In the latest issue of Meeting News, a trade publication for for meeting planners, the front page article talks about the growing problem of finding that your meeting has been placed in a ball room right next door to an “alternative-lifestyle” group of some kind.
You’ve planned your insurance industry junket for months, but when you get there, you find that walking around the halls are a bunch of leather and chains fetishists, or swingers, or sex toy enthusiasts or whatever. They’re making out in the halls, wearing nothing but boots and a hat, etc. According to irritated meeting planners in the article, this is a growing problem. Meeting attendees report being deeply offended, and overall, your conference is now a failure.
So what to do? The magazine says you have to really grill the convention staff because the alternative lifestyle meeting market is extremely lucrative (attendees spend a lot at the bar and buy a lot of massages), but the conference centers don’t want to give up their run-of-the-mill meetings of vacuum salespeople either.
First of all, if you end up in this situation, does the conference center owe you a refund? Was it implied in your agreement that there would not be a grown man in nothing but chaps at the urinal next to you in the bathroom? Or is it really the meeting planners fault? It will be interesting to see how the market handles this in the long run. The article tells us that you’ll find alternative lifestyle crowds at even the most upscale conference center – so you can’t assume your conference will be safe. I can only guess that eventually, the market will provide conference centers that cater to specific “moral sensibility levels.” Perhaps.
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I can only guess that eventually, the market will provide conference centers that cater to specific “moral sensibility levels.” Perhaps.
Ryan,
That would invoke discrimination based on factors the centralized, multicultural state has declared verboten, so the market will not be allowed to do so.
The market doesn’t provide anything. The market isn’t a thing. People provide (or don’t).
Remember it’s Human Action, not Market Action.
The market is people. What else could it mean?
I can’t help but suspect this is some kind of hoax. I seriously doubt some hotel manager would allow S&M types to freely mingle with business types.
Let us hope that “alternative life-stylists” go back into the closet where they belong.
I would think that it would be obvious that they ought to segregate the alternate lifestyle conventions in some way, either to not schedule other more conventional groups at the same time, or put them in a set of rooms in a separate wing, or something.
Never put the Dingo dog breeders association in the same venue as the cute baby contest. That’s what I found out.
Waaa–subhuman barbarians in animal skins offend me–waaa.
Get over yourselves. Seriously.
Michael A Clem, I think “they ought to segregate” _you_ and your hoity-toity friends too. You offend me. Off with your head then, or something.
Oh great market, creator of all that’s good, please provide a conference center where nothing may offend my fragile person. A place where no man may imply with his beastly demeanor that I suffer from a testosterone deficiency–and worse–a case of shelterism. Amen.
Personally, I’d be more offended to share a floor with buttoned-down bureaucrats.
Pansies.
Peter wrote:
The market is people. What else could it mean?
Yet how frequently do free market economists ignore problems of small/bilateral markets or Mark Granovetter’s Problem of Embeddedness or Meyer and Rowan’s Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.
I believe this underscores the usefulness of Mises’ approach of economics as a social-science (i.e. sociology) or a kind of cognitive-science, and epitomized in Human Action.
People are not perfectly rational. Of course, they don’t have to be; “the perfect is the enemy of the good”. Tools such as the price system allow people to make more rational decisions than they could without that information.
Supposed problems are usually caused by looking at everything backwards. E.g., the idea that sellers can pass on costs (see the “Fair Tax” threads), etc. ; that’s what Bastiat’s “Seen vs. Unseen” essay/Hazlitt’s “Econ. in One Lesson” is largely about. The only inherent “problem” with small markets is in the heads of “perfect competition” believers and their like (read: the certifiably insane). “Tools such as the price system allow people to make more rational decisions than they could without that information” I don’t know what “perfectly rational” is supposed to mean, but it should be obvious that those prices are the result of their actions, not the cause!
Get a grip, John. I shouldn’t have used the word “ought”, because I’m not saying that they *have* to segregate them. Rather, if they want to retain business, then obviously, they can’t have some of their customers offended by their other customers. They have the choice of doing their best to accommodate their customers or lose business. It’s their decision, and of course, their customers’ decision, not mine. But clearly, this is not some kind of insurmountable problem or market failure, just a matter of using some common sense.
John sez;
“Oh great market, creator of all that’s good, please provide a conference center where nothing may offend my fragile person. A place where no man may imply with his beastly demeanor that I suffer from a testosterone deficiency–and worse–a case of shelterism. Amen.”
John, it sounds like you don’t like markets much. As Mike Clem said, it isn’t a “must”, but a “should” – if the convention center wants repeat business, they should make sure to provide their customers with the most pleasant environment possible, even if that means they have to protect (marginally) one group’s delicate sensibilities and offend (slightly) another’s.
To put another spin on this, using your remark about “subhuman barbarians in animal skins”, would you force the conference center managers to put such leather-clad conventioneers next to a PETA meeting? Can you see how not doing so would be a good business decision, and just as valid?
