How brand-new words are spreading across America

[David Eric Smith]

On Aug 6, 2015, at 7:59 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:

So business people are anti-union not because unions interfere with the running of their own businesses, but because unions interfere with their ruining of other peoples businesses?

Very nice!

E

I think we could get a whole new freakonomics franchise out of this.

-- rec --

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 4:22 PM, David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

You know what I find curious about the various econ conversations around this topic?

What I am about to say is not any deep insight, and I have heard Hanauer say the same things in his TED talk (nearly verbatim to the article), but just this time, reading it led to the realization.

In the sense of where the agency lies, this is a simple non-cooperative game played by the owners of firms _against each other_.

Powerless labor is essentially a background fabric that responds mechanically to the strategic choices of those who have the bargaining power over terms of employment, in the society as we currently have it structured.

So essentially, as Hanauer says, every business wants its customers richer and its employees poorer.  That is: they want all _other_ employers to provide richer citizens who can be customers, while they then return less of that wealth to their own employees as members of the customer pool.  

It can be framed as one of the simple standard public-goods games, in which a public resource (a non-desperate pool of people who both sell wage labor and buy products and services) is either contributed to, or not, by firms' wage-setting policies.  The strategy of public contribution is dominated under the non-cooperative equilibrium, so the "businessman's tragedy of the commons" has everybody trying to cheat and not pay labor, until the whole populace is decimated and there are no customers.  This is the descent into the Walmart effect on towns, though the way it plays out into a final locked-in ruined state is more complicated than this simple game has the structure to describe.

All this is obvious, and putting it into a game-theoretic frame doesn't really add anything to the substance of the argument, though for me it does state more transparently who the players are and makes the useful point that it is the firm owners competing with each other as adversaries that drive this dynamic.  Firm owners don't, as a class, destroy the economy through low wages because they are colluding: rather, they are being coordinated by the bad version of Adam Smith's invisible hand as they jointly independently and competitively choose the same destructive use of their power in the labor market.  This is why the notion that firms will "voluntarily" raise wages once a few do, mentioned by opponents in Hanauer's essay, is false (and disingenuously so).  Now, certainly, maintaining market power over wages by putting a fence around the labor pool is a collusive act, but it is carried out through different institutions (particularly, lobbying legislators etc.) and other levels than the competitive pricing one.  Thus, the game has a few layers with different structure that interact, but it wouldn't be all that hard to lay out which parts are which.

The thing that surprises me -- given how many statements of the obvious Complex Systems academics make lots of press putting into formalism -- is that I haven't seen anyone write this down in those terms.

Maybe everyone realizes it would be kind of silly, and that is why they don't bother to do it?  Would make sense, except that we see it done in so many other areas that are equally shallow and silly.

?

Eric

On Aug 6, 2015, at 6:24 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Nick Hanauer is clear that he is a multi-billionaire because Jeff Bezos called him back before another guy when Hanauer had some venture capital to invest.  See:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#.VcJ-ElDnbqA

Frank

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On 08/05/2015 01:20 PM, Parks, Raymond wrote:

   At the risk of being unpopular on this group, I would point out that many gun-owners have made the argument that none of their guns have spontaneously fired.  Referring back to Ethics - an arm (whether or not it holds a sword) does not harm without voluntary movement by the person.

I don't think that's true at all.  It's not the voluntary movement that concerns most.  It's the involuntary movement that concerns most, especially liberals, because most liberals (I think) tend to give more weight to unintential or coincident circumstances than most conservatives.

An analogous consideration is the (seemingly) popular conservative position that if you have succeeded at something (e.g. making money), it's because _you_ did it, not because you were lucky or fortunate.  (The alternative position that God did it for you, or allowed you to do it is an interesting hedge.)  Most liberals tend to place at least a little more weight on luck or circumstance when considering one's success.

So, it's not spontanous firing the gun control people are worried about.  It's not even the rational, intently intentional firing they're worried about.  It's the accidental and/or rash, semi-intentional firings they're worried about.  Hence the solution: remove the material cause.

--
⇔ glen

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[Steve Smith]

Glen-
>
> Useless anecdote:  I opened the fridge one day and noticed the CO2
> regulator on the keg was broken.  I asked my office mate about it.  He
> said: "Yeah, the regulator broke."  I asked: "It just spontaneously
> broke all by itself?"  He didn't respond.
This sounds like a scenario that would happen if XKCD was drawn by
Steven Wright.


