A friend from Argentina once told me Argentina keeps its best wines for themselves and exports the mediocre stuff, even at the sake of profits.
Similarly, a friend from Turkey once said he couldn’t find good Turkish olives outside of Turkey because “Turks are terrible businessmen and keep the best olives to themselves.”
These are anecdotal and might be untrue but I liked the idea.
At an individual level, it’s irrational to cooperate in a prisoner’s dilemma yet experiments show people cooperate.
Contributing to open source projects may fall into this category.
Have you observed any obvious behavior that goes counter to profit maximization? Any cool examples?
I don’t know if they still do it but when I was a kid in the 70’s they would dump semi trailer tanks of milk in the ditch to maintain pricing and supply.
Heard the same (keep the best for themselves, only sell the inferior stuff) about Spanish olive oil, Italian pasta, and Chinese everything.
Buying locally will always be better than what you get in the supermarket. I think that’s true for any country.
It’s the stuff that’s produced on a smaller scale and can be harvestet ripe.
Gawd forbid people actually enjoy the things they produce rather than sell them abroad.for maximum profit.
It’s only irrational to cooperate in a prisoner’s dilemma game if the rewards are set appropriately for that.
If you raise the individual rewards of the cooperation above those of the individual rewards people would get for defecting, people will in fact cooperate.
Others in the thread have already hinted at this fact: logic and optimization are lasers that can be pointed at anything. Point it towards money and of course it’s irrational to forfeit profits for good wine. Point it towards the good wine and of course it’s irrational to forfeit evenings drinking good wine with friends.
Put another way, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Of course, this doesn’t mean most people don’t share some common values. Most people want both wine and profits!
Not only is logic and optimization a laser, but optimization can happen at many levels.
There are many experiments where the most egg-laying hens are selected and bred, but often these hens are aggressive and kill each other. However, when whole groups of hens (e.g. a group of 5 hens) are chosen, some of the hens do not lay eggs but are peace-makers and create the perfect environment for egg-laying eggs to lay many eggs.
In this example, optimization happened at the group-level and not at the individual level.
Similarly, rich people who leave high-tax societies end up in a ‘Lamborghini in a road made of mud’ situation. However, if rich people contribute to the societies that made them rich in the first place, everyone benefits. There are lower anxiety, depression, and suicide rates for everyone (including the rich) in more egalitarian societies. Here you can see the laser and the levels: the laser is either pointed at the luxury car or the quality of life, while the level is either the individual or whole society.
Group-level selection seems irrational for those who think that being an egotist is the only way.
Of course, life is not just about lasers and levels. It’s about values. Rationality is a tool. It can help us live valued lives or trip us up. If you want good wine, good cheese, money to buy something else, good friends, and a good society, that’s what matters.
Both of those seems very rational in term of maximazing value.
The UK under Thatcher utterly anihilated its own manufacturing sector at a huge longterm economic detriment seemingly just to destroy labour unions.
The UK manufacturing sector for raw materials and basic products was on the way out anyway due to costs being so low in Asia, so it was more to be able to shut it down and save the government from needing to bail it out while also destroying labour unions while they were at it, hence why the advanced manufacturers (JCB, Rolls Royce, etc.) were largely unaffected
This.
It’s irrational to consider maximum monetary gain to be the only best outcome. Why? What’s the goal? Money is only means to an end, not intrinsically worth anything.
Put another way, if the Argentinians cherish good wine, how are they better off with slightly more money and mediocre wine? (I guess they could use the profits to buy good wine?)
Totally agree. That’s why I love it so much. Like a big “fuck you” to economic theory and profit maximization.
You can only get the best result in the prisoners dilemma by working with others.
Believing that humans make rational economic decisions is pretty irrational economically.
As is centering economics on a theory that ignores the means of production.
I’m sure you could write an entire collection of books on the irrationality of Brexit.
As James O’Brien graciously puts it: “We are the first country in history to have placed economic sanctions upon itself”
Besides the dumbass tariffs imposed by the US on everyone, including an island that only has penguins?
My father once told me of an old IBM machine, I think it was the System 3 model 15D or one of its contemporaries, or maybe the original System 38. It had some amount of memory, like 32k of memory (I’m going to get these numbers wrong), and to upgrade it you could spend many thousands of dollars to have IBM come install a control board to upgrade it to 64k. The memory was already physically in the box; they manufactured and delivered it to the customer, and sold the memory control board as an exorbitant cost option, when it was the RAM (it might have even been core storage) that was the expensive part to make.
To a lesser degree, I’ve been hearing about cars that install cost options on all models, but they don’t hook them up on the lower tiers. Like apparently all Lotus Exiges have power mirrors, they’ve all got motors in them, but they don’t give you the switch unless you pay for it. You can go to a Ford dealership, buy the right switch and just pop it in and it’ll work. I suppose it can make some sense to reduce part counts, but it’s getting to the point where it’s "we installed the option in the car, it’s hooked up, it’s perfectly functional, we’ve already put in the expense, and we’ll allow the software to turn it on if you pay for it.
A friend from Italy told me that they keep the best cheese for themselves and export the rest.
While Italy does have very good cheese, I can’t help but to be reminded that they also consider maggot infested cheese to be excellent.
Actively ruining the ecosystem and the climate, two things we probably cannot survive as a species without them working smoothly, so we can all buy new phones and clothes and help less than a handful of us to become even richer than they already are.
Imho, that’s an impressive demonstration of our stupidity and one of the most impressive species-level suicide I can think of. Even dinosaurs were not that stupid and they needed a meteor to hit the planet for them to be wiped out from its surface. Something we humans are working real hard to manage doing all by ourselves.
To our credit, I should say those few already very rich people will indeed be reaching unheard-of levels of richness. And while helping them do so we will get our new shiny phones and new fashionable clothing. Yeah, I suppose.
