Things I Wish They'd Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome

and they're very affordable

But doesn't this undercut the original point a bit?

The important thing is to make the right people notice you put in the extra effort.

Woking extra hours seems like the obvious solution, but depending on circumstances it may not be the best one. If the company does not keep records (or if your boss outsources the recordkeeping to someone else), it may even be unnoticed.

The good strategy requires finding out what your boss considers an evidence of an extra effort. (Some bosses may consider extra hours an evidence of extra effort, others may consider it an evidence of incompetence.) Then produce that. If you really put in the extra effort, make sure you don't forget to provide this evidence. (And of course there is a dark path of not putting in the extra effort, just optimizing for this evidence. Even if people notice you optimize for evidence, they will probably not discount properly.)

For example, bosses are often not aware of what their subordinates are doing. And to some degree that's okay, because you are paid to take care about the details. It's just: the more you see something, the more real it seems. So you could sometimes remind your boss of what you are doing, in a way that does not make them worry about you not being able to handle it. Like: "Yesterday I had this interesting problem [keyword, keword, keyword, skip the boring details], it was really complicated, but then I solved it successfully, so no problem, everything goes according to the original plan." For example while you are together at lunch. (Dark version: describe a problem your colleague had and solved yesterday, but pretend that you contributed to the solution. The boss will be delighted that you care deeply about the company and take initiative even beyond your responsibilities.)

Them are fightin' words, y'know... :-D

I'm aware, hence the hedging. I am not a food critic, and am relying on the judgments of food critics.

It's more complicated than it looks

Yes, people rage at high prices, especially when demand jumps and supply falls. And I'm sure that the status threat of the price rising or being priced out makes it worse than just the scarcity.

But the right answer probably isn't lotteries. People are unhappier when others receive rewards for merit than they are when others receive rewards because of luck. The right answer almost certainly is efficiency.

thanks for the link. I wonder if it would be feasible for companies to run lotteries for highly demanded goods.

(Statement of conflicting interest: I am in fact an exploitative Bay Area techie.)

The Marxist in me wishes to point out that if you're part of the tech salariat rather than the VC class or real-estate rentier class, you are not in fact exploitative. The fact that the Bay Area confuses "high productivity worker" with "exploitative capitalist" is one of its larger collective errors of thinking.

The toast is Josey Baker Bread (yes, that's actually his name; short documentary here) and it really is that good. By which I mean, as another exploitative Bay Area techie, I've paid that price at The Mill more than once and I felt it was worth it.

Some customers don't have extra money, but do have extra time. (And they can't easily just convert the extra time into money.)

Yes, but when you have more people who want to be customers than who are customers (as is implied by selling out of stock before you run out of line), the question is "who do you exclude?"

One way is exclude people randomly. This gives everyone involved a sense of fairness, but no sense of control- either they get lucky, or they don't. Another way is to exclude people by time preference. If they aren't willing to wait, then they aren't going to get any. A third way is to exclude people by cash preference. If they aren't willing to pay the price, then they aren't going to get any.

Generally, the only option that benefits the supplier is the last one, and thus it's probably the one that they want to take. There are a few counterexamples; one example that frequently comes up here is concert tickets for young female singers. There are generally two kinds of fans that go to those concerts: young girls who enjoy the music and older men who enjoy the show. The older men are generally willing and able to pay more, but not as willing and able to wait in line. It's unlikely that the optimal experience for all involved is for all of the tickets to go to the older men, and so they might parcel out tickets to different venues in the hopes that they will go to different people while still increasing revenue.

I decided to not elaborate on that because the second-order effects depend on why everyone has more money. If it's because everyone is more productive, then there's also lots more art floating around, because the artists are also more productive. I do agree that people who are richer spend more money on luxuries like art, but it's not clear to me that all ways of giving people more money actually make more rich people.

But even if there's a bunch more art floating around, there is a fixed supply of the best original paintings, and those will still go to whoever wants to spend the most money at art auctions. (Of course, best is subjective, and so on, but that's part of the point of using auctions.)

I'm actually starting to believe that factors like trade, industrial policy, and public regulation of economic rents and public goods ... have more to do with our current economic crises than any notion of individual "merit".

