whatihear
3d ago
For what it’s worth I think one of your two options is the most likely explanation, but this is a false dilemma. There is a third option: non-cis people might be more likely to lie (both to themselves and others) to make themselves seem more interesting.
whatihear
7d ago
As nice as it would be, the United States is not actually capable of trashing an economy by withholding trade. There are other countries out there that Cuba can trade with. If they had a system that worked, they could have enough funds to buy gas. Cutting off trade obviously isn’t great for their economy, but if they managed their country well it would just be a drag on growth.
whatihear
11d ago
I’m a little confused about what you mean by the “actual” energy used to do a thing. Energy is either used for some purpose or it is not. To rephrase what I think you are saying, it sounds like you are refining the energy theory of value to say that things should be valued by the “minimal reasonable” amount of energy used to produce the thing. This seems like a good refinement to me because then you can’t mess with the value of a thing by just making it while sitting in the cab of your idling F350. Is that what you meant?
I still think this is off base, though it does make it harder to trivially produce counter examples. It just seems obvious to me that some lower energy things are much higher value than high energy things. Immaterial services are the most obvious example, but I’ve already talked about that with the doctor example. You say doctors are like more efficient machines, so maybe you agree with me here? Another good example would be high fashion items. Before the “minimal reasonable” refinement you could maybe argue that actually flying the models and designers to the show circuit makes them high energy products, but the “minimal reasonable” refinement rules that argument out.
I do think an energy theory of value gestures at something interesting, but it just seems unable to handle large swaths of the modern economy. Are you actually proposing it as a bedrock principle for an overarching economic theory, or are you just saying it is an interesting idea and an improvement over the labor theory of value. I would agree with the later.
whatihear
12d ago
The energy was spent training the physician before the service was rendered.
This also leads to super silly results. Leaving aside that it would still value the medical advice way below a flight if you do your amortization properly, it also means that different doctors advice would have different value and that difference would have nothing to do with how good they are but instead the fact that one took an elevator to class throughout medical school and the other had classes on lower floors.
whatihear
13d ago
Great write up! Thanks!
How does your energy theory of value deal with high value and low energy services such as medical consultation? How does it deal with more efficient machines? A machine that created 1000 widgets and hour and requires 2 kilowatts to operate is clearly less valuable than a machine which produces the same number of widgets per hour and requires 1 kilowatt. I do think energy is a useful tool for examining economies in general. We can learn useful things by comparing night time light pollution in China with their stated GDP numbers. That doesn’t mean it is a good theoretical basis for a theory of value though. It’s better than labor, but still wrong, and still seems politically motivated. Marx wanted to do a socialist revolution, so he grounded value in labor and I think you may be doing something similar.
For your next book I suggest Human Action by von Mises. He has a similar discussion of theory of value, and I think this “subjective theory of value” makes the most sense of any I’ve heard. Before I read him I just called it the “market theory of value.” Basically he points out that there is no inherent value to a good, value is determined through a process of negotiation with the people around you. The only way to price something is to see what the market will pay for it.
whatihear
13d ago
Isn’t the doctor shortage almost entirely because the AMA restricts medical school class sizes? I know of at least one quite smart and motivated guy who did not get into medical school when he totally should have. People are doing insane resume padding things like working in hospitals for a few years before medical school. The doctors have a midevil guild and they are restricting the supply of labor, patients be damned.
but on the ground, already, in my perfectly respectable, mainstream, upper middle class environment, the reaction was almost universally a certain giddiness and excitement
I was pretty young for 9/11, so my impression was that Europeans had a lot of sympathy and support and only soured on the reaction later. This is a big update for me, so thanks for letting me know. You just converted my contempt for Europeans at your general economic dysfunction, cultural arrogance, churlish ingratitude, and eagerness to commit civilizational suicide into genuine hatred.
Edit: I’m seeing other Europeans in this thread disagreeing with you, so I’m updating back to “leftists are evil everywhere.”
whatihear
26d ago
Keep in mind that ~90% of Iranian missile launchers have been destroyed, so most of what they will be launching from now on are drones, which can be intercepted with much cheaper systems than full on Patriots and would never require a THAAD. I think the main interceptor for shaheds is a relatively cheap air to air missile at this point in the war.
One of your main bits of evidence that Americans are disrespectful is that we dress like slobs, but that's not what respect means. You can tell a little story about how dressing up conveys respect for the people around you by showing that you put in effort, and respect for yourself by presenting yourself nicely, but you can also tell a story about how dressing down conveys respect for the people around you by releasing them from the obligation to perform a silly social ritual that per everyone's revealed preferences they don't want to perform, and respect for yourself by living authentically. Another one would be that dressing nicely shows off either wealth or a particular kind of cultural competency that encodes class in a way that is inaccessible to some people, therefore putting them down and displaying contempt for anyone who can't manage it. Since you have some background in fashion, this might be an alien perspective to you, but it's definitely not the case that nicer-clothes = more respect. Respect is about how you treat people. How you dress is part of it, and showing up to a wedding in sweats is obviously disrespectful, but it's not at all obvious that going about your daily life in casual clothing is disrespectful.
I'll allow that we may have had a hiatus in class expression between the 40s and 70s (though I'm pretty dubious even of this), but the idea that class was invented in the 80s is absurd. The robber barons, Southern planters, and the Easter financiers around the turn of the 20th century were all way more overt in their class expression than the elite of the 80s. We had a rash of anarchist terrorism motivated on a class basis that resulted in a president getting assassinated. Just walk through the historic part of Detroit and tell me with a straight face that class was invented in America in the 80s.
Finally, the idea that Europeans should be held up as exemplars of respect is crazy to anyone who has worked in a multinational company. Southern Europeans are generally perfectly lovely, but nearly without fail upon having some distant co-worker be rude and unprofessional to me I'll look up where they are based and it's somewhere in Northern Europe (and no they aren't anglophone). I don't actually mind this too much because it means they don't dissemble and you know where you stand with them. I'd much rather work with a Dutchman or German than someone from a high power distance culture who will either not call out a bad idea if they are lower rank or bully people if they are higher rank. Fortunately, there is a culture that manages to both be low power distance and professional: mine. Yes, I understand that this is culturally dependent and everyone has their own perspective. My perspective is that Americans do by far the best job of both remembering that their co-workers are people with egos and getting shit done. (I will say that the French that I've worked with in a professional context seem much closer to the American norms of professionalism than a lot of other Europeans).
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