"Fuck the poor"

[Surlethe]

So, here's an argument relevant to political theory. If it drifts too much toward morality, we'll punt it to SLAM. Enjoy, and don't give me any stupid rebuttals.

There is no way to measure utility (or value - I conflate the two) save by the actions that people take. The only rational measure of utility given a person by a particular outcome is what the person is willing to voluntarily sacrifice to achieve the outcome. In particular, we can measure the value of a person by what other people are willing to give up for him.

The bidding process therefore measures the value a person places upon a good or service. The person bidding the highest receives the good or service because he values it most. What of income inequality? Simple: the person with more income is a person more valuable to society. Therefore, goods and services are allocated not just to those people who derive great utility from them but also to those whom society, i.e., the aggregate of all other human beings, values most, as measured by the voluntary transfer of resources from all other human beings to that individual.

Note that this process only accurately measures utility when people are not coerced, i.e., not threatened with direct harm by other humans should a particular outcome occur.

I have thus justified the anarcho-libertarianistic ideal.

[Bakustra]

While I am no expert, one fault that I can see is that this conflates corporations and persons. Though people may be willing to give resources to corporations, that does not translate to a willingness to give resources to the owner or chief operator of that corporation. So the two are dissociated, and while the people value the corporation and the corporation values the owner, this is not transitive as far as I can see.

[Stark]

Did Surlethe just discover considering utility to be value enables lolbertarians?

[une]

If a person with more income is a person more valuable to society, wouldn't that mean professional athletes are more valuable to society than engineers or doctors?

[Rye]

So, here's an argument relevant to political theory. If it drifts too much toward morality, we'll punt it to SLAM. Enjoy, and don't give me any stupid rebuttals.

There is no way to measure utility (or value - I conflate the two) save by the actions that people take. The only rational measure of utility given a person by a particular outcome is what the person is willing to voluntarily sacrifice to achieve the outcome. In particular, we can measure the value of a person by what other people are willing to give up for him.

The bidding process therefore measures the value a person places upon a good or service. The person bidding the highest receives the good or service because he values it most.

Mark 12:41 And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much. 42 And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing. 43 And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury: 44 For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living.

What of income inequality? Simple: the person with more income is a person more valuable to society. Therefore, goods and services are allocated not just to those people who derive great utility from them but also to those whom society, i.e., the aggregate of all other human beings, values most, as measured by the voluntary transfer of resources from all other human beings to that individual.

Wealth isn't distributed according to worth to society. Paris Hilton is not more valuable to society than, for instance, a nurse. There's undoubtedly examples of parasitic and exploitative behaviour being cracked down upon and society prospering as a result; the unions forming a response to the mistreatment by the industrialists of the gilded age springs to mind.

[Simon_Jester]

It seems to me, Surlethe, that this argument relies on the efficient market hypothesis, or something like it: that the market price of a commodity (be it hours of my time, loaves of bread, medicine, or solid gold houses) accurately reflects all past information. If the efficient market hypothesis is flawed (and there are some problems with it, so far as I know)

It also ignores the question of relative commitment. If my net worth were ten thousand dollars, and my dear friend comes to me looking for money that she needs to save her life, I cannot possibly give her more than ten thousand dollars. That doesn't mean her life is worth ten thousand dollars in any objective sense that can be used to justify saying "well, fuck her then." It doesn't even mean her life is worth ten thousand dollars to me. It means I can't pay more than that.

If Bill Gates dropped by my house one day and gave me all his money, and the next day that same friend came to me looking for ten million dollars to save her life, I'd give her the money, probably very shortly after she gave me the explanation of why she needed it. It would be trivially easy for me to do so; I'd never notice the difference in my own bank account. But if I don't have the money to begin with, I can't pay it out, even for a service that I consider to be worthwhile.

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To take another example, how much is the atmosphere worth? If Q showed up tomorrow and told you, personally, that he was going to make the atmosphere go away you'd give him pretty much everything you have to avoid that. There'd be no point in holding back, because if the atmosphere vanishes you and everyone else you know dies. If you had more, you'd give that to him too.

And any other person on the planet (if they were a rational agent) would make the same decision: everyone would give up everything they own rather than let the atmosphere disappear, because everyone needs it to live. If we suddenly gave everyone twice as much stuff and repeated the threat, they'd still do it.

