re: How much damage can a stupid socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani do to NYC

quote:

---

when the definition of efficiency is profit, it's impossible to come up with an example of profits not equating to more profits.

---

No, that's not what I said. What you're trying to smuggle in is "the rich get richer," which may or may not be true, but which is certainly a non-sequitur in the context of this conversation and only thrown out as a propaganda drive by line. I hope you are showing your Marxist professors how much you've learned as evidenced on this thread.

Here's the dictionary definition of the word efficiency:

quote:

---

Efficiency is the ability to achieve maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort, expense, or energy. It is calculated as the ratio of useful output to total input, often expressed as a percentage, aiming to reduce wasted resources.

---

Can you think of an economic situation in which maximizing productivity and minimizing wasted effort, expense, or energy wouldn't result in the greatest possible profits? I can't.

quote:

---

Private Equity has a track record of bankrupting companies in the name of short-term profits or "efficiency" if the terms are synonymous.

---

I don't know the history of all of those companies, but if you are saying that they were purchased by private equity firms and then driven into bankruptcy, I'll assume for the sake of discussion that those things are true and say two things about it:

1. In that scenario the private equity company is the one ostensibly maximizing their own efficiency, not the companies they bought. The companies they bought were assets. Was it maximally efficient and profitable for the PE to act as it did in each case? I don't know (see the next point), but I can certainly imagine how that could be the case. I doubt we need for me to lay out a hypothetical scenario detailing such a case, so going on to #2...

2. Just because there are economic principles at play, that doesn't mean everyone always relates to those principles wisely. Your claim is that the principles themselves cause people to act unwisely. I've already conceded that to some degree I agree with that, but we differ greatly on the degree to which we agree that that is true, and probably differ even more on our opinions about the degree to which society has already put up guardrails around the edges of capitalism.

quote:

---

labor and profits have switched. Labor costs have stagnated

---

Go read the UPS contract and other the union and get back to me

quote:

---

What you're trying to smuggle in is "the rich get richer," which may or may not be true, but which is certainly a non-sequitur in the context of this conversation and only thrown out as a propaganda drive by line.

---

not at all, which is evidenced by the rest of my post.

quote:

---

Can you think of an economic situation in which maximizing productivity and minimizing wasted effort, expense, or energy wouldn't result in the greatest possible profits? I can't.

---

No, but efficiency isn't the only way to achieve the greatest possible profit.

quote:

---

In that scenario the private equity company is the one ostensibly maximizing their own efficiency,

---

Disagree. They are maximizing short-term profits. That has nothing to do with efficiency.

quote:

---

Your claim is that the principles themselves cause people to act unwisely.

---

Correct. Not always, but often enough.

quote:

---

I can give you the reason. I can also tell you why you deny the obvious truth that profit and efficiency are synonymous in an economic sense.

---

Price gouging is a way to ensure maximum profits. Is that also considered "efficient"?

quote:

---

Because you are desperate to inject subjective value judgements into the argument.

---

I hate discussing things with you because you inevitably turn things personal. Like dude, we were having a legit discussion. Don't bring emotions into it.

quote:

---

Hope that wasn't too TL/DR.

---

I did read it!

quote:

---

But this folds into everything everyone does. We all try to maximize our profits as personal human beings. I know I do. I appreciate that you have empathy for others. That makes you human. You still need profit. A savings at the end of the day. Maybe you should be one of those who own a business. I feel you would use that empathy you have and your employees would be happy being your employee.

---

Profit isn't inherently bad. I don't believe it is. I think pursuing increased profits at all non-monetary costs can be bad.

quote:

---

Detroit's demise was d/t to societal breakdown

---

It was driven by a lot of government intervention, too. Redlining was a critical component of Detroit's decline. Redlining systematically denied Black residents access to mortgages and stable neighborhoods, resulting in concentrations of poverty and limited wealth-building opportunities through home ownership. Detroit remains one of the country's most racially segregated cities to this day.

The resistance to integrating workplaces, unions and housing forced blacks with little opportunities available to them and little income into slums, essentially, and restricted their upward mobility and fueled White Flight.

Other than Tesla, the most american made cars are Toyota, Honda, Jeep, Volkswagen.

Trivia, the state of Alabama now makes more cars than all of Canada.

quote:

---

not at all, which is evidenced by the rest of my post.

---

Then I confess I have no idea what you meant by that.

quote:

---

No, but efficiency isn't the only way to achieve the greatest possible profit.

---

Then give me an example of achieving an equal profit while being less than maximally efficient.

quote:

---

Disagree. They are maximizing short-term profits. That has nothing to do with efficiency.

---

Of course it does, if, for example, they are raising capital to invest in a more profitable venture. It's like buying a coffee shop for the building because you're betting that you can find a real estate developer that you can interest in buying the building from you to make into condos.

You could wait five years for the coffee shop to throw off $100,000 and yeah, you would still own the building and could still sell it, or you could flip it in the short term, make $200,000 on the deal (and here's where your concept goes out the window) and invest that $200,000 in something else that would mature as fast or even faster. If you can do that (and if you are a private equity firm, that's what you do, so you hit a lot more often than you miss), you'll far outperform the former scenario over the same time frame.

That is efficiency, by the dictionary definition I gave for it.

This is the thing with all of theses absolute statement you're making as though they are always true. They are NOT always true. In fact, them being true probably happens the minority of the time, not the majority.

But the point is that they are all circumstance-dependent. You're claiming to always know how long a piece of string is.

quote:

---

Not always, but often enough.

---

Often enough for what? To have guardrails? Yeah, we have those. We've accumulated quite a bit of them. To the point that pretty much without exception that I can think of, when we try to add new ones, it causes even dumber behavior than letting the market work things out.

Remember the housing crisis around 2008? There's an example. Forcing banks to lend money to people that they never would have lent money to without being forced, that market conditions would never have produced naturally, so that everything could be "fair" and "disadvantaged people" could buy a house.

How'd that work out for us? Literally every taxpayer in the country?

The Detroit labor unions, same thing. Those unions reduced efficiency to the point that the companies weren't willing or able to operate, so they left. Who won there? Who cut off their nose to spite their face in that scenario?

Let's define greed, why don't we. It's a subjective definition, so your definition will be different from mine and will no doubt include some concept of people wanting more than they "need," which is another subjective rabbit hole (which is why these terms have no place in a discussion of economics, but here we are, so...)

My definition of greed is when people demand more than they've earned. When the value of what they demand is greater than the value that they can or are willing to exchange.

As long as there are employees who are able to do the job and are willing to do it for less, when you demand more than that rate and are willing to disrupt your employer's operations or otherwise hold a company hostage to get it, you are the greedy ant in that equation. Because by definition you are demanding more value than you are offering.

In conclusion, it turns out that greed is something that exists in both capitalist and anti-capitalist mechanisms. Could be it's not the system that is responsible for it.

quote:

---

We can use the definition of "fair"

impartial and just, without favoritism or discrimination

---

You haven't been paying attention if you can't see that one hard-working man's definition of fair is not the same as some blue-haired cat ladies.