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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28027 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Pointwise vs Uniform "badness"

Note: This post assumes the axiom that some people are better than others, and that we can to some degree of accuracy say whether someone is a net contributor to the world or not.

Often when it is pointed out that people who are in group X are a net negative to society (e.g. low paid cleaners who consume a lot more in benefits and general wear and tear on public goods like roads than they put in) others are quick to point out that actually these people are the lifeblood of the country and if they suddenly disappeared the country would collapse within a week (e.g. truck drivers refuse to work, thereby causing collapse as food doesn't get to where it needs to be etc.). This is then followed by the conclusion that therefore these people are not bad for society but rather good for it, and so we shouldn't complain about them at all.

I am completely convinced that they are correct that the country would indeed collapse in short order if truck drivers went on strike, cleaners stopped working etc. However this fact is a statement about the group as a whole, instead of individual members of it. For example: If a factory needs 5 people to work the machines but union regulations require them to hire 25 people instead of 5 then yes, each and every single member of the group of "workers" is a parasite sucking on the teat of the group of people who are "factory owners", even though the "factory owners" need the group "workers". In this case it is not the individuals who are indispensable to society, but rather the group as a whole, and the example above shows, it's possible for the group to be a net positive while every single individual in it is a net negative.

Of course not all groups of people are like this. The group of people who are criminals is a net negative to society full stop (restrict criminals to those who commit non-state sanctioned violence+thieves if your worried about how exactly criminal is defined). The individual members of this group are a net negative to society and the whole group is a net negative too. This is probably why "criminals bad" is a much less controversial statement compared to "street cleaners bad" even though someone who earns enough to be a net contributor plus does some light burglary on the side is probably much less of a drain on public welfare.

To be clear here: the people who are members of a net positive category but themselves are net negative are still those who society would be better off without on the margins. And since all economic decisions are made on the margin it is perfectly valid to say that ceteris paribus the world as a whole would be better off without them in expectation.

I think it makes sense to distinguish these two types of a group being bad for society. Firstly we have pointwise badness as an individual which we define as a person who is on their own a net negative to society ceteris paribus holding everything else the same (i.e. we remove them and just them from society and ask if the result if better or worse in expectation). From this we can define pointwise badness for groups where a group is given this label if most of its members are pointwise bad as individuals (note: here we depart from the mathematical definition, every group has it's saints, I'm sure there are some net positive criminals so we don't require every single member of the group to be a net negative).

As examples the group of Criminals are pointwise bad for society, equally street cleaners are pointwise bad for society because they are easily replaceable and consume more than they output.

Then you have uniform badness, which is when the group as a whole is a negative influence on the world and if we could somehow Thanos snap every single member of it away the rest of society would be better off. Criminals are uniformly bad for the world, while street cleaners, truck drivers and steel mill workers are not. Note that uniform badness sort of implies pointwise badness in the real world (not exactly: a group with 10 good people but 1 Literally Hitler is uniformly bad for the world, while it wouldn't be pointwise bad, the Literally Hitler is pointwise bad as an individual, but none of the others are) much more than pointwise badness implies uniform badness.

There are lots of pointwise bad groups but much much fewer uniformly bad groups. Generally when people are talking about how members of a group are bad, especially when they want something to be done they're talking about pointwise badness rather than uniform badness.

  • -14

This is an obnoxious post. The people who show up on time every day for low status jobs and don't otherwise commit crimes are net positive for any society. On top of that, you seem to slide rather easily between "bad for society" and "bad people". These aren't the same concept, and I'm not entirely convinced the latter even exists.

For example: If a factory needs 5 people to work the machines but union regulations require them to hire 25 people instead of 5 then yes, each and every single member of the group of "workers" is a parasite sucking on the teat of the group of people who are "factory owners", even though the "factory owners" need the group "workers".

