Posts by James Butler
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to BenWilson,
All that matters is “how many people can do this, and want to do it” and “how many people do we need doing it”. As the first goes up, the price comes down. As the second goes up, the price goes up.
You see I don't think that really holds. I am by no means highly paid for a software developer, but I think I would still do my job for significantly less - provided other people in comparable roles were also paid comparably. But my contribution to my customer's profits is easy to measure.
-
Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Islander,
“The Left Hand of Darkness” is also a plus/minus look at bi/ambisexuality
Or a study of how our culture is shaped by our perception of gender.
-
Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to BenWilson,
that getting the most amazing physicist in the known universe to till the fields, or to use his mathematical talents on the horrible job of deciding who gets to eat, was a shocking waste of his talent.
Almost as bad as, say, coercing the top physicists and mathematicians of a generation to invent more and more effective and brutal ways of killing more and more people.
-
Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Sacha,
Heh, and I thought I was doing well remembering the subtitle :-)
-
Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Islander,
LeGuin! She has said more accurate & perceptive things about humanity and our various societies than any dozen philosophers and any thousand thousand politicians.
Yep, and in The Dispossessed she has an admirably fair go at showing the warts and cracks in both sides of her "ambiguous utopia".
-
Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to BenWilson,
Alternative ways of organizing things have their own problems too.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to suggest meaningful alternatives or anything crazy like that - just whining about the status quo :-) In reality I think progressive taxation is probably the best treatment we have for capitalism's chronic over-valuation of capital - but even that's pretty flawed, as it penalizes extra labour just as much as extra capital.
-
Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to BenWilson,
I think the value is mostly dictated by supply and demand under capitalism. There is no end of supply of unskilled labour, so it’s worth fuck all.
You say "supply and demand", I say "the market", same diff right?
The question is why does the market place its value as "fuck all", while society places its value somewhat higher (as revealed by the minimum wage)? I think it's more instructive looking at occupations above the minimum wage floor. A lot of us might agree, for instance, that teachers and social workers are underpaid; this is hardly down to oversupply, or the work being "unskilled" - the work is simply so far along the value chain from "capital" that it's too difficult for the market to measure quantitatively what it's "worth". The quantifiability of value has become a proxy for value itself.
-
Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Heather Gaye,
What I’m getting from this is that we have a problem in which certain work is perceived to be undervalued.
This is called "capitalism", no?
When we expect the value of labour to be determined entirely by the market, then that labour which brings one more information about the market (ie. closer to the money) becomes, by definition, more valuable. Certain economists would call this "efficient"; I have less charitable names for it, and mitigating this effect is (or should be) pretty much the entire point of centre-left politics.
-
Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Ben McNicoll,
Ah, that explains no Twitter then - so I'll be discussing the trivialities of my life on PAS for the time being, cheers.
-
Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Andre Alessi,
I don't really understand how National can think most people would choose to live on a benefit if they had other, genuine options
Because National's core voters are, almost by definition, people who have always had other, genuine options - "Well I never went on the benefit when I was younger, I went out and got job X / started business Y / invested my trust fund in Z". They have no meaningful exposure to a world where those options don't exist (which they themselves have created), and thus don't know that it exists.
I mean, like you say, what reasonable person would be on a benefit when they have alternatives? We can reason from this two ways, given that there are people on benefits: either there are no alternatives, or we must be dealing with unreasonable people (note how the rational actor hypothesis is discarded in this situation!) who need to be taught the error of their ways.
(An hour late with this, because of dodgy internet. Anyone else been having trouble with Vodafone Red in/around Mt Eden in the last week or two?)