I didn't state any hypotheses. I just asked a question. I said: what would be the net collective good if Bill Gates had personally earned $250 million less by selling Windows, because greater competition (among software titans, not software companies, although the one probably follows from the other) had forced him to earn a smaller fortune? Would it be greater or less than the good that Gates is now inarguably doing with that $250 million?
This is, first of all, not an implausible hypothetical. There are plenty of markets where tight competition keeps profits down, and where it is difficult to earn huge personal fortunes. Why aren't PC operating systems one of them? I think a good case can be made that it's just historical accident. That means a "parallel" universe in which Gates does not earn so much money is not only not very different from ours, it could be our universe in the future. Do we want that or not? The question is worth considering.
Second, it's a nonobvious hypothetical. People rarely consider opportunity cost when they think about the costs of economic decisions. So, for example, in this case, people have said: I guess it's OK that the price of MS software has been so much higher than its cost of production that $250 million more could be siphoned off to Gates' personal fortune than even he wants, because, after all, that $250 million is now doing good. But this mistakenly assumes that if that $250 million had not been moved from the pockets of MS customers to the pockets of Mr. Gates, it would not be doing as much good as it is about to do.
Some people have said just that, in fact; that (to paraphrase my original post), if the $250 million had been left in the pockets of consumers, it would just have all been frittered away in DVDs and beer.
But maybe that's not so. Maybe that $250 million in the hands of a few million people would have done more collective good than it's going to do in Africa now. In which case, it's a loss for humanity to have had it taken from consumer pockets and put into Gates'. It's less of a loss than if he'd spent it on beer and whores, sure, but it's still a loss, and something to be avoided in the future. The fact that there would be a silver lining doesn't make it not a cloud.
Put it this way: if I pay $2000 for a refurbished warranty-less computer from Dell, and it arrives broken except for the floppy disk drive, and when I call Dell they tell me to go to hell but I can keep the disk drive, then it would be damn weird to thank them for giving me a disk drive. In the same sense, if MS pricing policies have meant Americans gave (say) $500 million less to charity than they would have if prices were lower, but Gates is going to turn over $250 million of that dough to charity now, it would be a bit weird for charity to thank Gates. Do I know this to be true? Hardly. But it's a question worth pondering before one cheers too much, and certainly before one uses the donation as a way to reconcile one's self to MS prices significantly higher than the cost of production.
Finally, the hypothetical is not worthless, because it might get people thinking about the folly of mixing moral judgments up with economic decisions. Basically, the world works best (I think) if the consumer demands the lowest possible price for Microsoft products, regardless of whether Bill uses his personal profits to fight malaria or get teenage whores sozzled on 50 year old single malt Scotch every night. The reason being, any other attitude -- in particular the attitude that you can and should inject morality into many if not most economic situations -- leads to disaster. Precisely because the hideous complexity of the economic apparatus that is going to deliver the result of your moral intentions makes it impossible to be sure it will work as intended. You may well end up doing more harm than good.
People have thought I intend to censure Gates for being some kind of pirate. Not at all. His
Between them, they extract twice as much money from the general population as Bill Gates does in our universe.
Um, why? Are you saying there is some massive unmet demand for penguins in our universe? People have cash burning a hole in their pocket, wanting to be spent on penguins, but, alas, no supplier exists? 'Cause that's the only way Linus in the alternative universe would drain off lots of cash that remains in consumers' hands in this universe.
Anyway, I don't really follow your line of reasoning. Not sure what it is you're trying to say. If you're arguing that people's motivation for charity varies with income, I'll agree. Generally (there are hard numbers in another comment of mine in this thread) people's giving to charity on a per dollar basis decreases with income. That is, if you have 100 poor people with the same aggregate income as 1 rich person, the poor people collectively give more to charity than the rich person. I don't know why this is true, but it's a statistical fact.
So, generally speaking, if in an alternate universe private wealth is the same in total but is more concentrated, i.e. there are a fewer but more wealthy rich people, and more but slightly poorer poor people, then I suppose I would expect overall charity measured in dollars to decrease.
Does that mean charitable effort is less? I don't know, because the argument can be made that centralized decision making works better in terms of deciding where that donated money goes. Maybe Granny writing a check for $20 to her favorite charity, or just baking a meal for the Meals On Wheels program, is being less effective, per charitable dollar spent, then Joan Kroc giving $200 million to NPR, or whatever. I don't know. I'm sympathetic to the argument that people spend more time per dollar deciding on purchases that are smaller than larger, but I've no evidence one way or the other.
I know that I am more charitable when I have more money to be charitable with.
In an absolute sense, yes. But are you more charitable per dollar of income? It would be strange if that were true. Here is a PDF prepared by the Treasury Department on charitable giving in the United States. Some interesting numbers in the tables come from income tax records and allow us to calculate roughly the average amount of money given to charity by Americans in 1995 or so, both absolutely and as a fraction of their adjusted gross income (AGI):
AGI | average charitable donation (in dollars, and as percentage of AGI)
less than 10k_____1201_____12.0 10k to 20k________1723_____8.6 20k to 30k________1890_____6.3 30k to 40k________1946_____4.9 40k to 50k________2057_____4.1 50k to 75k________2332_____3.1 75k to 100k_______2844_____2.8 100k to 200k______3875_____1.9 200k to 500k______8634_____1.7 500k to 1M_______21718_____2.2
What we find is that the absolute dollar amounts of charitable giving rise with income, as you say. But the amount of giving per dollar of income falls, at least until you get to the few very rich people there are.
Hence, for example, four people with incomes of 20,000 give more to charity than two people with incomes of 40,000, who in turn give more to charity than one person with an income of 80,000. Odd fact of human behaviour.
I read a little on Daniel Fahrenheit and his scale. The story of how and why he picked his scale is not quite clear, although what is clear is that he originally set the scale by picking 32 for the freezing point of water and 96 for the (axillary) temperature of the human body.
The obvious question for the metric enthusiast is: why not pick 100 for the temperature of the human body? Nice, round number.
We can only speculate. But here's a thought: 96 for body temp and 32 for freezing means the scale between is divided into 64 parts. That's convenient for making marks on a thermometer, isn't it? You put the thermometer in freezing water, make a scratch on the mercury tube. You put it under your arm, then make another scratch.
And then you just take dividers and a straight edge and divide the distance between scratches exactly in half five times in a row, because 2^6 = 64.
Like so:
32______________________________96
32______________64______________96
32______48______64______80______96
32__40__48__56__64__72__80__88__96
and so forth. Voila! After 6 iterations you've marked your thermometer down to 1 degree F, and at no point did you actually need to get out a ruler and carefully measure, because you can divide distances exactly in half without a ruler quite accurately. (Incidentally, you can do the same to mark the thermometer for temperatures between 0 and 32 F, too, because 2^5 = 16.)
It's worth remembering that in Fahrenheit's day, you had to make your own thermometers, and very precise measurements of length and long decimal calculations were a lot more challenging than the simple geometric task of dividing a length repeatedly in half.
Why didn't he pick 0 for the freezing point of water? There's some thought, I understand, that he wanted to avoid needing to use minus signs in reporting weather in northern Europe (Fahrenheit was born in Poland), and indeed it is not very common to have winter temperatures in most of Europe below 0 F. All very interesting.
Perhaps I understand the problem. You're saying economic policies are strictly separate from political policies. So, a policy like collectivization, undertaken for political reasons ("because it's right that all the land be owned in common") can't be an economic policy, although of course it affects the economic situation primarily, i.e. it changes patterns of ownership and trade.
If so, well then I would generally agree, but the problem is most self-described die-hard socialists would not. (Although I admit the Euro socialism-lite types might.) One of the bedrock principles of socialism is that economic policy must be a part of political policy. You can't look at what happens economically separately from what happens politically. The rise or fall of wages, the price or availability of basic foodstuffs, interest rates and how people allocate capital -- these are never purely economic issues, but deeply political issues that must be addressed by socialist principles of what is right and wrong.
If you suggest that economic issues should be separated from political, that economic policies should have nothing to do with politics, then shake hands, because you are saying, in essence, that a man should be judged politically by his political actions, and not at all by his economic status or class. While I agree entirely with this idea, it is a very capitalist bourgeousie attitude, and if you'd ever said so in Soviet Russia I think you'd be carted straight off to the camps to be re-educated.
Sadly, no, the brutality of the USSR was not the result of a single dictator, even though people often sloppily talk that way. The top leaders of the USSR changed many times from 1917, but its general policy directions did not. Furthermore, it's really not possible for one man, for example Stalin, to have done all that was done his very own lone self. He had millions of eager helpers in the destruction he visited on his own people. He was a leader, certainly. But he had plenty of followers. You can argue whether a majority of Russians supported him or not, but there's no question a sizeable minority did.
you haven't given good counterexamples of socialist economic policies equalling millions of deaths
What are you talking about?! The forced collectivization of farms in the Ukraine --- an economic policy dictated by the socialist principle that the means of production should be owned collectively, rather than by individual wealthy owners, and an integral part of the first "Five Year Plan" for the Soviet economy -- directly causes a famine in which conservative estimates suggest five million people starved to death in a few short years, perhaps as much as 25% of the population of the Ukraine. Here's an account with grim eyewitness accounts and some statistics for you, but I'm sure if you Google around you'll find much, much more. This is very well known 20th century history, for God's sake.