Unions are generally net-negative, but economic estimates of the magnitude is relatively low. It's when they co-opt government that it really becomes a problem. When they make it impossible to build a new school to educate more, say, dental hygienists (a sort of 'white collar cleaner', who are massively overpaid relative to the service they provide if our comparison is one where it is free and easy to start a new school that can train/license them), or any of a number of different jobs where they've made it near impossible to build a school, get licensing, certification, approved facilities, etc. Then, rather than being localized teat-sucking in isolated locations in a way that can be managed, it's industry-wide and enforced by the men with guns.

FWIW, the consensus of the anti-occupational licensing crowd is that dental hygienists are underpaid because the law requires them to work under the supervision of a dentist, and the cut they have to pay the dentist is higher than the benefit they get from being licensed themselves.

Hairdressing and interior design are the canonical examples of jobs that are licensed in most states but shouldn't be (neither is licensed in most European countries).

One of those things that should have been obvious to me but that I never considered. I want my teeth cleaned 3-4 times a year. I have little interest in seeing a dentist ever. Why the hell do I have to go to a dentist office? I just want a sweet woman who knows the right amount of polite conversation to make, is gentle with the water pick and scraper, and doesn't ask me questions while a utensil is in my mouth. Why does a dentist get a cut of this arrangement.

Also, I've had great hygienists who I would return to their office indefinitely if I knew where to find them. Instead, I go to the dentist and roll the dice with whomever I get. I can't even show customer loyalty to those who excel and allow them to build a clientele.

I'm interested; can you point me to a reference that estimates the relative effects? Thanks!

This is the famous paper, but rereading it, I realise that it only looks at the effect of regulations requiring hygienists to work under dental supervision, showing a 10% wage drop (and an even larger loss to consumers). But it doesn't estimate how much hygienists gain from restricting competition. Other work tends to give a premium >10% for licensed workers, which would imply that hygienists are net gainers. In general, most of the literature focusses on the cost to teeth of excessive regulation, not the cost or benefit to hygienists.

This is the only paper looking at both effects that I could find with a quick Google, but the author appears to have run the wrong regressions. One thing it does point out is that Connecticut is the most deregulated state on both metrics (anyone can become a dental hygienist by passing an exam, with no requirement to study at an accredited school or serve an apprenticeship, and hygienists can set up their own practices) and has the highest hygienist incomes - although this is obviously confounded by the fact that it is a high-wage state generally.

Thanks!

One comment about Connecticut in the second paper. They have the highest hygienist incomes on the chart, but the chart only shows three states and the national average. The text says, "Wages, at $67,450, and employment, at 95 DHs per 100,000, are higher than the national average, but well below the highest-ranking states."

And man, super depressing that even though Vermont has the highest number of hygienists per capita, they have one school that had only twenty-one graduates in the year they looked at (2006). That seems appalling to me. That all of the other states are worse really makes me think that we're wayyyy out from the equilibrium were we to significantly increase competition among schools and supply of trained hygienists.

What does "remove from society" mean here, as regards in particular the 20 teat-sucking factory workers? Job severance? Imprisonment? Or something more sinister?

Yeah - John Smith, the guy with a cushy union factory job, isn't exactly a bad dude. Maybe the union's played hardball, maybe it didn't.

That was my question too. And also, they should have taken account of the non economical consequences of said removal. Like people beeing sad forbtheir beloved ones. Would they really like to live in a world where their beloved ones can be "removed" if someone thinks they are not productive enough?

@sodiummuffin and greyenlightenment's points below are correct: underpaid "essential workers" only have low wages because there are so many people able and willing to do their jobs at low wages, relative to the "need" for those jobs.

Several years ago I saw a cleaners strike happen at a university. (The cause was dissatisfaction with a middleman temp firm which was taking a large cut of the budget allocated for cleaners' salaries). The hallways and lecture halls were messy after only 2~3 days, and after two weeks they were full of trash. At which point graduate students were paid extra to clean up the hallways and lecture pits. To have graduate students cleaning the hallways was much more expensive than having the cleaners do it, but the labor market was suddenly artificially tight, and the department feared that having trashy lecture halls would result in undergrad enrollment dropping.

