Surlethe wrote:Simon_Jester wrote: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:
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.
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.
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.
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.