No finite price for the atmosphere can be set, not when it comes to the presence or absence of it. But assigning an infinite value to the atmosphere doesn't work because it completely kills all economic calculations: if the atmosphere is infinitely valuable, then any act that has even the tiniest possibility of destroying it or making it useless is an infinitely bad idea. Even if the probability is effectively zero, to the point where the only risk arises if I'm hallucinating the laws of physics and nature doesn't really work in a way that would let my actions destroy the atmosphere. Because even then, the infinitesimal chance that I'm wrong is too great for any plausible payoff I might receive from carrying out my plan.

Thus, the atmosphere is in a real sense "priceless:" Any price that can be measured in terms of a human economy would be too low, but an infinite price is too high. Once again, we find that we cannot accurately gauge the value of a commodity in terms of the sum of money people are willing to pay for it.

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Or another example. If I ask you for a nickel so I can pay the price of a cup of coffee (assume I have five cents less than the actual price) you will probably say "yes," being an obliging soul.

How many other people in the country would do the same thing? Even if it's only ten percent of the population, that's still thirty million nickels: 1.5 million dollars! If I could somehow locate all those people and independently ask each of them for a nickel, I'd be... if not set for life, at least quite wealthy by the standards of all but a handful of Americans.

And yet no one person would ever offer 1.5 million dollars to the "buy Simon_Jester a Cup of Coffee" fund. To accumulate that kind of money, I'd have to extract it under false pretenses... but given the ability to communicate with thirty million people in parallel before any of them cross-referenced and figured out what I was up to, I could do it.

The time when this sort of thing becomes possible may not be all that far away; given the right list of e-mail addresses it would not be hard for a "charity" to net a profit by asking a million people for donations and then only spending a small fraction of that money to accomplish their real goal.

That's another problem, and one that loops back to the fact that your argument relies on the efficient market hypothesis, Surlethe: false information about the "objective" value of given items.

Finally, because I am curious:

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Did Surlethe just discover considering utility to be value enables lolbertarians?

Do you actually have anything to say?

[Surlethe]

While I am no expert, one fault that I can see is that this conflates corporations and persons. Though people may be willing to give resources to corporations, that does not translate to a willingness to give resources to the owner or chief operator of that corporation. So the two are dissociated, and while the people value the corporation and the corporation values the owner, this is not transitive as far as I can see.

Well, a corporation is really just a firm owned by a bunch of people. So in transferring resources to the 'corporation', you're really saying 'I value the product made by the organization these people own", and transferring resources to the stockholders.

If a person with more income is a person more valuable to society, wouldn't that mean professional athletes are more valuable to society than engineers or doctors?

Correct. The point being made by this argument is that you can't really measure value except by where people voluntarily decide to transfer their resources. So people who (without defrauding) are raking in more money are literally more valuable to society than people who aren't making as much.

Wealth isn't distributed according to worth to society. Paris Hilton is not more valuable to society than, for instance, a nurse. There's undoubtedly examples of parasitic and exploitative behaviour being cracked down upon and society prospering as a result; the unions forming a response to the mistreatment by the industrialists of the gilded age springs to mind.

Well, why do you say that Paris Hilton is not more valuable to society than a nurse? You're kind of just contradicting the conclusion of the argument without giving a reason why it's wrong.

The sort of thing exemplified by cracking down on industrial mistreatment by union-forming is a different issue, and one I don't really want to get into. There are two (as I see it) fundamental flaws with utilitarian libertarianism: (1) the fact that income inequality changes bidding power so resources don't necessarily go to their most valuable uses, and (2) the fact that markets are rarely efficient, externalities abound, transaction, transfer, and information costs are high, and markets take significant time to adjust to new equilibria.

Your second point addresses #2. I want to abstract that flaw of libertarianism out of the debate and instead deal with #1.

(Note that this deals with utilitarian libertarianism and not deontological libertarianism, which is a different beast entirely.)