In labor markets flush with workers, salaries are completely unrelated to the infrastructure that makes it possible for jobs to be done, as well as completely unrelated to the upper limit of what people would pay for that job to be done (i.e. what would be paid if there were absolutely no workers), despite the net value of their jobs to other people in society being several orders of magnitude larger than the prevailing salary. They cannot negotiate higher salaries because if they do then someone else will come in and replace them, getting the job by undercutting their wage.

The same is true in reverse: if there were only one person able and willing to do plumbing in the entire country, that person would be paid millions of dollars per hour servicing nuclear reactors. If there were only one person able to clean in the entire country, they would be paid handsomely to work in a semiconductor fab.

It's called paradox of value, or water-diamond paradox (water is a lot more useful than diamonds, but the price of diamonds is higher).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value

I don’t think it’s a paradox of value. Realistically everything in every market has a consumer surplus. But prices settle where the marginal costs equals the marginal value.

If t-shirts were $10k I’d probably own one shirt and take really good care of it but since I can buy shirts for $20 I end up buying shirts until the very last one meets my utility.

Paradox of value though is an extreme example of a supply and demand curve. The diamond/water example is just the extreme where one product has very tight supply and one has very abundant supply. Cleaning services is really just more of a normal supply/demand curve where supply is available and adjustable. While the diamond supply has been relatively fixed in the short/long term (until recently since lab diamonds are taking over the market).

The paradox of value is that things that are more useful than others as a whole, like water, have a lower price than other scarcer things like diamonds.

Replace water with cleaning ladies and diamonds with software engineers and you get exactly the same situation as above

My point was both of these are just cases of normal supply and demand curves intersecting. Which also occur in every single market of which a cleaning lady isn’t in any way special compared to every other market. Nobody says the market for jeans is special and cleaning lady’s are similar to that market.

We don’t go around calling every market a paradox of value but ya clothes are valuable or I’d freeze. Oxygen is interesting because it causes death quickly when you don’t have it but the supply curve for the earth is unlimited quanitity at zero costs on earth.

Paradox of value is not a market, it's a phenomenon that can appear in any market: some things have a higher price than others that seem more necessary. It's something that must be explaned by the theory, and every economical theory (eg theory of labour value) has tried to explain it.

Supply and demand cruve intersecting is just a possible explanation of this phenomenon in marginal utility theory. Perhaps someone one day will come with a better theory and a better explanation, but as long as it is an economical theory it will have to provide an explanation for the paradox of value.

Seems like you are debating the entirety of Econ theory the stuff everyone agrees with that’s taught in intro to micro.

No I'm just explaining you the difference between the facts (the explicanda of the theory), like the price of diamonds and water, and the explanation of those facts (the theory itself), like supply and demand. It is true, however, that the theory is always more precarious than the facts

More comments

I am completely convinced that they are correct that the country would indeed collapse in short order if truck drivers went on strike, cleaners stopped working etc. However this fact is a statement about the group as a whole, instead of individual members of it.

This is the left-wing fantasy that society is dependent on these people and if they collectively quit society will be forced to heed their demands. What will actually happen is the market will simply adjust to some new equilibrium: new workers will be hired at this new equilibrium . If anything, this would be good for society because the new equilibrium would be more efficient in terms of allocation of resources than the one it replaced, such as too many truck drivers but not enough cleaning ladies.

overpaying for anything is inefficient and bad in that sense.

Truck driving is not a skilled job. There’s this fantasy that it is, but it isn’t. 70 year olds routinely buy gigantic class A RVs and drive them all over the country pulling ridiculously sized trailers all the time.

People buy absolutely massive 5th wheel RVs all the time etc.

I looked it up and while there is data on elderly drivers and crashes, I could find any (large) RV-specific data. It would be interesting to see if they’re a safety risk there.

What is the schooling and licensing for, then? Challenge Mode: answer with a reason that isn't "guild/union-like protection of salaries," as I hear that trucking is not that lucrative for many drivers.

