Exploitation of labor

When asked about my economic politics, I say I’m “socialist, kinda”. I owe a lot of that to listening to The Barefoot Bum over many years talking directly about how economic systems work, and the problems with capitalism. By comparison, I find a lot of other socialist arguments on the internet unsatisfying. It’s all “overthrow capitalism” and “seize the memes of production”, and I wish we could talk about specifics more often.

So, I’d like to lead a discussion about the problems with capitalism, much like what I did with health insurance years ago. Don’t treat me as an authority, tell me how wrong I am, discuss.

My first subject of discussion, is exploitation of labor. This is a Marxist concept, but I’m not interested in exploring what exactly Marx did or did not believe. I’m interested in exploring (and improving upon) the concept as I understand it. So here goes:

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Weird accounting

Something I now feel comfortable venting about, now that my PhD is over a year behind me, is their timekeeping practices.

At some point in the middle of my PhD, they started requiring that we record hours.  I (and other students) were pissed off about this, because we weren’t being paid by the hour, we were on fixed salaries.  Being salaried has the disadvantage that your employer pressures you to work long hours, because they know they don’t have to pay you overtime.  Being paid by the hour is better, but has the disadvantage that you have to record hours.  By making us record hours, while keeping us on fixed salaries, we were getting the worst of both worlds.

Once we actually started recording hours, it was even more ridiculous than we initially thought.  It was not possible to record accurate hours–the maximum number of hours I could record was about 20 hours per week.  This was supposedly because I had a “50% appointment”, meaning that half of my time was devoted to my position as a research assistant, and the other half devoted to being a student.  Which was not accurate by the way.  I wasn’t taking any more classes at this point.

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Why video games are so flammable

This is a repost of an article I wrote in 2013.  I was reminded of this post because I recently wrote about a queer theory paper about video game economics.  Wow, some of my references are quite dated!  And this predates gamergate!  Also, LOL at “I don’t intend to make a habit out of discussing economics”.

With Black Friday upon us, the flame wars over next-gen gaming consoles have really been heating up.  Which will win: the Wii U, XBox One, or PlayStation 4?  No one truly knows, but gamers everywhere agree that everyone else is wrong and should feel bad about being so stupid.

While I don’t intend to make a habit out of discussing economics, I do think that video game flame wars can be understood within economics.  The problem is twofold:

  1. There is limited space for video games and video game consoles, and everyone knows it.
  2. Video games are in a state of monopolistic competition.

Video game producers are most efficient when they make fewer, larger games, for many reasons.  Developing a game is a one-time cost, while actually manufacturing the game is cheap.  Selling more copies of a game is not a matter of paying for more manufacture, but paying for better advertisement and development so that more people want to play.1  Note that it’s much easier to advertise one big game than to advertise many little ones.  The main reason to have more smaller games is to better cater to different tastes (e.g. see the indie game industry).

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Paper: Gaming’s Queer Economy

In my last link roundup, I pointed to a paper called “Coin of Another Realm: Gaming’s Queer Economy“, by Christopher Goetz. I’m all over this, because I’m really interested in the economics of video games, and what this means for people with minority tastes. That’s not the direction Goetz takes, but still.

But I must warn you, you may find this paper infuriating. It shows some of the most frustrating tendencies of critical theory and queer theory. For example, in queer theory, “queer” often does not refer to sexuality, but instead means something like, “against norms”, “relating to oppressed groups”, or “in opposition to reproductive futurism”. Frustrating, as an activist, but also frustratingly standard!  And it’s not really much of an economic analysis–the paper quite literally uses a child’s understanding of economics. It’s a “literary” view of economics: myths, not maths.

But my purpose is neither to attack nor defend the paper (although I may do either incidentally), but to engage with it in good faith. The reader is welcome to quit in frustration at any point, and tell me about it in the comment section.
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The ethics of music in public spaces

On multiple occasions, I have toyed with the idea that it is unethical to play music in public places. It’s an idea that is difficult to take seriously, because it’s just so contrary to the culture we currently live in. Current norms surrounding public music seem to work just fine, so why try to fix what ain’t broken? And yet, it’s difficult for me to say exactly why the status quo is okay.

What follows is my argument as to why playing music in public spaces might be wrong. The goal is not to persuade you of the argument’s conclusion, especially when it’s a conclusion I don’t believe myself, but to persuade you that it’s a nontrivial question.

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More on the food truck game

In an earlier post, I was talking about the economics of entertainment media. As a way of starting that discussion, I introduced a very basic model which I called the Food Truck game. Several food trucks park along a single street, and each customer patronizes the nearest food truck. It’s a neat little problem, similar to the cake-cutting problem, but it’s not a very realistic model of entertainment media.

So I thought about it some more, and came up with some possible adjustments. With these adjustments, I hope to tease out some real implications. The question I want to answer is, what is it like to have fringe tastes in entertainment media, vs having mainstream tastes? How many businesses will cater to your preferences?  What prices will they charge you?

This also plays into a larger discussion I’ve been having, about the differences between capitalist systems, utilitarian systems, and fair systems.  Here I will show that each system leads to a different solution to the food truck game.

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Evolutionary Prisoner’s Dilemma sim

This is a small programming project I worked on in 2013-2014.  Although I wrote a blog series about it at the time, this is not a repost of that series.  Instead, this is a repost of the explanation I wrote earlier this year, when I uploaded the project to github.  If you liked this article, you might also enjoy this interactive game, although I had nothing to do with that one.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is an important concept in game theory, which captures the problem of altruism. Each of the two players chooses to either cooperate or defect. Cooperating incurs a personal cost, but benefits the other player. If both players cooperate, then they are better off than if they had both defected. In a single Prisoner’s Dilemma, it seems that it’s best to defect. However, if there are multiple games played in succession, it’s possible for players to punish defectors in subsequent games. When multiple games are played in succession, it is called the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD).

The best approach to the IPD is highly nontrivial. In 2012, William Press and Freeman Dyson proved that there is a class of “zero-determinant” strategies that seem dominant, and which would lead to mostly defection. However, Christoph Adami and Arend Hintze showed that the zero-determinant strategies are not dominant in the context of evolution. Understanding this issue could elucidate why humans and other creatures appear to be altruistic.

How the simulation works

  1. We have a population of 40 individuals. Each individual has 4 parameters that govern how they play IPD.
  2. Each individual plays IPD against 2 other individuals in the population, and their fitness is calculated from their average score.
  3. One individual dies, and another reproduces. The probability of reproduction increases with fitness, and the probability of death decreases with fitness.
  4. All the parameters of the individuals are mutated by small amounts.
  5. Steps 2-4 are repeated a million times. Each repetition is called a “generation”.

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