[Surlethe]

It seems to me, Surlethe, that this argument relies on the efficient market hypothesis, or something like it: that the market price of a commodity (be it hours of my time, loaves of bread, medicine, or solid gold houses) accurately reflects all past information. If the efficient market hypothesis is flawed (and there are some problems with it, so far as I know)

It also ignores the question of relative commitment. If my net worth were ten thousand dollars, and my dear friend comes to me looking for money that she needs to save her life, I cannot possibly give her more than ten thousand dollars. That doesn't mean her life is worth ten thousand dollars in any objective sense that can be used to justify saying "well, fuck her then." It doesn't even mean her life is worth ten thousand dollars to me. It means I can't pay more than that.

No, I don't think it relies on the efficient market hypothesis. If you could extract $1.5 million from the people of the United States (assuming you do not use false pretenses, of course), then you can accurately say that the people of the United States (in the aggregate) value you or your plea as worth $1.5 million.

Instead, the argument is really aiming at relative commitment by identifying you, yourself, as only worth ten thousand dollars and thus, you can't value anyone else at more than ten thousand dollars. According to this argument, that's it. End of story. If your friend needs more than (ten thousand dollars + her net worth) of treatment, she is screwed unless she can find someone else who values her, because otherwise she's literally not worth the cost of treatment. (I chose "fuck the poor" as the thread title for a good reason )

The same applies to the atmosphere. In your hypothetical, it's worth the net worth of all people on the planet (to whomever is bargaining for it) and not a cent more. (Mind, in a real sense, the atmosphere belongs to the people of the Earth; anybody trying to take it would be in violation of property rights and the premises of the exercise.)

[Surlethe]

It seems to me, Surlethe, that this argument relies on the efficient market hypothesis, or something like it: that the market price of a commodity (be it hours of my time, loaves of bread, medicine, or solid gold houses) accurately reflects all past information. If the efficient market hypothesis is flawed (and there are some problems with it, so far as I know)

It also ignores the question of relative commitment. If my net worth were ten thousand dollars, and my dear friend comes to me looking for money that she needs to save her life, I cannot possibly give her more than ten thousand dollars. That doesn't mean her life is worth ten thousand dollars in any objective sense that can be used to justify saying "well, fuck her then." It doesn't even mean her life is worth ten thousand dollars to me. It means I can't pay more than that.

No, I don't think it relies on the efficient market hypothesis. If you could extract $1.5 million from the people of the United States (assuming you do not use false pretenses, of course), then you can accurately say that the people of the United States (in the aggregate) value you or your plea as worth $1.5 million.

Instead, the argument is really aiming at relative commitment by identifying you, yourself, as only worth ten thousand dollars and thus, you can't value anyone else at more than ten thousand dollars. According to this argument, that's it. End of story. If your friend needs more than (ten thousand dollars + her net worth) of treatment, she is screwed unless she can find someone else who values her, because otherwise she's literally not worth the cost of treatment. (I chose "fuck the poor" as the thread title for a good reason )

The same applies to the atmosphere. In your hypothetical, it's worth the net worth of all people on the planet (to whomever is bargaining for it) and not a cent more. (Mind, in a real sense, the atmosphere belongs to the people of the Earth; anybody trying to take it would be in violation of property rights and the premises of the exercise.)

[Formless]

I think the best rebuttal I can come up with would be to point out that money is only an instrumental value, while human life (or more strictly human happiness) is an intrinsic good. Put it another way, you can't eat money.

[Rye]

I said a nurse is more valuable to society and left it at that because I didn't think you'd be that pedantic and dispute it. A nurse will save and enrich the lives of many different members of society over the course of her career, the lives of her patients and the lives of those who love them. Paris Hilton makes bourgeois products like perfume and bags, drives Ferraris drunk and gets caught with coke. Ask the board or anyone in real life if they'd rather have one less nurse in the healthcare system looking after their relatives or one less Paris Hilton in society. Ask yourself which one facilitates the flourishing of society better over the course of its existence.

[aerius]

Questions.

1) If I score a few million through leveraged capital markets speculation, does that make me more valuable than I was a year ago when I only had $10k?

2) If I win the lottery jackpot tomorrow, does that mean I'm instantly 100 times more valuable than I am now?

3) If my bank accidentally adds a couple zeros to my acount balance and they never find out about it or correct it, am I once again 100 times more valuable than I was before?

