No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn

[Hauldren Collider]

Example of "valid economic thinking": Senior citizens are burdens on our society, and should be put to death.

"WHAT? You take issue with this?"

At what point is keeping senior citizens alive feasible?

WTF? No. No this is just not true at all.

While they don't produce anything, part of the incentive to produce is the knowledge that you'll be around to reap the rewards later. I mean, duh, right?

[Kuciwalker]

Fail. This is what you do not understand.

Morality is defined: concern with the distinction between good and evil or right and wrong; right or good conduct

You fundamentally do not understand morality. You're talking about something else. You're not thinking at the high-level, which is unsurprising because it's operating at a level that does not involve economics. "Right" or "wrong" are concepts that exist independently of money. What is right is not always possible -- I understand that; it's obvious. That's not the point.

To say something is moral doesn't mean something is always practical -- it just means it's the right thing to do.

1) You are, of course, just factually incorrect here, though it doesn't matter because it's a question of definition.

2) Fine, then, I'll concede whatever you want about questions of the form "what would it be nice for us to do?" if you'll address the question of what we actually should do. For some reason, the question of what we actually ought to do seems more relevant...

[Asher]

WTF? No. No this is just not true at all.

While they don't produce anything, part of the incentive to produce is the knowledge that you'll be around to reap the rewards later. I mean, duh, right?

I want economic metrics. That's the whole point.

Kuci kept asking me for them. Economics and morality are not distinct, so surely you can easily provide me some.

[Asher]

1) You are, of course, just factually incorrect here, though it doesn't matter because it's a question of definition.

I'm not factually incorrect. I copy and pasted that from the definition from Google (from Princeton's WordNet).

2) Fine, then, I'll concede whatever you want about questions of the form "what would it be nice for us to do?" if you'll address the question of what we actually should do. For some reason, the question of what we actually ought to do seems more relevant...

So what is your question? SHOULD you have public health care? Yes.

Why?

Because it's the right thing to do, and a healthy society is a productive society.

[GePap]

By the same token you would argue that the weatherman is useless because he's sometimes wrong? Or that Isaac Newton's laws of physics were useless because they are incomplete and use EMPIRICALLY FLAWED ASSUMPTIONS?

When Issac Newton formulated his ideas, they did explain what was observable empirically at the time - that once our abilities expanded and we were able to observe new phenomenons his laws no longer explained what we now saw does not invalidate his work. On the other hand, modern economists make pronouncements that are based on ideas with no current empirical basis (or ideas that are clearly baseless).

As for wheather people, modern advances in meteorology have made them far more useful in planning, though I still always carry an umbrella with me, since I understand that their models have limitations. Seems the rational thing to do.

[Asher]

Also, SHOULD Canada have a private healthcare system people can opt into? Yes.

Why? Because it's the right thing to do. It's wrong to deny someone access to something that they are willing to pay for.

[Kuciwalker]

I would agree, but then there is hardly any imaginable circumstance in which anything would actually threaten the entire supply of oil to the United States, so what exactly was the point of the question in the first place?

It is called a THOUGHT EXPERIMENT. If you admit that there is some amount of money worth more than 1 life, then you can't be morally outraged when we make some attempt to actually figure out what it is, and then use that number in a purely economic calculation.

I do think that the worth of what was destroyed in the fire was much greater than the fee that the homeowner needed to pay, so as a society we ended up poorer because of this action.

Probably, but the question of "but what happens if you do that and everyone stops paying and then the fire department runs out of money and then there are even more houses burned down" is a legitimate response to that. It's not a case of "omg you can't just look at the numbers the morality is INDEPENDENT OF THE NUMBERS IT WAS WRONG AND YOU ARE HORRIBLE".

Nowhere did I mean to imply that keeping your brother live was the "right action" (I have plenty of reasons to think that killing him would be the preferable outcome for society) - the question was meant to show that its easy to make dry pronouncements about what should be done based on models but in the end, models aren't a substitute for reality, which is what we human being inhabit.

Hm? All you showed was that individuals often value personal happiness over doing the right thing. That's not especially surprising or insightful.