I don't recall mentioning National Socialist Germany, so Godwin's Law says you lose the argument I guess, ha ha. But with respect to your assertion that the USSR was not a socialist country -- I'm not sure what to say. This is a pretty unusual opinion. They certainly said they were good socialists. They used the word "socialist" a lot to describe themselves. They spoke the same principles of social good over individual freedom as any other socialist. Why not take them at their word? I realize one doesn't want to give any individual who calls himself a "socialist" credit for really being one, because some people are nuts. But you can't be saying an entire 240 million people are nuts, can you? So if they called themselves socialists, who are you and I to disagree?
Maybe what you're saying is that socialism has evolved or something, or that there are other brands of it that aren't quite as poisonous as what was practised in the USSR or China. Fair enough. I'm just pointing out, though, that the label has an evil sound for millions of people. If I believed in New, Improved Socialism(TM), with extra whitening power, I'd probably just change the name or something. It's a terrible legacy to live down. You might as well open a steak restaraunt and advertise it as the "Freshly-Slaughtered Animal Eatery."
Well, he kind of does, you know? The OP simply asked whether socialist policies killed millions, not whether all socialist policies killed millions. There are many small socialist institutions -- kibbutzim and communes, for example -- which undoubtably do good for people and which certainly kill no one. There are many socialist thoughts that, when implemented on a small scale, from barn-raisings to credit unions, are healthy and productive parts of most modern societies.
But unfortunately, the ugly facts are that the single largest cause of theoretically preventable death in the 20th century was living under or next to a self-described socialist regime, from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the People's Republic of China, North Korea, and assorted African socialist hellholes. Millions of people died in order to implement self-described socialist regimes and serve the putative good of the people.
You can certainly argue, and people do, that all this carnage has just been because socialist principles are trickier to use correctly than the average person thinks. It's easy for a society to hurt itself if it doesn't know what it's doing.
Fair enough. That does, however, put you square in the company of those who argue that gun control is wrong-headed, because guns are trickier to use correctly than the average person thinks, and it's easy for people to hurt themselves if they don't know what they're doing. You can expect the same kind of skepticism as you might encounter carrying an assault weapon around a school. ("Look, I know people have used these things to do terrible deeds before. But that's just because they didn't know what they were doing. I do. Trust me!")
And you're also asking a lot for people to just overlook history -- to overlook the millions who perished in the gulag archipelago, the Great Leap Forward, the Berlin Wall, the Stasi and KGB, the black cars in the night taking people away forever, and ecological devastation from the drying up of the Aral Sea to Chernobyl -- when you go to them and say oops, sorry, that wasn't what we meant at all. Can we just try this again from the top?
You're going to have to expect a certain amount of skepticism when you say this to a family in Poland, say, that remembers that grandfather disappeared into the gulag after he came back from a German POW camp, and uncle was taken away one night by the KGB.
Adding socialist coloration to a basically capitalist economy is one thing, but anyone who thinks full-fledged socialism is as clever an idea as it seemed to be on paper in 1880 should have his head examined, a forced history refresher, or both.
Unfortunately money and power are inseparable, because I'd like it much better if people could just get rich, but forget about the power.
They are not inseparable, they are identical. Money is power, the power to command the labor of others. A dollar bill is an IOU for one dollar's worth of labor, and when you hand someone a dollar bill you are promising them a dollar of your labor whenever they want it. (It's worse than that, actually: you also promise that they can give the IOU to anyone they please, and you'll honor your obligation to that other person, whoever he is.)
So, yes, if Bill Gates accumulates 50 billion dollars, he can command 50 billion dollars of labor. That is clearly power.
The nice thing about Bill's power, however, is that those IOUs were freely given, and there is no disenfranchised minority that has to work for him unwillingly. Furthermore, as soon as Bill starts using his power, calling in the IOUs, otherwise known as spending his money, his power decreases. So his power is self-limiting: the more he uses it, the faster he loses it.
On the other hand, political power is far less clean. The President has power over the 46% of the people who did not vote for him, who might loathe him. You've got to work for him (also known as paying your taxes) whether or not you want to, whether or not you want the "products" he's offering you (seeds of democracy and victory in the war on terror, or massive destabilization, the seeds of future terrorism and comprehensive ecocatastrophe, depending on your own favorite flavor of Kool-Aid).
Furthermore, in politics you don't get the choice of saving and not handing out your IOUs. If you don't like anyone's software, you can just not buy anything and save your IOUs for a more deserving product. But every four years, whether you want to or not, you are forced to choose from the candidates running. You can't say, screw this, I will reserve my IOUs (taxes) until I see a better "product" from anothe political leader. Many folks have complained about the famous lack of a "none of the above" option in elections.
(1) Multinational corporation Mobil knows better than ordinary mortals such as you, me, its customers and investors, the people of Indonesia, the potential victims of the violence, etc., what will be consequences of hiring Indonesian thugs. That means Mobil bears primary responsibility for stopping the violence, since none of the rest of us can foresee it. The fact that they did not means they bear primary guilt, or at least share it with the triggermen. They're certainly guiltier than the rest of us. Guilty enough for the OP to call them murderers, a pretty strong charge.
(2) But...you know perfectly well that the money would lead to murder and mayhem, and I don't think you're suggesting you are at Mobil's level of guilt. I also suspect you don't think your insight is especially tricky to come by, requiring much thinking and lots of data, 'cause you made your point in a very few number of words, and in a style that strongly suggests the point should be obvious to any dimwit (like me).
So how do you reconcile these two things? Are you and Mobil and your fellow-thinkers all equally knowledgeable and equally culpable, while the rest of us ignoramuses are innocent? Are you a murderer because you so clearly see that Mobil spent and (presumably) will continue to spend its revenues commiting murder -- and you do nothing more to stop it than post comments on a bulletin board? I mean, have you written to the Indonesian ambassador to warn him or anything? Do you still buy Mobil gas?
Or, does the rule about knowledge conferring responsibility apply only to the employees of Mobil and not to you? Because, say, when you join a multinational your IQ automatically goes up by 20 points. Or are all of us guilty, because we all could have figured it out? Or, um...do you just not like Mobil for some personal reason?
It's a noble try, but I don't buy it. For one thing, in the simplest model a supply price shock seems likely to have a worse effect when it turns up in the fixed costs. Consider a concrete example:
Waterboys, Inc. sells N bottles of bottled water a year at a price P. They use computer software costing S/year to schedule deliveries, run the company website and print invoices. Fixed cost: doesn't depend on water delivered. They use M gallons of gas at a price of G/gallon to deliver each bottle. Variable cost: depends on the amount of water delivered.
Waterboy's profit R for the year is:
R = P*N - S - N*M*G
Now suppose they suffer a price shock in software, that is S increases by dS. Naturally all their customers suffer similar price shocks, so the market turns a little soft, and orders drop a little. That is, N decreases by dN. In this case, the drop in their profit dR is given by:
dR(fixed) = P*dN + dS - dN*M*G
The third term conveys the fact that the drop in orders means a drop in variable costs (they spend less in gas to deliver the fewer orders), and this helps offset the hit from the increased software costs.
Now suppose Waterboys suffer a price shock in gas, so that the price of gas goes up by dG and, once again, orders drop by dN:
dR(variable) = P*dN + N*M*dG - dN*M*G - dN*M*dG
In this case, there are first and second order effects of the price of gas. Now let's compare similar price shocks, i.e. set dS = N*M*dG, meaning the extra yearly cost for software when the shock is in software exactly equals the extra total yearly cost for gas when the shock is in gas:
dR(fixed) = P*dN + dS - dN*M*G
dR(variable) = P*dN + dS - dN*M*G - dN*M*dG
dR(variable) = dR(fixed) - dN*M*dG
The last equation says the drop in profit for a shock in gas prices is less than the drop in profit for a shock in software prices, by dN*M*dG. The reason is simple: the impact of the shock is reduced when it appears in variable costs, because output is decreasing anyway. But you've got to eat the entire shock when it turns up in fixed costs.
If Bill Gates had serious competition from Linus, then clearly both profit margins would have been lower than had either operated alone, as Bill did. Since the total amount of software purchased would be the same, the total amount of money acquired from customers would necessarily be less, not more.
If there are a large number of competitors and the products are all equally good, then profit margins are usually driven to nearly zero. The airline or grocery industries are reasonable type cases. Competition is brutal and companies often fail to survive. The most successful companies are those that find "niche" markets where they can sell "luxury" versions of the good or service that are sheltered from the brutal competition over "ordinary" services. Hence the Virgin Atlantic airline with its pick-you-up anywhere limo service, or boutique grocery stores selling aragula and fresh wild salmon flown in from Alaska daily.