[Simon_Jester]

It seems to me, Surlethe, that this argument relies on the efficient market hypothesis, or something like it: that the market price of a commodity (be it hours of my time, loaves of bread, medicine, or solid gold houses) accurately reflects all past information. If the efficient market hypothesis is flawed (and there are some problems with it, so far as I know)

No, I don't think it relies on the efficient market hypothesis. If you could extract $1.5 million from the people of the United States (assuming you do not use false pretenses, of course), then you can accurately say that the people of the United States (in the aggregate) value you or your plea as worth $1.5 million.

The "I can get a nickel from each of thirty million people none of whom would for a moment believe that it's worth giving me the full sum" problem is only part of your model's dependancy on the efficient market hypothesis.

The core of the dependancy here is that the entire argument hinges on things being worth what their purchaser will pay for them. It ignores a HUGE range of possible counterfactuals. Examples:

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1) Assuming my friend has zero net assets of her own and no other means of support, if I suddenly acquire twice as much money does her value double in spite of the fact that nothing about her changed? If so, then what is the actual significance of "value" in this sense of the term? Does it correlate to anything that matters to any real person? Does it carry enough ethical weight to justify making prescriptive statements such as "the poor should be fucked if they can't raise the money to fix their situation?" If so, why so?

It seems to me that this argument leads to utterly absurd conclusions, such as the possibility that a person's "value" can change by a factor of ten if I suddenly inherit a lot of money, because the amount of money I'm able to pay to keep them in existence has increased. The problem with that is obvious: it breaks any correlation between the "value-as-in-dollars-raisable" of a thing or person and any other objective quality about that person. The value of a person in this model has as much to do with blind fucking luck as with anything they do or do not do.

That makes the model useless as a prescriptive one: it cannot tell us what we ought to do because it relies too heavily on chance to set the value of items and individuals. It would be like deciding that the value of individuals was set by reading tea leaves, or by having everyone gather round and draw straws. Such mechanisms are not useful for civilization-building, or for any other purpose except arbitrarily choosing one item from a group completely at random.

Short form: this model of value is arbitrary. It lacks reference to any other quality anyone might want to optimize. It is therefore useless.

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2) The model is just as incoherent when looking at sudden random drops in wealth as when looking at sudden random increases. Suppose Michael Jordan loses half his 500 million dollars of wealth in a fire started by a random bolt of lightning. Is he now worth half as much because of a random event?

Does it make a difference whether the fire was started by natural causes or by arson? If so, why does losing wealth in a natural disaster affect your worth when having it destroyed in a manmade disaster does not? If not, then doesn't that mean any person can arbitrarily change the value of another person at will simply by destroying or stealing the assets they control? In which case "value" isn't much of an objective measure since I can make a person worthless by a relatively trivial exercise in criminal activity. Suddenly, having one enemy willing to burn your house down decreases your "value" by a very large margin... because if you lose your house you lose much of your value as a human being.

Either way we're looking at absurd conclusions that only hold together if the model is taken purely for its own sake as an axiom. In which case it's nothing but circular logic: value is value is value, and it doesn't matter what the consequences are, and there's no reason to define value that way in the first place.

This is the economic and sociological equivalent of sophism, and you really shouldn't be wasting your time on it, Surlethe.

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3) Even ignoring the effects of blind chance in determining the "worth" of items under this model, we're still left with the efficient market hypothesis. If markets can overvalue or undervalue a product due to an information breakdown, the idea that any objective value can be placed on an item starting from its market value becomes a farce.

In an efficient-market system that can't happen, by definition. In real life, it happens all the time: tulips in the Netherlands in the mid-1630s come to mind, as does the present real estate bubble. When the amount people are willing to pay for a commodity becomes unhinged from the amount that it's plausible for them to be able to recover in value to them, it stops making sense to say that tulips or flippable condos or junk bonds really are worth X amount of money just because you can find someone (or even thousands of people) fool enough to think they can get their money back on their investment.

Likewise there's the problem of hyperbolic discounting, which creates time-inconsistent models of value: the net outcome of a series of short term decisions does not match the net outcome of a single long term decision the subject would have made at the outset. Suddenly, "value" stops being a single-valued function of a person's preferences and becomes multi-valued... which, to a physicist, ought to be a sign that something's gone wrong in the model.

