Comments on: Farting around (and “economic rationality”)

By: W. Kiernan

W. Kiernan — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 22:25:09 +0000

jet sez: A minor point, but one that is often overlooked is that in the US those 40 million uninsured americans have to be served in an emergency room reguardless of ability to pay. And that all states have programs to help pick up the tab for the uninsured. No, you're wrong. If you're absolutely, positively dead broke you can get ordinary medical care utterly for free in the local emergency room. But of the forty million plus Americans without health insurance, only a small percentage are completely penniless. If you're too poor to buy insurance, and you become sick or injured, and if you own anything, once you resort to the emergency-room to get medical treatment, you'll get the treatment all right (probably far too late) but you're also going to lose everything you've got. For example, imagine your family brings in $25,000 a year. That's not totally unskilled burger-flipper wages, incidentally; it's better than twice the minimum wage. I've met intelligent, industrious workers who told me with something like joy, something like amazement, how they had never earned so much as twelve dollars an hour at any job before, and what a delight it is, being able now to take the kids to WalMart and buy them all the school clothes they need. On $25,000 a year gross, you can't afford rent, food, clothing, gas-insurance-repairs for your car and health insurance. You obviously can't do without the first three and you need your car to keep your job. One day your kid falls ill. Too bad you can't afford a clinic when the first symptoms kick in, but that's Life in America, ain't it. Your kid gets sicker. And sicker. Now what's going to happen to what little your family has got? And once the repo man has taken all that away, and once you've been evicted, where and how is your family going to live?

By: Pete

Pete — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 11:37:55 +0000

I just wonder what all those people describing life in terms of income-maximisation are doing posting to this thread. Is the marginal utility of reading comments and typing in a textbox higher than the marginal value you’d recieve for working?

By: Tracy

Tracy — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 11:07:14 +0000

I’ve been thinking about those Quashees enjoying their leisure time once they’ve covered their basic needs, vs. modern people working considerably longer than would be necessary to keep body and soul together, and I think there’s an explanation other than “modern advertising creating an empty demand for material goods”. I suspect that at the time an extra hour’s labour by the Quashee would not have bought much at all – maybe enough to buy a hair ribbon. And if you took that time in leisure you could make yourself an ornament out of some flax and shells or coloured stones. And I would not be at all surprised to learn that the Quashee had ample reason to believe that any effort to accumulate assets in the long-term would risk appropriation by the whites. (In other words, why bother working on your home if there’s a large risk it will be burnt down in some riots?) Nowdays that extra hour’s labour can buy a bottle of wine, or a DVD, or a day’s air-conditioning. Assuming that the value of an extra hour spent lounging around in the sun, or playing with kids has not changed since the time of the Quashee, we would expect at the margin as the value of what an extra hour’s labour buys in terms of pleasure increases, more people would choose an extra hour’s labour. Interestingly, if all other things were equal, I wonder if there would be more work done by people in countries with miserable weather than by people in countries which the climate is such that it is more frequently nice to sit in the sun and watch the world go by.

By: Kevin Carson

Kevin Carson — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 18:38:58 +0000

BTW, Bernard, As one of those free market libertoonians (who apparently aren’t popular among some on this thread), I’d also like to comment on this remark of yours: “The more socialist the state, the less far personal effort will influence personal outcome.” What you’re describing, the divorce of effort from reward, is less a result of what you call “socialism” (which apparently equates to centralized control) than of centralization and hierarchy in general. The less decision-making control that workers have over how they do their own work, the less fully are the utilities and disutilities of a given action internalized in a single actor. Most large corporations have grown to the point where it is prohibitively expensive even to track the results of an individual action, let alone see that those results are internalized by the actor. Government is, primarily, a mechanism for creating externalities: especially for forcing the taxpayers to absorb the operating expenses of big business, and thereby rendering large, inefficient organizations artificially profitable. Without such interventions in the market, production on the average would be much smaller-scale and less centralized. Labor would have much more control over the production process, and would keep its full product (as Benjamin Tucker said, the natural wage of labor in a free market is its product). That’s what I mean by “socialism.”