However, the personal fortune of Gates, or any CEO, is not directly related to the profit margin of his company, a frequent mistake people make when thinking about Microsoft. The reason is that Gates himself competes in a different market, the market for CEOs. His salary -- his personal wealth -- is a result of the demand for him personally, not for the products of his company. If he personally is an exceedingly able CEO, greatly in demand, then he will have a large personal profit margin (the excess of what he is paid over what he needs to live), regardless of whether the profit margin of his company is low or high.
The evidence suggests that Gates is, in fact, a CEO in enormous demand. Certainly Microsoft is willing to pay him huge amounts of money to stay at their helm. Would that change in an alternate universe? Perhaps. If there were a large and diversified market in PC software, and Microsoft iself had many more effective competitors, it seems likely there would also be many more competent PC software CEOs, and Gates would have more effective personal competitors. So his personal wealth would be less.
You're forgetting one thing: history. Wherever and whenever decision-making power has been highly concentrated, the final results have been markedly poorer than when it is more distributed. The USSR is the most spectactular example, of course, a situation in which the decision of where to spend nearly every dollar (well, ruble) in the economy was made by a very few people at the top, allocating huge amounts of money at a time. The results speak for themselves.
The performance of companies that deliberately distribute decision-making authority down to lower levels is also illustrative. Generally when lower-level "front-line" people have as much decision making power as they can handle the company is more agile, more responsive, more successful. All successful companies know this, and take steps to prevent decision making from taking place on too high a level, because the view from the penthouse is often lacking some critical details. Any engineer or salesman who has worked for a large firm knows that the fewer layers of management up through which information must percolate, and down through which decisions must be filtered, the faster problems are solved correctly. This is not news. You just may not be used to thinking of these facts in this context.
Neither of these trends should be robust facts of history if your idea is true, that it's generally "impossible to tell" whether highly centralized or distributed decision-making is best. So do the lessons apply to charitable decision-making, too? Hard to say. But since it definitely applies to many other kinds of decision making, one would have to consider the possibility carefully before saying "Oh goody! Let's give another $250 million to Bill ultimately for charity, instead of spending it where we ourselves choose."
The only point of your brain exercise is to vaguely hint that Bill Gates doesn't deserve his money.
God knows what you mean by deserve. Where does morality creep into economics? I was talking strictly about economic efficiency, nothing else. The question of whether Bill "deserves" his earnings I find meaningless noise. You might as well ask if he "deserves" to be named "Bill." He just is, that's all. He's just rich, that all. Morality doesn't enter into it.
Well, first of all, I certainly didn't say Microsoft shouldn't exist. Far from it. I just said it's not clear whether the good deeds Bill Gates' personal fortune does when he spends it are necessarily greater than the sum of the good deeds that would have been done had that money stayed in his customer's hands, i.e. had he, personally, not acquired $250 million more than he can possibly use (so that he's cool with giving it away now).
It's seems a tad inefficient to transfer all that money from customers to Bill and then to charity. Why not eliminate the middleman and let it flow directly from the customers to charity? There are two arguments I've heard: First, and most common, customers would not spend the money originally if they knew it was going to charity ultimately, but once it's out of their hands they're OK with it being redirected (judging from the comments here).
That makes Bill some kind of weird parent who tricks us into donating money to charity by hiding the purpose of the money we pay him, for a while. Initially, we think he needs it to pay software engineers to make the software we buy. But later on we find out he didn't need it all for that, he's actually using some of it to donate to charity. And, although we would not have given the money to charity ourselves, we're OK with Bill doing it for us. This seems a little weirdly infantile by me.
The second argument is that Bill makes better decisions by himself than all his customers do collectively, so he should collect our charity money and decide what to do with it. For all I know this could be true.
And as for "grass roots" level information? How well did that work in the wake of Katrina? Kasmir earth quake?
You really need to think this through. You're mistaking the highly reported visible things that were done for all that was done. But that's totally silly. The majority of the rescuing and recovery that was done with Katrina was by millions of individuals, one small action at at time, and never made the TV news. One guy pulls another to safety. Another drives his old mother out of town to safety. One fellow sticks with his job as a cop even when things get rough. Another lends a drink of water from his stored supply to someone who is thirsty. One woman lends a blanket to a cold child.
And after the disaster, most of the work is done by individuals. FEMA trucks make the news, but hundreds of thousands cleaning out their yards, sweeping the street clear, getting back to work, repairing phone lines, restocking shelves, driving trucks and taxis, delivering supplies -- in short, bringing the economy back to life, is going to be invisible to you. Don't assume because it isn't concentrated in one spot for you to see in a 30-second bite on the news that it doesn't exist, or is negligably small.
In terms of the earthquake, who do you think did most of the digging and rescuing? Giant earthmovers or individual people with hands? And where did the most valuable information come from? From $10 million superduper listening devices flown in from Bagram Air Base? Or by a dazed little girl climbing out of the rubble and pointing: "There! My mother was over in that corner! Dig there!"
I don't think your argument is sound, but I am having difficulty explaing precisely why. Instead, let me give a parallel situation and ask a question:
Recently the price of gas rose from $2 to $3 a gallon. That's a very small amount of money. Even over the course of a year, for most people it's a small additional cost. Maybe $10 a week or so. So by your argument a 50% rise in gasoline energy costs should have zero or negligible effect on the economy. After all, if people were going to do something important with that extra $10 a week -- buy a house or new car, invest in a business, hire someone, place an order for 1,000 new workstations -- they would have already done it, or not done it, and the extra $10 won't make any real difference.
And yet, of course, such a price shock has most definitely had profound and lasting effects on the US economy, even on the world economy, for example in the 70s. And people today get highly lathered up about it, predicting dire effects and proposing drastic remedies (drilling in ANWR, forcing everyone to drive a hybrid, whatever).
Yes, but Rockefeller had a nice book written about what he did. No books were written, or will be written, about the millions of actions taken by his millions of customers. So how can you compare? You can certainly compare what Rockefeller did to what any one individual you know has done, or is likely to do. But how can you compare to what millions of people would do in small amounts, here and there?
You might as well say that the wisdom of General Eisenhower was far more important than the wisdom of the millions of men under his command in winning the Second World War, because we have many books discussing Eisenhower and the brilliant decisions he made, but all we really know about all those men is they executed his orders successfully. We have no clue about what wisdom or folly they might have deployed in doing so. So we have no way of knowing whether their collective wisdom exceeded Ike's individual wisdom. Maybe yes, maybe no. We don't know which was more critical to winning the war. Consequently we don't know whether it would be better to put even more decision-making authority in Ike's hands, or distribute some of it from Ike down to the grunts.
Of course, we do know that Ike's individual wisdom exceeded the wisdom of most or all individual front-line grunts. Which you may be unconsciously doing when you compare Rockefeller to "ordinary" people -- comparing him to one or a few ordinary people. But that's not fair. The correct comparison is to millions of ordinary people. And that comparison is very hard to make, and it's very hard to know what the result would be. That's my point.
Ah, I see! Mobil, for example, is guilty of murder because they hired Indonesian army thugs who have murdered people. May I assume that it doesn't matter to your logic that Mobil did not hire the IATs for the purpose of killing people? That is, Mobil did not intend the murders, but simply provided the actual trigger men with gainful employment so they could...uh...buy bullets for their guns, which caused them to murder when they would otherwise (if not employed by Mobil) stay peacefully at home. You're saying, I guess, that Mobil could have found out the use to which the salaries they were paying would be put, and hence, they are as guilty (or at least somewhat as guilty) as the IATs who actually pulled the triggers.
Hmmm. So, I guess, when the RIAA sues a file-sharing service because its software facilitates copyright violation, and the service could have found out that people were violating copyright, then you are sympathetic to the argument that the file-sharing software authors are just as guilty (or half as guilty) as the actual downloaders? And if you published a guide on your Web-site to making a fortune selling crack to 12-year-olds, and the police arrested you, you'll admit it's a fair cop? "I'm just as guilty (or half as guilty) as doze criminals what used my guide, Judge, and must t'row myself on de moicy of de Court!"
But wait...why does the chain of guilt stop at Mobil? What about Mobil's customers? If you bought gas at a Mobil station, and you could have known that Mobil was going to use your money to hire IATs in Indonesia who would commit murders -- aren't you guilty, too? Maybe you're more guilty than Mobil? After all, while Mobil clearly must extract gas to survive as a company -- meaning investing in gas extraction is a "life and death" decision for them -- you don't need to buy Mobil gas. Maybe Mobil's customers are more guilty than Mobil itself?