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Instead, the argument is really aiming at relative commitment by identifying you, yourself, as only worth ten thousand dollars and thus, you can't value anyone else at more than ten thousand dollars. According to this argument, that's it. End of story. If your friend needs more than (ten thousand dollars + her net worth) of treatment, she is screwed unless she can find someone else who values her, because otherwise she's literally not worth the cost of treatment. (I chose "fuck the poor" as the thread title for a good reason )

But that makes no sense. It's a prescriptive statement based on a descriptive model. You're saying "inability to pay for a desired outcome occurs, therefore it is right and good that inability to pay for a desired outcome occurs, and those who are unable to pay for a desired outcome deserve whatever they get." That's foolish. It's like saying "evolution occurs, therefore we should encourage more evolution to occur by arranging tests of people's ability to dodge oncoming vehicles and so on." Or, perhaps more blatantly but no less unreasonably, "gravity exists, therefore we should seek to maximize the amount of falling going on in accordance with the principle of gravity."

The same applies to the atmosphere. In your hypothetical, it's worth the net worth of all people on the planet (to whomever is bargaining for it) and not a cent more.

That still leaves counterfactuals, though. If there were only half as many assets available to bargain for the atmosphere with, would the value of the atmosphere itself change? Why? It's not as if the atmosphere suddenly became less useful, less necessary. Conversely, if the number of assets doubles does the value of the atmosphere double? If so, why? Again, nothing about the atmosphere itself changed.

(Mind, in a real sense, the atmosphere belongs to the people of the Earth; anybody trying to take it would be in violation of property rights and the premises of the exercise.)

That reflects a profound flaw in the premises of the exercise, then. If your moral system evaporates the moment anyone proposes to violate property rights, it never existed at all. All acts ignore property rights on some level: either because they do not adequately take into account harm to specific individuals, or because they ignore externality costs. No one offers to pay you for the damage to the atmosphere caused by their activities, even though clearly that damage harms you in some incremental way.

If you choose to ignore this obvious fault in your proposed model of value, then we can easily recover the "purity" of the original thought experiment. Just say that Q, who is threatening to remove the atmosphere, is the one who put it there in the first place. Suddenly the atmosphere becomes his property, not yours, and instead of threatening to rob you he's renegotiating the rent he charges you for the privilege of breathing his property.

[Surlethe]

I think the best rebuttal I can come up with would be to point out that money is only an instrumental value, while human life (or more strictly human happiness) is an intrinsic good. Put it another way, you can't eat money.

I said a nurse is more valuable to society and left it at that because I didn't think you'd be that pedantic and dispute it. A nurse will save and enrich the lives of many different members of society over the course of her career, the lives of her patients and the lives of those who love them. Paris Hilton makes bourgeois products like perfume and bags, drives Ferraris drunk and gets caught with coke. Ask the board or anyone in real life if they'd rather have one less nurse in the healthcare system looking after their relatives or one less Paris Hilton in society. Ask yourself which one facilitates the flourishing of society better over the course of its existence.

I think you guys are missing the point of the argument. It's that value and utility are fundamentally subjective, depend on the person, and the only way to measure it is to see what the person is willing to give up. Similarly, what a person has to give up is exactly his value, which is exactly what everybody else has been willing to give up for him.

(Mind, I do not agree with the argument. But it's the best I can come up with to address the (1) flaw of libertarianism I listed earlier, so I was curious as to everybody else's takes.)

aerius --- according to the argument, (1) yes (2) yes (3) no.

Simon - I'll get to yours after I'm done cleaning the kitchen.

[Formless]

I think you guys are missing the point of the argument. It's that value and utility are fundamentally subjective, depend on the person, and the only way to measure it is to see what the person is willing to give up. Similarly, what a person has to give up is exactly his value, which is exactly what everybody else has been willing to give up for him.

This falls apart the instant you realize that there are some things that are universally valued among humans (and even animals), such as food, shelter, avoidance of pain, avoidance of disease, social bonds, etc.. If we ever come across a being that doesn't value those things, then we can start talking about how to treat them differently from a human.

This argument simply conflates your wealth with your value as a person. Shouldn't the libertarian then have a duty to get rich, thus increasing the value of their person? And wouldn't this mean that they must become the fabled utility monster, screwing over every last person in existence but themselves in an effort to accumulate wealth and personal value? And thus, would not society fall apart from everyone else having nothing? Because if so, we're right back to the saying "you cannot eat money." Its literally useless not only to others, but to you as well if you follow through with this ethic.

