Thursday, July 20, 2017

One More

One More

At a farmers market, I buy peaches from Gary. I spend $10 on peaches. Gary spends $1 on taxes and booth rental, and it cost Gary $4 to grow & haul the peaches.

I bring my peaches to a party. Melissa has her first peach. She absolutely adores the peach, getting peach goo all over her face. We tells her friends, who buy more of Gary's peaches. Whenever she does, she relives the happy moment with a smile. I hear the story a few times.

Who wins the transaction? And, please, why?

27 comments:

  1. Everybody? Gary gets money for his hard work, you get to enjoy some nice peaches and share them with your friends. Melissa got to try something that she instantly loved and got to tell her friends about it. EDIT: and everybody seems to have had a very nice time.

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  2. Everyone? If 'I' is me, then I am happy because I helped a local farmer, and gave my friend something she liked. Melissa is also happy. Gary is making money, so presumably he's happy.

    Competition is not implicit, and making winning a baked in consequence makes the encounters ugly.

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  3. Rabbit Stoddard Can you tell me what you mean by ugly?

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  4. From my perspective, I won. I could assume from their reactions that they won as well, but I cannot speak for them. But I only know for sure my motivations and my outcomes. Ask them.

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  5. Doesn't strike me as a situation that requires a single winner.

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  6. I feel like everyone won... well maybe not Big Peach.

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  7. Does there need to be a winner? I mean, what is the contest here, what are the stakes?

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  8. Dianne Harris Always the solipsist.

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  9. John Hattan, Yanni Cooper, Matt Johnson What does it mean if there isn't a winner?

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  10. The economist's answer is that everyone wins. That's my answer too.

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  11. A winner implies one or more losers. Applied to commonplace social interactions, that's ugly. People may or may not care about the feeling of winning, but avoiding the feeling of losing is important, and I think it drives people to behaviour that is shitty to others.

    But here's the thing- the stakes here, or lack of, mean that a win/loss framing is irrelevant- and if seen as relevant, then . it increases the feeling of high stakes, therefore increasing feelings of anxiety and stress- pressure to make a "right" decision, rather than just doing something nice for your friend.

    Emotional perceptions change people's behaviour, yo. And that's why I think that any discussion of "rationality" that doesn't address the emotional stakes/reality of the participants is flawed.

    That said, I don't dislike Dianne Harris's answer.

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  12. I'm not sure it means anything. I mean, honestly I basically never think "I won" when I go grocery shopping... maybe if I manage a fortuitous set of bus rides with no stop waiting on either side...

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  13. William Nichols:

    (1) If I wanted to create a hilariously convoluted post wherein I calculated overall utility for all actors (including satiation curves and a supply-demand calculus) I would need to know something of Gary's supply, which I could invent from whole cloth with plausible-sounding mathematics by leveraging off of the per-peach production costs, and his willingness to bring them to market where he loses 20% of his overhead to market fees.

    (2) But really, I've got the music from Peggy Harmon's adaptation of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" buzzing through my head, so I'm trying to figure out whether my head-canon that Gary is a goblin, stealing away Melissa's soul (and therefore the clear winner) holds water.

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  14. No transaction is ever won. Melissa didn't transact anything, so she is all right. Both you and Gary were cheated by each other. Death is inevitable. Hail Satan.

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  15. Doesn't strike me as a competition. Although competition seems to be a subjective thing.

    One person might get some lizard-brain-gratification from finding a parking spot three spaces closer to the front door. And another person won't.

    Seems like neither person is wrong. Just one doesn't see the activity as a thing that has a winner.

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  16. Tell me more about how Melissa has never had a peach before.

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  17. So, we know where the peaches come from. They are made in batches of 10 by using 5$, including 1$ for taxes. We also know where the peaches go.

    Where does the money come from? Do we have infinite money? Is the supply of peach production limited by something else? What else can be bought/made with money? What's done with the taxes? That's oddly specific given the broadness of the rest of the scene.

    The scenario is not detailed enough to make more than rough, general statements like "There is no winner." or "Everybody wins."

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  18. Dave Younce she's from the midwest. They don't have (good) peaches. I'm from Oklahoma. We only have terrible peaches.

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  19. What kind of peaches does Gary have?

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  20. As someone who enjoys introducing people to new foods, I can't call it "winning" because the pleasure is not a competitive one, but certainly this is a good scenario that makes lots of people happy.

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  21. (We've about finished out peach season here, alas. OTOH, the best tomatoes are nigh!)

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  22. William Nichols​​​ Central Coast of CA, but our foodshed spans a lot of different climates so we get overlapping "seasons". For instance, strawberries are locally grown from March through October, though we ourselves mostly eat them from May through August, because they're better then (I wait for my favorite cultivars to be at their peak, as the local farms tend to grow multiple cultivars with different qualities and growing seasons.)

    I may be a WEE bit spoiled. I also find it a bit shocking when someone hasn't ever had an artichoke. (Not having ever had a peach is something that had never occurred to me; artichokes at least are highly regional.)

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