Or what about Mobil's investors? The company wouldn't exist without them! No Mobil, no murders in Indonesia, right? (Because Mobil caused those murders.) What about people who sell office supplies -- pencil, papers, calculators -- to Mobil offices? One of those pencils could have been used to write letters directing the hiring of an IAT who murdered a little girl. If that pencil hadn't been delivered on time, the girl would be alive today! Clearly the wretched pimply-faced teenager in the Office Max shirt who delivered the pencils is guilty, damn him...
I dunno. My head's spinning. Maybe...maybe there's something to be said for saying that the only people we accuse of murder are those who actually pull a trigger, push the knife in, twist the rope, or directly and knowingly order those deeds done? Maybe accusing anybody who can conceivably be creatively connected to the deed is, well, kind of diluting the concept of guilt to the point of uselessness?
Your argument -- or rather implication -- is familiar to all charities and purveyors of dubious investments. "For just the price of your morning coffee you could..." "For an investment of just pennies a day you might reap..." Wise men do not fall for this con, because they realize a dollar is worth exactly a dollar, no more and no less, regardless of whether it is accompanied by 42 others or by 42,000,000 others. It takes the same amount of time to earn and it buys the same amount of goods and services and, generally speaking, sensible people use about the same amount of time and energy thinking about where to put it.
Although, if anything, the case is best that people spend less time and energy per dollar thinking about how to spend their money when they are spending large amounts. Would you spend more time getting the best deal when spending $43 at the grocery store, or arguing with your bank about a mysterious extra $43 charge on your $600,000 mortgage papers? We already know the answer, because selling groceries has a razor-thin profit margin and brokering mortgages is obscenely profitable. You don't see many grocers building four-story mansions next to real-estate wheeler-dealers. From this point of view it would seem millions of separate $43 decisions would be better thought out, dollar for dollar, than one or two $250 million decisions.
In essence your argument falsely assumes that because people usually don't think carefully about a financial decision the whole cost of which is $43, they also don't think carefully about a financial decision the marginal cost of which is an extra $43. But this is nonsense.
Consider my final example. Is it really possible an extra $43 could mean the difference between a brilliant but poor scholar staying in medical school or dropping out to wait tables? A simple thought experiment proves it can: assume Joe barely has enough money to pay for his tuition, live without serious want, take care of his most pressing medical and personal needs, buy textbooks, and mail his feature articles to Albert Schweizer's Magazine for Humanitarian Heroes.
Now let us take $43 away from Joe. Big deal, huh? He just eats a little less pizza, a little more Ramen.
So let's take another $43 away from him. And another. And another. Clearly, at some point, we will take the last $43 away from him that he can stand. It will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and yes, he will decide to drop out of medical school. For Joe, that particular $43 is indeed the difference between staying in school and not. It may seem weird, but it's no different than the last snowflake that starts an avalanche, or the final half-ounce ripple of flood water that breaks the levee and causes the deluge.
Now obviously most people in medical school are not going to be situated such that the $43 in question is the make-or-break $43. But equally, some undoubtably will be. How many will be? Or rather, for what fraction of Microsoft's customers over the past 25 years in which Bill Gates amassed his fortune has there been a situation in which the $43 spent on Windows could, at some time or other, have been the marginal cost of a very important decision? Quite possibly all of them. It's a rare person indeed who never has to make an important decision based on how much dough he's got in the bank, or for whom such a decision never turns out to be close.
So I could take every last $43 of the money Bill Gates has collected over his career and argue that it would have been applied entirely to critical make-or-break decisions just like Joe's. In which case, of course, the aggregate money would have a far larger impact than ever Bill will cause by sending it to malaria researchers. Because, in a sense, it's being universally applied to all the really critical junctures in people's lives.
But this doesn't actually make any more sense than your decision that all of those $43
You mean American soldiers in Iraq? Goodness, I didn't realize they'd been killed by Halliburton, Bechtel et cetera. I thought it was random Iraqi or import Arab thugs with bombs and stuff. I guess that's what comes from reading the lying news reports.
But...I'm still puzzled. How did they do it? I mean, don't the soldiers carry machine guns, drive tanks, enjoy close air support from nastily-armed airplanes, that kind of thing? How does a collection of paunchy middle-aged Halliburton employees in pocket-protectors and eyeglasses manage to reach and kill the trained warriors in the 82nd Airborne?
Damn it, I'm going to write my Congressman. If random American oil drilling companies can so easily kill thousands of American soldiers, then clearly our soldiers are terribly equipped and disastrously led.
One of the questions to ask seriously (and I'm not saying I know how the answer would come out, because I don't) is this: what would've happened if Bill Gates hadn't acquired all that money which he is now giving away? Where would it be? In the pockets of millions of ordinary folks, of course. And what would they have done with it?
One possibility, of course, is that they would have frittered it away on DVDs and beer. But it's also possible they would have done a million individual worthy deeds of charity, such as buying some shoes to send a soldier on tsunami relief, who knows a little girl who needs them, or cooking a hot meal for a neighbor with cancer, or buying a textbook for an inner-city school that's short. Or maybe some extra money would've let a brilliant but poor student not drop out of medical school, so he would get the education he needs to invent the malaria vaccine that works for 20 years. You never know, actually.
And that's the rub. Is the good that Bill does with that money necessarily greater than the distributed good that would have been done by the millions of original possessors if they'd kept their money because he sold his products more cheaply? I don't know, of course. You can argue it both ways: (1) Bill has time to study the issues very carefully before investing, make a single "strategic vision" and implement a cohesive overall plan, so maybe "centralizing" the charity decisions makes them better. Or, (2) Bill's only one man, he can't possibly have access to all the information all those millions of people at the "grass roots" level have, so their distributed "Open Source Charity" movement would make better, more flexible and effective decisions.
Really? Wow! I've heard of people being killed by criminals, cancer, pneumonia, heart attacks and AIDS before, but I didn't realize oil drilling, construction and refining firms were in the business of killing people. You'd think it would sort of work against their own long-term interests, killing customers like that. But I'm not a businessman, so what do I know?
The US Centers for Disease Control reported that 2,443,387 Americans died in 2002. How many of those do you figure Halliburton, Bechtel and Exxon killed? I mean, to the nearest ten thousand or so. I'm not asking for the exact number.
You're absolute right, and that's what I first thought. Imagine my surprise when I picked up the container and it said, nope, I'm made of 100% pure salt in the Pure Food and Drug Act sense of the word (i.e. nuthin' but NaCl). I contain no KCl, no sugar, no secret spice, no nothing. And yet, the box insisted the stuff contained "30% less sodium per serving*" than regular salt.
Yes, I figured out the secret by following the asterisk. In fine print at the bottom it said: "* When servings are measured by volume, not weight."
Ah. What those clever buggers had done was repackage sea-salt, which is naturally made up of larger and more jagged crystals than salt from mines, and therefore packs down less efficiently. So when you measure out a teaspoon of their salt, it contains less salt by mass than a teaspoon of normal salt. Voila! Less sodium.
Incidentally, the standard-sized salt container it came in sold for $3.50 (versus 65 cents for the "high-sodium" regular version).
Best marketing trick I have ever seen. Re-package identical stuff in a slightly different shape, give slightly different instructions for use, and clean up 200% profit. Beats the heck out of "You May Already Have Won!"
All right, I can understand that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have zillions of moons because they're big mommas with a lot of gravity, and when you're very generously rounded -- well, you just naturally attract a lot of trash. Fact of life.
But now even puny Pluto is getting into the act. Three moons, when Mercury has zero and Mars but two. What gives? Why are moons more common in a general way in the outer Solar System than the inner? This is odd. Is it all captured from the Kuiper Belt? Did the solar wind when the Sun was T-Tauri blow all the moon-making crap out of the inner system, but not the outer? Is there some reason why whirlpools in the nebula are more probably further out? Inquiring minds want to know!
It is clear that it did not form from the same planetary disk that spawned the planets from Neptune on in.
I don't understand this, can you elucidate? Are you saying there was another planetary disk at some other time? Or that Pluto and friends wandered in from interstellar space?
Wait, let's look at the ranges for the muscle temps: 68-86 F. Seems a bit of an odd range, doesn't it? If you don't know the temps any better than +/-9 degrees, why state it as 68-86 instead of, say, 70-90?
But converting to Celsius, we find the temperature range is 20-30 C. Aha! One strongly suspects the PR people converted the Celsius numbers in the original paper for the purposes of publication.
Kind of reminds me of buying a quart of milk and there at the bottom it says:
Contents: 1 qt (946 mL)
Hmm, so they're saying this bottle contains 946 mL of milk, and definitely not 945 mL or 948 mL or even 960 mL? Giving three specific digits conveys the false impression that the amount of milk is known to 1 part in 1000. In their "own" system they understand this, which is why it says "1 qt" and not "1.000 qt." But the "common sense" function of the brain just sort of clicks off when they convert to SI. Or maybe it's some kind of brain-dead legal requirement, I dunno.
