Is the push towards privitization all it's cracked up to be?

blatham wrote:

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I also think that representative democracy and unrepresentative plutocracy are the only choices, which you seem to imply.
No, I don't think they are the only possibilities at all. I do think, however, that the business community will inevitably push towards the second and away from the first. It's what I meant earlier when I spoke to fishin about a 'dynmamic'.

Sorry, I misspoke. I wanted to say "They are not the only alternatives".

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There's an article in today's paper that reports that the Bush administration has extended the release of mercury by factories until 2010. I guess making money is important that the current and future health of the environment.

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I have a big problem with them telling AIDS patients that they can't get the medication they want until the medical studies are in, which will take another 5 years.

In the 50s, medications containing large amounts of synthetic estrogen were prescribed for morning sickness. Turns out that they caused birth defects, and that high concentrations of estrogen are carcinogenic.

Are there cases where the delay caused by regulation results in horror stories? Absolutely. Are there other cases where they prevent potentially very dangerous drugs from reaching the consumer. Absolutely, and far more often than you probably realize. I've worked for people involved in malarial drug design, and the number of dead-ends they come up against where the drug turns out to have profoundly deleterious side effects after extensive research trials far outnumbers the number of successful drugs produced.

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I'll add that a big problem in all of this area we are discussing is what might be the proper measure of progress or advance in human activity?

The business community will and does promote certain yardsticks according to their interests (all the measurements like GDP which we commonly see proffered). To the degree that the business community is in ascention politically (and this is surely such a time), to that degree these yardsticks will be ascendent too. But there's no good reason we ought to assume that these measures describe something like 'the good life'.

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Interesting thing about the GDP: externalities frequently enhance it: once in the gains made by not preventing their production (triple negative, Jeeves?) and once in the gains made in dealing with them.

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patiodog wrote:

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I have a big problem with them telling AIDS patients that they can't get the medication they want until the medical studies are in, which will take another 5 years.

Are there cases where the delay caused by regulation results in horror stories? Absolutely. Are there other cases where they prevent potentially very dangerous drugs from reaching the consumer.

That's why I don't have a problem with the FDA certifying products. If it certifies a product as "very dangerous", that's all it needs to do to keep it from reaching most consumers. All I'm saying is that I prefer the final decision to be made by the person who bears the consequences,or his chosen doctor, but not the FDA bureaucrat whose incentives are highly asymetrical.

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blatham wrote:

But there's no good reason we ought to assume that these measures describe something like 'the good life'.

I'm curious: Which measure would you propose instead of GDP per head?

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Thomas wrote:

blatham wrote:
But there's no good reason we ought to assume that these measures describe something like 'the good life'.

I'm curious: Which measure would you propose instead of GDP per head?

Big discussion. And I'd have to cheat and take arguments from Sen and say they were mine (I'm an economics dummy). But, for anecdotal example, I was talking with my mechanic's wife a couple of years past. He's a Brit and she's Thai. She came here to Canada with him and though she found the access to 'stuff' considerably greater here, she was deeply torn by the simplicity and sense of community which she left behind. Another...as children, we grew up in a little farming town near Vancouver and everyone's house was about one half the size of modern homes. I doubt the increase in square footage has made us live more fulfilling or happy lives.

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That's an interesting rebuttal, fishin' -- exactly what have I oversimplified for you?

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gozmo wrote:

by what measure?

Can you clarify what you were asking me?

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blatham wrote:

But, for anecdotal example, I was talking with my mechanic's wife a couple of years past. He's a Brit and she's Thai. She came here to Canada with him and though she found the access to 'stuff' considerably greater here, she was deeply torn by the simplicity and sense of community which she left behind.

But she and her husband are staying in Canada rather than settling in Thailand -- which is evidence that they, as a couple, find the advantages of Canada greater than the disadvantages of Canada -- which is exactly what I'd predict based on a GDP per head comparison.

blatham wrote:

Another...as children, we grew up in a little farming town near Vancouver and everyone's house was about one half the size of modern homes. I doubt the increase in square footage has made us live more fulfilling or happy lives.

