Messages

No, I want thewake doing the math.

Show us the math, thewake.  I want to see what kind of economic students the 584th ranked college in the USA is producing.  Teach us, oh wise one.

what kind of math do you want me to do?

I mean, it's not like I can get the information out of someone's head and actually have real marginal benefit and marginal cost curves. The graph, while based on a few assumptions that can be shown to generally be true, is ultimately more or less a heuristic that can't take into account all the multitude of variables that actually exist in the real world and may, or may not, be measurable. I'm also assuming moments of life is normal good, which may be quite stupid. :P

Notice that I explicitly said we are unable to actually measure utility. We just know it exists.

To quote Joseph Jastrow 'Create a belief in the theory and the facts will create themselves'.

I don't know if this fits in with the serious debate going on, but I like the quote, and so should you.

This is a serious discussion?

Anyone?  ?  ?      Anyone?  ?  ?
   \

He was actually giving a real econ lecture when they filmed that movie

----themoreyouknow!!--->

Ooh!  Can we then argue that life itself is meaningless and has no inherent value, since the only true thing that's happening in the universe is the probabilistic movement of sub-atomic particles in the void?

this is my fetish

When I was in high school, the teachers would tell gullible students to go ask another teacher for the key to the pool on the roof. The teacher they were sent to would be like, nah go to yet another teacher they have it. And the kid would get shuffled from teacher to teacher until they realized it was a joke at their expense.

currently have a few books with markers in them

Coming Apart by Charles Murray
Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective by Thomas Sowell
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche
Parliament of Whores by P.J. O'Rourke

as for camus, I can highly recommend his fiction.

How can the cost of living another moment (barring shit that makes you ask for euthanasia) EVER outweigh the benefit, to ME?
I might outlive my usefulness to YOU, or the Machine, but that's notnthe same. Is it?

I wanna LIVE!

I find that trying to put an economic value on life hardly ever leads to 'good things'...

We put value on life all the time though. It's part of living. If every life was infinitely valuable, in our world of scarcity, we'd have an irresolvable problem of resource allocation.

Anyway, death is a dilemma that we all must face. But maybe at some point we just get weary of being alive. Even if we assume we might some day be immortal, might we still realize that our human existence wasn't meant to last forever? Maybe death is as natural as being born and no less or more desirable. It just is.

So, this guy graphed postmodernism.  I fucking hate postmodernists.  Modernists say there is a solution to everything.  Postmodernists say everything is fucked and you can't fix it.  So if you're sick of the miseryguts doom & gloom bullshit, punch a postmodernist.

I'm an American not any of your commie bullshit.

Or maybe he graphed what he assumes middle age is like.  I'm middle aged, and I'm fucking awesome.  I am better off, and a better¹ person than I was at 20.

I'm a worse person than I was at 20. However, I like being worse.

I'm 9000 years old.

But he's going to give us a lesson in macroeconomics.  Someone give him the clown shoes.

Nah, macro is pretty fucked. Go read a book on that one.

Let me be more explicit, which may give all of you a lesson in microeconomics and marginal theory:

The "good" the hypothetical individual here is consuming are units, or rather moments, of life. so the x-axis is time lived. Moving further to the right indicates that the person is living longer, and therefore consuming more and more units of life, time on earth, etc.

The y axis is utility (aka benefit). one can't actually measure utility in and of itself, so in most cases the utility is measured in dollars by assuming that the highest amount someone is willing to pay for something is a dollar measure of the utility one derives from it. In this case, because we can't really measure the value of a unit of life in dollars given our current means of measuring things, we have to just assume that there is a level of utility that exists and we could measure it if we had the ability to (and do we not all feel how much value we derive from consuming a certain product or doing a certain thing? are we not able to discern our own utility from consuming something? so, differing levels of utility do exist)

Let me now define MARGINAL utility as: "The additional satisfaction a consumer gains from consuming one more unit of a good or service" (thanks, Investopedia)

for normal goods, they obey the law of diminishing marginal utility (link to an explanation). So, the curve labeled "marginal benefit of living one more moment" indicates that the additional utility of living another moment of life (aka consuming another unit of this good we're analyzing) declines with each unit consumed. Of course it may not be shaped like a straight line for anybody, but we're assuming that generally, over time, it trends downward. So a straight line is good enough to illustrate my point.

The curve labeled "marginal cost of living one more moment" assumes that the cost (in utility) of living one more moment of life, as we move rightward along the x-axis, goes up for each unit of life consumer, moment of life lived, however you'd like to say. This seems like a decent assumption to make. As we get older, life tends to suck more for most people and it's costlier to keep oneself alive. Organs deteriorate, as well as the mind. Even if the costs of living one more moment of life were constant throughout life (i.e. the marginal cost curve were horizontal) the graph would still illustrate my point:

Which is that, at time T* on the graph, the marginal cost of living one more moment of life equals the marginal benefits (at a utility level of U*). So, following this logic, continuing to live another moment past this will in fact cost more in terms of utility to a person than they get out of it (in other words, it will be "more trouble than it's worth").

I was really stoned when I came up with this idea.

This diagram doesn't even make sense according to economic theory.  And that's quite an accomplishment.

how so?
declining marginal benefits
increasing marginal costs
--holding all other things constant

makes perfect sense. looks like a standard graph of marginal benefits and marginal costs

pretty self explanatory as long as you understand marginal analysis:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marginal-analysis.asp