I find this humorous, although not as funny as the time I found "low sodium salt" for sale in the supermarket.
I guess I should check myself into some kind of clinic to get help, huh?
It's not the generation of heat that's interesting, I gather, but the fact that the fish may go to some effort to hold onto the heat, i.e. the heat is not just allowed to seep into the water as fast as it's generated.
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I didn't state any hypotheses. I just asked a question. I said: what would be the net collective good if Bill Gates had personally earned $250 million less by selling Windows, because greater competition (among software titans, not software companies, although the one probably follows from the other) had forced him to earn a smaller fortune? Would it be greater or less than the good that Gates is now inarguably doing with that $250 million?
This is, first of all, not an implausible hypothetical. There are plenty of markets where tight competition keeps profits down, and where it is difficult to earn huge personal fortunes. Why aren't PC operating systems one of them? I think a good case can be made that it's just historical accident. That means a "parallel" universe in which Gates does not earn so much money is not only not very different from ours, it could be our universe in the future. Do we want that or not? The question is worth considering.
Second, it's a nonobvious hypothetical. People rarely consider opportunity cost when they think about the costs of economic decisions. So, for example, in this case, people have said: I guess it's OK that the price of MS software has been so much higher than its cost of production that $250 million more could be siphoned off to Gates' personal fortune than even he wants, because, after all, that $250 million is now doing good. But this mistakenly assumes that if that $250 million had not been moved from the pockets of MS customers to the pockets of Mr. Gates, it would not be doing as much good as it is about to do.
Some people have said just that, in fact; that (to paraphrase my original post), if the $250 million had been left in the pockets of consumers, it would just have all been frittered away in DVDs and beer.
But maybe that's not so. Maybe that $250 million in the hands of a few million people would have done more collective good than it's going to do in Africa now. In which case, it's a loss for humanity to have had it taken from consumer pockets and put into Gates'. It's less of a loss than if he'd spent it on beer and whores, sure, but it's still a loss, and something to be avoided in the future. The fact that there would be a silver lining doesn't make it not a cloud.
Put it this way: if I pay $2000 for a refurbished warranty-less computer from Dell, and it arrives broken except for the floppy disk drive, and when I call Dell they tell me to go to hell but I can keep the disk drive, then it would be damn weird to thank them for giving me a disk drive. In the same sense, if MS pricing policies have meant Americans gave (say) $500 million less to charity than they would have if prices were lower, but Gates is going to turn over $250 million of that dough to charity now, it would be a bit weird for charity to thank Gates. Do I know this to be true? Hardly. But it's a question worth pondering before one cheers too much, and certainly before one uses the donation as a way to reconcile one's self to MS prices significantly higher than the cost of production.
Finally, the hypothetical is not worthless, because it might get people thinking about the folly of mixing moral judgments up with economic decisions. Basically, the world works best (I think) if the consumer demands the lowest possible price for Microsoft products, regardless of whether Bill uses his personal profits to fight malaria or get teenage whores sozzled on 50 year old single malt Scotch every night. The reason being, any other attitude -- in particular the attitude that you can and should inject morality into many if not most economic situations -- leads to disaster. Precisely because the hideous complexity of the economic apparatus that is going to deliver the result of your moral intentions makes it impossible to be sure it will work as intended. You may well end up doing more harm than good.
People have thought I intend to censure Gates for being some kind of pirate. Not at all. His
Between them, they extract twice as much money from the general population as Bill Gates does in our universe.
Um, why? Are you saying there is some massive unmet demand for penguins in our universe? People have cash burning a hole in their pocket, wanting to be spent on penguins, but, alas, no supplier exists? 'Cause that's the only way Linus in the alternative universe would drain off lots of cash that remains in consumers' hands in this universe.
Anyway, I don't really follow your line of reasoning. Not sure what it is you're trying to say. If you're arguing that people's motivation for charity varies with income, I'll agree. Generally (there are hard numbers in another comment of mine in this thread) people's giving to charity on a per dollar basis decreases with income. That is, if you have 100 poor people with the same aggregate income as 1 rich person, the poor people collectively give more to charity than the rich person. I don't know why this is true, but it's a statistical fact.
So, generally speaking, if in an alternate universe private wealth is the same in total but is more concentrated, i.e. there are a fewer but more wealthy rich people, and more but slightly poorer poor people, then I suppose I would expect overall charity measured in dollars to decrease.
Does that mean charitable effort is less? I don't know, because the argument can be made that centralized decision making works better in terms of deciding where that donated money goes. Maybe Granny writing a check for $20 to her favorite charity, or just baking a meal for the Meals On Wheels program, is being less effective, per charitable dollar spent, then Joan Kroc giving $200 million to NPR, or whatever. I don't know. I'm sympathetic to the argument that people spend more time per dollar deciding on purchases that are smaller than larger, but I've no evidence one way or the other.
In an absolute sense, yes. But are you more charitable per dollar of income? It would be strange if that were true. Here is a PDF prepared by the Treasury Department on charitable giving in the United States. Some interesting numbers in the tables come from income tax records and allow us to calculate roughly the average amount of money given to charity by Americans in 1995 or so, both absolutely and as a fraction of their adjusted gross income (AGI):What we find is that the absolute dollar amounts of charitable giving rise with income, as you say. But the amount of giving per dollar of income falls, at least until you get to the few very rich people there are.
Hence, for example, four people with incomes of 20,000 give more to charity than two people with incomes of 40,000, who in turn give more to charity than one person with an income of 80,000. Odd fact of human behaviour.
I read a little on Daniel Fahrenheit and his scale. The story of how and why he picked his scale is not quite clear, although what is clear is that he originally set the scale by picking 32 for the freezing point of water and 96 for the (axillary) temperature of the human body.
The obvious question for the metric enthusiast is: why not pick 100 for the temperature of the human body? Nice, round number.
We can only speculate. But here's a thought: 96 for body temp and 32 for freezing means the scale between is divided into 64 parts. That's convenient for making marks on a thermometer, isn't it? You put the thermometer in freezing water, make a scratch on the mercury tube. You put it under your arm, then make another scratch.
And then you just take dividers and a straight edge and divide the distance between scratches exactly in half five times in a row, because 2^6 = 64.
Like so: and so forth. Voila! After 6 iterations you've marked your thermometer down to 1 degree F, and at no point did you actually need to get out a ruler and carefully measure, because you can divide distances exactly in half without a ruler quite accurately. (Incidentally, you can do the same to mark the thermometer for temperatures between 0 and 32 F, too, because 2^5 = 16.)
It's worth remembering that in Fahrenheit's day, you had to make your own thermometers, and very precise measurements of length and long decimal calculations were a lot more challenging than the simple geometric task of dividing a length repeatedly in half.
Why didn't he pick 0 for the freezing point of water? There's some thought, I understand, that he wanted to avoid needing to use minus signs in reporting weather in northern Europe (Fahrenheit was born in Poland), and indeed it is not very common to have winter temperatures in most of Europe below 0 F. All very interesting.
Perhaps I understand the problem. You're saying economic policies are strictly separate from political policies. So, a policy like collectivization, undertaken for political reasons ("because it's right that all the land be owned in common") can't be an economic policy, although of course it affects the economic situation primarily, i.e. it changes patterns of ownership and trade.
If so, well then I would generally agree, but the problem is most self-described die-hard socialists would not. (Although I admit the Euro socialism-lite types might.) One of the bedrock principles of socialism is that economic policy must be a part of political policy. You can't look at what happens economically separately from what happens politically. The rise or fall of wages, the price or availability of basic foodstuffs, interest rates and how people allocate capital -- these are never purely economic issues, but deeply political issues that must be addressed by socialist principles of what is right and wrong.
If you suggest that economic issues should be separated from political, that economic policies should have nothing to do with politics, then shake hands, because you are saying, in essence, that a man should be judged politically by his political actions, and not at all by his economic status or class. While I agree entirely with this idea, it is a very capitalist bourgeousie attitude, and if you'd ever said so in Soviet Russia I think you'd be carted straight off to the camps to be re-educated.
Sadly, no, the brutality of the USSR was not the result of a single dictator, even though people often sloppily talk that way. The top leaders of the USSR changed many times from 1917, but its general policy directions did not. Furthermore, it's really not possible for one man, for example Stalin, to have done all that was done his very own lone self. He had millions of eager helpers in the destruction he visited on his own people. He was a leader, certainly. But he had plenty of followers. You can argue whether a majority of Russians supported him or not, but there's no question a sizeable minority did.
you haven't given good counterexamples of socialist economic policies equalling millions of deaths
What are you talking about?! The forced collectivization of farms in the Ukraine --- an economic policy dictated by the socialist principle that the means of production should be owned collectively, rather than by individual wealthy owners, and an integral part of the first "Five Year Plan" for the Soviet economy -- directly causes a famine in which conservative estimates suggest five million people starved to death in a few short years, perhaps as much as 25% of the population of the Ukraine. Here's an account with grim eyewitness accounts and some statistics for you, but I'm sure if you Google around you'll find much, much more. This is very well known 20th century history, for God's sake.