This would suggest that you move back into a home about half the size of your current one, and donate the rent you saved to charity. That way, you'd make some poor people happier without making yourself unhappier. Are you interested?

Talk is cheap. If you want to know what people really think, look at what they do, not at what they say.

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Talk is cheap. If you want to know what people really think, look at what they do, not at what they say.

Which is precisely why market forces won't reduce externalities (except as an outgrowth of technological advancements): we, as consumers, may pay lip service to being appalled by an industry's practices, but we are not, on the whole, likely to withhold out dollars.

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patiodog wrote:

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Talk is cheap. If you want to know what people really think, look at what they do, not at what they say.

Which is precisely why market forces won't reduce externalities (except as an outgrowth of technological advancements):

I agree with you about market forces. Where I disagree is when you imply, without stating it explicitly, that government forces will, on net, reduce externalties. I just see no reason why this would be the case. Just because one solution isn't perfect, it doesn't follow that another one is better.

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Where I disagree is when you imply, without stating it explicitly, that government forces will, on net, reduce externalties.

Which is precisely what I'm trying to figure out for myself, and why I'm involved in the conversation. I don't really buy into a blanket statement that regulation is good or bad, and would like to be able to develop an eye for when gov't regulation can (and, further, when it actually will) reduce externalities and when it won't. It's not as though "regulation" is some sort of unifaceted tool that is only capable of exerting a single type of influence. The government of the United States, for instance, has a distinctly different effect on, say, pollution, than did the government of the USSR. I don't mean to imply that regulation will always exert a positive net effect any more than I believe that it never can.

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Talk is cheap. If you want to know what people really think, look at what they do, not at what they say.

Oh come on. That's a cheap way out of every complex dilemma we face. Because morals or values questions are difficult, let's leave them out of all calculations.

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blatham wrote:

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Talk is cheap. If you want to know what people really think, look at what they do, not at what they say.

Oh come on. That's a cheap way out of every complex dilemma we face. Because morals or values questions are difficult, let's leave them out of all calculations.

That's not what I'm advocating, and I'm wonder how you conclude that from what I said. But you offered two specific examples as evidence that (in my words) money doesn't buy happiness, so GDP per head isn't a good measure of a nation's true welfare. Yet in both of your examples, the solution of the complex dilemma, as revealed by people's actions, is just what you would predict if money did buy happiness, and GDP did reflect true welfare reasonably well.

So I don't see how your examples support your case that "there's no good reason we ought to assume that these measures describe something like 'the good life.' "

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fishin' wrote:

blatham wrote:
. . . In Ontario, several years ago, as a consequence of reduced regulatory staff for municipal water supply (under a business-minded government) a bunch of folks ended up dead.

Was the lack of regulatory staff failures of privatization or a failure of planners to determine what the real requirements were???

I can field that part of the question. I read about this extensively and it was all over the tv news in Canadia at the time. According to CBC, and several newspaper articles (and when The Globe and Mail and The National Post agree, you know somethings stinks, because that's a violation of their respective editorial policies), the failure was a result both of the non-functioning self-regulatory responsibility of private enterprise, and a failure of the Tories' responsible ministry. This is precisely something i was trying to get at earlier, which is that the public needs to be responsible for the vigilance without which no one can expect good results, as the odds are high that capitalists won't reliably regulate themeselves, especially if they believe no one is watching.

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What caused the great East Coast blackout?

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Since Leno was having a field day with jokes about train accidents and AmTrak, I wonder how serious an escalation of train accidents there's been since its privitization?

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Lightwizard wrote:

What caused the great East Coast blackout?

The fact that electricity had been deregulated the wrong way. Power production got privatized, but the network to distribute the power did not. It couldn't have been, because power distribution is the prototype of a natural monopoly. This state of affairs left power distribution as a public good; none of the producers had an incentive to maintain and upgrade the grid, because any investment would have benefitted mostly other suppliers. So the grid deteriorate to the point where the Great East Coast black out occured.

As I said in my earlier post, this goes to show that the how of privatization is at least as important as the if.

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Is the push towards privitization all it's cracked up to be?

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