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Accounting identities
Life is a business that does not cover the costs.
Artur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 7, 2006 at 08:22 AM in Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
Indeed, most people never earn back the education money invested in them by the government ($10,000/year X 12 years).
This is why low wage immigration is a bad idea.
Posted by: Half Sigma at Dec 7, 2006 11:12:53 AM
But if it is true that in principle any "cost" equals the price of the forgone highest value alternative, then here is the question: What is the alternative to the life?
~ Jacopo
Posted by: Jacopo at Dec 7, 2006 2:34:16 PM
According to http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa072602a.htm
high school graduates can expect, on average, to earn $1.2 million.
Using a discount rate of less than 6% I would say they earn back the money.
But low wage immigrants don't have their schooling paid for so why is this relevant to desirablity of low wage immigrants.
Posted by: bertram at Dec 7, 2006 3:30:10 PM
I don't understand the context of this quote. Are we talking about entropy and the conservation of energy? By living am I taking more from the environment than if I had never lived?
Posted by: Shane Milburn at Dec 7, 2006 10:23:11 PM
Life is for non-profits?
Posted by: sb at Dec 8, 2006 6:19:44 AM
Here is the context, from Schopenhauer himself:
"... the present is always inadequate, but the future is uncertain, and the past irrecoverable. With its misfortunes, small, greater, and great, occurring hourly, daily, weekly, and yearly; with its deluded hopes and accidents bringing all calculations to nought, life bears so clearly the stamp of something which ought to disgust us, that it is difficult to conceive how anyone could fail to recognize this, and be persuaded that life is here to be thankfully enjoyed, and that man exists in order to be happy. On the contrary, that continual deception and disillusionment, as well as the general nature of life, present themselves as intended and calculated to awaken the conviction that nothing whatsoever is worth our exertions, our efforts, and our struggles, that all good things are empty and fleeting, that the world on all sides is bankrupt, and that life is a business that does not cover the costs; so that our will may turn away from it. ... Consequently, our life is primarily like a payment made to us in nothing but copper coins, for which we must then give a receipt; the coins are the days, and the receipt is death."
--The World as Will and Representation, chapter XLVI, "On the Vanity and Suffering of Life"
Life's costs > benefits because, as Schopenhauer says a few paragraphs later,
"We feel pain, but not painlessness; care, but not freedom from care; fear, but not safety and security."
Therefore everything we experience is some sort of pain or deprivation of benefits, i.e., costs, while we do not really directly experience the benefits of comfort or security (except on reflection, which he claims few people do).
Schopenhauer offers transcendence of this perpetual suffering in a manner similar to that of Buddhist teachings (which he was familiar with)--the part about "so that our will may turn away from it" referred to this.
And you have to give credit to Schopenhauer for hating Hegel first!
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