[ExI] government corruption, was: RE: Social Mobility and Bioconservatism

[painlord2k at libero.it]

Il 23/02/2009 12.53, Stathis Papaioannou ha scritto:
> 2009/2/23 Rafal Smigrodzki<rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com>:

> I am a consequentialist. I just thought I'd point out the obvious
> difference in motivation between business and government or
> non-profit organisation, FWIW.

Declared motivations of organizations.
This never tell anything useful about the real motivation and intentions
of the people running them and their future actions.

Business give better social results because do a social service as a
consequence of looking for personal selfish interests. You can count on
people doing their personal interests and being selfish.
Governments talk about social goods, but they are run by people that
don't know really what a the social good is, because they are not able
to know what are the aims and goals of all single persons and how they
rank any single goals in their personal value ladder.

> Sometimes business will provide the best service and sometimes
> government will, and we should choose accordingly. The problem with
> you is that you take it as a given that business will always do
> better.

Generally this is true.
But most important, when they don't, people are able to change them
faster than governments.

> So if someone points out that, for example, a particular public
> health system is cheaper and results in better outcomes than a
> mostly private health system, you react as if you've been presented
> with plans for a perpetual motion machine: you *know* there must be
> a flaw, clever though the design may be, and it is just a matter of
> finding it.

Because we are not interested in the short term effects in a particular
group of people, but in all effects for all people.
This is "the lesson" of Henry Hazlitt

<<From this aspect, therefore, the whole of economics can be reduced
to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence.
The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but
at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the
consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.>>

 From the other side, I could say that, if a public policy is really 
cheaper and without negative consequences, it can be offered freely and 
don't need to be forced inside the throats of the people.

Any and all systems that need to be imposed to not consenting people to 
properly work, really don't work as publicized and intended.

> It is this ideological commitment, rather than the case by case
> arguments, that I find problematic.

One problem is that "pragmatists" in economics rule now, and we are in 
the mess we are because they followed "pragmatic" solutions.
When pragmatic solutions always put you in a mess, maybe they are not 
"pragmatic" as publicized.

The problem in real life economics is that you have too many variables 
to be able to build an experimental version of it. And many of the 
fundamental variables are not easy to record, if it is possible to know 
them. So, judging what is happening ex-post is very difficult and 
probably always something wrong.

Currently, for example, there is a MMORG calle EVE  Online that have a 
real economist surveying the  inner economy of the game.
In a recent interview, he tell the journalist that in the game, outside 
the many interferences of the real world, the laws of classic economics 
(austrian economics) work exactly as stated in the textbooks.
The position of commercial hubs are decided by the players and are 
consistent with the expected positions an economist would

I suppose that, from a theoretic and experimental point of view, the 
MMORG like Eve Online will give very interesting informations about how 
economy work in a "real" environment, where tens of thousands of people 
act, because we will able to record any and all of their actions and 
study them.



Mirco