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The Way of the Sloth

The real question is, did you check to see if it was a prince before you let it go?

Yes, it is. Except for people being deliberately narrow-minded, that is.



Lol. "Design" is often "Implementation" of the prior step in a process. You're splitting hairs. We create a program "designed" to provide housing assistance to poor people which will allow them to live in neighborhoods better than a ghetto. We gather funding for this program. We then hand it to the next layer on the bureaucracy to "implement". That layer may decide that giving a small percentage of the poor $3000/month to live in high rise apartments in the most expensive part of town is a good way to do this. That may very well be their "design", but they are also "implementing" the previous groups plan.

TL/DR: You're a freaking idiot.



How do we measure contribution to society? While not all-inclusive, looking at how much someone earns in a free labor market would appear to be at least a good starting point. So yes, someone's wealth is a measure of their contribution to society. What else do you think it is? Unless you have a really strange definition of "contribution" which apparently involves arbitrary assignment of value by a small authoritarian ruling class in ways which "the people" don't agree with. The fact that "the people" pay more money to the hedge fund manager than the ditch digger means that they value what the hedge fund manager does more. You can try to pretend that this isn't true and try to argue for "better" systems which reward differently, but at the end of the day you can't actually get around the fact that, while not perfect, a free market is the best way to align reward with contribution.

Would saying "yes" count as a prediction?

Yes, it is.

Nope. I didn't read the rest, I assume it was you fumbling about desperately for some sort of semantic argument that doesn't exist. That's how it usually ends out.

Dear god, not you, too! It spreads, like Ebola!

Contribution and virtue (a better word for what you seem to be describing might be "charity") are not the same thing. The guy who repairs lawn mowers isn't necessarily being virtuous, nor charitable, but if you need your law mower repaired and it's worth the cost for him to repair it, he's is absolutely contributing to society. Not everything (not even a small minority of things) in society revolve around good works and charity. Most things are exchanges of goods and services. The farmer grows crops and sells them to a larger distributor. The distributor sells them to grocery stores. The stores sell them to you. Without that process, you (and everyone else not growing their own food) would starve to death. The fact that they charge money for this does not mean that what they do doesn't contribute to society. And my argument is that how much society as a whole pays for those things gives us an indication of the relative value of that thing to society.

Is there a better method of determining the relative value we as a society place on things than looking at what relative portions of our earnings we pay for them? And does that not measure the contribution of the person receiving the payment? You may not think that Flint's contribution is so great, but clearly a ton of people are willing to freely spend a portion of their own earnings buying his products. What is that? Who gets to decide that's not contribution? You? Some authoritarian regime?

Call me silly, but I think that people's free choices is the best way to determine what people consider to be important to them. It's not for you or the government to decide what people should choose to value.

Let me also be clear that it's not that "making money is a virtue", but that the money you make generally reflects the value that others place on what you did. It's what you do that is the contribution, not what you earn. But if you're earning money because someone is paying you for something you did for them, then that money *is* a good measure (arguably the best measure) of your "contribution" to society. It's certainly a more fair measurement than the arbitrary valuations we might otherwise use.

Edited, Aug 5th 2014 5:02pm by gbaji

In terms of whose earnings benefit society more, the answer is "the middle class".

Rich people do not spend as much proportionately to their wealth as middle-income people do. You don't need a million pairs of pants just because you can afford them. You don't need more food than your family can consume.

A healthy middle class is the key to prosperity for everyone. Unfortunately the middle class has been weakening for about forty years now, and the whole trickle-down fiasco just about nailed the coffin shut.

I agree with the whole "healthy middle class" bit. However, I'd caution against the implication that contribution is only measured via consumption. It's why I mentioned earnings, and not sales. While consumption is the most obvious way to view this (I do X for you, and you pay me Y, so Y is the value you place on what I did for you), we can actually view any earnings as a measure of "contribution" to society (well, with some exceptions). It's just harder to see how the interest the banker earned off lending money to people is a "contribution" (but it clearly is, if you stop and think about the value of lending to a society). It's even more hard to see how the gains in say a mutual fund contribute to society (but they do - usually).


I just feel the need to make this point because otherwise we end up reinforcing the false assumption that what "the rich" do with their money doesn't benefit anyone but themselves, which in turn is used as an argument to just tax away more of their wealth. There is no such thing as "idle money". It's always doing something. And that something, if it results in increased earnings, almost always does so as a result of some value benefit for others in the economy (which, admittedly is not the same as "the society"). Someone (or usually a large group of someones) values whatever you did sufficiently to generate those earnings. We can sit around and debate what that was and whether we think it's of value, but at the end of the day, the only really good way to measure this is by that economic valuation.

Any other method is arbitrarily subjective, and massively subject to ideological influence (and really really dumb mistakes). We can say that handing out food at a soup kitchen constitutes a greater contribution to society than just doing your job as an executive of some company somewhere, but if everyone handed out food at soup kitchens and no one worked as executives, we'd have a total mess on our hands (as in economic collapse). Contribution is not just charity. In fact, it's quite arguable that the most important and numerous contributions to society are those done as part of an economic exchange. It's what makes societies livable.

If everything was free, we'd soon have nothing. Ponder that for a bit.

Edited, Aug 5th 2014 6:47pm by gbaji

There is absolutely such a thing as idle money. Perhaps not completely inert, but certainly far too sluggish to do our economy any good.

Or, you know, invested overseas because there's **** all else to do with it.

Whereas if it were in the hands of the middle class, it would be churning away, keeping the economy nicely aerated.

No, but I am known to be easily amused.