Posts by Keir Leslie
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It's not producing anything for consumption by others, which is what one expects of a productive asset.
Shelter not being a consumable good, obviously.
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"productive" is a rather poor choice of word on your part.
I think that's massively confused. Houses are capital which produces something people want: shelter. They're productive.
(And a house is a productive asset as opposed to say gold.)
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Well hidden? Well, hidden.
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But physics isn't an ideal type of a science. Biology is just as much a science as physics, and yet surprisingly light on things like equations. Things can be scientific without being physics-like.
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It's more a judgment-based evaluation than an assay, though, wouldn't you say?
But lots of measurements are really judgement based I should say. (And again here I want to talk about Wittgenstein on measurement, and the rubber yard-stick.)
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But just because Peters manages to clown around with an idea doesn't mean it is a bad idea. In general, more asking `what does it mean?' would be a good thing.
Certainly the idea of getting 76% in morality is absurd. (The idea of getting 76% in literacy is pretty absurd as well for that matter.) But that doesn't mean you can't measure these things in some ways.
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I went to a party at a house owned by Middleton Grange once. Towards the end of the evening, me and my flatmate were waiting to get a ride back home, so we wandered down the drive to the street. It stunk of fags, which was kind of curious. My flatmate knew the guys who lived there pretty well, and he said yeah, because it's school property they aren't really supposed to smoke on the grounds. They've got to come out here when they want to light up.
Which was when I looked across the road and saw the big sign saying Middleton Grange and it all kind of clicked.
Very odd feeling.
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Ignore the terms defective/not-defective[1], it may as well be yellowish or greenish. The point is that Giovanni clearly thinks he can make decisions based on things like values. Now, there must be some way to get that information out of Giovanni's head and into the hands of other people who make decisions[2].
An Hayekian would no doubt say that the best way to do that would be a market. As a good little socialist, I think that's wrong. I think that the best way would be an empirical research project. I would call this research project `pedagogy', and I would certainly admit that not all, and probably not even most, of it would involve numbers. But it would certainly remain scientific.
[1] it's defective/not-defective 'cause I've been reading a book on quality control. If you'd been a week earlier it would have been artistic and political worth or something else.
[2] Unless you subscribe to some very harsh beliefs about the communicability of thoughts.
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Now line them up in order of morality. Good stuff, that's a tough one. Now, get all their parents to do the same. Guarantee you that the height and age lines will look largely the same, and every lineup measuring morality will look *very* different. Measurement? Certainly. Repeatable and objective, though?
Suppose I have a widget factory. Widgets can be defective in three different ways. I have some widgets that are defective in one way, others in a different way, and yet others in another way. And I have widgets that aren't defective.
Now, I couldn't line them up from most-defective to least, & that would be nonsensical. But I could certainly make two piles: go/no-go.
So the idea that measurability must mean easily enumerated and comparable &c is I think wrong.
And yes, it's quite possible that different people might use different measuring sticks. I'm sure Wittgenstein rattles on about this, but basically if there isn't enough agreement on that we shouldn't try.
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Er, I am using safe to mean risk-free in the technical sense that Solvency II uses it, I think. (There! That's me out the woods.)
More seriously, yeah, nothing is really risk free.
(For instance, you are taking on the risk that you won't be able to enjoy the assets in the future owing to death/infirmity/etc.)