In this way the foundations of morality lie in evolution. — A Seagull

That might be the point.

But also what David Hume says is that morality is not consciously and rationally developed; and it is even more evident when you remember that Hume was a radical skeptic.

Thanks for replying.
That is nice. I did not know you were familiar with economic theory.

So,

What you mean by this? — ssu

I meant that union trades cannot ultimately do much thing to make real wages increase, since they are concerned with wages defined in contract by employees and employers.

And btw those "workers rights" also raise the labour costs... — ssu

I must differentiate social rights from benefits. What I meant by workers right was negative rights, not positive ones; simply such as the right of not being badly treated, etc.

Yet raising wages, ceteris paribus, exactly means redistribution of income. It doesn't necessarily produce inflation — ssu

I did not say it produces inflation. And that is the reason why I am not concerned to aggregates once I want to understand the process and mechanisms of change that aggregate analysis usually ignore, resulting in precipitated conclusions. The movement of relative prices in relative markets are far more important than a price level for ex.

If the additional income (from technological advances and more efficiency) is also redistributed to workers, they usually spend it and the local economy profits as aggregate demand rises. However, if every increase in profitability goes only to the owners of companies, the additional income is basically saved. — ssu

Well, I must ask you to continue. People, whoever they are, ultimately save to invest or consume. Unless you consider the Keynesian paradox of thrift to be true (and that is something we can discuss), an increase in savings must, in the fund market, lower the interests rates, enabling long-run investments that will absorb any occasionally factor unemployed by a relative low consumption.

Now saving is a good thing on one hand, but only up to a point, because in the end if all profits go basically to increase the stock value (especially with companies buying back their shares), you end up with what is called asset price inflation, which just helps a tiny portion of the people. — ssu

No! This asset price inflation is not caused (though apparently it is) fundamentally by an increase in savings, but I would say an increase in the money supply that is confused with real loanable funds (it is, those backed by savings), lowing the interest rates bellow from what in the Wicksellian theory it could be called "natural interest rate", i. e., the theoretical level of interest rate relative to the quantity of savings in which supply and demand for funds are equal. When interest rates are bellow that, there could happen to be different effects in market depending on where exactly this additional quantity of money first enters the economy by the funds market. This money variation (ΔM) that lowers interest rates is called forced saving. If those new created funds enter the market in the demand for assets, there will be inflation caused by demand and the suddenly rise of prices given a certain sort of agents' expectations can lead us to a bubble; on the other hand, if all funds are backed by savings, the relative consumption will be lower, since what induces inflation in the previous case is that the interest rates were lowered while consumption remains the same.

and shouldn't you talk here about macroeconomics when you talk about aggregates like labour? — ssu

Labor are not an homogeneous variable; you should not aggregate them and pretend them to be one simple thing. And I'll show you the reason.

And do you think those exist in the real world? Do you think the market, dominated by oligopolic competition and government intervention is as competitive as the premisses of economic theory assume a competitive market to be? Can we assume an equilibrium level of workers employed given a certain supply and demand for work? You see, simple economic models usually just make one certain argument about reality and have to have a lot of dubious premisses in order to make the model mathematically sound. — ssu

Indeed, I agree with you; I don't believe literally in those static models; but one cannot deny their partial validity at least to the comprehension of complex economic phenomena; they are just useful abstractions.


Now, my point is that Union Trades can increase transaction costs and thus induce unemployment.
We cannot consider here labor as an aggregation; we have to consider each market separately, because people have different skills, preferences, knowledge and live in different circumstances.
Increasing nominal wage in a certain market will prevent some other workers to get a job for one relatively lower; in this market specifically, even more if we consider a monopolistic competition and necessary combinations of complementary factor, a decrease in profits will result in less firms employing. However, as you said, those workers whose wages are now higher will boost consumption and increase aggregate demand, that will induce more investments in such markets where the increasing in demand higher profits, so that people who were unemployed by the increase of nominal wages will be absorbed by those new investments that require and demand labor.
The problem is with the process. First the process of changing factors means an increase in information costs; people will have to look for available work. Second: what if those people who were unemployed have different abilities from the sort of work that now is demanded? So there is a structural unemployment.

And I agree with your last point.

I think one of the main aspects of this discussion is also how moral values happen to be what they are, how they are created and by whom. Thus, this is not ultimately a matter of what is right or wrong, but how we come to think what morally right and wrong are, and whether what we think of them is what they really are.

Although I'm not a leftist, one obvious reason for slow wage growth in the US is the small and shrinking role trade unions have had in the country. — ssu

That is not true. First you should differentiate nominal from real wages in your analysis, and there are reason to believe that this discussion is concerned fundamentally to real wages.
Nominal wages are the monetary amount that is paid to a worker, while "Real wages are adjusted for inflation, or, equivalently, wages in terms of the amount of goods and services that can be bought. This term is used in contrast to nominal wages or unadjusted wages"
It is:
Real wages = Nominal wages / general price level

Trade Unions are useful to the extent in which they can be a more practical way to speak by a community of workers and defend their rights. However, assuming you don't consider any theory of exploitation (such as Marxist surplus value), any attempt of rising wages will just rise nominal ones, which ultimately means redistribute and centralize incomes.

Let me give a very very simple example; in microeconomic theory, assuming a competitive market, real wages equal marginal production of labor factor; in a labor market, we assume a equilibrium level of workers employed given a certain supply and demand for work.


Once we assume that trade unions convince, by what let be the means, firms to make wages in contract (and so they are actually nominal wages) to be higher, given the amount of output to be the same, there will be unemployment in other place

.

The former are capable of discrete definition and identification. The latter, I think cannot be discretely determinable. — Mentalusion

I understand. Do you think that the difficult to deal with social sciences rests ultimately on a epistemological problem?
I would ask then whether do you agree that social phenomena would have so high level of complexity and difficulty regarding to duly acquisition and justification of its knowledge so that it would require a even more complex mind to understand it? As if a complex system could not be so by which it could understand itself.
And last, how do you think it should be the right methodology concerned to social phenomena?

I think it differs from social Darwinism in the extent that this social phenomena, which I just described, is neither concerned to the individuals itself nor to a particular nation or commonwealth, much less to a certain race. What it states is essentially a theory of the process that lead us to this state of affairs in which all societies currently are.
For instance, take an institution as the State, or family, or language structure (take Chomsky's theory) etc; or any institution that exists, similarly to the respect of particular circumstances, commonly or in the majority of all societies.
What I stated about natural selection was just an analogy and does not belongs to the original discussion, although regarding to the fact that it is well known as an evolutionary approach indeed.

If by democratic you mean the condition of a system in which the actual state of affairs is decided fundamentally by a certain number of people among whom the power of decision is decentralized, I think market is, essentially, democratic; but it might not be in so many cases. In fact, the proper allocation of resources, as Romanv wrote,

that happens by allocating resources to where profit is maximised. — romanv

, is guided by the largest amount of profit one can get. In microeconomic theory, profit is concerned to the distance between price level given by market and the average total cost; markets, or simply places where profit is high will "attract" resources if just there is still profit in the long run. Since profit, as I said, is concerned to the price of a good, and given that the price is determined by market, seeking profit is to allocate resources in those places in which people are willing to pay more (because they need it more, maybe) for that specific good. However, there are cases of natural monopoly, oligopoly and other state of affairs which economists call "market failures"; in fact there is also the discussion whether market failures are consequences of a natural process of market, whether market tends to be centralized instead of remaining decentralized.