I don't understand what do you mean -- I can't see any connection between "individual merit" (and by "merit" do you mean the productive value of a person?) and current economic crises.

seems to be able to afford uneducated individuals, expensive social programs, or short work hours much more easily

I don't understand that either. It's not that, say, Germany can afford a more generous welfare system than the US -- after all per-capita GDP is higher in US than in Germany -- it's just that Germany chooses to reallocate more of the wealth produced in this way.

while Australia and Germany are more equal and stable

Equality isn't a good yardstick -- the old USSR had much more equality than any Western country. And I don't see the stability you're talking about. Stable in which sense?

I still care about people who don't produce much value

Sure. Nobody says you have to not care about less productive people.

I don't like to see them being impoverished and miserable.

So redistribute some of your value to them.

Some might say that exactly that is the problem.

To these people I would point out the difference between reality and various imaginary universes one can construct.

As a trivial example, severely mentally retarded people are unable to produce almost any value. A surgeon is able to save lives routinely.

Under the conventional economic definition of value, compare how much value is produced e.g. by successful start-up founders compared to a low-IQ guy who is on welfare and will stay there for the rest of his life.

Or, say, compare the value produced by J.K.Rowling to the value produced by an airport TSA agent.

Individuals are usually paid according to the laws of supply and demand. Value has little to do with it.

You don't think that the 'demand' part has anything to do with value? That's a novel idea.

Yeah, it's a solution of type "pick a few people who are easiest to save, and save them, ignoring the rest".

It's worse than solving the problem globally; and it's better than doing nothing -- which is what most people will do; including most of those who like to think about global solutions. It's far from optimal. It's also something that one can do as an individual -- so it can be used as a backup plan is case no better idea comes around.

I don't think lack of access to training or facilities is the reason

Assume that 1% of people could become good programmers. If we trained (or offered training to) 10x as many people, we would still end up with 10x as many programmers.

I grew up with computers in my home; I had a programmable calculator in middle school; my high school offered programming courses; my family could pay for me to go to a very strong CS university. Not everyone has those opportunities.

I actually tried to donate to them, and they claimed my card was declined. So does NewEgg. I think some of these processors aren't equipped to handle debit cards, apparently, since both Amazon.com and CareerVillage have proven capable of "shutting up and taking my money".

Further pity, the Rolling Jubilee had stopped taking funds for the year. They're a favorite of mine: they buy up defaulted, second-hand debts of the housing and medical kinds that cripple people so damn hard, and then just abolish them. People who were being hounded by collectors get a call and find out their catastrophic debts are just gone.

I suspect that it worked historically because the amount of power you could wield over a servant was so immense that you could destroy the servant's life based on any amount of suspicion you like, even if it wasn't enough suspicion to get the servant arrested. Kicking the servant onto the street without a social net would be really damaging, since the servant depends you for food and shelter, not to mention that spreading the word that the servant is unreliable could lead to the servant becoming unemployable and starving.

Alternately, you probably could hurt the servant in other ways, such as by retaliating against the servant's family. Or just have someone beat up the servant and count on the police to look the other way.

That sucks for the servants, but it makes having a servant relatively safe for the employer. I would also imagine it's one reason why rich people like to use illegal aliens as servants. If the servant steals something it may be impossible to prove in court, but you could always get the servant deported.

Interesting. In Finland house cleaning services are usually provided by big companies with native workers and I think they usually do the cleaning while people are away. It's easier to track those companies' reputations than to try to hire a reliable house cleaner yourself. Giving the company a copy of your key is migitated by having two locks (which is the default) and designated hours of service. Perhaps a different kind of an image was evoked in your mind based on where you live?

I probably wouldn't put up with this kind of a scheme either if I had enough stuff worth stealing in my house that I couldn't reliably keep track of and my insurance sucked. I couldn't care less if strangers visit my house while I'm away if they don't steal (or plan to steal) or destroy anything.

Finance is a cancer ... and is strangling and poisoning everything.

