Harry Potter VS Adam Smith

Right now I'm planning to create a website where people can submit links and rank them with their money. The order (relative importance) of the links will essentially be determined by the Invisible Hand. The website will be a non-profit. All the money (after costs) will be used to promote the website. The higher ranked links will receive more attention/clicks than the lower ranked links.

He thinks that the website would be useless.

Turns out that the guy assumes that Harry Potter would be more highly ranked than Adam Smith. When I asked him to justify his assumption he simply replied "The Market". I replied that The Wealth of Nations is freely available online. This means that it's a public good. The Harry Potter books, on the other hand, are private goods. According to a quick Google search 400 million copies of the Harry Potter books have been sold.

Think about tug of war. Harry Potter fans are on one side of the rope and Adam Smith fans are on the other side. The Potter fans are super winning right now. But here's the thing, the Smith fans aren't even pulling on the rope. So it's not much of a contest when one side isn't making any effort.

The point of the website would be to level the playing field. The Potter fans would not be spending their money to buy the books. They would solely be using their money to rank them. The Smith fans would solely be using their money to rank his books.

What would motivate the fans to pull on the rope?

The other day two Mormon ladies knocked on my door and tried to convert me. Let's say that a link to the Book of Mormon was on the Invisible Hand website. Mormons would be motivated to pull on the rope because it would mean that the link to the Book of Mormon would get more attention/clicks. The harder that they pulled on the rope, the more attention that the Book of Mormon would receive.

Personally, I definitely wouldn't want the Book of Mormon to receive more attention than the Wealth of Nations. This is what would motivate me to pull for the Wealth of Nations.

Ok, so here are some books...

A Tale of Two Cities
Harry Potter
Principia
The Bible
The Book of Mormon
The Origin of Species
The Wealth of Nations
War and Peace

How do you predict that they would be ranked on the Invisible Hand website? And how much money would you be willing to bet on your prediction?

What exactly are we proving here? I'm not saying your experiment is useless, I'm just not sure what it's supposed to accomplish.

Let's say we put music on your site instead of books. Let's say in a large collection of music you put Beyonce's most popular song and Beethoven's 5th and Beyonce ends up at the "top". What does that mean? How is that information useful? Does anyone believe that Beethoven's 5th isn't more valuable?

I'm confused.

csbrown28 said:

What exactly are we proving here? I'm not saying your experiment is useless, I'm just not sure what it's supposed to accomplish.

Let's say we put music on your site instead of books. Let's say in a large collection of music you put Beyonce's most popular song and Beethoven's 5th and Beyonce ends up at the "top". What does that mean? How is that information useful? Does anyone believe that Beethoven's 5th isn't more valuable?

I'm confused.

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If people spend more money promoting Beyonce's music, then evidently society believes that her music is more beautiful than Beethoven's music.

Importance is in the heart of the beholder. I want to know what’s truly important to people, and I want people to know what’s truly important to me.

It's useful to know what's truly important to people because...

It's useful for people to know what's truly important to me because...

I think you'll agree that it's useful for people to be able to communicate what's important to them. For me the fundamentally big issue is how people communicate what's important to them. The two main ways are voting and spending. These two ways are very different. So I really don't think that they can be equally good at revealing what's important to people. If they were equally good, then we might as well replace all markets with democracy. Then we could simply give "thumbs up" to all the things that are important to us.

The internet is primarily dominated by voting... Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, Buzzfeed, Google and so on. The page rank of this website is determined by voting. The page rank of this thread is also determined by voting.

What would happen if there was a website where a page's rank was determined by spending? This is what I want to find out. What's your prediction?

Xerographica said:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If people spend more money promoting Beyonce's music, then evidently society believes that her music is more beautiful than Beethoven's music.

Importance is in the heart of the beholder. I want to know what’s truly important to people, and I want people to know what’s truly important to me.

It's useful to know what's truly important to people because...

It's useful for people to know what's truly important to me because...

I think you'll agree that it's useful for people to be able to communicate what's important to them. For me the fundamentally big issue is how people communicate what's important to them. The two main ways are voting and spending. These two ways are very different. So I really don't think that they can be equally good at revealing what's important to people. If they were equally good, then we might as well replace all markets with democracy. Then we could simply give "thumbs up" to all the things that are important to us.

The internet is primarily dominated by voting... Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, Buzzfeed, Google and so on. The page rank of this website is determined by voting. The page rank of this thread is also determined by voting.

What would happen if there was a website where a page's rank was determined by spending? This is what I want to find out. What's your prediction?

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Since you have no way of enforcing honest responses, I think your data would be more of what people think would make them look good, smart, etc.

<alt>doxygen said:

Since you have no way of enforcing honest responses, I think your data would be more of what people think would make them look good, smart, etc.

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With voting there's no immediate/personal cost to virtue signalling. But with spending there is a cost to virtue signalling.

Virtue signalling is cheap in the voting both. In the non-profit sector, on the other hand, virtue signalling isn't cheap.

