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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

This is a great (long!) piece.

I think one important thing for people on HN here is this:

> I think Carl, with his background as a Corporate Finance guy, seeing the world through that filter, must have believed that I was trying to blackmail them; trying to maximise my revenue, like the “rational agents” that populate economics textbooks; that I was refusing to sign it to hold up the deal, because I wanted to get paid off. And I totally get how he could see it that way, given where he was coming from; but that wasn’t really what the issue was.

There are many people on HN (and elsewhere) who see behaving as a rational economic actor as a default state and - worse - many believe economics is a zero sum game.

Neither of these things is true, and it's a big mistake to think so. People do things for diverse motivations, and money is only one.

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The main takeaway here is that you definitely should not interact with a corporation as anything other than rational economic actor, because while people have motivations, corporations only have one: money.

I think you are sort of missing the point.

Read what the tattoo he got at the end of the story says.

It's not his tattoo.

The number of times I've been told I don't believe my beliefs because they don't make rational economic sense is innumerable.

I'm happy when my tax rate goes up. This apparently really bothers people. (Me being happy about it.)

Would you be happy if only your tax rate went up, or is that tied to other people in your tax bracket also paying out more and thus, presumably, benefiting society more than they would by hoarding/wasting the money?

The latter. I make something like 750k a year, people in my income range can afford more and still live very comfortably.

I don’t think it’s weird that people don’t behave “rationally” in the crude sense of that word[1]. But it seems really weird to be happy about your tax rate going up. Consider the alternative: for example, you could give the money to charity that works in developing countries. So there seems to be two explanations:

(1) Either you consider yourself prodigal and want an authority to take care of your spending for you.

(2) Or you have weirdly framed your views for extra shock value; and you simply dislike inequality and suffering; and you think that the state can help alleviate some of it by reallocating social resources in a socially beneficial manner. And you think it would be just if they also would take some money from you, even if it’s done by force. There is really nothing surprising about this view; I would rather say it is very popular. (And, unfortunately, for most people that feeling for equality doesn’t spread beyond their own country.)

[1] In principle, rationality in economics doesn’t necessarily imply egoism. It just means that the choices made by a person have nice properties like completeness or transitivity. Whether your choices maximize your consumption, consumption of other people, the scientific progress or the amount of plastic in the world ultimately doesn’t matter.

> Consider the alternative: for example, you could give the money to charity that works in developing countries.

Why not both? I am happy for my tax rates to go up - indeed, I will vote for any political party that advocates this - and donate to developing countries (and also food banks in the UK because we are shamefully bad at being a developed country.)

> Why not both?

Because you cannot spend the same money twice, obviously. Labor and resources are finite.

The third option is that it genuinely makes me happy, because it implies we're taking care of everyone more. My money going to charity is fine. My money going to taxes implies other wealthy people like me are also chipping in for schools, healthcare, etc.

The idea that we have to use force to take money away from people to take care of those in need doesn’t make me genuinely happy. That is rather depressing that we cannot solve those problems without ultimatums based on violence. Necessary? Maybe. Wholesome? Not really.

> Neither of these things is true, and it's a big mistake to think so. People do things for diverse motivations, and money is only one.

Well, when most of the essay contains references to how much money Mojang made, how much Notch went home with, the many billions thrown around, the bonuses paid out per employee, the dividends from Mojang, over and over again, one gets the strong impression that he is concerned about how much money he didn't get.

Money is often one of the more boring and predictable ones too.

Why do you think rational economic actors and non-monetary motivations could not coexist?

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