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ymeskhout  1yr ago (text post)   4706 thread views

What is your favorite Motte post ever?

I'm curious about not just what your favorite post is, but also what you think is the GOAT, or perhaps what you think is most illustrative and representative of this space (e.g. what would you show someone to get them intrigued). Please limit your post to only ONE pick and briefly explain why you chose it. This can be from anywhere within the Motte's history thus far, and r/TheThread is a good place to check in case you're having trouble finding something. Asking for a friend.

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I don't know if it's my favorite, but I really liked "Gratitude Walking Through Walmart". It's hard to remember, but poverty is the default state of mankind. Anatomically modern humans spend tens of thousands of years living in mud huts and owning no more than what they could carry. The incredible amount of wealth that I have access to after working for a day and dropping by the local Walmart with my wages is nothing short of an economic miracle.

From "Thanksgiving Prayer" (2008) by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Dear Global Economy, we thank thee for thy economies of scale, thy professional specialization, and thy international networks of trade under Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage, without which we would all starve to death while trying to assemble the ingredients for such a dinner as this. Amen.

And from "Contra Robinson On Schooling" (2016) by Scott Alexander:

I often see poor people using food stamps at my own grocery store, so I know the quality of service these poor people get for their money. And it is really good. Practically all grocery stores are really good. There's a story about Boris Yeltsin coming to America for the first time, walking into a random grocery store, seeing that random middle-class Americans had a better selection of goods than the highest-status Soviet officials, and freaking out that this was some kind of weird Potemkin economy that the Americans had set up to demoralize him. Grocery stores don't just have fifty different kinds of cereal and a hundred different kinds of soda, they're also really cheap. You can buy a day's worth of food for an hour's minimum-wage work, maybe two hours if you want a little quality and variety.

My thou-obsessed pedantry is set off by all of those "thy <vowel>"s. It's "thine economics" and "thine international," thou genie-summoner.

/pedantry

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