This thread feels so odd to me. I studied economics and I understand things intellectually the way Walter does. LTV for sure does not work. The market decides things by marginalism.
But I also live in the real world and I think there's just a gigantic number of people who are paid something different from what they ought to be paid.
We may just be seeing the beginnings of it now in the UK, with lots of strikes about to happen.
I'm also well read enough to have heard all the arguments, sadly. It's the same over and over. "It's not a real free market" as the counterpart to "communism has never been tried". "People get paid their marginal product" is another one.
"If you don't like it, why don't you just pay the guy/government yourself" is another wiseass answer I've seen in these debates.
The orthodox economically literate answer somehow to me is not satisfying and needs some reassessment.
There is a deeper point to that - that people tend to be free with money as long as it doesn't cost themselves. People behave very differently w.r.t. what is "worth" spending money on when it is their money, as opposed to someone else's.
> what they ought to be paid
How do you propose to determine that amount?
> is not satisfying
Nothing human is perfect. But in trying to get that last step towards perfection often just makes things worse. There's no such thing as a perfect free market. Nor would a perfect free market produce perfect results. It's just that, so far, nobody has devised anything that works better. The solutions I see people propose have all been tried before. If they worked, we could point to them.
> There is a deeper point to that - that people tend to be free with money as long as it doesn't cost themselves. People behave very differently w.r.t. what is "worth" spending money on when it is their money, as opposed to someone else's.
This is typically where people drop in their Milton Friedman video/meme: "With my own money... with someone else's..."
Which has a grain of truth to it, just no nuance.
> How do you propose to determine that amount?
Certainly the answer isn't "whatever the machine spits out". Which at the bottom of it is what free market fanatics are saying. At least we should work on the machine so that the inputs are something sensible.
> Which has a grain of truth to it, just no nuance.
I see it in action all the time. In the small, parents know that kids are sloppy with money given to them. When they earn the money, they suddenly get careful with it. In the large, politicians play on the "tax the rich" theme because that means someone other than the bulk of voters will be paying the bill.
> free market fanatics
This sort of thing discredits your postings. It isn't necessary to be a fanatic to study economic history and see how well it works. The evidence is pretty compelling - far more than a "grain" of truth.
But I also live in the real world and I think there's just a gigantic number of people who are paid something different from what they ought to be paid.
We may just be seeing the beginnings of it now in the UK, with lots of strikes about to happen.
I'm also well read enough to have heard all the arguments, sadly. It's the same over and over. "It's not a real free market" as the counterpart to "communism has never been tried". "People get paid their marginal product" is another one.
"If you don't like it, why don't you just pay the guy/government yourself" is another wiseass answer I've seen in these debates.
The orthodox economically literate answer somehow to me is not satisfying and needs some reassessment.