In the EU (and still in the post-Brexit UK), a significant part of HGV driver training is about how to stop illegal immigrants stowing away in your truck.

Regulatory creep. At some point we decided that if people were going to be driving these insane vehicles around mixed in with the public, then they should have some schooling and licensing.

The schooling degraded to the point of not accomplishing anything productive (like coding boot camps), but nobody is ever going to say we should give it up due to safetyism.

One reason for special licensing is to make it easier to prevent truck drivers from engaging in law-breaking arbitrage. Speeding to make delivery times, not sleeping, etc. Once someone is doing something for money there is that extra incentive to break laws. You can see the same thing with Uber - as soon as people started driving for money, there were suddenly a lot more violations of no-stopping zones, transit lanes, parking in bike lanes, etc.

The way you're grouping and valuing people seems fundamentally nonsensical. What does it even mean to talk about cleaners hypothetically vanishing? If you need a cleaner and don't have one then you put out a job ad, with the wage increasing as necessary until someone accepts, until you add cleaning duties to some other job and find someone willing to accept (perhaps yourself), or until you have to go out of business because you can't afford to get it done. People who have some job are not a fixed group with fixed properties, and they certainly don't have fixed wages, fixed value, or fixed levels of unnecessary employment across different societies.

The value of low-skill labor varies widely based on the opportunity cost of accomplishing it some other way in your society. If a job has a low skill floor and a low skill ceiling it tends to hire the less competent members of society, but that is relative competence. If there was a mass genetic-engineering/eugenics program such that the least-competent bottom 10% of society had an average IQ of 130, high conscientiousness, and low rate of mental or physical illness, and that society hadn't completely replaced cleaners with robots, then presumably you'd be hiring those people as janitors since that would be a lower opportunity cost than hiring from the other 90% (so they accept lower pay). The only differences are that they would do a somewhat better job (such as less incidents of janitors destroying cell samples, to reference a post linked here a while back) and you would have to pay them much more because the overall prosperity of society would have increased and even the bottom 10% would have better options you need to compete with. Of course, the overall prosperity of society increasing generally also means you can afford to pay them more. They're only going to vanish if there are alternatives preferable to the additional expense, like how personal servants have largely vanished in first-world countries.

I agree. Stuff like that always weirds me out. Presumably we all want someone to hang the sheet rock, clean the toilets, or wait our tables. I can completely understand the person saying "Why doesn't this person want more from their life?" but really that question is "why doesn't this person want to do a job that is more exclusive." Well, getting fulfillment from having a job that requires very specific and exclusive skill sets is a huge privilege. There are by definition going to be a lot of people who are kind of average (or kind of below average) at almost everything. They me need a job that is easy (intellectually) or requires micromanagement or direction. Who cares? If you want those jobs to be done you should want the person does them to have a dignified life. Also many of these jobs do benefit from some type of talent which isn't universal. I'm pretty great at building financial models, but I've never made my bathroom sparkle like a professional cleaner can, even if I spend way more time. They do have a skill set and develop techniques, learn the best cleaning products, and know the right tool for the job. Good for them.

Obviously people with the lowest common denominator skill sets will get paid less, but anyone doing productive labor is almost certainly a net benefit to society and 100% worthy of dignity and respect.

This gets at something of a personal peeve of mine in discussions (especially culture war or political discussion more generally) where generalizations over groups come with a lack of quantifier for the group being generalized over. This might seem pedantic but I think it's important because quantifiers can cause a generalization ("Street sweepers are bad") to range from the trivial ("There exists at least one bad street sweeper") to the absurd ("Every street sweeper is bad"). I think a lot of motte and bailey arguments boil down to two people interpreting the same statement with radically different quantifiers. This is especially the case when there is a lack of charity on either side. It is very easy to read statements by your political opponents in the most absurd way and unclear communication enables such misunderstandings.

