Grief, on 08 July 2019 - 06:27 PM, said:
Azath Vitr (D, on 08 July 2019 - 05:51 PM, said:
Sure, you could selectively tax people for spending on that particular hobby. Though personally I would tend towards simply taxing the higher-wealth brackets far more. Professional athletes are far from the least deserving of their wealthy peers.
Azath Vitr (D, on 08 July 2019 - 05:51 PM, said:
It has. Then you get into a debate over what the "correct" value of a ticket should be since it's not being set by a market but rather by a central authority. In the event where this money is taken from the athletes, you're essentially removing wages from the worker to give to the consumer. Which feels somewhat debatable in terms of morality. Watching professional sports isn't particularly more productive than playing them, after all.
Azath Vitr (D, on 08 July 2019 - 05:51 PM, said:
If anything this makes the problem worse. Rather than superseding capitalism, the system you're describing is essentially hyper-capitalist. Algorithmic pricing discrimination works to more accurately gauge exactly what a consumer is willing to pay on the market (i.e, where on the demand curve they fall). What you're describing seems more like optimizing market-economics than superseding it, to me. It's a technological way to ensure that companies maximise their surplus while giving the minimum they can to the customer (i.e, selling at exactly the price point where consumers will buy, rather than customers being able to find bargains where the product costs less than they would pay).
Indeed, the potential for social harm and anti-competitive behaviour that is facilitated by algorithmic pricing has been a pretty hot topic in policy circles for the last few years (for one example see the OECD, Algorithms and Collusion: Competition Policy in the Digital Age).
worry, on 08 July 2019 - 05:53 PM, said:
Oh hello new sig quote it's been a while.
I was referring to the traditional advantages of capitalism over managed economies (for example, actually existing forms of communism, which relied on a top-down approach to data science that generally proved less effective, even though they tried to collect and process vast amounts of information with the tools then available; but advances in data collection and AI are now making a more bottom-up, real-time approach, with vastly more data and much better predictive models, seem feasible in the near future), and to using these tools in the context of a (primarily or fully) managed economy. In a way it would still maximize a sort of abstract 'capital' in the form of measures of efficiency, adapting the main positive aspects of capitalism. But the equivalent of 'corporate profit' would go to the general welfare, and motivation for human performance (to whatever extent human or transhuman labor it hasn't yet been automated away) would be based on fine-grained, data-driven scientific approaches to what actually motivates the individuals in question most effectively (that can also be ethically implemented, perhaps with virtual proxies---if people want power, for example, or prestige, or whatever 'wealth' in a post-money world might be abstracted into---human brains almost certainly didn't evolve to want 'money', or even to hoard gold, but what money provides, symbolizes, or allows).
But hypercapitalism of the sort you're referring to is already helping to create most of the information processing infrastructure necessary for a managed economy to replace capitalism.
Similarly, labor is increasingly going to be replaced by automation, including intellectual and even creative labor, rendering labor for capital superfluous. (The idea of labor as an intrinsic good is contrary to what major thinkers and authors in the western tradition believed until just the last few centuries. Aside from the potential for meditation (as an accidental consequence of interacting with human physiology, not logical necessity in the transhuman context), labor is odious. The idea that it's otherwise (not counting activities like self-perfection or cultivation), that work in itself is a positive, is an odious ideological tool for manipulating people to labor.