They will not indeed submit to more labours and privations than other people, for the relief of distressed fellow creatures: but they make amends by whining over them more. It is not difficult to trace this sort of affectation to its cause. It originates in the common practice of bestowing upon feelings that praise which actions alone can deserve. - J.S. Mill

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Xerographica said:

How do you predict that they would be ranked on the Invisible Hand website? And how much money would you be willing to bet on your prediction?

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I don't see how you'd get enough people willing to pay to vote on this for it to achieve anything and I'm not sure what it would achieve anyway. I don't see how you can have "the best" book since there are countless different ways to judge and measure them.

HonestJoe said:

I don't see how you'd get enough people willing to pay to vote on this for it to achieve anything and I'm not sure what it would achieve anyway. I don't see how you can have "the best" book since there are countless different ways to judge and measure them.

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We already know that plenty of people are willing to spend lots of money on advertising. The difference with the Invisible Hand website is that it would be easy for people to pool their advertising money. This is good for people with small advertising budgets. If you're a struggling artist, your friends and family can chip in to promote your work. Plus, ideas will be ranked according to how much money people are willing to pay to promote them. This allows the direct value comparison of any two ideas. Which idea is more valuable... UBI or building a giant wall between the US and Mexico?

Xerographica said:

We already know that plenty of people are willing to spend lots of money on advertising.

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Businesses spend money on advertising because they're confident of getting a return on that investment in sales. This wouldn't even be advertising because there'd be no reason for anyone to know or care who was top of the list on your website.

Xerographica said:

If you're a struggling artist, your friends and family can chip in to promote your work.

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I don't think many "struggling artists" would want or expect their friends and family to pay to promote their work though. Helping them spread word-of-mouth and giving them business certainly but paying out for no direct benefit doesn't make sense, even if there was actually any benefit to the artist (which you idea still doesn't provide).

Xerographica said:

Plus, ideas will be ranked according to how much money people are willing to pay to promote them.

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And how much people can afford to pay. Harper-Collins doesn't value a dollar anything like as much as our "struggling artist" would so could easily drop enough money to drown out any and all "friends and family" contributions. Even if your idea took off somehow, how could you prevent it being dominated by big companies and wealthy individuals?

HonestJoe said:

Businesses spend money on advertising because they're confident of getting a return on that investment in sales. This wouldn't even be advertising because there'd be no reason for anyone to know or care who was top of the list on your website.

I don't think many "struggling artists" would want or expect their friends and family to pay to promote their work though. Helping them spread word-of-mouth and giving them business certainly but paying out for no direct benefit doesn't make sense, even if there was actually any benefit to the artist (which you idea still doesn't provide).

And how much people can afford to pay. Harper-Collins doesn't value a dollar anything like as much as our "struggling artist" would so could easily drop enough money to drown out any and all "friends and family" contributions. Even if your idea took off somehow, how could you prevent it being dominated by big companies and wealthy individuals?

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Not sure if you're quite understanding how the Invisible Hand website would work. You'd be able to filter the links by keyword and date. To put it into words... you could say, "Show me the most valuable fantasy books that have been published in the past 24 hours." How many results do you think there would be? What are the chances that one of the results would be a Harper-Collins (HC) book?

It would be a different story if you said, "Show me the most valuable fantasy books that have been published in the past decade." Then, in this case, it's entirely possible that several of the highest ranked books might be from HC. But it would be a pretty long list of books. The more visitors there were, the further down the list they'd scroll.

Imagine if HC spent $500,000 for a 1 minute commercial. The first 20 seconds would feature HC books, but the next 40 seconds would feature non-HC books. I'm not sure if HC would do this. Then again, if HC didn't help pay to increase the rank of its books on the Invisible Hand website then their rank would be lower. Not sure if the authors would appreciate the lack of support.

For me it makes sense for struggling artists and their supporters to pool their promotion money. Maybe this analogy will help. People usually won't drive out of their way for a garage sale. This is because chances are slim that they'll find something of interest. It's a different story with flea markets. Since there's a much wider variety of items to choose from, chances are higher that somebody is going to find something of interest. But it's not like anybody necessarily worries about Walmart paying for 90% of the stalls.

On the Invisible Hand website struggling artists would share links to their websites and/or very best work. By paying to rank their links they will essentially be pooling their promotion money. Individually their money isn't much... but together it would be pretty substantial. So it could theoretically drive a bunch of traffic to the website. When there are lots of visitors and lots of links... chances are good that the visitors will find links of interest. Then they'll chip in to help increase the rank of the best links. This process will result in the most valuable links/ideas quickly rising to the top of the list.

For me the main interest is that it will be the very first website on the internet where the order (relative importance) of the items will be determined by the Invisible Hand. How will the order of the links compare to the order of the links on Reddit? For example... here are the top rated libertarian links of all time. The order of the list was determined by voting. In other words, the order was determined by the Democratic Hand. From my perspective, nearly all of the highest ranked links are super stupid. That list either proves that libertarians are stupid... or it proves that democracy is stupid. My guess is that it's the latter. So I'm super interested what the top libertarians links would be on the Invisible Hand website. I'm pretty certain that they will be infinitely more intelligent than the links on Reddit. But I could be wrong. In any case, the proof is in the pudding.