Yes, and I really want my own airplane.  Damn those airplane owners 
screwing me out of my airplane!  I already said I'm fine with 
redistributing enough money so everyone can afford food, housing, 
healthcare, and education.  Your argument is that we should redistribute 
as much income as we reasonably can because it is the right thing to do. 
This is based on a fallacy that you are refusing to see.

If you knit yourself a sweater, that is new wealth that you created from 
scratch (the yarn had some small value, the sweater much more).  The 
temptation is to think something changes when you swap different forms of 
wealth with others (using money).  It doesn't.	You are still creating 
wealth from scratch, wealth you yourself don't want, and then swapping it 
for wealth someone else created that you do want.  (And these swaps happen 
such that *both* parties feel they got more wealth than they started 
with.)

Coconut world doesn't depend on literally infinite coconuts, just that my 
harvesting doesn't diminish your haul.	That's the right analogy because 
in the real world, wealth I create in no way decreases your wealth, 
whether I'm turning my yarn into a sweater, turning my dirt and my seeds 
into food, learning how to remove a brain tumor, writing a book, etc. 
It's like infinite coconuts not because it's unlimited (you're right, it's 
not) but because I can conjure it out of thin air.

I still think we're making progress here.  Are we now on the same page for 
the case of truly infinite coconuts?


PS: Heading off possible confusion: My concession about redistributing 
a little bit of income is not a concession that the daddy model is a 
little bit right.

--- \/	 FROM James W Mickens AT 07.09.08 14:40 (Today)   \/ ---

>> So I think we've achieved consensus for simple coconut world.  What about 
>> when some resources are limited?  Say Ingrid is building cars out of 
>> coconuts but she can only build them so fast.  James claims that when a 
>> rich person gets a car that that's directly hurting some poor person who 
>> didn't. That's wrong, and the reason is prices.  The price of Ingrid's cars 
>> go up until supply meets demand.  What's so exquisitely just about that? 
>> It means that the people who get the cars are coughing up so many coconuts 
>> that the people who don't get cars actually *prefer* to not have them -- 
>> they'd rather keep the coconuts [4].
>> 
>> So in fact all these things (cars, experts' time, real estate) that seem 
>> constrained are not.
>
>
> This isn't true. The claim "supply equals demand" does not necessitate that 
> "resources are unconstrained." When a resource is rare, its price will go up.

> However, this doesn't always mean that people who can't afford it don't want 
> it---instead, it may mean that they've been priced out of the market. Thus, 
> prices are *not* always a direct indication of people's preferences. For 
> example, consider the set of households that are too poor to send their 
> children to college. Would you say that all of these households *prefer* to 
> not send their children to college? Or would you say that some of them would 
> like to send their children to college, but lack the money to do so? You 
> might claim that these families "prefer" to spend their money on food and 
> shelter instead of education, but this is only because survival needs must be

> satisfied before all others. The preference of food and shelter over 
> education doesn't imply that there is "enough education to go around." Some 
> families may desire education but lack the funds to enter the educational 
> market. Thus, education is a constrained resource although supply may equal 
> demand.
>
>
>
>> Supply meets demand.  The distribution of these things is unequal because 
>> people have different amounts of coconuts, which are unlimited [4].	The 
>> more you're willing to harvest, the more you have.
>
> Coconuts are not unlimited. I cannot emphasize this enough. There is no 
> island that produces an infinite amount of coconuts every day, just like 
> there is no nation that produces an infinite amount of goods or services or 
> natural resources every day. The laws of physics make this impossible. There 
> is only so much work that a physical process can accomplish in a day, and 
> this imposes an upper bound on the amount of resources that can exist. For 
> example, recent fluctuations in food prices are partially driven by 
> fluctuations in corn distribution. More corn is being diverted to ethanol 
> production, so less corn is available to feed to livestock and convert into 
> food. Less corn is available precisely because corn exists in finite 
> quantities. Since we can't grow an unlimited amount of it, allocation changes

> to one sector must affect all others.
>
> Any other resource, including a human-provided service, is similarly 
> constrained by physics-based limits. For example, consider legal services. 
> Poor people have a difficult time affording high quality legal 
> representation. This stems from three facts:
>
> 1) There is a finite supply of lawyers.
>
> 2) Most lawyers prefer to work for wealthy clients instead of poor ones, 
> since the former can pay more than the latter.
>
> 3) Lawyers have a finite amount of time. So, once they have finished meeting 
> with wealthier clients, they often lack the time to meet with poorer ones.
>
> As a result, poor people have been priced out of the legal services market. 
> But once again, this does not indicate their *preference* for shoddy legal 
> representation. Supply may equal demand, but we can't claim that net utility 
> has been maximized or that people are living their lives according to their 
> true preferences. The limited nature of resources prevents these optimal 
> outcomes.
>
>
>
>
>> It's unsettling to see Ingrid's vast piles of coconuts but after all, 
>> coconuts are unlimited so she hasn't hurt anyone.
>
> But coconuts are *not* unlimited, so she *is* hurting people, at least to the

> extent that a coconut for her is a coconut that someone else can't possess.
>
> If wealth in the real-world has infinity-based characteristics that coconuts 
> lack, you should use real wealth in your examples and talk about these 
> characteristics directly. Otherwise, I completely reject your hypotheses 
> about unlimited resources.
>
>
> ~j
>

-- 
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves  - -  search://"Daniel Reeves"

Q: How can you tell a dyslexic agnostic insomniac?
A: They lie awake at night wondering if there really is a dog.