I misread you, your paying-your-own way price is more nuanced than I had realized. I think after including things like protecting against not selling all tickets and providing some extra for subsidizing student tickets, it would be noticeably above the break-even price. I think Skyler’s East Coast Megameetup provides a good case study, as of yesterday he had a “Low” price of $65, a “breakeven” price of $100, a “high” price of $120, with several additional sponsorship tiers. He defines the “breakeven” price as something like if everyone paid this and the event sells all tickets, we would break even, and the “high” price as something like if 2/3rds of participants paid High and 1⁄3 paid “Low”, while selling all tickets, the event would breakeven. I think under your schema the “paying your own way price” is the High one ($120), or even higher to account for the risk of not selling out, not the breakeven price of $100, right?
I think yes, this does resolve at least most of our disagreement. I think it’s reasonable to expect the software engineer to contribute more to public goods than the grad student. I think events count as mostly public goods (they’re technically club goods, since they’re somewhat rival and somewhat excludable, but there are still substantial spillover effects from events that should provide you value by binding the community together even if you don’t go, so I think rounding them to public goods is close enough.) Descriptively, not endorsing, I think some in the community would expect the software engineer to pay more than $120 or $135 (building in sales risk) for the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup, unless they have some good reason to have a low willingness to pay. But your framework has a lot to recommend it, and I think could reasonably be the median expectation from the community.
I agree with Skyler that it’s not reasonable to describe expecting public goods to be funded more proportionally to income as “stealing,” at least not at the margins we’re typically looking at in practice in the community. But it could get there! If, for instance, there was a social pressure and expectation that the richest 10 people in the community must pay for the whole event, I would describe that social pressure as immoral. I’d probably call it something like an “unjust entitlement to someone’s resources”, rather than stealing, but these are mainly prudential questions with fuzzy boundaries.
I see. Yes, I think that mostly does.
I misread you, your paying-your-own way price is more nuanced than I had realized. I think after including things like protecting against not selling all tickets and providing some extra for subsidizing student tickets, it would be noticeably above the break-even price. I think Skyler’s East Coast Megameetup provides a good case study, as of yesterday he had a “Low” price of $65, a “breakeven” price of $100, a “high” price of $120, with several additional sponsorship tiers. He defines the “breakeven” price as something like if everyone paid this and the event sells all tickets, we would break even, and the “high” price as something like if 2/3rds of participants paid High and 1⁄3 paid “Low”, while selling all tickets, the event would breakeven. I think under your schema the “paying your own way price” is the High one ($120), or even higher to account for the risk of not selling out, not the breakeven price of $100, right?
I think yes, this does resolve at least most of our disagreement. I think it’s reasonable to expect the software engineer to contribute more to public goods than the grad student. I think events count as mostly public goods (they’re technically club goods, since they’re somewhat rival and somewhat excludable, but there are still substantial spillover effects from events that should provide you value by binding the community together even if you don’t go, so I think rounding them to public goods is close enough.) Descriptively, not endorsing, I think some in the community would expect the software engineer to pay more than $120 or $135 (building in sales risk) for the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup, unless they have some good reason to have a low willingness to pay. But your framework has a lot to recommend it, and I think could reasonably be the median expectation from the community.
I agree with Skyler that it’s not reasonable to describe expecting public goods to be funded more proportionally to income as “stealing,” at least not at the margins we’re typically looking at in practice in the community. But it could get there! If, for instance, there was a social pressure and expectation that the richest 10 people in the community must pay for the whole event, I would describe that social pressure as immoral. I’d probably call it something like an “unjust entitlement to someone’s resources”, rather than stealing, but these are mainly prudential questions with fuzzy boundaries.