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?
My state has free school lunch for all kids. However it’s typical school lunch quality and quantity
My kid’s high school wants to install a fingerprint system to keep hungry kids from cheating by using the code of someone who brings lunch. You want to install an expensive system to collect biometrics n kids to save like $2 per instance, or whatever pittance goes into school lunches?
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?)
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”
Many governments cut social programs that would result in net benefits economically for society (e.g. disability services that mean more people can maintain jobs, education, family planning, public transit, all mean more money is being made overall including more taxes going to the government). But it isn’t a direct enough benefit and it’s hard to quantify, whereas slashing funding feels like immediate savings.
Imagine no longer paying for your phone service in order to save money, then being confused about why none of the jobs you applied to are calling you back. Same logic.
Well said. Using the US as a super obvious example, there’s been data for a long time that offering free publicly available birth control had a MASSIVE ROI. And yet we have piles of idiots out here saying “I don’t want my taxes going up for pay for some stranger’s birth control!”.
We can even set aside considering a “decent human” aspect where we’re happy to save women and men from PILES of stress, strife, and burden. It just makes a fuckload of economic sense if you’re not dumb or some evil Handmaiden’s Tale-style piece of shit.
It just makes a fuckload of economic sense if you’re not dumb or some evil Handmaid’s Tale-style piece of shit
Bro you can’t just call out 80 of elected government officials like that, you may hurt their feelings.
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.
But then it stops being a prisoner’s dilemma. What makes the game so intriguing is that individual rewards take you to a suboptimal outcome. When the collective and individual incentives agree, it’s called a prisoner’s delight.
I had to look that (prisoner’s delight) up, very interesting thanks. TIL!
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2011.02307.x#b6](Binmore, 2004)
