On Cost

One time I heard Ezra Klein talk about how someone needed to invent a technology that made some activity much easier. It’s probably annoying to read that sentence and not to have filled in after just what the activity was, but I think the ideas here will apply generally.

Let’s just imagine that what he wanted to happen was increased generosity. He’s normatively saying that more generosity should happen, and that the obstacle to it happening is the barrier to it happening, the cost faced by people trying to do it, and that if you made it cheaper, more people would do it. That’s an economics-ey way to frame the decision by people to do a thing or not to do the thing, as if what mattered more weren’t taste or attention or something more subjective or irrational.

In general, can you frame things this way, of thinking of people’s decisions to either do the thing or not as a function of cost, first and foremost?

Well, you might be thinking, something can be a function of cost and not depend exclusively on it. You could even have something be a function of cost and not depend mainly on it. What matters with evaluating interventions is if they will make a difference, not the biggest difference.

To which I’d say, sure, you can make something cheaper and someone will start doing it for whom it was too expensive before. But consider how many people are, in effect, watching prices and actively deciding whether or not to do something, how many people have, in effect, the “price tracker” turned on and alerting them. Mightn’t it be the case that these prospective consumers are either actively or passively ignoring prices or that they get distracted from making a purchase, rather than them actively deciding “these prices… TOO HIGH FOR NOW!”

The reason I’m going on and on at length about this is that this metaphor of making a technology for solving a social problem that people could choose to solve now but don’t really resonated with me. It rings true that if you build it, they will come. I think of doing machine learning and a big impediment to my doing it over the course of my career has honestly been that I felt stupid in conversations with people about it, and if it had been easier to understand, I wouldn’t have faced the cost of feeling embarrassed and I could have been a productive member of those conversations. I think of waking up and running harder or more consistently than I have over the years, and if that had been easier, then I would have done more of it. So when someone proposes that thing X doesn’t happen enough and we need to make a technology that makes it easier, I see that as a call to arms, to build the technology and thereby bring about more of the thing in the world.

I get excited about building out things to make research easier, tech to make productive conversations easier, tech to make eating healthy and exercising easier (can you tell the things I struggle with in my own life yet?), and I start evaluated the goodness or the badness of my ideas by the yardstick of whether it is a technology that makes some activity easier.

But then I start wondering what we even mean by costs, and whether costs mean giving something up, paying a price of some kind out of a vat of resources that you positively possess, or whether they are supposed to be just a generalized symbol for what gets in our way in “making purchases”, which itself stands in as a generalized symbol for doing behaviors.

When terms get this general, what stands in our way of doing something, the something we might do, it starts to feel like a tautology to say we “face high costs” for doing something because, well, yeah, if it weren’t for all the reasons I were doing something, I suppose I could probably be doing that thing!

At some base level, this feels like a dumb conversation since we’re talking about prices and purchases and whether these things are really informing consumer choice, but isn’t it true that the realest thing is whether someone has food to eat, whether they have a roof over their heads, whether their family is safe? This whole blog post can be read as a skepticism that anything can be considered true about whether incentives matter; but I don’t really question whether incentives matter. I think the reason social media is so consumed-upon-an-endeavor is the ease of it and the pleasantry of it, i.e., it’s cheap and it’s nice. That’s not really true about anything else to the same extent that social media is. You only have to press a button, ultimate ease, and exert no further effort and you bring the entertainers into your home. If it were easier to have a spiritual experience during prayer, or if it were easier to get into a book, to the point that you actually felt enlivened by its ideas, or if it were easier to feel pleasure instead of pain by sitting there and meditating, then I think no one would get on social media.

Which brings me to another last irrationality which feels so worth reflecting on: If I get on social media and get a unit of pleasure for zero effort, I basically am gonna be trigger-giddy at my free unit. A no-brainer! But if you had to compare one unit of pleasure for zero effort to 10 units of pleasure for 5 units of effort, I think you’d have a more rewarding experience because I think we care a lot more about the net than we do about the ratio. I also think we care about opportunity cost, and I’m aware, after pulling the lever for my one unit pleasure, what I could have done with the half an hour on instagram, even if it technically was free. Capitalism, maybe, has tuned us to think of costs in terms of price, which is variable, and which can determine our purchasing behavior, and ignore what we else we could do with the money or what we could do with the money in five weeks if we don’t spend it now. Maybe this is so because everything is talked about in terms of price, instead of what it costs.