I think one problem with this analysis (that is illustrated by the factory worker example) is an unstated assumption that an individuals marginal value or net contribution is some property of the individual that is somehow fixed over time. All humans start out as net drains on society (in the form of infants) and develop our abilities in various ways to be more or less productive. How productive a member of society we end up being is not just down to our personal characteristics but also other social and economic facts of the society we exist in. As in the factory worker example the marginal value of the 5th worker (whoever they are) is very high but the marginal value of the sixth worker (and more) is very low. Our contribution to society is not purely some individual thing, but also a function of the decisions and positions of other people in society.

You might enjoy this John Nerst post on Interpretation Matrices, if you haven't already seen it. Some simple statements are imprecise on multiple dimensions, even.

A very good post, thank you for sharing it. One of those eye-openers that I'm sure I'll see everywhere now.

This 'pointwide badness' seems to be mostly a result of the welfare state.

Like sure, an Uber driver in a European country is heavily subsidised by more productive taxpayers. But if you take away the various welfare goods he consumes, then a law-abiding member of the lower working class would be net positive, in as far as whoever is willing to pay for his labour must be deriving some surplus value from the exchange to make it worth it. The same is true of everyone he deals with as a consumer (his landlord, the shop he buys food from etc).

I think the word "marginal" is much better than "pointwise" here. People already use it to refer to the distinction you're making here (though usually not in the context of "badness", and doesn't require grabbing a tangentially related word from mathematics and abusing it into shape.

Similarly, we can use the word "average" or "group" instead of "uniform"

Additionally, "bad" seems like an unnecessarily loaded term. We might as well refer to the "marginal" versus "average" contribution people in groups make to society and/or the economy. From there, the "badness" of people with a net negative contribution to society is left as an exercise for the reader. This way it's more clear specifically what you're referring to, because there are lots of different ways people can be "good" or "bad".

Maybe I’m too PC but is there a reason we need to call people “bad”. These aren’t exactly bad people and we could use a better term.

What are you are getting into is marginal value for a lot of these things which is basically any entry level micro econ course.

IMO truck drivers and housekeepers may have similar long term marginal value but you also sort of get into bottlenecks. The economy shuts down if they go on strike but driving and cleaning are about the same complexity of work. Medium to longer term you can swap in labor and their value falls. Short term they have quite high marginal value for a lot of their workers. In the short term a truck driver might have the marginal value of a brain surgeon but a brain surgeon maintains that marginal value long term because of the IQ and training required to be one.

This post assumes the axiom that some people are better than others,

Alright, cool…

and that we can to some degree of accuracy say whether someone is a net contributor to the world or not.

There’s the catch. I don’t think it’s trivial to assess this. At the extremes, we can say a brain-dead patient must be a net sink, or a genius engineer adds value. But we are specifically looking at the margins.

Take, for example, your marginal cleaner. His continued employment is proof of some economic value. Erasing him from existence doesn’t erase the demand for his labor. It just removes one of the many frictions in price discovery.

Labeling a group as “pointwise bad,” then, is a claim that the market is wrong at least half of the time. I don’t share your certainty.

The first-order consequence of liquidating all minimum-wage cleaners is that every gas station now looks like a Valero. The cost of gas is heavily driven by inputs, so I wouldn’t expect too much change. Same for their incredibly cheap (if dangerous) tacos. To get any significant benefit, you have to start hypothesizing about second and third order effects.

"equally street cleaners are pointwise bad for society because they are easily replaceable and consume more than they output"

Aren't you the guy crying about how you are never going to have the beautiful life you are entitled to due to your education, etc.?

Well, I guess you're just one of the people on the margins, and you're a net negative to society, so you're in the situation that best fits you and quit whining about it.

If you fire an entire group based on this heuristic, then congratulations, your factory no longer runs. If you can extract profit from the factory and people still buy the product for cheap, then you aren't losing anything by having some excess.

Some vague morality points, perhaps.

I don't understand how you can say that "having some excess" (paying 20 extra people) costs nothing but morality points. It costs economy points, however many it takes to compensate 20 people to work for you.