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[Steve Smith]

Glen -

>> "Useless anecdote:  I opened the fridge one day and noticed the CO2
>> regulator on the keg was broken.  I asked my office mate about it.  
>> He said: "Yeah, the regulator broke."  I asked: "It just
>> spontaneously broke all by itself?" He didn't respond."
>>
>> And the keg _in the office_?  It just got there all by itself?
>
> What are you implying?  Are you saying that the alcohol (materially)
> caused the broken regulator?  And hence the efficient blame lies on
> the agent who placed the alcohol there?  Pfft!  If anything, alcohol
> is a depressant and would stabilize the motor control system of the
> consumer so as to make regulator breakage _less_ likely.  Something
> like carbonated kombucha is way more dangerous, in my not so humble
> opinion.
>

I have not yet seen you staggeringly drunk, but beyond stabilization of
the motor control system, there is a mode where one is likely to lose
one's balance and in trying to catch themselves, can tear the tap or
regulator from the keg, or the keg from the fridge or heck, the fridge
from it's upright position if you are as big and clumsy as I am...

And besides, who said that the keg in the fridge in the office had
alcohol in it, it *could have been* Kambucha, maybe even with Chia Seeds
in it!

- Sieve

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[glen ropella]

On 08/06/2015 12:08 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> I don't think that's true at all.  It's not the voluntary movement that concerns most.  It's the involuntary movement that concerns most, especially liberals, because most liberals (I think) tend to give more weight to unintential or coincident circumstances than most conservatives.
>
> Would these be the canonical "knee jerk liberals"?  Or the neologistical "knee jerk conservatives"?

Although I appreciate the pun (is it a pun? can a 2 word phrase be a pun?  I was surprised that a 2 word phrase can be an oxymoron.), I'd guess it might be related to the DRD4 gene and the preference some have for new exploratory experiences.  I can imagine that anyone open to new experiences would tend to give more weight to coincidences and happenstance than someone less open to new experiences.

> The latter would be the ammunition, not the guns, right?   Once, dynamite was a "weapon of choice" until the industry came up with a way of "tagging" it such that even after "rapid disassembly" one could determine the stick or case of Dynamite it came from and with good record keeping who purchased it and therefore used it or allowed it to be (stolen and?) used.   Is there an equivalent for ammunition?   I suppose anyone can pour their own bullets, so that doesn't work well...  One might be able to design "signature rifling" that causes new guns to always throw a "tagged slug" (what about metal-jacket slugs?)... or perhaps tagging the gunpowder (similar to dynamite?) with "mixing your own powder" being similar in challenge to making your own high explosive to avoid the tagging problem?

Yes, ammunition is also part of the material cause.  Regulating ammunition is, I think, in the same category as regulating guns, except for the added environmental aspect.  Parts of the forest up here are absolutely loaded (!) with slugs from idiots firing their guns for no reason ... as if they were toys.

--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
So pour some coins in my crater


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[Arlo Barnes]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Parks, Raymond <[hidden email]> wrote:

My wife hates "New and Improved" and news-stories about vehicular homicide that state "the car hit the group of children at the school bus stop". The first has been a staple of language comedy - how can something be new and improved at the same time?

 Would it help to think of the phrase as a shortening of "renewed, and improved in the renewal"?

 

Her gripe with the second is that a car (or truck or ...) has no volition - it must be controlled by someone. The driver hit the group of children with the car under their control. This will still be true for autonomous vehicles - even if the passengers in the car have no control (unlikely), the software developers who program the algorithms of the autonomous vehicle will be liable when the car hits the school children - the programmers hit the school children.

No, that is the opposite of what happened - the car physically contacted ("hit") the children, while the driver was shielded from physically contacting the children by the shell of the car, or the programmer from the indirection of the technology.

However, the discussion on how the cause-effect relationship can be parsed as relates to liability in auto-related accidents is a good one, especially amusing is the idea of software-wrangling using the doctrine of the elemental.

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 10:14 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

If I *was* should be If I were, subjunctive. Loan is a noun so I can not "loan you something" .. "lend (verb) you something". Less -> Fewer.  It goes on.

 

The was/were thing keeps coming up on alt.usage.english and the English Stack Exchange - it seems like there is not a strong enough grammar in this context for English for there to be a hard-and-fast rule either way; trying to compare English to other languages results in pointless rules like the 'no split infinitives' dogma.

I do not think I have heard people say "I will loan you something", but "I will lend you something" seems like it would be rarer still (that is the usage I favour, however). Sometimes I notice people mix up 'lend' and 'rent', oddly enough.

-Arlo James Barnes 

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