raywardI've come to bury tech, not praise it. Anyway, this video is a fair presentation of the bleak future when economists control our lives. Have a nice Sunday.
raywardThose who listen closely to the video will pick up on what the economists at Uber are doing, which is tweaking algorithms to maximize the revenues of Uber. That sounds like a great idea, right? Economic efficiency and all that. But who is getting tweaked with all that good tweaking? Uber drivers,that's who. One economist did offer a tweak Uber is considering to help women drivers, namely tweaking how riders are charged, with more weight in the algorithm for time spent on the ride than on the distance traveled. Why would this help women drivers? Because they are sooo sloooow. The (woman) economist who offered this solution to the woman problem only said it's a tweak Uber is considering, not a tweak that has been tweaked. Why not just tell the women drivers to speed up, or get out of the way and go back to their knitting!
EdREverything I have read on this blog for the last year or so leads me to believe that economists desire a dystopian future right out of the first "Blade Runner". They envision world of dense cities populated by people with no social capital, a transactional world without familial or communal bonds, a world of strangers competing against each other according to the rules of the free market, a world of cities stretching to the horizon without forests and prairies.
Matt YoungPrices are used to balance supply and demand? ---------
Patently false and one of the great blunders of economics. What balances supply and demand is our desire to avoid long lines. It works, absolutely, maintaining a trend toward equilibrium without regard to price. The system is stable when there are 1 or 2 customers in the line, and 0 or 1 clerks serving them. At that point, Walmart velocity equation is maximally accurate, and prices work. Prices second, queue stabilization first. One of the major blunders of economics.
It is not a vision, it's a nightmare.
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Patently false and one of the great blunders of economics. What balances supply and demand is our desire to avoid long lines. It works, absolutely, maintaining a trend toward equilibrium without regard to price. The system is stable when there are 1 or 2 customers in the line, and 0 or 1 clerks serving them. At that point, Walmart velocity equation is maximally accurate, and prices work. Prices second, queue stabilization first. One of the major blunders of economics.