I suspect I'm missing something here.

Those economy points (err, dollars) could be used to pay the remaining workers more, to buy the owner a yacht, to invest in the business (new machine, new/expanded building, lowered sale price of produced good, whatever).

I suspect I'm missing something here.

Allow me to break down my argument further for you, hopefully it will elucidate the meaning.

Assumption: A business existing is better than a business not existing. They provide some good to the market that satisfies some vague demand. Assumption: Per the OP's framing it is better to fire all 25 workers in order to get rid of the excess, because you evaluate the group as a whole, not individuals in the group.

Under these assumptions, and within the OP's thought experiment, would it be better to put the factory out of business to get rid of the 20 parasites, or would it be better to keep the business still running, when the only option is to fire the entire group in order to be rid of the union workers?

My response:

If you fire an entire group based on this heuristic, then congratulations, your factory no longer runs. If you can extract profit from the factory and people still buy the product for cheap, then you aren't losing anything by having some excess.

Some vague morality points, perhaps.

If profit is still being extracted, and the factory is able to continue to run, it is better to keep the factory running, even with the excess. Is it better for a factory to run with an optimal crew-number? Sure, that is not under dispute. In a less contrived thought experiment, you fight the union and reduce the number of workers until you hit a "true"/safe/optimal minimum for your goals, or if demand is high, expand the factory so you can utilize those 20 excess workers and ensure they're producing value.

The thought experiment has a lot of assumptions baked into it. The other issue perhaps, is that I don't use profit or money as an equivalent to calculating utility.

Right, I misunderstood. That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.

Who has ever said that cleaners are a net negative on society? Why do you believe they can be classified as net negative because their wages are low? In a medieval agricultural society, you could argue that every farmer is “net negative” individually because the Lord provides more in resources for their protection and administration… but this would be forgetting that those resources are wholly the result of the farmers. If I own a cleaning company and I hire illegal migrants and I take most of their wages just because I can, and then I hire an overseas Indian to oversee my fiefdom company’s day-to-day, who is bad for society here? Isn’t it me? So I don’t think a wages-only analysis works here.

If a factory needs 5 people to work the machines but union regulations require them to hire 25 people instead of 5 then yes, each and every single member of the group of "workers" is a parasite sucking on the teat of the group of people who are "factory owners"

Why? You are alleging it’s now better for society to have less people employed, less people paid more, which means more people stressed, more people unhealthy, more health problems, less civic engagement. You want to live in a society where more people are worse off, so that someone “at the top” who may not even be financially or socially invested in the community has more to spend on overpriced foreign goods and overpriced foreign women. You really need to flesh out your argument more instead of assuming your wages-only premise is correct.

I was more or less going to type out your comment. Why would anyone easily assert that cleaners are net negatives? Talk about a claim in need of serious justification.

In a free market the cleaners would never be a net negative utility to the rest of society. The issue are the government programs which provide them extra pay which can be argued is good on being a human terms. One can certainly build economic models that certain workers due to socialism in our society have negative utility to society and the math would be solid.

The problem with this calculation is "the rest of society" excludes the cleaners themselves.

The problem I see with group pointwise badness is it lets you tar saints. The problem I see with uniform badness is it lets you tar normal people. It seems to me that ever talking about groups is less fair than just dealing with pointwise bad people. This is made worse because often when people complain about groups, they gerrymander and redefine things to play games.

You used examples of criminals and human rights crimes, so when it comes to legal justice I would say generalizing is unfair - just punish pointwise bad people.

What's a more appropriate context for when we should generalize groups as being "bad" and ignoring individual differences?

I think you have an idea here, but it isn't quite right. If 5 members of a group are needed for society, but 25 members are not, then the first 20 people you fire are pointwise bad, and the remaining 5 aren't, and you can pick them in a different order and different ones will be "pointwise bad". Furthermore, removing the whole group may be either negative or positive for society depending on whether the first 5 bring more benefit than the last 20 bring harm.

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