Chris, I agree with your observation that people don’t think very consequentialist here. However, there is also something to be said for a solid application of common sense.
Yes, the obvious economic argument is that Walmart is under no obligation to hire employees, and any employee is free to leave whenever, so they should be allowed to treat them any way they want. The underlying assumptions here are that the (job) market is efficient so that no single company can influence it, people can get new jobs instantly, people can rationally decide whether to switch jobs on the fly, etc. etc. Of course these assumptions are not correct. For example, if a company becomes successful by beating all competition, say by driving costs lower than anyone else can, and then one day the company fires all employees and packs up and leaves there is going to be a very real hit to the economy. There certainly is not going to be an identical company performing the same service there the next day. In the case of Walmart, they are one of the largest companies in the world. It would be extremely unrealistic to assume that if they don’t pay their employees enough, everyone could just go and leave and it would be the same as if Walmart had never existed. The larger a company you are, the better a bargaining position you have, and the more capable you are of driving down wages to make a higher profit.
The point I’m trying to get across here is this: The reason many people object to Walmart’s policies is because their moral intuitions tell them that there is something wrong when a company doesn’t pay its employees enough for them to feed themselves. Yes, a lot of it boils down to “Companies Boo, people Jay!”. No, it isn’t very consequentialist. But you should probably not ignore that moral intuition, because a good helping of common sense is usually better than an overly simplistic economic argument based on unrealistic assumptions. At least in my experience.
If possible, I would like to hear the reason for the downvoting of the above post. Specifically, whether the reason is:
1) It discusses politics (in response to an article about politics?) 2) The reasoning is fallacious 3) It was written by me 4) People don’t like silly examples 5) It sounds vaguely leftish 6) The point I made is so obvious that it’s redundant 7) people prefer to have their politics debates one-sided
8) It’s too long, says very little and doesn’t have a summary preceding it.
9) Almost all of your writing is either political or meta, which suggests you don’t belong here and will only add noise. 10) You’ve clearly failed to learn from previous criticism.
Given that immediately after you posted this, about 10 of my older and unrelated posts got downvoted in a row (and counting), I’m going to guess that you are one of the people block-downvoting me. Classy.
I wish I could say that it doesn’t depress me that people would be willing to go through all that effort just to make me feel bad, but it kind of does.
Perhaps someone just went through some of your comments and didn’t like them either. You feeling bad is probably not the sole intention of those downvotes. People will be more than happy to upvote some of your comments if they start being relevant to rationality.
I looked through some of your comments, and they’re not equally downvoted. Some of them are upvoted. I expect there’s some signal there if you’re willing to look for it. Might not be a signal you like or care about, though.
The single most important reason for my downvote was the invocation of “common sense”, which I tend to read as “don’t bother doing any analysis, just fall back on your learned heuristics”; I’m fairly sure this is a correct reading in context. Now, that’s good advice in time-constrained or highly complex situations, but this is neither. To make matters worse, it’s a politically polarized topic, which implies that the salient heuristics are very likely going to be split along ideological lines: half the people you’re talking to are using their common sense, which just happens to say something different from yours. That in turn implies either that you aren’t aware of this dynamic or that you’re using rallying tactics, and I don’t want to see either one on this site.
I also feel it’s too long for its content. Additionally, it’s in a political thread, arguing for a politicized stance, and both lower my threshold for downvoting.
Chris, I agree with your observation that people don’t think very consequentialist here. However, there is also something to be said for a solid application of common sense.
Yes, the obvious economic argument is that Walmart is under no obligation to hire employees, and any employee is free to leave whenever, so they should be allowed to treat them any way they want. The underlying assumptions here are that the (job) market is efficient so that no single company can influence it, people can get new jobs instantly, people can rationally decide whether to switch jobs on the fly, etc. etc. Of course these assumptions are not correct. For example, if a company becomes successful by beating all competition, say by driving costs lower than anyone else can, and then one day the company fires all employees and packs up and leaves there is going to be a very real hit to the economy. There certainly is not going to be an identical company performing the same service there the next day. In the case of Walmart, they are one of the largest companies in the world. It would be extremely unrealistic to assume that if they don’t pay their employees enough, everyone could just go and leave and it would be the same as if Walmart had never existed. The larger a company you are, the better a bargaining position you have, and the more capable you are of driving down wages to make a higher profit.
The point I’m trying to get across here is this: The reason many people object to Walmart’s policies is because their moral intuitions tell them that there is something wrong when a company doesn’t pay its employees enough for them to feed themselves. Yes, a lot of it boils down to “Companies Boo, people Jay!”. No, it isn’t very consequentialist. But you should probably not ignore that moral intuition, because a good helping of common sense is usually better than an overly simplistic economic argument based on unrealistic assumptions. At least in my experience.
If possible, I would like to hear the reason for the downvoting of the above post. Specifically, whether the reason is:
1) It discusses politics (in response to an article about politics?)
2) The reasoning is fallacious
3) It was written by me
4) People don’t like silly examples
5) It sounds vaguely leftish
6) The point I made is so obvious that it’s redundant
7) people prefer to have their politics debates one-sided
8) It’s too long, says very little and doesn’t have a summary preceding it. 9) Almost all of your writing is either political or meta, which suggests you don’t belong here and will only add noise. 10) You’ve clearly failed to learn from previous criticism.
Given that immediately after you posted this, about 10 of my older and unrelated posts got downvoted in a row (and counting), I’m going to guess that you are one of the people block-downvoting me. Classy.
I wish I could say that it doesn’t depress me that people would be willing to go through all that effort just to make me feel bad, but it kind of does.
Perhaps someone just went through some of your comments and didn’t like them either. You feeling bad is probably not the sole intention of those downvotes. People will be more than happy to upvote some of your comments if they start being relevant to rationality.
I looked through some of your comments, and they’re not equally downvoted. Some of them are upvoted. I expect there’s some signal there if you’re willing to look for it. Might not be a signal you like or care about, though.
The single most important reason for my downvote was the invocation of “common sense”, which I tend to read as “don’t bother doing any analysis, just fall back on your learned heuristics”; I’m fairly sure this is a correct reading in context. Now, that’s good advice in time-constrained or highly complex situations, but this is neither. To make matters worse, it’s a politically polarized topic, which implies that the salient heuristics are very likely going to be split along ideological lines: half the people you’re talking to are using their common sense, which just happens to say something different from yours. That in turn implies either that you aren’t aware of this dynamic or that you’re using rallying tactics, and I don’t want to see either one on this site.
I also feel it’s too long for its content. Additionally, it’s in a political thread, arguing for a politicized stance, and both lower my threshold for downvoting.
I’ve no idea who you are and I’ve just downvoted you because your post is a tedious wall-of-text.
LWers are mostly socialists. If you’re getting downvoted here while saying “leftish” things, what you’re saying probably has some actual problems.