I don't recall mentioning National Socialist Germany, so Godwin's Law says you lose the argument I guess, ha ha. But with respect to your assertion that the USSR was not a socialist country -- I'm not sure what to say. This is a pretty unusual opinion. They certainly said they were good socialists. They used the word "socialist" a lot to describe themselves. They spoke the same principles of social good over individual freedom as any other socialist. Why not take them at their word? I realize one doesn't want to give any individual who calls himself a "socialist" credit for really being one, because some people are nuts. But you can't be saying an entire 240 million people are nuts, can you? So if they called themselves socialists, who are you and I to disagree?
Maybe what you're saying is that socialism has evolved or something, or that there are other brands of it that aren't quite as poisonous as what was practised in the USSR or China. Fair enough. I'm just pointing out, though, that the label has an evil sound for millions of people. If I believed in New, Improved Socialism(TM), with extra whitening power, I'd probably just change the name or something. It's a terrible legacy to live down. You might as well open a steak restaraunt and advertise it as the "Freshly-Slaughtered Animal Eatery."
Well, he kind of does, you know? The OP simply asked whether socialist policies killed millions, not whether all socialist policies killed millions. There are many small socialist institutions -- kibbutzim and communes, for example -- which undoubtably do good for people and which certainly kill no one. There are many socialist thoughts that, when implemented on a small scale, from barn-raisings to credit unions, are healthy and productive parts of most modern societies.
But unfortunately, the ugly facts are that the single largest cause of theoretically preventable death in the 20th century was living under or next to a self-described socialist regime, from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the People's Republic of China, North Korea, and assorted African socialist hellholes. Millions of people died in order to implement self-described socialist regimes and serve the putative good of the people.
You can certainly argue, and people do, that all this carnage has just been because socialist principles are trickier to use correctly than the average person thinks. It's easy for a society to hurt itself if it doesn't know what it's doing.
Fair enough. That does, however, put you square in the company of those who argue that gun control is wrong-headed, because guns are trickier to use correctly than the average person thinks, and it's easy for people to hurt themselves if they don't know what they're doing. You can expect the same kind of skepticism as you might encounter carrying an assault weapon around a school. ("Look, I know people have used these things to do terrible deeds before. But that's just because they didn't know what they were doing. I do. Trust me!")
And you're also asking a lot for people to just overlook history -- to overlook the millions who perished in the gulag archipelago, the Great Leap Forward, the Berlin Wall, the Stasi and KGB, the black cars in the night taking people away forever, and ecological devastation from the drying up of the Aral Sea to Chernobyl -- when you go to them and say oops, sorry, that wasn't what we meant at all. Can we just try this again from the top?
You're going to have to expect a certain amount of skepticism when you say this to a family in Poland, say, that remembers that grandfather disappeared into the gulag after he came back from a German POW camp, and uncle was taken away one night by the KGB.
Adding socialist coloration to a basically capitalist economy is one thing, but anyone who thinks full-fledged socialism is as clever an idea as it seemed to be on paper in 1880 should have his head examined, a forced history refresher, or both.
Unfortunately money and power are inseparable, because I'd like it much better if people could just get rich, but forget about the power.
They are not inseparable, they are identical. Money is power, the power to command the labor of others. A dollar bill is an IOU for one dollar's worth of labor, and when you hand someone a dollar bill you are promising them a dollar of your labor whenever they want it. (It's worse than that, actually: you also promise that they can give the IOU to anyone they please, and you'll honor your obligation to that other person, whoever he is.)
So, yes, if Bill Gates accumulates 50 billion dollars, he can command 50 billion dollars of labor. That is clearly power.
The nice thing about Bill's power, however, is that those IOUs were freely given, and there is no disenfranchised minority that has to work for him unwillingly. Furthermore, as soon as Bill starts using his power, calling in the IOUs, otherwise known as spending his money, his power decreases. So his power is self-limiting: the more he uses it, the faster he loses it.
On the other hand, political power is far less clean. The President has power over the 46% of the people who did not vote for him, who might loathe him. You've got to work for him (also known as paying your taxes) whether or not you want to, whether or not you want the "products" he's offering you (seeds of democracy and victory in the war on terror, or massive destabilization, the seeds of future terrorism and comprehensive ecocatastrophe, depending on your own favorite flavor of Kool-Aid).
Furthermore, in politics you don't get the choice of saving and not handing out your IOUs. If you don't like anyone's software, you can just not buy anything and save your IOUs for a more deserving product. But every four years, whether you want to or not, you are forced to choose from the candidates running. You can't say, screw this, I will reserve my IOUs (taxes) until I see a better "product" from anothe political leader. Many folks have complained about the famous lack of a "none of the above" option in elections.
Hmm. You've said:
(1) Multinational corporation Mobil knows better than ordinary mortals such as you, me, its customers and investors, the people of Indonesia, the potential victims of the violence, etc., what will be consequences of hiring Indonesian thugs. That means Mobil bears primary responsibility for stopping the violence, since none of the rest of us can foresee it. The fact that they did not means they bear primary guilt, or at least share it with the triggermen. They're certainly guiltier than the rest of us. Guilty enough for the OP to call them murderers, a pretty strong charge.
(2) But...you know perfectly well that the money would lead to murder and mayhem, and I don't think you're suggesting you are at Mobil's level of guilt. I also suspect you don't think your insight is especially tricky to come by, requiring much thinking and lots of data, 'cause you made your point in a very few number of words, and in a style that strongly suggests the point should be obvious to any dimwit (like me).
So how do you reconcile these two things? Are you and Mobil and your fellow-thinkers all equally knowledgeable and equally culpable, while the rest of us ignoramuses are innocent? Are you a murderer because you so clearly see that Mobil spent and (presumably) will continue to spend its revenues commiting murder -- and you do nothing more to stop it than post comments on a bulletin board? I mean, have you written to the Indonesian ambassador to warn him or anything? Do you still buy Mobil gas?
Or, does the rule about knowledge conferring responsibility apply only to the employees of Mobil and not to you? Because, say, when you join a multinational your IQ automatically goes up by 20 points. Or are all of us guilty, because we all could have figured it out? Or, um...do you just not like Mobil for some personal reason?
It's a noble try, but I don't buy it. For one thing, in the simplest model a supply price shock seems likely to have a worse effect when it turns up in the fixed costs. Consider a concrete example:
Waterboys, Inc. sells N bottles of bottled water a year at a price P. They use computer software costing S/year to schedule deliveries, run the company website and print invoices. Fixed cost: doesn't depend on water delivered. They use M gallons of gas at a price of G/gallon to deliver each bottle. Variable cost: depends on the amount of water delivered.
Waterboy's profit R for the year is:
R = P*N - S - N*M*G
Now suppose they suffer a price shock in software, that is S increases by dS. Naturally all their customers suffer similar price shocks, so the market turns a little soft, and orders drop a little. That is, N decreases by dN. In this case, the drop in their profit dR is given by:
dR(fixed) = P*dN + dS - dN*M*G
The third term conveys the fact that the drop in orders means a drop in variable costs (they spend less in gas to deliver the fewer orders), and this helps offset the hit from the increased software costs.
Now suppose Waterboys suffer a price shock in gas, so that the price of gas goes up by dG and, once again, orders drop by dN:
dR(variable) = P*dN + N*M*dG - dN*M*G - dN*M*dG
In this case, there are first and second order effects of the price of gas. Now let's compare similar price shocks, i.e. set dS = N*M*dG, meaning the extra yearly cost for software when the shock is in software exactly equals the extra total yearly cost for gas when the shock is in gas:
dR(fixed) = P*dN + dS - dN*M*G
dR(variable) = P*dN + dS - dN*M*G - dN*M*dG
dR(variable) = dR(fixed) - dN*M*dG
The last equation says the drop in profit for a shock in gas prices is less than the drop in profit for a shock in software prices, by dN*M*dG. The reason is simple: the impact of the shock is reduced when it appears in variable costs, because output is decreasing anyway. But you've got to eat the entire shock when it turns up in fixed costs.
If Bill Gates had serious competition from Linus, then clearly both profit margins would have been lower than had either operated alone, as Bill did. Since the total amount of software purchased would be the same, the total amount of money acquired from customers would necessarily be less, not more.
If there are a large number of competitors and the products are all equally good, then profit margins are usually driven to nearly zero. The airline or grocery industries are reasonable type cases. Competition is brutal and companies often fail to survive. The most successful companies are those that find "niche" markets where they can sell "luxury" versions of the good or service that are sheltered from the brutal competition over "ordinary" services. Hence the Virgin Atlantic airline with its pick-you-up anywhere limo service, or boutique grocery stores selling aragula and fresh wild salmon flown in from Alaska daily.