This is the kind of “discrimination” that is perfectly moral for businesses to conduct, even if it is illegal for anyone but government to. And this example shows the superiority of private to government discrimination.
And, just so you are clear, as long as they are peaceful and pay their bills, I have nothing at all against perverts, which is one of the reasons why I enjoy New York City so much. In fact, for some, the proximity to “transgressive” groups might even be a selling point!
Peter-
Indeed, your points of discussion seem to parallel the recent discourse on plutonic ideal forms of competition.
I will need to consider this issue more before taking a definitive stand on the issue. However, (and I may be breaking with certain Austrian School positions), I don’t an impossible or taboo task to be the modeling of societies and organizations of people. I would agree that societies and organizations emerge from human action by its constituents. But I would argue the purpose of economics as not merely a “moral” regulation of human behavior, but as a symbiotic and expendient means of mitigating scarcity. (Scarcity being the lack of mutually exclusive items relative to peoples’ demand for those items.) I could see how one could consider this a collectivist viewpoint, though I may argue against such a view.
However, the difficulty with “everyone getting what they want” is the means of measuring and valuing whose wants more quickly expedite more wants and so on — in addition to the compounding complexity of the time domain: that computations as such must occur in “real-time”, that wants change across time (e.g. hunger), and that all of this manifests into an extemely complex and thus uncertain future. For these problems I strongly prefer Hayek’s models as a corollary of information theory.
Organization/organism is a scaling phenomenon, from the quantum probability which stabalize into atomic forces, up through the persistence of organisms through molecular and then cell biology, up to the ongoing evolution of humans, and then to the interactions with our environment, solar system, galaxy, universe, and so on. Perhaps Eames‘ Powers of Ten simplifies this concept concisely. This is often why Hayek has also been associated with connectionism.
In contrast to some centralized bureaucrat or use of force, free market-based coordination accounts for much more of the information, across the time-domain, necessary for the economic calculus. As an illustratory example, the AIDS epidemic hinders vast numbers of human capital… people who would otherwise provide net-positive productivity, just as the baker would provide bread for both-benefit (ala Adam Smith). Now, a well-intended dictator or technocrat might typically say “we need to throw huge gobs of wealth bluntly at this problem to solve it by sheer volume of action”. Such a forced transfer of wealth will ripple through the market to put those who are losing their capital at a loss, as well as everyone who depended on their products — a kind of both-loss opposite to Adam Smith. A market solution, on the other hand, would take a path of creation rather than destruction to reach the same goal; perhaps genetic engineering which provides people with prettier flowers, or more fragrant flowers for the perfume industry (the mother of organic chemistry, btw), or even the farmer with more hearty or nutritious (and thus premium) crops, these same market-encouraged techniques of applied science also double as effective tools for studying and disrupting HIV infection. Thus, not only will the scientific technology be developed to provide people with an AIDS cure, but the process by which those tools have been elegantly realized came in the ongoing continual process of creating wealth in many other spheres of human want. Perhaps the best example of how “progress” has rarely been planned (by central-planners), whereas the market succeeds in mutual “collective” benefit has been documented by James Burke in his Connections series.
I hope this more clearly communicates my position of accepting human societies / organizations as only an emergent phenomena of Human Action by individuals — a phenomena which can be modeled in much the same consequentialist means as we draw the consequences of human action to support free markets. We use markets (at a “collective” level) because of the immense difficulty in measuring and valuing what’s actually important to the mitigation of scarcity. What seems “obvious” in importance to us as individuals is almost certain to be wrong, as far as imposing on society is concerned. Free markets provide an effective discovery process.
–”I seriously doubt some hotel manager would allow S&M types to freely mingle with business types.”
I’m an anime fan who goes to conventions, so I can answer this in some degree. We aren’t quite to the S&M level, but… there’s this thing known as cosplay (short for costume play; the Japanese love to make portmanteaus). Some of the costumes definitely get to the S&M level. And the percentage of cosplayers is rising every year; some of the conventions are getting over the 10% of attendees being in cosplay.
One of the conventions I attend was, last year, scheduled at the same time as the hotel was hosting a ROTC meeting. Watching their reactions was quite fun.
Another convention, the third biggest in the states, is currently held in the biggest hotel/convention center in Dallas. They had a teacher’s union convention going on at the same time; a small one, as the anime convention is quite large and was taking up almost every convention room (they were using some of the unused meeting rooms in the hotel itself, as was the anime con). One gal was dressed up as Felicia from Darkstalkers. The character is a catgirl, and, well, this lass was wearing little more than cat ears, a tail, and a few cottonballs. More interesting reactions.
BTW, this latter hotel is where the big Mary Kay Cosmetics convetions are held. I asked one of the hotel staff what she thought of our convention compared to them. She said, “You guys are weird, but at least you aren’t grumpy like the Mary Kay people.”
It definitely happens, in other words ^_^
I was taught one fine definition of Market when I was in 12th grade at high school. It goes somewhat like:
Market is a place where buying and selling takes place. Of course, they are the people who are either buyers or sellers.
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