By: Kevin Carson

Kevin Carson — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 18:32:50 +0000

By: Kevin Carson

Kevin Carson — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 18:13:53 +0000

Ummm, here’s how it works: if labor had full disposal of its product, and full control over its work hours, people would work until the marginal disutility of another hour’s labor exceeded the marginal utility of consuming another hour’s labor product. What about that is so friggin’ hard for alleged “free market” economists to understand? The slave-owner’s lament in Grundrisse was only one example of a complaint that has been common to the owning classes throughout history, when they have perceived that the working classes had too much access to the means of production and too much control over their own labor. “If we don’t rob those shiftless laborers of most of their product, they’ll only work until their needs are satisfied—and then we might have to work ourselves. Egad!” You can find many expressions of this same sentiment in the following chapter from Mutualist Political Economy: Chapter 4: Primitive Accumulation and the Rise of Capitalism

By: wood turtle

wood turtle — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 17:22:34 +0000

Farting around, farting around….Did anybody ever figure out exactly what that expression means? Are we making the world a better place by fartingaround? How so? Think about it. Then THINK AGAIN! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Oh, abb1 I see you are are reverting back to your old obnoxious presumptuous cantankerous self. I had high hopes for you and you have really really let me down. Oh, and one more thing abb1. I remember once when you were in a similar mood you said “What is your f—-ing problem anyway,” and I would just like to inform you that I have not had any problems in this area so far, but REST ASSURED that you will be the FIRST PERSON on my list that I will contact because you are so EMINENTLY KNOWLEDGEABLE on so many subjects, because all you probably do is READ READ READ and so of course you would have all the answers for me. So, in other words, abb1, YOU’RE MY MAN HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Get ready abb1, SUPER FUN TIMES AHEAD

By: jet

jet — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 01:34:31 +0000

Harry, there I go misusing those pronouns. I’m certainly not rich by anyone’s standards.

By: washerdreyer

washerdreyer — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 23:26:56 +0000

Dsquared – When I was learning quantificational logic, the example was barbers who only cut the hair of…, not lawnmowers. I can’t remember if it was in our text or if it was the professors example though.

By: Slex

Slex — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 22:12:26 +0000

I haven’t read the paper in question, so maybe I’m missing something, but working more is the last thing that would occur to me once taxes are lowered. I will just dispose of more money to spend during my leisure time.

By: Uncle Kvetch

Uncle Kvetch — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 21:56:54 +0000

So while emergency room visits for non-emergency room care is expensive, the solution is not solialized health-care, just an expansion of our already existing socialized system for the uncovered. You mean something like the one Kerry was proposing?

By: paul

paul — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 21:56:28 +0000

I keep reading threads like this and they’re almost as tedious as those on Israel and the Palestinians. As I understand it, the trade unions in Europe engaged their industries in various ways—industrial actions or negotiations—and took cuts in work day/work week rather than money as their reward. Here in the US, we went the other way, striking for a higher wage (wages != standard of living). In other words, it’s a choice: we chose money over time. Interestingly, time can’t be devalued or debased: a week with your kids on the beach is seven days long, while the dollar’s value is more volatile. For whatever reasons, a nation that could go from guaranteed launch failures to sending two men to the moon and back in less than a decade—40 years ago—won’t agree to work less that 50 hours a week into one’s 70s and won’t establish a reliable system of healthcare for everyone, regardless of ability to pay. Some choice.

By: ladder

ladder — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 21:47:48 +0000

jet, How is that going to reduce costs?

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 21:36:46 +0000

I think you misunderstand my point with regard to diagnostic tests. My point is that if there are two ways of checking for some illness, a profit-oriented one will uniformly tend to choose to use the more expensive one, whereas one oriented towards the health of its patients will tend to choose the cheaper one. Profit-oriented systems will be able to get away with this because it is quite hard to create a properly functioning market in health care: for one thing, the informational costs are very high. My point is, US hospitals cost more for no better treatment. I also think that you misunderstand the situation in Britain. We have a private health care system for those willing to pay. On the perhaps dubious assumption that those who were not happy with the NHS would pay, people must be happy with the NHS since they don’t defect in large numbers. Further, it’s not like you don’t have some degree of choice about where you treated on the NHS. If you don’t like one hospital, you can be treated somewhere else (at least in cities). It’s just that we don’t use market criteria to fund or pay for (most) medical treatment because we recognize (as do you, regarding emergency medicine) that there are substanial moral and economic externalities that a market would miss, even if we could get a perfectly functioning one. I don’t think our basic positions, at least on this issue, are that far apart.

By: harry

harry — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 21:29:52 +0000

Jet, we’re still waiting for the figures on social mobility. By all traditional analyses it is no greater in the US than in other OECD countries, and is greater in Sweden. I have a not-very well-worked out from the traditional way of doing the analyses, which would push Sweden back into the rest of the groups, and might even get the US into the lead. Have you worked it out? But my ill-worked out dissetn doesn’t take quality of life issues into account. I’m glad you enjoy being richer than your comparators. I hope they don’t get as much disbenefit from being be.ow you as you get from being above them.