However, the personal fortune of Gates, or any CEO, is not directly related to the profit margin of his company, a frequent mistake people make when thinking about Microsoft. The reason is that Gates himself competes in a different market, the market for CEOs. His salary -- his personal wealth -- is a result of the demand for him personally, not for the products of his company. If he personally is an exceedingly able CEO, greatly in demand, then he will have a large personal profit margin (the excess of what he is paid over what he needs to live), regardless of whether the profit margin of his company is low or high.
The evidence suggests that Gates is, in fact, a CEO in enormous demand. Certainly Microsoft is willing to pay him huge amounts of money to stay at their helm. Would that change in an alternate universe? Perhaps. If there were a large and diversified market in PC software, and Microsoft iself had many more effective competitors, it seems likely there would also be many more competent PC software CEOs, and Gates would have more effective personal competitors. So his personal wealth would be less.
You're forgetting one thing: history. Wherever and whenever decision-making power has been highly concentrated, the final results have been markedly poorer than when it is more distributed. The USSR is the most spectactular example, of course, a situation in which the decision of where to spend nearly every dollar (well, ruble) in the economy was made by a very few people at the top, allocating huge amounts of money at a time. The results speak for themselves.
The performance of companies that deliberately distribute decision-making authority down to lower levels is also illustrative. Generally when lower-level "front-line" people have as much decision making power as they can handle the company is more agile, more responsive, more successful. All successful companies know this, and take steps to prevent decision making from taking place on too high a level, because the view from the penthouse is often lacking some critical details. Any engineer or salesman who has worked for a large firm knows that the fewer layers of management up through which information must percolate, and down through which decisions must be filtered, the faster problems are solved correctly. This is not news. You just may not be used to thinking of these facts in this context.
Neither of these trends should be robust facts of history if your idea is true, that it's generally "impossible to tell" whether highly centralized or distributed decision-making is best. So do the lessons apply to charitable decision-making, too? Hard to say. But since it definitely applies to many other kinds of decision making, one would have to consider the possibility carefully before saying "Oh goody! Let's give another $250 million to Bill ultimately for charity, instead of spending it where we ourselves choose."
The only point of your brain exercise is to vaguely hint that Bill Gates doesn't deserve his money.
God knows what you mean by deserve. Where does morality creep into economics? I was talking strictly about economic efficiency, nothing else. The question of whether Bill "deserves" his earnings I find meaningless noise. You might as well ask if he "deserves" to be named "Bill." He just is, that's all. He's just rich, that all. Morality doesn't enter into it.
Well, first of all, I certainly didn't say Microsoft shouldn't exist. Far from it. I just said it's not clear whether the good deeds Bill Gates' personal fortune does when he spends it are necessarily greater than the sum of the good deeds that would have been done had that money stayed in his customer's hands, i.e. had he, personally, not acquired $250 million more than he can possibly use (so that he's cool with giving it away now).
It's seems a tad inefficient to transfer all that money from customers to Bill and then to charity. Why not eliminate the middleman and let it flow directly from the customers to charity? There are two arguments I've heard: First, and most common, customers would not spend the money originally if they knew it was going to charity ultimately, but once it's out of their hands they're OK with it being redirected (judging from the comments here).
That makes Bill some kind of weird parent who tricks us into donating money to charity by hiding the purpose of the money we pay him, for a while. Initially, we think he needs it to pay software engineers to make the software we buy. But later on we find out he didn't need it all for that, he's actually using some of it to donate to charity. And, although we would not have given the money to charity ourselves, we're OK with Bill doing it for us. This seems a little weirdly infantile by me.
The second argument is that Bill makes better decisions by himself than all his customers do collectively, so he should collect our charity money and decide what to do with it. For all I know this could be true.
And as for "grass roots" level information? How well did that work in the wake of Katrina? Kasmir earth quake?
You really need to think this through. You're mistaking the highly reported visible things that were done for all that was done. But that's totally silly. The majority of the rescuing and recovery that was done with Katrina was by millions of individuals, one small action at at time, and never made the TV news. One guy pulls another to safety. Another drives his old mother out of town to safety. One fellow sticks with his job as a cop even when things get rough. Another lends a drink of water from his stored supply to someone who is thirsty. One woman lends a blanket to a cold child.
And after the disaster, most of the work is done by individuals. FEMA trucks make the news, but hundreds of thousands cleaning out their yards, sweeping the street clear, getting back to work, repairing phone lines, restocking shelves, driving trucks and taxis, delivering supplies -- in short, bringing the economy back to life, is going to be invisible to you. Don't assume because it isn't concentrated in one spot for you to see in a 30-second bite on the news that it doesn't exist, or is negligably small.
In terms of the earthquake, who do you think did most of the digging and rescuing? Giant earthmovers or individual people with hands? And where did the most valuable information come from? From $10 million superduper listening devices flown in from Bagram Air Base? Or by a dazed little girl climbing out of the rubble and pointing: "There! My mother was over in that corner! Dig there!"
I don't think your argument is sound, but I am having difficulty explaing precisely why. Instead, let me give a parallel situation and ask a question:
Recently the price of gas rose from $2 to $3 a gallon. That's a very small amount of money. Even over the course of a year, for most people it's a small additional cost. Maybe $10 a week or so. So by your argument a 50% rise in gasoline energy costs should have zero or negligible effect on the economy. After all, if people were going to do something important with that extra $10 a week -- buy a house or new car, invest in a business, hire someone, place an order for 1,000 new workstations -- they would have already done it, or not done it, and the extra $10 won't make any real difference.
And yet, of course, such a price shock has most definitely had profound and lasting effects on the US economy, even on the world economy, for example in the 70s. And people today get highly lathered up about it, predicting dire effects and proposing drastic remedies (drilling in ANWR, forcing everyone to drive a hybrid, whatever).
How do you explain this?
Yes, but Rockefeller had a nice book written about what he did. No books were written, or will be written, about the millions of actions taken by his millions of customers. So how can you compare? You can certainly compare what Rockefeller did to what any one individual you know has done, or is likely to do. But how can you compare to what millions of people would do in small amounts, here and there?
You might as well say that the wisdom of General Eisenhower was far more important than the wisdom of the millions of men under his command in winning the Second World War, because we have many books discussing Eisenhower and the brilliant decisions he made, but all we really know about all those men is they executed his orders successfully. We have no clue about what wisdom or folly they might have deployed in doing so. So we have no way of knowing whether their collective wisdom exceeded Ike's individual wisdom. Maybe yes, maybe no. We don't know which was more critical to winning the war. Consequently we don't know whether it would be better to put even more decision-making authority in Ike's hands, or distribute some of it from Ike down to the grunts.
Of course, we do know that Ike's individual wisdom exceeded the wisdom of most or all individual front-line grunts. Which you may be unconsciously doing when you compare Rockefeller to "ordinary" people -- comparing him to one or a few ordinary people. But that's not fair. The correct comparison is to millions of ordinary people. And that comparison is very hard to make, and it's very hard to know what the result would be. That's my point.
Ah, I see! Mobil, for example, is guilty of murder because they hired Indonesian army thugs who have murdered people. May I assume that it doesn't matter to your logic that Mobil did not hire the IATs for the purpose of killing people? That is, Mobil did not intend the murders, but simply provided the actual trigger men with gainful employment so they could...uh...buy bullets for their guns, which caused them to murder when they would otherwise (if not employed by Mobil) stay peacefully at home. You're saying, I guess, that Mobil could have found out the use to which the salaries they were paying would be put, and hence, they are as guilty (or at least somewhat as guilty) as the IATs who actually pulled the triggers.
Hmmm. So, I guess, when the RIAA sues a file-sharing service because its software facilitates copyright violation, and the service could have found out that people were violating copyright, then you are sympathetic to the argument that the file-sharing software authors are just as guilty (or half as guilty) as the actual downloaders? And if you published a guide on your Web-site to making a fortune selling crack to 12-year-olds, and the police arrested you, you'll admit it's a fair cop? "I'm just as guilty (or half as guilty) as doze criminals what used my guide, Judge, and must t'row myself on de moicy of de Court!"
But wait...why does the chain of guilt stop at Mobil? What about Mobil's customers? If you bought gas at a Mobil station, and you could have known that Mobil was going to use your money to hire IATs in Indonesia who would commit murders -- aren't you guilty, too? Maybe you're more guilty than Mobil? After all, while Mobil clearly must extract gas to survive as a company -- meaning investing in gas extraction is a "life and death" decision for them -- you don't need to buy Mobil gas. Maybe Mobil's customers are more guilty than Mobil itself?
Or what about Mobil's investors? The company wouldn't exist without them! No Mobil, no murders in Indonesia, right? (Because Mobil caused those murders.) What about people who sell office supplies -- pencil, papers, calculators -- to Mobil offices? One of those pencils could have been used to write letters directing the hiring of an IAT who murdered a little girl. If that pencil hadn't been delivered on time, the girl would be alive today! Clearly the wretched pimply-faced teenager in the Office Max shirt who delivered the pencils is guilty, damn him...
