Posted by alexandra_k on September 2, 2017, at 2:59:23
In reply to Re: gangrenous foot, posted by baseball55 on September 1, 2017, at 19:20:47
Thanks for sharing. Yeah, I guess people take economics for a bunch of reasons. And... Generally... If you want to help make a situation better and if you want to profiteer from the situation... Either way... It helps to try and understand what is going on...
I was just thinking that the trouble with building playgrounds for free... Is that it (might be viewed as) taking work away from honest people. I mean... The school would probably have found the money from somewhere to build a playground if it hadn't gone and gotten built for free.
So... There is incentive for people to undermine charity work that is... Any kind of approximation of work. In the best case because it is taking work away from honest people. In the worst case because it makes dishonest people look bad.
Thinking about the electrition bottleneck. I suppose you sort of go 'hmm... we made xxx profit from the electrition arriving a day after shedule...' and just sort of filing that information away. And then when you are providing a quote to someone sort of being in the back of your mind about whether you should tell them you think the electrition might be planning on taking that day off as part of a week over school holidays or... Nah... They'll find that out soon enough... and then... cutting back the working hours on your electrition so he's always running a few days behind... And it's an 'opportunity', I suppose. And if all the other building firms are doing it and one isn't then one will always be undercut on price and lose all the work.
And you end up with a big mess of a situation.
Someone was saying about getting free insulation from a building site that was only going to be thrown away... And I felt upset about that. Because... Somebody paid for it. Somewhere along the way. At the very least... A school classroom could have been insulated... What gives you the right to take for yourself? An opportunity?
I went to a talk about global warming... Trying to get air conditioning into these large sweatshop factories... People don't want to invest in that for their employees so people are trying to help the situation by saying that installing air conditioning will result in increased productivity from their employees so as to be cost-effective (because humane things never incentivised anything). How that wasn't believed. How they wanted to install one in one of the factories to show them. How that wasn't allowed. The reason being that the employees that didn't get the air conditioning would be jealous...
Suppose you manage to get some sort of habitat for humanity building site up off the ground where volunteers manage to assemble kitset homes... Who would get those homes? Other people would be jealous... Some people worked hard for their home - other people should just get homes for free?
How to incentivise things that are good... That's a pretty big deal, seems to me... And how to get in with a group making a good honest living... Something where... Good interests seem to align. Tis a hard thing, indeed. The hardest? Possibly...
And then it's probably frequency dependent so once people start to notice you are onto a good thing it will rapidly be undermined (even if peoples intentions are good rather than merely to profiteer from it)... It probably is about small groups... Where there is some kind of bonding / where the cost of defection makes defection not really an option. I guess that is the idea of a family business... Or bonding apprentices. I wanted to learn motorcycle maintenence. The tech should run a short course over the summer on how to change your oil and stuff. Only... That would do the local mechanics out of a job. So...
The apprentice who is too stupid to see what is going on with the electrical hold up... Is more valuable than the one who asks too many questions...
Sigh.
Do you study this sort of stuff in economics? I don't realy feel that I understand about money, at all. I guess... It's social history, really. I don't know any of this...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1094747
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20160906/msgs/1094818.html