So this let me make a comparison between trends in college and the World of Warcraft. Probably like many other people, I assumed WoW would became the "MMO for stupid people" when it became evident the designers were reacting to popular opinion and were either not aware of or not interested in suggestions that would have kept the quality of the game high by maintaining accurate measures of skill. This would allow intelligent people to play other MMOs while WoW distracted stupid people from joining other games.
But not only did other MMOs do even worse, the trend toward an easier difficulty and obsoletion of content did not actually attract more people. Many people came back for the Northrend expansion but much of that was probably for the story, and the developers openly admitted that subsequent increases in difficulty in the expansion following it were because the "easy" difficulty was not as popular as they had expected. Being able to faceroll content was not enough to attract stupid players to an MMO. It was clear that achievements had value only because they were based on truth—people with actual skill and determination who were playing the game.
College is the same. As it becomes more expensive and fewer people see it as a good investment, intelligent people will begin to decide that it isn't worth going and the underlying reality which the 'signal' of a college degree is based on will change. (Complicated though...)
And 'being wealthy' as a signal for ability is the same way. If highly competent people choose to work less, the signal of income or wealth will also decay. But the factors reducing the likelihood of this happening were described in the previous post.
So this might accurately describe the present:
1) OWS did not display willingness to support the idea that "the middle class is to blame for the recession". Posts in early June, as well as previous forum topics on OWS website which led up to it.
2) summary posts on this site which conveyed the message "logic has failed", while suggesting that problems still exist. What this could have been seen as meaning: "the middle class is dishonest but they still have good intentions", and therefore it is morally acceptable to support the idea on this site.
3) what it might actually have been seen to mean: "I have failed and everything on this site is wrong." Evidence, working from my history...
- Think of the Children
- Continuing to suggest subsidies of peripheral EU states instead of those countries just raising taxes. (Also see: Spanish local governments spending more than they have to get votes.)
- Completely refusing to say anything controversial. (Comment about this column.)
The first of two vacations was announced shortly after I commented on recent posts, after having avoided reading the site once Paul Krugman mentioned his schedule was taking him to Seattle.
This could have been intended to mean that ... Paul Krugman was uncertain of my motives, or something. (Maybe someone could have interpreted a later comment to mean I was not interested in getting people to use the idea, but it was after this happened.) I really don't know. I have always seen the most efficient way to get people to use the idea on this site is to have it be supported by economists. I sort of hoped that the person mentioned at the start of this post, who studied economics, would get people to use the idea maybe but when they didn't immediately reply, I tried contacting various professors listed on Wikipedia (who seemed like they might be interested) and so on. The person I mentioned said that even professors did not have much influence on politics, and linking a study on the number of citations in different academic disciplines and its implication that actual usefulness or relevance to real-world problems is not valued as much as getting published I said that maybe it's because professors do not care if they can't affect politics, but I did not outright reject the academic conception of success as accurately measuring ability.
That was a few hours before... no, less than 24 hours after I wrote the bananas thing. I also linked to the BBC prison study in the same email.
But I still think my characterization of economists as "only interested in GDP" was accurate at the time I made it. See for example, this post about actual vs potential GDP... though I don't know what relation, if any, it had with a comment I made the previous day. Should note that potential GDP only measures what it would be if less people were unemployed, so if most people decided to work less then "potential GDP" would decrease just as it would increase if more people decided to enter the workforce.
A line from the song Alchemy by Girls Dead Monster is about "wanting to brighten everything I touch as I go". Also Gangnam style by Psy is finally showing up in Youtube's Most Liked charts lol, at twice the second place video. Favorites are broken at the time of writing though, all videos have 0 favorites in their statistics and the top list.
So the conclusion is that Paul Krugman made a mistake about whether I had a "backup plan" in case OWS didn't support the 'blame the middle class' argument, or whether I expected a favourable outcome for myself if OWS had done so. Oh what I was going to mention earlier: the first email I sent out, addressed to the Obama administration, I included everyone in the "To" field. This was to suggest distributed responsibility. The next one I sent out to everyone on my contact list had everyone in the "Bcc" field, because the fact no one really responded to the previous one and it had no real-world effects suggested that people were aware of the perceived conflict etc., and were more interested in helping people they knew by avoiding the ethical standard of supporting change than helping strangers they did not know and who they suspected might be using the "selfish" strategy of choosing one's own benefit.
With that situation, allowing people think that 'someone else will take care of it' by showing everyone's email address would not benefit the world.
If OWS had supported the 'blame the middle class' argument and this led to people using the idea of working less, it would have meant I underestimated the competence of the typical person (including OWS supporters)... as seen by the video I linked at the end of the "Why economists are wrong" argument (first seen here). A given change in the world will be seen as having a certain benefit by any specific person. It may be possible to manipulate their perceptions so they overestimate this benefit but this is not an honest thing to do. Meanwhile, understanding that change will incur a specific cost for someone. Smarter people have a lower cost for understanding things. This is the time and mental cost but also implications for other people and situations, which is why intelligent people are less likely to be traumatized after undergoing a traumatic event, because they are more able to integrate unexpected events with a view of the world where people are still 'good'.
If the cost of understanding a change exceeds the expected benefits, then there is no reason to think someone will support a change or that they will try to get their friends to support it. It is easy to assign value to economic changes to one's situation but more difficult for things like "not being accused of being greedy by people with less money than you", especially when people feel they can compensate for inequality by associating only by people with similar amounts of money and thereby maintain the perception that there are no significant problems in the world. And people who do see value in the non-economic changes are generally intelligent enough to fall into the 'feedback gap'.
So I am just a little afraid that pointing out someone's mistakes will make them ignore the idea on this site by letting them tell themselves that someone else will take care of it. By now I have pointed out mistakes of basically everyone involved in the situation, multiple times even... and I am not sure how people would feel about this if they read it.
This post was supposed to be a refutation of the assertion in the previous one that the situation could only be fixed if taxes were raised on the middle class, giving them an incentive to care about what happens to the poor. This time by attacking the system of credentials for economic expertise.
But then people might expect me to be interested in the topic! And what would I do then?
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