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There are only two factors that determine how a person's value will be measured in dollars in a market economy. Both have to do with perception, and both do not have to accurately reflect the truth to imbue value to a person (or a good, or a service). The first is the perception is how intrinsically good, or better, or unique the person (or good, or service) is in relation to other potential competitors. The second is the perception of the level of scarcity or abundance on the part of the buyer (or hirer, or whatever).
The first perception dictates the base level of desirability a person or object in the market will have, and is the best way to choose between two similar or identical objects or persons in the market. For example, Dell makes laptops and Apple makes laptops. These are two similar objects. The build quality of Dell's laptops are x while the build quality of Apple's laptops are y. Desirability in terms of build quality or construction will be determined how the marketplace (or buyers within the marketplace) view x vs. y, regardless of any objective value difference between x and y.
The second perception dictates a number of things, but most importantly, the perception of scarcity or abundance determines the range of prices under consideration, and the need (or drive) to acquire the particular good or service (or person) under consideration. If there is a perception that oil production is having troubles due to a hurricane, there is going to be an increased perception of scarcity, which will allow the available range for the barrel of oil increase, while also increasing the need of users of barrels of oil to acquire more oil (due to the assumption that barrels of oil may become even more expensive)*.
The conclusion to all of this, is that if a person is able to successfully convince other people that a) they are special, talented, or otherwise valuable in the market, and, b) they are scarce in terms of other people of the same or similar type, or there is a general scarcity in items of the same or similar type, then these people will be able to compel buyers in the market to pay them money at a rate that does not accurately reflect whatever intrinsic value we can measure.
For instance, if you are, say, a mediocre teacher who is looking for a job, but the going wage is $10 000/year (hypotheticals, people) and you want to earn more money...All you would have to do is convince prospective employers that they are an exceptional teacher, and that there are very few exceptional teachers. What you've done is misrepresented yourself to be more skilled in your occupation than you actually are, thereby increasing your desirability, and also moved the range of acceptable wages higher in your favour (and also potentially compelling the employer to snap you up before someone else does).
No, fuck that. Value is not subjective at all. All that "earning power" or "earning potential" tells us are what the historical trends have been for a certain occupation at a certain time and in a certain marketplace. Absolutely nothing more.
*This second point is a bit more nebulous, because there are certainly situations where the range of acceptable pricing to the market outweighs the ability of buyers in the market to satisfy their needs, which leads to a lot of other stuff that we don't need to talk about.
Wait since when does funding something mean you are rich?
All that prices and wages tell us are what people in the marketplace are willing to pay for a good, service, or employee. That is all it tells us. One cannot extrapolate value or goodness in any meaningful sense from prices and wages.
Yours,
saggio.
*ehug*
If you're funding medical research, you're more than likely packing some dough. Why the nitpicking?
And yes, it is still about perspective electricitylikesme. There will always be opposition to your point of view. Saying "I'm right" proves shit and does nothing.
Its great that you can come up with an individual instance that alot of people will probably agree on.
What have you accomplished?
I know ambition is the main topic of discussion (big neon thread post helps), but money seems to be the primary point of discussion. Ambition apllies to a great many things.
PS: Judging one's character or anything of the like by one's amount of money makes as much sense as a shit-flavored lollipop.
See: Obama campaign.
If you don't think people providing money for things are as vital as people doing things with money...
Yes, but rich people have an obviously higher capacity for funding, so they must be better people!
Further, up until now, we have been discussing the individual's value/worth/whatever to society, and how to measure that (next to impossible, really). I beg your pardon for not having the clairvoyance necessary to notice your sudden focus shift.
I'm interested as to what you pulled the second line out of.
Because the focus is all on the short-term, and completely ignores any externalities.
Then I would say that our very understanding of "contribution to society" also ignores those externalites or that long-term, calling into question their validity in determining contribution to society.
My response to ege basically covers this:
The first perception dictates the base level of desirability a person or object in the market will have, and is the best way to choose between two similar or identical objects or persons in the market. For example, Dell makes laptops and Apple makes laptops. These are two similar objects. The build quality of Dell's laptops are x while the build quality of Apple's laptops are y. Desirability in terms of build quality or construction will be determined how the marketplace (or buyers within the marketplace) view x vs. y, regardless of any objective value difference between x and y.
The second perception dictates a number of things, but most importantly, the perception of scarcity or abundance determines the range of prices under consideration, and the need (or drive) to acquire the particular good or service (or person) under consideration. If there is a perception that oil production is having troubles due to a hurricane, there is going to be an increased perception of scarcity, which will allow the available range for the barrel of oil increase, while also increasing the need of users of barrels of oil to acquire more oil (due to the assumption that barrels of oil may become even more expensive)*.