I dunno. My head's spinning. Maybe...maybe there's something to be said for saying that the only people we accuse of murder are those who actually pull a trigger, push the knife in, twist the rope, or directly and knowingly order those deeds done? Maybe accusing anybody who can conceivably be creatively connected to the deed is, well, kind of diluting the concept of guilt to the point of uselessness?
Your argument -- or rather implication -- is familiar to all charities and purveyors of dubious investments. "For just the price of your morning coffee you could..." "For an investment of just pennies a day you might reap..." Wise men do not fall for this con, because they realize a dollar is worth exactly a dollar, no more and no less, regardless of whether it is accompanied by 42 others or by 42,000,000 others. It takes the same amount of time to earn and it buys the same amount of goods and services and, generally speaking, sensible people use about the same amount of time and energy thinking about where to put it.
Although, if anything, the case is best that people spend less time and energy per dollar thinking about how to spend their money when they are spending large amounts. Would you spend more time getting the best deal when spending $43 at the grocery store, or arguing with your bank about a mysterious extra $43 charge on your $600,000 mortgage papers? We already know the answer, because selling groceries has a razor-thin profit margin and brokering mortgages is obscenely profitable. You don't see many grocers building four-story mansions next to real-estate wheeler-dealers. From this point of view it would seem millions of separate $43 decisions would be better thought out, dollar for dollar, than one or two $250 million decisions.
In essence your argument falsely assumes that because people usually don't think carefully about a financial decision the whole cost of which is $43, they also don't think carefully about a financial decision the marginal cost of which is an extra $43. But this is nonsense.
Consider my final example. Is it really possible an extra $43 could mean the difference between a brilliant but poor scholar staying in medical school or dropping out to wait tables? A simple thought experiment proves it can: assume Joe barely has enough money to pay for his tuition, live without serious want, take care of his most pressing medical and personal needs, buy textbooks, and mail his feature articles to Albert Schweizer's Magazine for Humanitarian Heroes.
Now let us take $43 away from Joe. Big deal, huh? He just eats a little less pizza, a little more Ramen.
So let's take another $43 away from him. And another. And another. Clearly, at some point, we will take the last $43 away from him that he can stand. It will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and yes, he will decide to drop out of medical school. For Joe, that particular $43 is indeed the difference between staying in school and not. It may seem weird, but it's no different than the last snowflake that starts an avalanche, or the final half-ounce ripple of flood water that breaks the levee and causes the deluge.
Now obviously most people in medical school are not going to be situated such that the $43 in question is the make-or-break $43. But equally, some undoubtably will be. How many will be? Or rather, for what fraction of Microsoft's customers over the past 25 years in which Bill Gates amassed his fortune has there been a situation in which the $43 spent on Windows could, at some time or other, have been the marginal cost of a very important decision? Quite possibly all of them. It's a rare person indeed who never has to make an important decision based on how much dough he's got in the bank, or for whom such a decision never turns out to be close.
So I could take every last $43 of the money Bill Gates has collected over his career and argue that it would have been applied entirely to critical make-or-break decisions just like Joe's. In which case, of course, the aggregate money would have a far larger impact than ever Bill will cause by sending it to malaria researchers. Because, in a sense, it's being universally applied to all the really critical junctures in people's lives.
But this doesn't actually make any more sense than your decision that all of those $43
You mean American soldiers in Iraq? Goodness, I didn't realize they'd been killed by Halliburton, Bechtel et cetera. I thought it was random Iraqi or import Arab thugs with bombs and stuff. I guess that's what comes from reading the lying news reports.
But...I'm still puzzled. How did they do it? I mean, don't the soldiers carry machine guns, drive tanks, enjoy close air support from nastily-armed airplanes, that kind of thing? How does a collection of paunchy middle-aged Halliburton employees in pocket-protectors and eyeglasses manage to reach and kill the trained warriors in the 82nd Airborne?
Damn it, I'm going to write my Congressman. If random American oil drilling companies can so easily kill thousands of American soldiers, then clearly our soldiers are terribly equipped and disastrously led.
One of the questions to ask seriously (and I'm not saying I know how the answer would come out, because I don't) is this: what would've happened if Bill Gates hadn't acquired all that money which he is now giving away? Where would it be? In the pockets of millions of ordinary folks, of course. And what would they have done with it?
One possibility, of course, is that they would have frittered it away on DVDs and beer. But it's also possible they would have done a million individual worthy deeds of charity, such as buying some shoes to send a soldier on tsunami relief, who knows a little girl who needs them, or cooking a hot meal for a neighbor with cancer, or buying a textbook for an inner-city school that's short. Or maybe some extra money would've let a brilliant but poor student not drop out of medical school, so he would get the education he needs to invent the malaria vaccine that works for 20 years. You never know, actually.
And that's the rub. Is the good that Bill does with that money necessarily greater than the distributed good that would have been done by the millions of original possessors if they'd kept their money because he sold his products more cheaply? I don't know, of course. You can argue it both ways: (1) Bill has time to study the issues very carefully before investing, make a single "strategic vision" and implement a cohesive overall plan, so maybe "centralizing" the charity decisions makes them better. Or, (2) Bill's only one man, he can't possibly have access to all the information all those millions of people at the "grass roots" level have, so their distributed "Open Source Charity" movement would make better, more flexible and effective decisions.
Really? Wow! I've heard of people being killed by criminals, cancer, pneumonia, heart attacks and AIDS before, but I didn't realize oil drilling, construction and refining firms were in the business of killing people. You'd think it would sort of work against their own long-term interests, killing customers like that. But I'm not a businessman, so what do I know?
The US Centers for Disease Control reported that 2,443,387 Americans died in 2002. How many of those do you figure Halliburton, Bechtel and Exxon killed? I mean, to the nearest ten thousand or so. I'm not asking for the exact number.
You're absolute right, and that's what I first thought. Imagine my surprise when I picked up the container and it said, nope, I'm made of 100% pure salt in the Pure Food and Drug Act sense of the word (i.e. nuthin' but NaCl). I contain no KCl, no sugar, no secret spice, no nothing. And yet, the box insisted the stuff contained "30% less sodium per serving*" than regular salt.
Yes, I figured out the secret by following the asterisk. In fine print at the bottom it said: "* When servings are measured by volume, not weight."
Ah. What those clever buggers had done was repackage sea-salt, which is naturally made up of larger and more jagged crystals than salt from mines, and therefore packs down less efficiently. So when you measure out a teaspoon of their salt, it contains less salt by mass than a teaspoon of normal salt. Voila! Less sodium.
Incidentally, the standard-sized salt container it came in sold for $3.50 (versus 65 cents for the "high-sodium" regular version).
Best marketing trick I have ever seen. Re-package identical stuff in a slightly different shape, give slightly different instructions for use, and clean up 200% profit. Beats the heck out of "You May Already Have Won!"
All right, I can understand that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have zillions of moons because they're big mommas with a lot of gravity, and when you're very generously rounded -- well, you just naturally attract a lot of trash. Fact of life.
But now even puny Pluto is getting into the act. Three moons, when Mercury has zero and Mars but two. What gives? Why are moons more common in a general way in the outer Solar System than the inner? This is odd. Is it all captured from the Kuiper Belt? Did the solar wind when the Sun was T-Tauri blow all the moon-making crap out of the inner system, but not the outer? Is there some reason why whirlpools in the nebula are more probably further out? Inquiring minds want to know!
It is clear that it did not form from the same planetary disk that spawned the planets from Neptune on in.
I don't understand this, can you elucidate? Are you saying there was another planetary disk at some other time? Or that Pluto and friends wandered in from interstellar space?
Wait, let's look at the ranges for the muscle temps: 68-86 F. Seems a bit of an odd range, doesn't it? If you don't know the temps any better than +/-9 degrees, why state it as 68-86 instead of, say, 70-90?
But converting to Celsius, we find the temperature range is 20-30 C. Aha! One strongly suspects the PR people converted the Celsius numbers in the original paper for the purposes of publication.
Kind of reminds me of buying a quart of milk and there at the bottom it says:
Contents: 1 qt (946 mL)
Hmm, so they're saying this bottle contains 946 mL of milk, and definitely not 945 mL or 948 mL or even 960 mL? Giving three specific digits conveys the false impression that the amount of milk is known to 1 part in 1000. In their "own" system they understand this, which is why it says "1 qt" and not "1.000 qt." But the "common sense" function of the brain just sort of clicks off when they convert to SI. Or maybe it's some kind of brain-dead legal requirement, I dunno.
I find this humorous, although not as funny as the time I found "low sodium salt" for sale in the supermarket.
I guess I should check myself into some kind of clinic to get help, huh?
It's not the generation of heat that's interesting, I gather, but the fact that the fish may go to some effort to hold onto the heat, i.e. the heat is not just allowed to seep into the water as fast as it's generated.