[Surlethe]

I think you guys are missing the point of the argument. It's that value and utility are fundamentally subjective, depend on the person, and the only way to measure it is to see what the person is willing to give up. Similarly, what a person has to give up is exactly his value, which is exactly what everybody else has been willing to give up for him.

This falls apart the instant you realize that there are some things that are universally valued among humans (and even animals), such as food, shelter, avoidance of pain, avoidance of disease, social bonds, etc.. If we ever come across a being that doesn't value those things, then we can start talking about how to treat them differently from a human.

Why does it fall apart? The fact that people almost universally value food, shelter, avoidance of pain, etc., doesn't invalidate the argument, which just says that in resource allocation the values of people who are less valuable to other people are given less weight than the values of people who are more valuable to other people. That everybody happens to value the same things doesn't imply anything about whether value is ultimately extrinsic or intrinsic; it just means that people are similar in their tastes.

[Formless]

Why does it fall apart? The fact that people almost universally value food, shelter, avoidance of pain, etc., doesn't invalidate the argument, which just says that in resource allocation the values of people who are less valuable to other people are given less weight than the values of people who are more valuable to other people. That everybody happens to value the same things doesn't imply anything about whether value is ultimately extrinsic or intrinsic; it just means that people are similar in their tastes.

What use is the whole "objective vs subjective" dichotomy if it discounts the fact that everyone agrees that certain things are good and others bad? Usually people invoke "subjectivity" when there is disagreement in opinion; why invoke it when there isn't such disagreement?

Even if we ignore that, wealth is only valuable to individuals because it gives them the ability to buy other stuff they will enjoy. So even to an ethical egoist, the simple fact of the matter is that money is merely an instrumental value.

It sounds like you are trying to attack the premises of utilitarianism, not use them.

[Surlethe]

The core of the dependancy here is that the entire argument hinges on things being worth what their purchaser will pay for them.

Not quite correct. The argument defines worth as that which the purchaser is willing to give up, and avers that no other measure of value or utility is meaningful.

Here are in-character responses to your examples:

1) Assuming my friend has zero net assets of her own and no other means of support, if I suddenly acquire twice as much money does her value double in spite of the fact that nothing about her changed? If so, then what is the actual significance of "value" in this sense of the term? Does it correlate to anything that matters to any real person? Does it carry enough ethical weight to justify making prescriptive statements such as "the poor should be fucked if they can't raise the money to fix their situation?" If so, why so?

It seems to me that this argument leads to utterly absurd conclusions, such as the possibility that a person's "value" can change by a factor of ten if I suddenly inherit a lot of money, because the amount of money I'm able to pay to keep them in existence has increased. The problem with that is obvious: it breaks any correlation between the "value-as-in-dollars-raisable" of a thing or person and any other objective quality about that person. The value of a person in this model has as much to do with blind fucking luck as with anything they do or do not do.

Why is that absurd? That your friend is worth as much as what others are willing to give her is the conclusion of this argument; it does not seem absurd to suppose that her value increases as the amount others are willing to give her increases (after all, we apply this argument to all other things, especially commodities). So if your income rises and you're willing to give more to her, whether by chance or by design, then her value rises, all else equal.

2) The model is just as incoherent when looking at sudden random drops in wealth as when looking at sudden random increases. Suppose Michael Jordan loses half his 500 million dollars of wealth in a fire started by a random bolt of lightning. Is he now worth half as much because of a random event?

Does it make a difference whether the fire was started by natural causes or by arson? If so, why does losing wealth in a natural disaster affect your worth when having it destroyed in a manmade disaster does not? If not, then doesn't that mean any person can arbitrarily change the value of another person at will simply by destroying or stealing the assets they control? In which case "value" isn't much of an objective measure since I can make a person worthless by a relatively trivial exercise in criminal activity. Suddenly, having one enemy willing to burn your house down decreases your "value" by a very large margin... because if you lose your house you lose much of your value as a human being.

I need to be more careful conflating wealth with income: the former reflects past value created, the latter reflects current value. But the point of the exercise is to establish that the only objective way to measure the value of X to Y is by how much Y is willing to give up to get X; no other way suffices, because value is entirely subjective: it is "in the eye of the beholder", so to speak. (As a professor used to say, "Put your money where your mouth is!")