[Kuciwalker]

So what is your question? SHOULD you have public health care? Yes.

No, my question is "how much money should we spend on it?" I don't want you to give a very detailed answer at all, just a vague idea of how you think the government should figure out when to stop spending more.

My answer to the question would be, roughly, "they should try to figure out a way of valuing lives in terms of dollars, and then stop spending more when the value of the additional lives they think will be saved is less than the value of the extra money they would spend". But that is evil economics-thinking that might ask the government to cruelly not save a person that they could, so I'm guessing you'll dismiss it out of hand.

[GePap]

Let me be blunt:

We live in a world with sufficient productive capability to clothe, feed, house and educate every living human being, as well as providing them with basic preventative medical care and inoculate them against most common communicable diseases. We could do this and still allow for significant differences in economic outcomes which would allow certain people to control vastly more wealth than others if we saw that this was necessary in order to motivate individuals enough to ensure their utmost production. "God" only knows how much overall human capital is wasted by allowing millions to starve and die of diseases that we as a species have the ability to prevent.

That we don't do these things is not a result of us as human beings being unable physically to do them, its that we as social apes (which is what we are) are unwilling to do this because we still behave based on the underlying evolutionary impulses that got our primate ancestors to where they were - we are greedy (which is different from being rationally self-interested, as greed is inherently irrational), fearful, xenophobic,and incapable of feeling much for utter strangers (studies have shown that people hand more strict punishment to people who harm a few than those who harm many - as Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic).

The sane thing, I would posit, is to understand this basic reality and then see what we can do to create structures that get closer to the world that could actually be given our abilities, structures meant to mitigate as much as possible our base human nature.

And with that, I have things to do that are of greater importance to me at this time.

[Kuciwalker]

Example of "valid economic thinking": Senior citizens are burdens on our society, and should be put to death.

This is a fairly bizarre strawman. Why would senior citizens' interests not be accounted for in the grand utility calculator?

[Kuciwalker]

Let me be blunt:

We live in a world with sufficient productive capability to clothe, feed, house and educate every living human being, as well as providing them with basic preventative medical care and inoculate them against most common communicable diseases. We could do this and still allow for significant differences in economic outcomes which would allow certain people to control vastly more wealth than others if we saw that this was necessary in order to motivate individuals enough to ensure their utmost production. "God" only knows how much overall human capital is wasted by allowing millions to starve and die of diseases that we as a species have the ability to prevent.

You are quite correct, and this is why we should not particularly shed tears for the guy in the OP when he's better off than 95% of the human beings on the planet. We have much more urgent priorities.

[giblets]

This is a fairly bizarre strawman. Why would senior citizens' interests not be accounted for in the grand utility calculator?

Presumably because they consume resources without producing anything.

[Asher]

No, my question is "how much money should we spend on it?" I don't want you to give a very detailed answer at all, just a vague idea of how you think the government should figure out when to stop spending more.

My answer to the question would be, roughly, "they should try to figure out a way of valuing lives in terms of dollars, and then stop spending more when the value of the additional lives they think will be saved is less than the value of the extra money they would spend". But that is evil economics-thinking that might ask the government to cruelly not save a person that they could, so I'm guessing you'll dismiss it out of hand.

Your answer is simultaneously stupid, irrelevant, and amusing.

[Asher]

Presumably because they consume resources without producing anything.

Yes. They are obviously a net drain on both the government and families.

@Kuci:

My question to you is this: How much money should we spend keeping senior citizens alive?



It's not a strawman, it's a logically consistent argument to the one you're making. You just don't like it because instead of aligning with American norms, it's counter to them. The inconsistency is the point.

We don't cut off senior citizens for the same reason we don't turn away poor people who want access to a family doctor for preventative medicine (which is, by the way, another reason public healthcare is more efficient -- everyone has access to preventative medicine, and when you catch stuff early it saves a fortune).

[Kuciwalker]

Presumably because they consume resources without producing anything.

So? If our goal is, roughly, the greatest good for the greatest number, I don't see how you reason from that to "we shouldn't bother with doing good for people who can't give us anything in return".