How Do You Define Morality?

[Undertoad]

Cathy, nice to meet you.

[9th Engineer]

The amount of indoctrination needed to make a change as drastic as the one
you are describing would be so massive as to be unthinkable Dana. This is assuming a transformation in a (relatively)short time span of course. If, over the next 200-300 years our culture shifts in that direction, that's slightly different in my mind even though I am convinced it will not happen for that sustained period.

What I could see happening is something like an aftershock effect from the hippie years. Many of them took jobs in education and thought it was their mission to 'reeducate' a new generation. The next decade or two might very well be much more socialist, but such systems are unsustainable in the long term and it will revert to an independently monetary one.

I'm a little curious though. In your ideal system, are people allowed to move where they want and participate in whatever other systems they wish? In the US you would be totally free to join a commune and do business with the rest of us. Would you allow capitalists to operate in smaller micro-economies which could interact at will with the general public?

[skysidhe]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Cathy, nice to meet you.

aww,

right back at'cha

[DanaC]

I'm a little curious though. In your ideal system, are people allowed to move where they want and participate in whatever other systems they wish? In the US you would be totally free to join a commune and do business with the rest of us. Would you allow capitalists to operate in smaller micro-economies which could interact at will with the general public?

Capitalists would be able to operate within that system, the only thing that changes is the relationship to wages and the effect that wuold have on the flow of finance. Freedom of movent and choice would be essential.

And I agree with your first point about the violence of change. This is why I am not a revolutionary Having spent a lot of time amongst some of the wilder trots in my country I am quietly convinced that I'd be on the other side of the barracades were they to try and provoke a revolution :P

[DanaC]

Supply and demand again. There are only a handful of top footballers who entertain hundreds of millions, and the same handful of top docs can only treat a limited number of patients a day. The footballer who is not entertaining is paid less than the average doc. I can't find the inequity.

What's odd though, is that the the top of the heap brain surgeons and research scientists who are as rare as the top of the heap footballers, are paid less than the Beckhams of the world.

Originally Posted by DanaC

What's odd though, is that the the top of the heap brain surgeons and research scientists who are as rare as the top of the heap footballers, are paid less than the Beckhams of the world.

Beckhams only play for twenty years, if they are VERY lucky, and it takes a MASSIVE infrastructure to be a Beckham (what they make is not what they actually end-up with, not even close).
Doctors practice for as long as they like and don't need managers, agents, personal assistants, PR managers, to travel a fraction as much, and tend to have much longer lives than sports figures. The money they finally end up with is earned and is probably about what those top doctors make, or less.
And, unlike those doctors, they work 18 hour days, seven days a week.
I would not do that job.

[DanaC]

One of the things that puzzles me about the arguments for supply and demand economics being something that is natural and inherent and impossible to regulate away sustainably, is that actually we do regulate the supply and demand model. Our economic health depends upon such regulation. Most countries which have embraced capitalism have also instituted strict anti-monopoly regulations.

In reality true laissez-faire economics would lead to a handful of monopolies controlling each sector of the economy. We institute laws against monopolies to protect the free flow of trade and to allow competition within the market to drive prices down and spread the effects of wealth creation.

I would be interested to hear an explanation as to why it is acceptable/desirable for controls to be added to that part of the system and not acceptable/desirable to control the part of economy that deals with wage levels.

[Perry Winkle]

Originally Posted by DanaC

I would be interested to hear an explanation as to why it is acceptable/desirable for controls to be added to that part of the system and not acceptable/desirable to control the part of economy that deals with wage levels.

I have a completely out of my ass explanation. There are controls on wage levels. Minimum wage being one of them. Minimum wage laws like anti-monopoly laws are restrictions on what I suppose you might call the controlling class. Anti-monopoly and minimum wage laws give the little guy a chance to survive, and if they have the right stuff, compete.

It all has to do with minimal levels of fairness. If you regulate past a certain point you are enforcing too much fairness. Where is the line? I don't know, but putting restrictions on the top-end of earning seems wrong (aside from reasonable taxation).

[Undertoad]

The monopoly argument was started a century ago and it is not aging well in the information era and through the end of scarcity.

In this country, with the least number of restrictions, we find that almost all monopolies are unnatural, requiring government support to retain their monopoly power (such as public utilities).

There hasn't been a serious anti-trust case fought here in years. The last one was Microsoft and although they were not successfully prosecuted, it would appear that the most serious competition for their product has appeared, cannot be bullied out of the market, and is 100% free of charge.

I call that a good outcome. The long run corrects better than the courts ever could.

[DanaC]

It all has to do with minimal levels of fairness. If you regulate past a certain point you are enforcing too much fairness.

And that is the essence of the disagreement: as you say, where is the line?

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by DanaC

What's really peculiar to my mind about the way our culture relates to the economy, is that we usually pay more for luxuries than we do for necessities. Cetainly in terms of the way we pay wages. A doctor is a necessity for the country, a footballer is not. Who do we pay more?

But... but... you want poor people to be able to afford necessities!

Originally Posted by DanaC

What's odd though, is that the the top of the heap brain surgeons and research scientists who are as rare as the top of the heap footballers, are paid less than the Beckhams of the world.

You've shot your own analogy right there--can you name a single "top of the heap" brain surgeon or research scientist? The average person in your country watches and enjoys football, and especially enjoys Beckham himself. The average person does not require brain surgery, and certainly doesn't receive it from that one top surgeon. It's not about the rarity of the person, it's about the quantity of service they provide.

What confuses me is what we pay teachers and those who care for our children.
We need to create demand in that market to raise the quality of those doing the job.

[9th Engineer]

I would generally agree to the idea of making teaching positions very well paid, and making them very dependent on performance. You would need to abolish teachers unions, make the training program very rigorous and demanding, and have schools compete for the best teachers. Essentially you would need to limit the field much more to achieve a consistently higher quality of teacher.

[monster]

Originally Posted by 9th Engineer

I would generally agree to the idea of making teaching positions very well paid, and making them very dependent on performance. You would need to abolish teachers unions, make the training program very rigorous and demanding, and have schools compete for the best teachers. Essentially you would need to limit the field much more to achieve a consistently higher quality of teacher.

This is a big issue round here at the moment. Our teachers are very well paid.

http://blog.mlive.com/ann_arbor_news_extra/teacher_pay/

and here's the quote from our principal:

Naomi Zikmund-Fisher, the principal at Ann Arbor Open at Mack, said traditional merit pay plans are dependent on the individual students in a class.

"If you get a class full of students that are way behind grade level and you bring them up to grade level, you might have done a better job than someone who got a class full of students that already are at grade level and just moved them up a bit, yet on the tests it would look like the second teacher had better achieving students," Zikmund-Fisher said.

exactly. Just what we are demonstrating with the 5th-grders needing subtraction tuition. A better class test score would probably be attained by continuing to teach them enough by rote to scrape through rather than taking the time to make sure they actually understand.... and then more time could be devoted to moving the rest up an extra bit of a notch. Fortunately, our school relies on parental support, so the "we" this morning was me and another mom who is an elementray teacher with a math speciality, so the class teachers could also work on cranking the whole class up another notch, and even had time to provide some extra challenges for the children who exceed the required standard.

I'm reading this thead backwards so I'm assuming this is what got us onto standardized tests?

[Griff]

We covered "from each according to his" to footballers pay scales to mistaken generalizations about teachers salaries to standardized testing... you know the usual cellar thing