In any case, if Michael Jordan for any reason can no longer outbid others for what he wants, he can no longer be said to value it more than others.

Either way we're looking at absurd conclusions that only hold together if the model is taken purely for its own sake as an axiom. In which case it's nothing but circular logic: value is value is value, and it doesn't matter what the consequences are, and there's no reason to define value that way in the first place.

Well, there is the fact that utility is perfectly subjective.

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Re. efficient markets, see my first response to Rye. I want to abstract away the differences between theoretical and real markets and focus on the "distributional flaws" of libertarianism.

___

ut that makes no sense. It's a prescriptive statement based on a descriptive model. You're saying "inability to pay for a desired outcome occurs, therefore it is right and good that inability to pay for a desired outcome occurs, and those who are unable to pay for a desired outcome deserve whatever they get." That's foolish. It's like saying "evolution occurs, therefore we should encourage more evolution to occur by arranging tests of people's ability to dodge oncoming vehicles and so on." Or, perhaps more blatantly but no less unreasonably, "gravity exists, therefore we should seek to maximize the amount of falling going on in accordance with the principle of gravity."

Not quite. The prescriptive statement is that, "total utility should be maximized". This is a largely uncontroversial moral premise in these parts. The radical departure is the argument's observation that it is perfectly impossible to measure utility derived from resource allocation except as what people are willing to give up to get those resources.

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Atmosphere.

That still leaves counterfactuals, though. If there were only half as many assets available to bargain for the atmosphere with, would the value of the atmosphere itself change? Why? It's not as if the atmosphere suddenly became less useful, less necessary. Conversely, if the number of assets doubles does the value of the atmosphere double? If so, why? Again, nothing about the atmosphere itself changed.

The amount that people are willing to give up to get it has changed.

If you choose to ignore this obvious fault in your proposed model of value, then we can easily recover the "purity" of the original thought experiment. Just say that Q, who is threatening to remove the atmosphere, is the one who put it there in the first place. Suddenly the atmosphere becomes his property, not yours, and instead of threatening to rob you he's renegotiating the rent he charges you for the privilege of breathing his property.

Sure. In that case, Q has to determine between alternative uses of his property: letting us breathe it and not letting us breathe it. If he gets more value out of not letting us breathe it, he will forgo whatever we're willing to pay him to let us use it and utility will be increased.

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This is the economic and sociological equivalent of sophism, and you really shouldn't be wasting your time on it, Surlethe.

But it's fun, eh? Besides, you seem to be wasting more time on it with your long posts, pal

[Surlethe]

Why does it fall apart? The fact that people almost universally value food, shelter, avoidance of pain, etc., doesn't invalidate the argument, which just says that in resource allocation the values of people who are less valuable to other people are given less weight than the values of people who are more valuable to other people. That everybody happens to value the same things doesn't imply anything about whether value is ultimately extrinsic or intrinsic; it just means that people are similar in their tastes.

What use is the whole "objective vs subjective" dichotomy if it discounts the fact that everyone agrees that certain things are good and others bad? Usually people invoke "subjectivity" when there is disagreement in opinion; why invoke it when there isn't such disagreement?

It's not that people agree or disagree that certain things are good and bad, it's that you can't measure how good they are to anybody without watching what they give up to get them. Once you know that, you send the resources to the person who values them most, maximizing utility. This line of argument is familiar to anybody who's taken introductory economics; I'm just following it to its conclusion here.

[Alyrium Denryle]

There is no way to measure utility (or value - I conflate the two) save by the actions that people take.

Here is your problem. The false equivocation of Utility in the market sense, and utility in the moral sense. You also do not remember that there is a distinction to be made between what someone would like to pay, and their ability to do so.

If I pick people off the street and hold them for ransom, with Most variables about their lives constant but the ability of their loved ones to pay for their release, how can you say that the person with wealthy friends is more valuable, more worth saving? Do rich people suffer more than poor people? Does a person with rich friends contribute more to society than an otherwise identical person with poor friends? Clearly no.

The bidding process therefore measures the value a person places upon a good or service. The person bidding the highest receives the good or service because he values it most.