The conclusion to all of this, is that if a person is able to successfully convince other people that a) they are special, talented, or otherwise valuable in the market, and, b) they are scarce in terms of other people of the same or similar type, or there is a general scarcity in items of the same or similar type, then these people will be able to compel buyers in the market to pay them money at a rate that does not accurately reflect whatever intrinsic value we can measure.
For instance, if you are, say, a mediocre teacher who is looking for a job, but the going wage is $10 000/year (hypotheticals, people) and you want to earn more money...All you would have to do is convince prospective employers that they are an exceptional teacher, and that there are very few exceptional teachers. What you've done is misrepresented yourself to be more skilled in your occupation than you actually are, thereby increasing your desirability, and also moved the range of acceptable wages higher in your favour (and also potentially compelling the employer to snap you up before someone else does).
In short, people are willing to pay more or less for something based on the perceived "goodness" of the good, service, or person (usually in comparison to others) as well as the perceived state of scarcity or abundance.
I thought that you and everyone in [chat] would enjoy that.
Where is this "better" bullshit coming from?
Did I say anyone was better, ever?
Do not put words into my mouth, you will burn your fingers.
There are a hell of a lot of variables in funding. Sometimes it's a single donor saying "Oh holy shit I have all this extra money I could be helping people with!" Sometimes it's some poor fucker saying "Well shit I could have a tasty burger tonight but you know what there's this charity that needs tasty burger money even more than I do, so I will settle for a plain potato." Sometimes it's some person of random income saying "Shit. Look at all these rich and poor fuckers wit their tasty burgers and yachts. They should do something better with their money. Oh I know I'll start a funding drive."
Maybe, say, funding a medical scholarship.
You were BSing about contributions. The number of people who contribute to any one success story is rarely accurately considered. EVERYTHING takes a goddamn village.
--
Saggio: Marketing, basically. Marketing and business math courses are what disgusted me with business enough to drop considering it as a minor.
I'll start at the top and work my way down. Maybe you'll be able to follow.
First off, this "better bullshit" is a jab at how focused this thread has been on money, and how it seems to be the determinant of one's worth (not really, but its been brought too much). I've even made mention of this oddity (shock!). The fact that you think that this is an attempt to put words in your (burning?) mouth is really quite amusing.
Your second tirade really makes no sense. It seems that all your attention has been directed towards funding, but even that doesn't explain this response. The number of people was never the fucking point; it was all about how much money one was worth. All this discussion of funding was just a convenient and applicable way of comparing one's monetary worth (which I condemned early on) to another's ability to use skills to help people. Medical funding certainly helps people, but that was never really the point. If you go back to when I started my little point, you'll notice that the whole money thing was being used to prove my point on perspective! Congratulations, you have managed to take all that I have said and utterly misunderstand it!
That line you pulled out of your ass was born out of your above-mentioned misunderstanding.
Now, I'm willing to give you the BoD and assume you're not just really stupid, and that you've just been misunderstanding what I've been saying. This is (if the BoD served me well), however one clusterfuck of a misunderstanding.
So you're saying that Tiger Woods is rich as hell because we perceive him to be a good golf player, and not necessarily because he actually is a good golf player.
Oh man, if only there was a way to objectively measure if he was good or not... oh wait.
On the other hand, my explanation stands: Tiger Woods is rich as hell because he is an exceptional golf player, and people have a lot of demand to watch exceptional players of any sport. Low supply + High demand = High salary.
Tiger Woods' wealth is based on the perception that Golf is not a stupid thing to spend your time and money on, as with all sports.
Think about it.
Oh wow this guy can hit a ball with a stick really far and accurately. Let us watch him for hours and give him money.
I mean I have no problem with people enjoying sports, but, seriously, it's people devoting their lives to throwing balls around or running in circles.
So you're saying that we enjoy sports because we perceive them to be entertaining.
*boggle*
I see you have reached the end of your valuable contributions to this thread.
But maybe that's just my perception.
Some people do, some people don't. Some people value Sport X, some people think it's a waste. Some people value sports in general, some despise them. Some people will pay $500 for front row seats at a Nicks game, some people wouldn't go if you paid them.
There is no objective value in it, only a variable value based on what some individuals perceive it to be.
Tiger Woods gets paid good money because he is really good at that thing that some people value and some people don't.
Golf fans no doubt think he's an incredibly valuable person due to his rare skills.
Other people may see his only value as being that he has helped to whack a racial barrier down a bit.
Holy shit sports fans.
Most of Tiger Woods' money comes from pitching Nike goods amd other endorsements. How do you justify increased sales of Nike goods vis a vis, say, Adidas as a "public good"?