That looks to be way too much emotion and not enough reason.

when the world comes to its senses and regulates that sector with fire

Are you making a prediction, by any chance? If you believe it, you can bet on it -- will make you very rich if it were to happen...

First of all, I was not making any recommendations. Just pointing out that you can get quite big bucks even from a job you don't enjoy very much, in some fields.

Second, taking the moral rather than the pragmatic aspect of your comments about the finance industry: I think it's clear that (a) the world has more people in finance than it needs and (b) some people in finance have been responsible for a lot of harm -- but going into finance could still, for an individual, be the best thing they can do for the world. (By getting paid a lot of money, and then giving a lot of it away in a way calculated to do as much good as possible.) There's a post on the 80000 Hours blog that does some calculations and concludes that even with very unfavourable assumptions someone who can do well in finance can do a lot more good than harm that way. And, of course, the fact that an industry has been responsible for some very bad things doesn't mean that everyone working in it is doing a lot of harm; it seems pretty clear to me that a lot of what happens in the field does (to a very good approximation) no overall good or harm at all. And if a person of good conscience goes into finance, they're probably in effect displacing someone with fewer scruples and may even on balance make the world a slightly better place by their work.

On the pragmatic point: If your prediction is correct, and some time in the nearish future it is likely that the finance industry will be hit by legislation that costs a lot of jobs and hugely reduces profits, then indeed it would be a bad career choice. I have to say that it doesn't seem a very plausible prediction to me.

(This seems like the sort of discussion where disclaimers like the following may be useful: I do not work in the finance industry -- I'm at a small technology startup -- and neither does anyone close to me; but I'm a mathematician, lots of mathematicians end up in finance, and it's not impossible that I might work there some day. I would have no particular moral qualms about that, for exactly the reasons given above.)

Not high-status within their peer group anymore, you mean. I've heard people talk about this, and for many of them it may not be what they really want, but some people may value being part of a high-status peer group.

(What we really want to know is this: how often do people set out to make money with one purpose in mind, but get sucked into spending more and more money on positional goods they didn't originally want?)

I think you're reading more into this than there is.

"Revealed preferences are revealed"

Notably, this says nothing about whether humans are consistent or whether their preferences are coherent or unambiguous. In your example you're drawing clearly unsupported conclusions from your action and then point out that they are unsupported. Well...

On practical level 3 things can limit your intelligence:

You don't believe there is a cap for IQ that's basically fixed by adulthood?

Do you think that with enough training you can raise someone's IQ from, say, 80 to 120?

I could hire excellent tutors to make myself more intelligent

As far as I know you can't raise your IQ significantly by training.

There is a lot of data about how much can you raise your SAT/GRE/LSAT/etc. scores by tutors and training and that amount is limited, plus most of the gain is test-specific and not properly a rise in g.

More to the point, I could hire smart people to think of good ideas for me

That doesn't buy you IQ, that buys you solutions to problems. That's a different thing.

Hire some psychologists to figure out what experiences causes people to have them, then buy those experiences.

Let's see how that works for achieving moksha (= becoming enlightened) :-D

I could pay lawyers to threaten with lawsuits people who criticize me. ... I could bribe some bloggers and journalists to write nice things about me.

Both these actions would significantly reduce your honor, though they might improve your PR image.

It is very much like a joke that tar is a great baldness cure - if poured on heads of those people who call you bald. Honor and public image are not the same.

Hiring assistants to do IQ-related tasks doesn't raise your IQ for the same reason that purchasing a notepad to jot down things you can't remember doesn't raise your IQ.

Huh. Interesting. Wish I'd thought of that.

Having had it pointed out, though, I wonder if this is largely a salience thing. Stereotypical Rich Assholes (TM) get a lot of news coverage, while the dubious career-planning decisions of the mass ranks of recent college grads get very little attention. However, I personally know an awful lot of those recent college grads who made dubious career-planning decisions.

And I think it's even less plausible that the people on the bottom half of the income distribution care too much about money. To a large extent not worrying much about money is a luxury of the rich. Poor people may often have unrealistic ideas about the best way to become better off financially (winning the lottery, making it in sports / entertainment) but I doubt caring too much is their problem.