Socialism / communism is about equally abstract as Georgism, and it certainly inspired a lot of people to fight! Similarly, Republican campaigns to lower corporate tax rates, cut regulations, reduce entitlement spending, etc, are pretty abstract (and often actively unpopular when people do understand them!), but have achieved some notable victories over the years. Georgism is similar to YIMBYism, which has lots of victories these days, even though YIMBYism also suffers from being more abstract than conspiracy theories with obvious villains about people “hoarding” vacant housing or chinese investors bidding up prices or whatever. Finally, Georgism itself was extremely popular once, so it clearly has the potential!! Overall, I don’t think being abstract is fatal for a mass movement.
But I also don’t think that we need to have some kind of epic Georgist popular revolution in order to get Georgist policies—we can do it just by making small incremental technocratic reforms to local property tax laws—getting local governments to use tools like ValueBase (developed by Georgist Lars Doucet) to do their property value assessments, getting reforms in a few places and then hopefully seeing success and pointing to that success to build more momentum elsewhere, etc.
As Lars Doucet tells it, the main problem with historical Georgism wasn’t unpopularity (it was extremely popular then!), but just the technical infeasibility of assessing land value separate from the value of the buildings on the land. But nowadays we have machine learning tools, GIS mapping systems, satellite imagery, successful home-value-estimation companies like Zillow and Redfin, etc. So nowadays we can finally implement Georgism on a technical level, which wasn’t possible in the 1890s. For more on this, see the final part of Lars’s epic series of georgism posts on Astral Codex Ten: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-can-unimproved?utm_source=url
Maybe “abstract” was the wrong word. Communism and minarchy both have very simple visceral moral impulses supporting them. Fairness/equality vs liberty/choice. It’s possible to get a person into a state where they feel one pole so intensely that they will be willing to fight against someone fighting earnestly for the other pole (right? But I’m not sure there’s actually been a civil war between communists and minarchists, it’s usually been communists vs monarchists/nationalists)
For grey civics, I don’t know what the unifying principle is. Commitment to growth? Progress? Hey, maybe that’s it. I’ve been considering the slogan “defending zoning isn’t compatible with calling yourself a progressive. If you believe in urban zoning you don’t believe in progress.”
Progress seems to require meritocracy, rewarding work in proportion to its subjective EV or capricious outcomes, distributing rewards unevenly, and progress comes with a duty to future generations that minarchists might not like very much, but at least in tech, people seem alright with that.
On the left, the tension mostly comes out of earnest disbelief, it’s not intuitive that progress is real. For most of our evolutionary history it wasn’t real, and today it happens only on the scale of years, and its every step is unprecedented.
But how would we resolve the tension with humanism. I guess e/acc is the faction within the grey tribe who don’t try to resolve that tension, they lean into it, they either explicitly reject the duty to defend the preferences of present humanity against those aspects of progress that threaten it, or they find reasons to downplay the immanence of those threats. The other faction has to sit and listen while Hanson warns them about the inevitability of absolute cultural drift, and I don’t think we know what to say to that.
Socialism / communism is about equally abstract as Georgism, and it certainly inspired a lot of people to fight! Similarly, Republican campaigns to lower corporate tax rates, cut regulations, reduce entitlement spending, etc, are pretty abstract (and often actively unpopular when people do understand them!), but have achieved some notable victories over the years. Georgism is similar to YIMBYism, which has lots of victories these days, even though YIMBYism also suffers from being more abstract than conspiracy theories with obvious villains about people “hoarding” vacant housing or chinese investors bidding up prices or whatever. Finally, Georgism itself was extremely popular once, so it clearly has the potential!! Overall, I don’t think being abstract is fatal for a mass movement.
But I also don’t think that we need to have some kind of epic Georgist popular revolution in order to get Georgist policies—we can do it just by making small incremental technocratic reforms to local property tax laws—getting local governments to use tools like ValueBase (developed by Georgist Lars Doucet) to do their property value assessments, getting reforms in a few places and then hopefully seeing success and pointing to that success to build more momentum elsewhere, etc.
As Lars Doucet tells it, the main problem with historical Georgism wasn’t unpopularity (it was extremely popular then!), but just the technical infeasibility of assessing land value separate from the value of the buildings on the land. But nowadays we have machine learning tools, GIS mapping systems, satellite imagery, successful home-value-estimation companies like Zillow and Redfin, etc. So nowadays we can finally implement Georgism on a technical level, which wasn’t possible in the 1890s. For more on this, see the final part of Lars’s epic series of georgism posts on Astral Codex Ten: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-can-unimproved?utm_source=url
Maybe “abstract” was the wrong word. Communism and minarchy both have very simple visceral moral impulses supporting them. Fairness/equality vs liberty/choice. It’s possible to get a person into a state where they feel one pole so intensely that they will be willing to fight against someone fighting earnestly for the other pole (right? But I’m not sure there’s actually been a civil war between communists and minarchists, it’s usually been communists vs monarchists/nationalists)
For grey civics, I don’t know what the unifying principle is. Commitment to growth? Progress? Hey, maybe that’s it. I’ve been considering the slogan “defending zoning isn’t compatible with calling yourself a progressive. If you believe in urban zoning you don’t believe in progress.”
Progress seems to require meritocracy, rewarding work in proportion to its subjective EV or capricious outcomes, distributing rewards unevenly, and progress comes with a duty to future generations that minarchists might not like very much, but at least in tech, people seem alright with that.
On the left, the tension mostly comes out of earnest disbelief, it’s not intuitive that progress is real. For most of our evolutionary history it wasn’t real, and today it happens only on the scale of years, and its every step is unprecedented.
But how would we resolve the tension with humanism. I guess e/acc is the faction within the grey tribe who don’t try to resolve that tension, they lean into it, they either explicitly reject the duty to defend the preferences of present humanity against those aspects of progress that threaten it, or they find reasons to downplay the immanence of those threats. The other faction has to sit and listen while Hanson warns them about the inevitability of absolute cultural drift, and I don’t think we know what to say to that.