Not necessarily. The required assumption made by this argument is equal ability to bid across those bidding, and the monetary value placed on the one accepting the bid. For example, a research scientist makes comparatively little considering their benefit to society and skill set because they are willing to work for less, simply because they will often do the same work for free if money was not necessary to function in society.

The point being made by this argument is that you can't really measure value except by where people voluntarily decide to transfer their resources. So people who (without defrauding) are raking in more money are literally more valuable to society than people who aren't making as much.

So, a meth manufacturer creates more benefit to society than a biochemist trying to cure cancer because he makes more? Despite all of the suffering and death caused by the meth manufacturer?

This argument only holds water when you completely divorce its logic from reality.

Well, why do you say that Paris Hilton is not more valuable to society than a nurse? You're kind of just contradicting the conclusion of the argument without giving a reason why it's wrong.

Because there is such a thing as non-quantifiable value. Paris Hilton literally does nothing but be a slutty cunt. Her money is inherited. A nurse on the other hand over the course of their lifetime literally guards the well-being of thousands upon thousands of people. That value cannot be quantified in terms of what the Nurse is paid. What the Nurse is paid is only able to quantify two things: How much monetary value the nurse places on their time, and how much a hospital values his/her time. It does not take one iota of account for the value the Nurse's patients place on the services the nurse provides.

[Formless]

It's not that people agree or disagree that certain things are good and bad, it's that you can't measure how good they are to anybody without watching what they give up to get them. Once you know that, you send the resources to the person who values them most, maximizing utility. This line of argument is familiar to anybody who's taken introductory economics; I'm just following it to its conclusion here.

At some point people will give up everything they have because they cannot eat their bank account. So therefore, if we take this line of reasoning to its utmost absurdity its actually a moral good to maximize the utility of the poor because they obviously value food, shelter and so on comparatively more than rich people. Unless you claim that money has an absolute, objective value that food, water, healthcare, and so on for no apparent reason does not or cannot have. That's an inconsistency. That's basically what Rye is arguing.

[JointStrikeFighter]

The nurses value is more accurately measured as the sum total of the wealth of the people whom the nurse saves, divided by the percentage which the nurse contributes to the saving.

eg: a nurse contributes 20% to saving a given patient.

A nurse has over a lifetime X patients. Let the income of a patient be Y.

The nurses contribution to society is thus

X(Y1+Y2+Y3...) * 0.2

Now i suspect that this number will be greater than the net worth of paris hilton

[J]

Note that this process only accurately measures utility when people are not coerced, i.e., not threatened with direct harm by other humans should a particular outcome occur.

I have thus justified the anarcho-libertarianistic ideal.

Ah. The Goldman-Sachs model of speculative finance. It works, until it doesn't.

[Master of Ossus]

At some point people will give up everything they have because they cannot eat their bank account. So therefore, if we take this line of reasoning to its utmost absurdity its actually a moral good to maximize the utility of the poor because they obviously value food, shelter and so on comparatively more than rich people. Unless you claim that money has an absolute, objective value that food, water, healthcare, and so on for no apparent reason does not or cannot have. That's an inconsistency. That's basically what Rye is arguing.

The claim isn't that money has an "objective value," but rather that it is a useful proxy for the level of "desire" that people have for specific goods or services. Indeed, the model treats it as a constant "subjective" value in that sense. You cannot measure how much someone wants something without recourse to the question of what they are willing to give up in order to receive it. Money, in Surlethe's model, is that proxy because it provides for everyone else.

While your framing of the argument entirely misses the point, you are vaguely alluding in the direction of diminishing marginal returns of money or resources: a concept which has been used to argue in favor of redistributive models of income including communist or socialist economic models since Jeremy Bentham. It's a reasonably powerful argument, but can itself be criticized for adopting many of the assumptions of the model that Surlethe advanced originally. For instance, Rawls argued that the utility of multiple individuals cannot be meaningfully aggregated and therefore such comparisons are necessarily invalid.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Well played, Surlethe, I love the bait and switch you pulled there.

You started off by defining value as what other people would 'give up' for someone, then casually went with the unspoken assumption that money defines the total of what people are able to give in life and based all your measurements off that alone. It would be quite the wicked argument if that basic assumption isn't self-evidently false. People can survive without money, people can 'give up' things other than money, thus assuming money is the sole measurement of worth is faulty.