From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Sat Nov 30 2002 - 08:36:02 MST
On Friday, November 29, 2002 11:20 PM Ron H. Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
> Professor Caplan,
Ron, I've passed along your response to Bryan Caplan. (I forwarded it
to this list for comments, but he is not, to my knowledge, a member of
this list.)
[big snip]
> The result is that a guy like myself can almost run
> through a factory and spot the opportunities to cut cost
> and improve throughput while making the quality at least
> no worse; in cases where quality is a cost issue you
> improve it.
If what you say is so -- and, in my experience, you always find
incompetent people at the top and lots of room for process improvement
(I work in IT) -- then you can make a nice chunk of change either
starting your own business and doing things right or by offering up your
cost cutting services to others already in business. Well, have you?
I think the wider question, though, that Caplan addressed was whether
people should be rewarded equally when their output is not equal. The
belief of not a few on this list appears to be that there should either
be some minimum -- everyone gets at least a certain basket of goodies
regardless of what they do or who will give it to them (some variant of
welfare statism) -- or equal -- no one should get more or less than
anyone else (pure egalitarianism) -- level of reward regardless of what
individuals do. Applied to any other area, this notion would seem
absurd. For instance, one would expect a species to evolve if all
members had equal reproductive success -- save for drift effects.
Likewise, one would also not expect a brain to learn if all synapses
worked regardless of input and output. Academic rewards would be
meaningless if everyone passed the test -- especially those who haven't
mastered the material. Why must an economic system be any different?
This is another reason I think some of these ideas would lead to
non-extropic outcomes in society. Indeed this has been their track
record historically.
Happy Holidays!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:30 MST