Trading Candy

post by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2024-11-01T01:10:08.024Z · LW · GW · 4 comments

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There are a lot of fun things about halloween, with costumes, neighbors, and sweets, but maybe the part I like best is the trading. Two kids sit down, each with a bucket full of candy. After a while they get back up, each with a better bucket than they started with. This feels like it shouldn't be possible: isn't there some sort of law of conservation of candy?

But of course it is possible: not everyone has the same preferences. We each start with some candy we aren't the ideal person to appreciate. Which also means the more different our preferences are, the greater the benefit of trading.

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comment by johnswentworth · 2024-11-01T02:30:40.461Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My two siblings and I always used to trade candy after Halloween and Easter. We'd each lay out our candy on table, like a little booth, and then haggle a lot.

My memories are fuzzy, but apparently the way this most often went was that I tended to prioritize quantity moreso than my siblings, wanting to make sure that I had a stock of good candy which would last a while. So naturally, a few days later, my siblings had consumed their tastiest treats and complained that I had all the best candy. My mother then stepped in and redistributed the candy.

And that was how I became a libertarian at a very young age.

Only years later did we find out that my mother would also steal the best-looking candies after we went to bed and try to get us to blame each other, which... is altogether too on-the-nose for this particular analogy.

Replies from: AliceZ
↑ comment by ZY (AliceZ) · 2024-11-01T03:50:19.061Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think that is probably not a good reason to be libertarian in my opinion? Could you also share maybe how much older were your than you siblings? If you are not that far apart, you and your siblings came from the same starting line, distributing is not going to happen in real life economically nor socially even if not libertarian (in real life, where we need equity is when the starting line is not the same and is not able to be changed by choice. A more similar analogy might be some kids are born with large ears, and large ears are favored by the society, and the large eared kids always get more candy). If you are ages apart with you being a lot older, it may make some limited sense to for your parents to re-distribute.

Replies from: johnswentworth
↑ comment by johnswentworth · 2024-11-01T03:55:04.081Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

To be clear, I don't really think of myself as libertarian these days, though I guess it'd probably look that way if you just gave me a political alignment quiz.

To answer your question: I'm two years older than my brother, who is two years older than my sister.

comment by Yair Halberstadt (yair-halberstadt) · 2024-11-01T04:50:14.291Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Counterpoint: when I was about 12, I was too old to collect candy at my Synagogue on Simchat Torah, so I would beg a single candy from someone, then trade it up (Dutch book style) with naive younger kids until I had a decent stash. I was particularly pleased whenever my traded up stash included the original candy.