Re: Comparing Lisp conditions to Java Exceptions

Robert Marlow <bobstopper@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on Tue, 03 May 2005:
> Seems to me you're blaming the wrong thing. It seems to me the
> entity to put at fault here is the profit motive itself.

Oooh! An economic argument. Fun!

> What pisses me off is that such provision to society isn't considered
> something which justifies survival in our society.

Who is to determine which contributions are worth what rewards?

> If I want to just write free software that I know many people can make use
> of then that's not enough to justify my being able to eat. I have to
> market it, attribute it a price and attempt to legally force people to pay
> for it.

If not the capitalist market, then you're going to need some different
mechanism of evaluating the worth of your contribution to society, and
thus rewarding you appropriately. Please propose such a mechanism.

> Likewise, if my wife decides she wants to devote all her time to caring
> for sick, underprivileged children she will herself starving unless she
> can somehow convince people to fund her expenses.

Don't forget that money (or, more generally, wealth) comes from somewhere.
Who do you imagine is paying for her efforts? What if the people who have
the wealth don't value that particular job, whereas the people who value it
don't have wealth? Who is to decide (and how), whether this particular job
is valuable to society or not? Surely the exact value of that particular job
is at least open to debate, don't you think?

> Do these things contribute to society? Of course.

Your "of course" hides a lot of complexity. There are no easy answers in
determining the relative value of things like programming computers vs. caring
for sick kids.

But if you don't come up with relative value, then your society collapses in
a different way. Economics is the study of allocation of scarce resources.
In the abstract, the problem is that not everybody can have everything they
want, because there isn't enough to go around. You have to solve that problem
somehow. When 1000 people want an iPod, but there are only 500 of them, who
gets them? Every society has this problem, and capitalist markets is one
possible solution. You can propose others, but you need to have _some_
solution to allocation of scarce resources.

> But does the holy "invisible hand" of the market give it the provisions it
> needs? No. Because a market, despite the propaganda, isn't a good
> yardstick on what's valuable in society.

That's controversial, to say the least. It's far from obvious that the
free market is undervaluing the job of caring for sick kids. You're going to
have to make a stronger argument than that to be convincing.

> To the market, things aren't valued according to utility or human expense,
> they're valued according to how well people are brainwashed into paying the
> highest price for garbage they don't need.

And you're also very confused about how prices really get set in a free
market.

> Stallman, regardless of his personal vices, is contributing something good
> to society.

Kent's argument is that Stallman is making a change in society, a change which
has both positive and negative effects. The change is not a universal "good".

> Why can't we all just do what needs to be done and have everyone share the
> wealth?

Ah! At last we get to _your_ economic model.

This socialist/Marxist/communist approach to economics ("each contributes
according to their ability; each takes according to their need") has been
thought of, and tried before.

The basic failures of your model, when put into practice, include:

1. Free riders. Turns out lots of people wind up not working very hard
(because they have little incentive), yet still taking a lot (their
"needs" may even grow). So the overall society is both less wealthy, and
also has greater expenses, then in a capitalist model.

2. Somebody still has to decide the relative worth of various jobs. Without
a market, this is usually an "enlightened" person. Evidence suggests that
no person can evaluate the hugely complex tradeoffs among human activities
better than (most) markets.

3. Generally society with these structures result in huge concentrations of
political power in a few individuals, who often turn tyrannical. It's not
a logical consequence of the theory that the leaders become tyrants, but
in practice it turns out to be very, very difficult to avoid political
tyrants with such an economic model.

> I'd much rather just code software and give it away. Fighting for a higher
> place in the pecking order seems to me to be a big waste of time and
> effort that'd be better spent writing more code. Perhaps you'd be happier
> too, Kent, if you didn't have to keep worrying yourself over profit.

Similarly, I'd be a lot happier also if I could just sit around all day and
watch TV, and have somebody write me a check each month to support myself in
the lifestyle I desire.

Why should you get paid for coding software, but not me for watching TV?

You'll find it's very difficult to separate those two uses of human time
in your economic model.

-- Don
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don@xxxxxxxxxx
One thing a computer can do that most humans can't is be sealed up in a
cardboard box and sit in a warehouse. -- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
.

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