Hacker News Reader

Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

And there is the reminder that I'm reading hacker news.

From an economics standpoint the ideal labor force is slavery.

From an economics standpoint there is no point to the elderly they should be killed off once they are no longer viable laborers. Children are only useful if they show potential slave labor ability, and otherwise should be killed in adolescence if there are obvious shortcomings.

From an economics standpoint murder, war, and violence are viable tools in competition, as illustrated by cartel turf wars.

So it's OBVIOUS to me I should be allowed to kill you and your kid take your school start time slot if I am economically incentivized to do so / it's convenient aka economic to me and it is up to you to invest in the deterrent to prevent such things.

Oh, you're not in favor of such things? I guess you are in favor of regulation, humanity, and other factors in things besides raw "economics".

View on HN

This is a huge overreaction - a sort of caricature of the slippery slope argument, attacking points that the parent did not make or even remotely imply, that was presumably intended to signal virtue, but does more to discredit is maker.

Distasteful as the parent's comment might be, they are talking about Pareto optimality - finding a situation where both parties would agree it's an improvement.

>From an economics standpoint the ideal labor force is slavery.

How so?

A happily paid worker with their own free time isn't likely to revolt and kill you. Even an unhappy worker who hates you will just quit. Is your calculations forgetting to count such costs?

And a machine that replaces a person is far far more efficient. So machines backed by human operators/fixers/etc. end up outperforming humans, and free humans will have far better education possibilities.

>From an economics standpoint there is no point to the elderly they should be killed off once they are no longer viable laborers.

You are clearly zeroing out the cost of having all non-elderly realize this will be their fate as well. That seem an arbitrary cost to zero out and makes the results of your calculations unusable.

>Children are only useful if they show potential slave labor ability

A free child that is educated has a much higher return on investment on average.

>otherwise should be killed in adolescence if there are obvious shortcomings

Once again completely ignoring the costs of taking such a course of action.

I'm not really having any confidence in your models.

> A happily paid worker with their own free time isn't likely to revolt and kill you

Historically, slave revolts are extremely rare. Most slave populations are deliberately beaten into a state of learned helplessness so that they don't even believe that revolt will get anywhere. Or they are given just enough such that there is something to lose (besides their lives) in revolt, and the natural human aversion to loss kicks in. Many slave economies in human history have relied on this - see ancient Rome as an example.

> A free child that is educated has a much higher return on investment on average.

But that ROI takes 20 years to be realized. How many people, really, are going to forgo ROI today for bigger ROI two decades from now? There is a reason why on a normal yield curve, loans with long term maturity have higher rates of interest - psychologically, we are biased towards present income vs future income.

> your models.

Human history and empirical human psychology?

> How many people, really, are going to forgo ROI today for bigger ROI two decades from now?

That's (part of) what governments are good for! They are great for making decisions in situations where larger investments over longer time periods pay good dividends.

I wondered what Adam Smith thought about your statement that the ideal labor force is slavery. So I looked it up.

( Book I chapter 8 of the wealth of nations seemed to have some information that might be pertinent: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations; Direct link: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...) .

At one point he discusses the wages in North America, and how high wages seem to correlate to rapid economic and demographic growth. That does seem to mean he doesn't quite agree with you on what is more efficient.

In other places, Adam Smith seems to think slavery is rather inefficient. One argument he presents is: who do you trust more with the upkeep of a person?

* a master who may have many priorities;

* or the person themselves, where their upkeep is by necessity their own highest priority?

Skim it for yourself and see what you can find!

Says the person who is writing his response on a computing device that was made by virtual slave labor.

Well, probably not slavish enough for your conscience.

While I sympathize with the aim of your comment, it seems factually wrong to me.

In the past 100 years, it seems that individual freedom and economic prosperity of the society as a whole correlate. It is hard to tell what is the cause and what the effect. But it pretty obvious that - on average - less free societies are not very successful economically.

With respect to the elderly, if I would be killed on retiring, my incentive to work hard and generate wealth until then would probably not be very high. I think that - not only, but also from an economical point of view - it is much better to let people pay into a pension scheme instead.

And all economic experts agree that a robust legal system is much better for economy than murder, war, and violence.

Economics is the study of choice. I think you're confusing economics with some straw man caricature of libertarian capitalism.

Utility maximization is a core concept in economics. The definition of what utility is can vary. Utility isn't equivalent to money. Anything quantifiable - and you can quantify qualitative things if you give them some dimensions - might be input to your utility function. What economics does is gives you tools to reason about the systemic effects of decisions that balance competing utilities, and how to apportion scarce resources.

If you're trying to contend the study of economics is not highly politicized, then in my opinion you have your head in the sand. Or that economics is ad reductio absurdum to what you described and nothing more, then you must be oblivious to the world in general.

What you are really doing is just parroting what laissez-faire trickle down econ people... oh wait, by your definition they wouldn't be commenting on something so broad, macro, sociological, anyway they parrot that junk as if the redirection of wealth to the very few is some mathematical law, as if the pirate distribution game theory actually applies to a massively complex chaotic system like the real world.

Right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com