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Comment by tehwalrus | Hacker News Reader

Computer games, and the stock market, initially look pointless.

Games are, as the article puts it, frivolous toys, and the second-by-second stock market is a zero sum game casino. (Buying stocks is emphatically not investing in a company, except tangentially. It is principally a speculation on the price of an asset, and no money actually goes to the company when you buy stock through a broker).

In fact, they both do have some economic outputs, although their value is quite hard to measure:

Games are entertainment. They provide escapism and fun when we are bored or sad. This improves our wellbeing.

The stock market's output is difficult to see, but it is there: they compute the value of stock. Why we need to know the value of stock to such fine resolution in time, I do not know. But we're spending all those quants' brains finding it.

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> Games are entertainment. They provide escapism and fun when we are bored or sad. This improves our wellbeing.

Does it?

I think sheer boredom improves our well-being.

As usual "What doesn't kill you makes you tougher". Escapism and fun leaves you vulnerable to the brutal real-world.

Yeah, we shouldn't have books, games, websites, sports, arts, music, etc. because fun is bad

Lots of those are work or productivity related. Actual fun things are already banned.

If it's fun, it's most likely already illegal.

Starcraft is productivity related?

Micromanaging a zerg rush isn't productive management?

Some of the better minecraft mods require some exercising of your 3-d design abilities and budgeting skills and navigation of dependency trees. There is a certain lower cognitive limit to make a cobbleworks in modded minecraft and above that there's a lot of engineering going to time/space tradeoffs and energy budgets and various design criteria. Not to mention making it look nice and troubleshoot-able.

There are also secondary effects such as you can make a great pile of economic activity by shoving kids thru schools to give them skills that are not economically useful in general or if you have X economically useful job slots opening per year you can make twice the tuition revenue by graduating 2X the number of kids and blaming the individual for individual failings when the macro effect of 2x supply impacts 1x demand. Or the school produces grads ignoring the effects of ageism, racism, sexism, but the employers are certainly under no illusion they need to be as color blind as the schools. Then when the only work they can find is as baristas or maybe nothing at all, perhaps a lively home life as a minecraft player will tranquilize them to the point of society lasting a little longer, squeezing blood out of a couple more rocks, getting that national aggregate student loan debt to a higher score than ever, before the great reboot that rights all wrongs.

I have a lot of managing experience. Can I send you my resume? I'm a C Zerg user on the iccup server.

No, since it decreases productivity and well-being.

Never trust the well-being of anyone that can't be bored. They are broken people.

If that were true, people with really boring jobs would have higher wellbeing, all other things being equal.

Actually, there might be some truth in that.

> The stock market's output is difficult to see, but it is there: they compute the value of stock. Why we need to know the value of stock to such fine resolution in time, I do not know.

The bigger benefit of the stock market is that it provides liquidity, which is one of the major appeals of owning listed stock - that you can liquidate it quickly/easily/cheaply.

The benefit you mentioned - pricing stock - enables companies to issue new stock at a fair market valuation. But that's secondary to letting people buy/sell stock easily.

> This improves our wellbeing.

Which improves productivity.

But since productivity (GDP) includes stuff like making games and gambling on stocks, I'm not sure it's a number worth maximising. Wellbeing is a number worth maximising though.

There's a country already doing this. In The Kingdom of Bhutan they measure GNH, Gross National Happiness

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness

As an result of this the economist Med Jones later developed the concept into what's called GNW, Gross National Well Being

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Well-being

However such measurements are rarely used and the concept have been subject for criticism even within Buthan. To the best of my knowledge Buthan is still the closest we've come to maximizing well-being nor have I heard of more effective and successful attempts.

If anyone have firsthand experience of the subject I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I saw a documentary on Bhutan the other day. A German journalist travelled through the country to see how that Gross National Happiness actually looks in practice. His summary was that Bhutan is a third-world country by any measure that we commonly use (life expectation, GDP, etc.), but overall, people indeed seem very happy. Of course, you can only go so far wrt understanding a group of people when you look at them for a week only.

Slightly related: My favorite part was when he interviewed the leader of the opposition party. "It didn't become clear what policies he's actually opposing." :)

Interesting, would you happen to know the name of this documentary?

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