I think the key misunderstanding here is the idea that a market transaction is equitable to "good". Yar's stance seems to be "we cannot objectively measure 'good' but we can objectively measure monetary transactions, so let's basically substitute the latter for the former".
There are certainly situations under which market transactions are "good" under most definitions:
For instance, a starving man spending money to feed himself and meet his needs would probably be considered a fulfilling a "good" - both his "needs" and "desires"
An obese man spending money on unhealthy food is a little more grey - he's fulfilling a "desire" but kind of cutting against "need"
A man buying crack to fulfil and further fuel an addiction is even moreso murky.
Cases like crack addiction are a good example of when we can reasonably agree that fulfilling someone's wants isn't really what's best for them - we can assume this without having to chastise money or the economy's role in the transaction. The crackhead might disagree with us. That is a slippery slope and assumes that we have some other, better method of determining what's best for people other than satisfying their wants and needs.
Again, though, this isn't really about a failure of money, but rather recognizing that, money or no money, addiction (food, crack) distorts a human's very ability to make accurate judgments about long-term happiness over short-term satisfaction. "Good" itself becomes distorted.
All of that can be summarized thusly: "What someone thinks is valuable to them isn't really what's valuable them." Sooo... really it's what saggio thinks is valuable for them? What else?
As a general truth that statement makes decent toilet paper. There's an entire, sizable class of people and companies who make their money by "winning" in a zero-sum environment - their gain represents someone else's loss, so it all nets out to zero, except not because while going about their existence they're consuming resources that are, essentially, unearned. When a commodity trader buys a car that's basically a piece of charity from the human race to him.
Actual Play: Mage: the Awakening - At the Edge of All Things
Because I'm with the market.
No, that was a subtle strawman on somebody's part (not Yar naming any Yar names here Yar), but thanks for playing.
The argument is that some people make lots and lots of money without contributing anything meaningful to society. Which should be pretty fucking self-evident, but apparently some people are too busy giving Adam Smith sloppy posthumous blowjobs to see reason.
It seems like that is what results from blind ambition. How is it different?
At the moment, capitalism (though not laissez faire capitalism) appears to be the best economic system for generating lots of wealth and maximizing productivity; consequently it seems to be the best system for maximizing the public good (as long as certain negative side effects are mitigated through governmental intervention.)
That does not necessarily mean that all capitalists contribute to the public good, or that the degree to which they contribute to the public good is at all proportional to the amount of money they accumulate.
Technically, I'm a high-income earner (though I don't really have much personal wealth to speak of, since I'm still pretty young and I've only been earing a high income for a few years). I'm in the top quintile of household income just by myself. Frankly, I don't think I contribute much to the world at large. Yeah, I contribute a lot to my company but after it's all said and done I think I could disappear from the planet and my contribution - at least in occupational terms - wouldn't be particularly missed.
I'd like to change that, though.
steam profile
I've addressed your argument many times. Basically it comes down to how you define "meaningful." Your definition seems to lie in the tangible areas. You gave various examples spanning doctors, teachers, and other occupations that produce things (labor, services, goods). I've explained why I think this is an insufficient definition; it ignores the chain-effect, i.e. the secondary and tertiary and often but not always intangible benefits of someone's earning and spending their money.
My take is this: as long as a person's financial actions have a net positive effect on the economy as a whole and on the financial entities in particular, their contribution is "meaningful." Even people who do nothing besides playing the stock market; they vastly benefit the companies they invest in and the employees of those companies, for instance. Yeah, you look at the guy and see a bum who does nothing other than sit in his huge house all day play the stock market, and you judge him as an economic parasite. That's a pretty stupid thing to do, in my opinion.
More than a little, I'd think.
Something doesn't have to be tangible to be meaningful. A massage is intangible, or at least ceases to be tangible the instant it's over, but a masseuse is contributing to GDP in a way that a currency trader is not. People whose job it is to impose themselves as middlemen are engaging in rent-seeking behavior, and they are not, by any measure, producing anything except poop and CO2.
Your guy sitting in his house playing the stock market - is he a venture capitalist, actually putting together companies and deals that utilize previously unused workers and resources? No? Then he's not actually an economic contributor. The investment represented by most stocks is long since gone: when you buy a share of Sprint, they're not getting the money. Some other guy is. You're essentially purchasing the right to receive a share of the surplus profit of Sprint's workers, that initial money someone paid for the stock was spent decades ago.
Actual Play: Mage: the Awakening - At the Edge of All Things
Frankly, I really don't know how to respond to that objection because I find it so completely ludicrous. You seem to think that inspiring kids to play basketball is somehow comparable to saving cancer victims. I simply don't know what to say to that other than: what the fuck, man?
