It's actually kind if ironic, because his argument would be somewhat better (note that I'm not saying *good*, just less on its surface completely invalid) if he'd claimed that it was due to government incompetence, not capitalism.
I don't understand how a poorly written definition of the term "negative externality" makes sense as a response here, and I *really* don't understand how it connects to the leftist strawman he started with. What is he saying here?
Yudowsky's original post implies capitalism isn't that bad.
'Go drink Flint water' is meant to indicate that it is, actually.
'It's a negative externality' signals that Yud doesn't think it's that big a deal, because in his ideal system the government would step in to handle the problem. (never mind that it's precisely the government that *caused* the problem, which means it's very much *not* a negative externality in any sense of the word).
I guess what confuses me about his post (and yours, actually) is that it's not clear to me how to separate the state from capitalism in this context. It seems obvious to me that the residents of Flint were failed both by local government and by capital not prioritizing their safety.
I'm guessing Big Yud is acknowledging that it's a known problem that capitalism won't solve problems like the Flint water crisis and that the usual system for these problems within capitalism is government intervention, which failed catastrophically here and should be the real target of criticism. I think this is actually what you're saying as well. What I don't understand is why instead of just saying that, he gave a wordy but superficial definition of the term "negative externality" and expected us to extrapolate an argument from that.
> it's not clear to me how to separate the state from capitalism in this context. It seems obvious to me that the residents of Flint were failed both by local government and by capital not prioritizing their safety.
My understanding is that it was almost entirely a government thing, no? Government chose to change the water supply due to budget concerns, and then didn't take sufficient safety measures. If capitalism was involved, it was only indirectly.
>I'm guessing Big Yud is acknowledging that it's a known problem that capitalism won't solve problems like the Flint water crisis and that the usual system for these problems within capitalism is government intervention
This much I agree with, but I'm not sure he's actually pointing to the government as the real target of criticism. If he is, it's so oblique that I'm missing it. That would explain the fact that he's not really making an argument, here - his only point is 'my ideology has already taken your criticism into account'.
It seems like he actually just thinks the Flint water crisis is a negative externality of production/consumption, like pollution, or passive smoking.
The different between Scientology and rationalism is that: one is a pseudo scientific cult made up by a failed sci-fi writer with delusions of grandeur, and the other has Tom cruise in it
I remember a while ago reading someone saying that if you build a system based on competition of prices, eventually someone will start pricing shit below the production cost (it probably wasn't an idea that originated in a Reddit comment, but that's where I saw it). At first I was like cool notion but that would mean no profit. And then it clicked. Of course. This is how capitalism works. By offloading the costs to someone else. Maybe it's letting the workers starve (or the state pick up the tab for feeding them). Maybe it's by ignoring the actual cost of the pollution. But the truth is that almost every thing you buy, you paid less than the actual cost of production, because at every step a corporation is offloading some of that cost on someone else to maximize its profit and undercut the competition.
Even liberal economists have long known that in a perfect market, economic profit does not exist. It is a mathematical impossibility. In a war of competition, every company cuts profit margins to zero.
So what do you do? You slash prices to below production costs by externalizing some of the costs.
Doesn't part of the definition of "perfect competition" involve the idea that the rate of production of any given good is exactly equal to the rate it is bought/consumed? So if you relax that assumption, you could maybe have a market that still matches the other assumptions of perfect competition (perfect information, near-infinite number of competitive firms making identical copies of the same types of goods with the same knowledge of production techniques, etc.) but there's a nonzero overall rate of profit just due to the fact that the economy as a whole is producing more outputs per production cycle than it uses up as inputs. This was the mental model I used to try to understand the simplified economy Marx was analyzing, where supply and demand were at an equilibrium in a competitive market and all workers paid the same wage, but where there was still supposed to be a nonzero rate of profit for the whole economy.
Yea, there's many issues with perfect competition that cause it to rarely actually manifest in real life. It's a simplifying assumption to make the math easier.
Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx talked about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Adam Smith put a positive spin on it; Karl Marx put a catastrophic spin on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall
Empirical research on things like price stickiness and the consistent failure of firms to optimize based on marginal revenue and marginal cost means that theoretical predictions about profit are usually wrong.
You make a good point about the externalization of costs, though.
What’s interesting to me about economics is how pretty much all theory collapses in practice, and how economists today have turned to studying actual practical phenomena and learned thing like increasing the minimum wage does not necessarily reduce employment.
>increasing the minimum wage does not necessarily reduce employment
This is not incompatible with economic theory and is exactly what would be predicted by a monopsony.
Wow, that really makes things click.
Take plastic recycling for example. For a lot of plastic, the environmental costs and costs of the health problems that it causes among workers exceeds any potential profit from recycling it. For a while though, China was recycling plastic from around the world because Chinese companies had access to absurdly cheap laborers with government subsidized healthcare, so the government was unwittingly subsidizing the cost of plastic recycling enough to make it profitable, up until 2017 when China banned the import of this waste plastic because it was creating a net cost for the country. Profit was achieved by creating a niche with negligible competition by selling for less than the actual production cost. [Now this clicks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRtNwUju5g).
This [article](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282526339_The_Core_of_the_Apple_Degrees_of_Monopoly_and_Dark_Value_in_Global_Commodity_Chains) by Donald Clelland might interest you
For a second I was like, huh, that sounds like an accurate description of a negative externality. This doesn’t seem very sneerable.
Then I realised he was talking about the Flint water crisis.
Nothing more rationalist than badly explaining econ 101 concepts you learned in high-school like it’s a forbidden revelation
“it is standardly considered” what is? by whom? standardly?
Yud doesn’t know what a negative externality is.
It is indeed a negative externality.
But negative externalities are endemic in capitalism. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
Yes, it is a typical function of regulations to internalize negative exterrnalities
Oh, wait, Yud is treating that as an argument against regulation
Yud is the living embodiment of Dunning-Kruger’s Mt. Stupid peak
Source
the time before big yud goes full mask off white supremacist can now be measured in days, not weeks