same way that universities do -- in order to have better statistics to advertise.
I think your worries about a monopoly are unfounded. If another company comes along that can provide a better education at a lower price, then the bad old school will go out of business. As long as there is a profit to be made there will be competition for that profit.
I also think we should pay kids for performance. They would be a lot more interested in school if they made money rather than just got an A. And I mean a real significant salary, not just 50 cents.
I'm not sure I agree that tenure promotes (big T) Theories.
I agree that removing tenure would raise salaries. It could be argued that really top scientists who can get top salaries will go for the money instead of tenure. So the top scientists who produce Theories will not be tenured.
Einstein didn't have tenure. He was working in an office and doing science on the side. It depends on what you count as science which adds value to society but, the guy who came up with transistors was employed by Texas Instruments and Steve Jobs wasn't tenured either. Thats only a few examples, but I have to wonder if you profiled all the Theories that people have come up with and counted which ones were by tenured people and which ones were from untenured people, what kind of numbers you would come up with. I don't think there is an obvious answer, but I would bet science is helped by high salaries more than tenure. which is a bit confusing statement, since tenure is a form of compensation. But I think raising scientists salaries would be more effective than keeping tenure.
Tenure isn't a good way to prevent political intervention. It not only doesn't work very well, but it means bad teachers get to hang around forever. Vouchers and more private schools would be a more effective way to have schools be politically independant.
There are many kids who are 16 and 17 and not doing anything in high school. They should be moved out into the work force where they can be productive. They can always go back to school later. I don't think the parent poster was talking about 2nd graders.
Teachers have a hard job and work fairly long hours, but then they only work 6 months out of the year. Why do they deserve a saftey net thats any different from the rest of us? Let the market determine their value by getting rid of tenure and allowing parents to send their kids to any school they want.
No one will refuse tenure, but when asked to choose most people will take a high salary over tenure. Since when is not being able to fire someone who is not doing a good job a reasonable way to run an organization? Its crazy.
If you want to remove politics from science then we should eliminate government funding for science. science should be about producing useful research not about whatever the current administration feels like funding this week.
The same goes for schools. Schools should be about what parents want for their kids. Not whatever the current administration wants. That means vouchers and more private schools.
Since when is regurgitation or teacher independence a problem? The problem is that we can't fire bad teachers. Let parents decide if they want to go to a school with ID. Don't legislate what our kids should or shouldn't know. This should be a personal decision.
If a kid fails a class, who gets to decide if it was because he couldn't handle it or because the teacher was incompetent?
Let parents move their kid to which ever school is most effective and we will see bad schools with bad teachers go out of business leaving only the good schools.
i agree with everything you said.
So out of all the money you earn each day you only keep $1 a day and you give the rest to charity? Or if you live in the US, I might rephrase and ask if you really only keep $9,827 of your annual salary and give the rest to charity?
I'm guessing you are either in high school or college and don't realize just how long it really takes to make $120,000.
The immigrants who founded Google, Intel, Oracle, Sun, and Yahoo created wealth and good jobs. I'm not seeing the downside.
An easy way to increase the pool is to allow more immigrants in. If you are worried about the effect of poor mexicans on welfare rolls, then lets at least let in all wealthy educated people who would love to be here and work legally. Importing talent and wealth help everyone when immigrants innovate and create jobs here in America.
Limiting the number of all immigrants to 500,000 people or whatever is a waste. Personally I'd like to see us take in more immigrants of all kinds, but at the very least lets accept the wealthy and educated.
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