Medical and educational professionals generate secondary and tertiary business too.
And guess what? Those secondary and tertiary businesses help people learn and heal, rather than help people plaster their walls with baseball memorabilia.
But hey I guess selling a million baseball jerseys is better than saving a hundred lives, because one million > one hundred, right?
Whether or not this is superficial seems to be the real debate.
And it's all just a matter of opinion.
I cringe at the thought be being stuck in conversation with your friend for three hours whose whole raison
is beating down your liberal likely-collegiate views on capitalism/consumerism to tout his lifestyle.
Of course money is important. But that doesn't mean his balcony and HD TV and country club and BMW and whatever else is either.
Again, my first post, above. But anyway, don't blame me, this thread was guaranteed to be a stand-in for an Objectivist/Capitalist debate from the start.
All I'm saying is that there does exist a significant trend of thought (not among all or even most) that ambition is evil, money is evil, that wealth is gained only through exploit and theft and blind luck and detriment to society. And that this is, generally speaking, the opposite of the truth. This is what ege seems to be talking about, though making it appear to be more widely held than it might really be.
And yes, generally speaking, wealth is a measurement of your contribution to society, by definition! Wealth doesn't exist without a society who gives to you because you provided them with things they decided they were better off paying you for than getting on their own.
I've come back to this several times and you just don't want ot address it... but how are you judging what's greater here? Sarcasm? That doesn't quite convince me. You're just assured of yourself without question that your judgment is superior, and we should not even question you on it.
There is a theoretical calculus here. That jersey on his wall makes him happy. That happiness equals some fraction of the value of his life; the value of goodness he embodies; the value saved were one to save his life. That fraction, times the cost of the jersey, times the number sold, the cost to save his life, carry the one... do you have a good formula we can use to figure out exactly what it's worth? Guess what? I do! It's called money! It isn't perfect but it's better than sarcasm and simply trusting Feral's superiority in these matters.
As for wealth, your having it does not automatically make you useful. People who just sit on their money aren't doing much for the economy. People who spend a lot or use it to back up loans, on the other hand, are most likely being pretty damned useful to at least some sweatshop owner or a yacht merchant or something somewhere.
I respect that he is a doctor, and is busy, and wanted to have certain amenities in his home because it was inconvenient or impossible to drive across town to enjoy them.
In fact, he might actually be doing the environment a service by working out in his home rather than driving to a gym to do it, but I don't know how the exact math would work out on that one.
So I don't think I'd have a problem with ege's friend if I met him in real life. I dunno, I might, I don't know the guy. But since he's helping people and his luxuries don't seem particularly ostentatious to me then I'm not going to have any disrespect for him.
It's people who - for example - make their money selling essentially useless mass-produced goods (like, for instance, Bratz dolls) assembled by some child labor force in southeast Asia (note: I don't know if Bratz dolls in particular are assembled in southeast Asia, this is just an example) and negotiating contracts with retailers (especially retailers like Wal-Mart who are notorious for treating their employees poorly and fucking up local economies) and then go and buy a boat with their money that I have little respect for. Great, guy, you're selling kids useless bits of plastic and then using that money to spew more carbon into the atmosphere. Go you.
Or, closer to where I used to work, a drug company comes out with some repackaged version of an existing drug that offers no major therapeutic benefit over the old packaging but wants to figure out how they can make money off of it, so they hire a consultant to crunch some numbers for them but the consultant knows that this pharma company has more money than God so they charge tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell them to sell it to X specialty of doctor in Y region. And then said consultant goes on a vacation to his skiing resort in Aspen. Sorry, I'm not impressed.
You didn't address a single thing I wrote. I'm not arguing about subjective morality, I'm saying that there are a lot of wealthy people who do not produce goods or services. This should be neither shocking nor particularly difficult.
Actual Play: Mage: the Awakening - At the Edge of All Things
I presume Legos get a pass due to educational value, but what of Wolverine with Kung Fu Claw Action?
I mean, I have an issue with Bratz too, but it's because they encourage being a badly-dressed moron.
I don't really want to go picking apart one commercial good over another.
How does this gel with the extremely rich getting so by growing their stock portfolio rather than direct sales of a good or service? Are you arguing trickle-down economics here?
You are assuming that people's spending decisions are based on achieving the greatest value in their life. This is likely only true in the short term. They may get very happy buying cigarettes now, but they get cancer later and suffer for 5 years. Consumer decisions cannot be used as a measurement of objective good, they're not purely rational actors.
I'm mostly just trying to determine if your position is "Fuck toys" or just "Fuck especially stupid and potentially harmful toys."
My position is "fuck people who act like the money they make is a direct measure of how much they've benefited the world."
As for toys, I like toys.