The idea is that we should not rely too heavily on altruism, generosity, solidarity, or civic duty, because these moral sentiments are scarce resources that are depleted with use. Markets, which rely on self-interest, spare us from using up the limited supply of virtue. So, for example, if we rely on the generosity of the public for the supply of blood, there will be less generosity left over for other social or charitable purposes. If, however, we use the price system to generate the blood supply, people’s altruistic impulses will be available, undiminished, when we really need them. “Like many economists,” Arrow wrote:

I do not want to rely too heavily on substituting ethics for self-interest. I think it best on the whole that the requirement of ethical behavior be confined to those circumstances where the price system breaks down. . . . We do not wish to use up recklessly the scarce resources of altruistic motivation.

It is easy to see how this economistic conception of virtue, if true, provides yet further grounds for extending markets into every sphere of life, including those traditionally governed by non-market values. If the supply of altruism, generosity, and civic virtue is fixed, like the supply of fossil fuels, then we should try to conserve it. The more we use, the less we have. On this assumption, relying more on markets and less on morals is a way of preserving a scarce resource.

But to those not steeped in economics, this way of thinking about the generous virtues is strange, even far-fetched. It ignores the possibility that our capacity for love and benevolence is not depleted with use but enlarged with practice. Think of a loving couple. If, over a lifetime, they asked little of one another, in hopes of hoarding their love, how well would they fare? Wouldn’t their love deepen rather than diminish the more they called upon it? Would they do better to treat one another in more calculating fashion, to conserve their love for the times they really needed it?

Similar questions can be asked about social solidarity and civic virtue

joshua gross beschreibt wie thenextweb.com eine story von ihm übernahm und im original sehr unauffällig zu ihm zurücklinkten. der artikel wurde relativ schnell und ohne grössere hinweise geändert und thenextweb.com versuchte sich ziemlich unsouverän aus der affäre u ziehen.

joshua gross bekommt unterstützung von <a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/05/14/next-web-dirtbaggery">john gruber</a> und <a href="http://boingboing.net/2012/05/15/plagiarism-doesnt-work.html">rob beschizza</a>. mir kam dazu vor allem ein gedanke: auch boinboing hält sich nicht in jedem fall an die urheberrechte und klärt beispielsweise nicht immer alle bildrechte. was aber als goldene regel immer wieder durchscheint und als kleinster gemeinsamer nenner von den meisten akzeptiert ist ist <strong>fairness</strong>. unfaires verhalten regt immer und zuverlässig empörungswellen an. wer sich unfair verhält, bekommt fast immer auf die mütze.

"Mitt. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America."

"We consider the age-old problem of allocating items among different agents in a way that is efficient and fair. Two papers, by Dolev et al. and Ghodsi et al., have recently studied this problem in the context of computer systems. Both papers had similar models for agent preferences, but advocated different notions of fairness. We formalize both fairness notions in economic terms, extending them to apply to a larger family of utilities. Noting that in settings with such utilities efficiency is easily achieved in multiple ways, we study notions of fairness as criteria for choosing between different efficient allocations. Our technical results are algorithms for finding fair allocations corresponding to two fairness notions: Regarding the notion suggested by Ghodsi et al., we present a polynomial-time algorithm that computes an allocation for a general class of fairness notions, in which their notion is included. For the other, suggested by Dolev et al., we show that a competitive market equilibrium achieves the desired notion of fairness, thereby obtaining a polynomial-time algorithm that computes such a fair allocation and solving the main open problem raised by Dolev et al."

Answer: He writes an uncouth, butthurt, & strongly persuasive essay about what an arbitrary & vicious piece of child abuse it is.

Some dick on Mozy's forum:

> Backup is about trust, confidence ...
> Basically Mozy is saying "our business model is not good enough to sustain the service offered, so we have to charge you more". Sorry, I cannot trust you anymore.
> I'm a happy customer since 2006, you saved irreplaceable photos of my kids after a RAID huge failure ... I've recommended you do literally dozens of people.
> I was so happy with the "streaming" recovering utility ...
> And you abruptly (by email unlike some others apparently) ask me to triple my bill. I was more than offended by the "loyalty bonus".
> Like others I've looked at the competitors and I think I'll cancel my account tonight.

He loved their features & they'd saved his bacon for him in the past, but in his own words, Mozy's “business model is not good enough to sustain the service offered, so [they] have to charge [him] more”. What, pray tell, are they supposed to do about that? Keep mum about it until they collapse, taking his irreplaceable photos with them? Go back in time & charge more from the beginning? They're *doing something to maintain the service*, & they're *telling him about it*. What's not to fucking trust? The cunting dickhead seems to think that because they gave him something once, failure to do so in perpetuity is tantamount to slaughtering his firstborn. It's a pain, yes, & perhaps moving to someone else is a good move, but what they have done makes them *more* trustworthy than before; companies die without warning their customers rather than admit to unsustainability all the time. Fucking dickheaded moron.

Wealthy, motivated by greed, are more likely to cheat, study finds
#fairness #inequality

We can see, then, that the tax system in the United States violates the fundamental principles of income taxation. Those are “vertical equity,” which says that those with upper incomes should pay a higher effective tax rate than those with modest incomes — as far back as Adam Smith, ability to pay has always been a core principle of taxation — and “horizontal equity,” which says that those with roughly the same income ought to pay roughly the same taxes.