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Comment by caseysoftware | Hacker News Reader

> I think we can have a society that rewards people for productive or otherwise socially valuable contributions while also taking care of the poor and those who can’t work.

I find "socially valuable contributions" to be a disturbing phrase.

First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable."

Second, quite often society is wrong in what "it" values or finds popular.

Finally, I use "wrong" from my point of view. Obviously there are many definitions of "wrong" based on your ethics, morality, religion (or lack thereof), values, and preferences.

It sounds like yet another social credit system.. whoever runs it wins.

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> that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable."

Well, we already have a system that rewards “valuable” contributions: Money.

Just a lot of people don’t like that system much, as it turns out that system places little value on childcare, elder care and teaching; and huge value on executives who are fired for sexual harassment. Which doesn’t line up very precisely with a lot of people’s personal values.

Great childcare and elder care is very expensive and the people who do these jobs well are, in my experience, quite well compensated relative to other jobs available to them.

>Great childcare and elder care is very expensive

It's hard even to find a way to buy "Great childcare and elder care". Mostly you end up paying as much as such a thing should cost but the money just goes to people who "administer" minimum wage workers delivering care that is mediocre at best.

I ran through the numbers when my kid started in childcare. It turned out there wasn't really a grand bureaucratic conspiracy. Instead, mainly labor is just really expensive.

When your kids are still infants, at childcare centers, the caretaker:child ratio can get as high as 1:2. Those caretakers gross nearly $30k/year plus benefits & other employer costs such as FICA & Medicare.

$30k/year is not a lot of money - definitely not enough to raise your own kids on

No, but it does mean that as a parent, if (in this canned example) you are paying $18k/year- while the number initially sounds crazy- nearly all of it is going directly to caretaker compensation, not bloat & largess.

Maybe not, but it's a lot of money for most families to pay someone else to take care of their kids.

Aren't there childcare and elder care agencies that aim at families of different socioeconomic levels? I guess that the rich hire expensive nannies at expensive agencies.

What you comment sounds unlikely to me.

I agree there’s a sourcing/matching problem that leads the administrators in these markets to capture a disproportionately large share of any value premiums paid.

I agree childcare you pay for is often expensive - I was thinking more of the unpaid work done by stay-at-home parents and families caring for their own elders - who earn no direct salary for their efforts. But nobody would say they ought to stop.

That this is even arguable, I think, makes the OPs point.

Money certainly has it's drawbacks, but it does not have any kind of central authority that values it. It's the most distributed system there is.

> Just a lot of people don’t like that system much

Any other system would be more centralized, and even more open to abuse.

As they say: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."

It's the same with money.

> places little value on childcare, elder care and teaching

Those things have a completely different problem: Those benefiting from them are not those paying for them.

yes, money is the mechanism we've defaulted to for measuring value, but economists admit that our economic systems, even capitalism, don't yet (properly) price everything that's valuable to humans (as you note).

a charitable reading of the parent comment would find they're mainly against centralization of authority rather than how to value intangibles or how to engineer fairness into economic systems.

but their first assumption that "'socially valuable contributions' [...] implies there's some sort of authority" is wholly unsupported. capitalism, for example, highly values rational resource distribution, but there is no central authority dictating that distribution.

in any case, the crux of the problem is that with concentration of wealth comes concentration of power. we're all very wary of concentrations of power, for good reason. we need to decouple that pairing for a more stable and balanced society.

In fact it's quite efficient, as the feedback time between when the signal is sent from the consumer to when it is received by the producer is very short compared to political systems.

Revealed preferences also show that what people say they want and what they actually want can be quantified very precisely using money as a proxy. And more generally, the vast majority of consumers show they prefer low prices over all other things, including priced in externalities, bad labor and management practices, unsustainable production etc...

More recently however (~100 years) the advertising and marketing industry has shown that preference hijacking is a real thing, so markets are skewed in this way.

> First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable."

Not necessarily. I agree that having values dictated by fiat is a recipe for disaster - such arrangements are bound to get corrupted over time. But on the other end of the spectrum, there is some sense of social value - a sense in which e.g. garbage collectors, firemen and doctors do more socially valuable jobs than athletes and entertainers. A sense that's easy to convey - imagine if suddenly, any one of the former three occupations disappeared; the death toll and suffering would quickly overshadow the largest of wars. Meanwhile, even if both of the latter occupations disappeared, the culture would be a bit poorer, but the society would function just fine.

Unfortunately, it seems that this concept of social value is very hard to robustly define. And if we can't define it, effectively optimizing for it is pretty much out of the question.

What you are writing is another version of water/diamonds story. Basically WTF happened that diamonds, which nobody needs, are worth a lot, but water, which everyone needs, costs basically nothing?

The answer was something called marginalism. Well worth reading about, and I can't do justice to it in a few sentences.

Of course marginalism itself requires you to think about value in a certain way, often a very technical way (eg von Neuman-Morgenstern) that makes you forget that there are sometimes contradictions in how we think about value.

Thanks, I didn't know the term "marginalism", I'll look it up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value#Marginalism

Yes, but even these particular values embody subjective urbanist bias. For example, some towns run very effective volunteer fire departments, where the "payment" seems to be mutual aid and masculine pride. In some towns garbage disposal is mostly burn barrels and composting, which is bad for the environment but is not a service which can fail. And personally, having the privilege of education in biology, I feel like manufacturers of drugs and diagnostic equipment manufacturers are infinitely more valuable than doctors who are merely technicians trained in the use of these tools.

Perhaps the concept of "social value" is only useful in the context of societies small enough so that all participants can agree on values?

Huh, you're right about my "subjective urbanist bias", I didn't even notice it in my thinking. Thanks!

WRT. doctors vs. drug/diagnostic equipment manufacturers, a good point, but here I specifically picked my example - public health and safety vs. entertainment - to maximize the contrast.

> Perhaps the concept of "social value" is only useful in the context of societies small enough so that all participants can agree on values?

I think there might be a correlation between community size and the ease of agreeing on what is social value, but I wouldn't discount it for larger societies or even humanity as a whole. Humans do have a lot in common, and I feel you can get far in ranking jobs by social value by going along the gradient of reduction of suffering. And I say "jobs", not "professions", because IMO, professions are almost orthogonal to social value. For example, in terms of the social value, I'd rank a programmer working on diagnostic equipment > programmer working on a videogame > programmer working on advertising tech. The skillset and productivity may be similar or even the same, but these jobs occupy three very different point on the "making the world a better place" scale.

"First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable.""

There is. The opinions of other people in your society - generally expressed via the ballot box in a democracy. All authority is, or should, derive directly from that source of truth.

That's sort of what society is - everybody else. Hence why we have social judgments on what is appropriate - like banning guns and the death penalty - and why we have different countries to encapsulate different views on those social judgments (my country bans the former, yours likely doesn't - but we both take a dim view of marrying off 12 year olds, something other societies are quite relaxed about).

There is no objective truth here. It's all a social creation by a set of people who have chosen to co-operate with each other and call themselves a country.

First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable."

Are literally saying we should live a society without either values or institutions that make judgements about values?

Right now, the justice system, the zoning system and the operations of private foundations, and beyond are engaging in leadership that makes value judgements about what is socially valuable. That is how society has worked historically and the US in earlier times made those judgements more explicit.

Point blank denying this is actually calling for even more social change than the article.

> Are [you] literally saying we should live a society without either values or institutions that make judgements about values?

No, I did not say that literally or figuratively.

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