Your alternative would be to think an aristocratic or meritocratic principle is true. (It’s either equal or unequal, right?)
I think we can assume aristocracy is a dead duck along with the Divine Right of Kings and other theological relics.
Meritocracy in some form I believe has been advocated by some utilitarians. People with Oxford degrees get 10 votes. Cambridge 9. Down to the LSE with 2 votes and the common ignorant unlettered herd 1 vote…
This is kind of an epistemocratic voting regime which some think might lead to better outcomes. Alas, no one has been game to try get such laws up. There is little evidence that an electorate of PhDs is any less daft/ignorant/clueless/idle/indifferent on matters outside their specialty than the general public.
From a legal rights perspective, egalitarianism is surely correct. Equal treatment before the law seems a lot easier to defend than unequal treatment.
But put something up that assumes a dis-egalitarian principle and see how it flies. I’d be interested to see if you can come up with something plausible that is dis-egalitarian and up to epistemic scratch...
Your alternative would be to think an aristocratic or meritocratic principle is true. (It’s either equal or unequal, right?)
I wouldn’t use those terms, since they bring in all kinds of unnecessary connotations. I would say the opposite of the egalitarian principle is the non-egalitarian principle. I was thinking less along the lines of nobles/commoners and more along the lines of my children/other people’s children. I find the idea (that I think the egalitarian principle entails) that I have as much obligation to perfect strangers as to my wife to be extremely counter-intuitive.
I think we can assume aristocracy is a dead duck along with the Divine Right of Kings and other theological relics.
I don’t consider the Divine Right of Crowds (‘human rights’, or whatever the cool kids are calling it these days) to be any less silly than those ‘theological relics’.
Meritocracy in some form I believe has been advocated by some utilitarians. People with Oxford degrees get 10 votes. Cambridge 9. Down to the LSE with 2 votes and the common ignorant unlettered herd 1 vote...
This is kind of an epistemocratic voting regime which some think might lead to better outcomes. Alas, no one has been game to try get such laws up. There is little evidence that an electorate of PhDs is any less daft/ignorant/clueless/idle/indifferent on matters outside their specialty than the general public.
This part isn’t really relevant to what I’m talking about, since I’m not discussing equal weight in decision-making, but equal weight in a social welfare function. My infant son’s interests are one of my greatest concerns, but he currently has about zero say in family decision-making.
From a legal rights perspective, egalitarianism is surely correct. Equal treatment before the law seems a lot easier to defend than unequal treatment.
Equal treatment before the law does not necessarily mean that individuals interests are weighted equally. When was the last time you heard of jurors on a rape trial trying to figure out exactly how much utility the rapist got so they could properly combine that with the disutility of the victim?
Of course what “the cool kids” are actually talking about is more like a Divine Right of People; it’s got nothing to do with treating people differently when there’s a mass of them. And of course adding the word “divine” is nothing more than a handy way of making it sound sillier than it otherwise would (whereas in “Divine Right of Kings” it is a word with an actual meaning; the power of kings was literally thought to be of divine origin).
So, removing some of the spin, what you’re apparently saying is that “let’s treat all people as having equal rights” seems as silly to you as “let’s suppose that one person in each country is appointed by a divine superbeing to rule over all the others”. Well, OK.
Equal treatment before the law does not necessarily mean that individuals’ interests are weighted equally.
It means that people are treated unequally only according to differences that are actually relevant. (Of course then the argument shifts to which differences are relevant; but at least then one actually has to argue for their relevance rather than simply assuming it on traditional grounds.)
Having said all of which, I agree that the usual arguments for equal weighting completely fail to show that a person shouldn’t give higher weighting to herself, her family, her friends, etc.
Of course what “the cool kids” are actually talking about is more like a Divine Right of People; it’s got nothing to do with treating people differently when there’s a mass of them.
The state in which I live has statute law initiatives, so yes, people actually do ‘rule’ only if there is a large enough mass of them. Individually, I have no such (legal) right.
And of course adding the word “divine” is nothing more than a handy way of making it sound sillier than it otherwise would (whereas in “Divine Right of Kings” it is a word with an actual meaning; the power of kings was literally thought to be of divine origin).
Speaking of dubious origins:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...
I am in complete agreement with the following:
It means that people are treated unequally only according to differences that are actually relevant. (Of course then the argument shifts to which differences are relevant; but at least then one actually has to argue for their relevance rather than simply assuming it on traditional grounds.)
Having said all of which, I agree that the usual arguments for equal weighting completely fail to show that a person shouldn’t give higher weighting to herself, her family, her friends, etc.
In any case, the point of my comment was not to bring up politics, but to show the incompatibility of typical intuitions with regards to how one should treat family and friends compared to strangers with what (the most popular flavors of) utilitarianism seems to indicate is ‘correct’.
I have argued with utilitarians several times on Less Wrong and the discussions seem to follow the same sequence of backpedalling. First they claim utilitarianism is true. Then, when I ask and they are unable to conceive of an experiment that would verify or falsify it, they claim that it isn’t the kind of thing that has a truth-value, but that it is a description of their preferences. Next, I demonstrate that relying on revealed preference shows that virtually nobody actually has utilitarian preferences. Lastly, they claim that intuition gives us good reason go with (even if it isn’t True) utilitarianism. My response to NancyLebovitz in this thread is yet another attempt to show that, no, it really isn’t intuitive.
Is this an accurate description of what is going on or am I mind-killed on the subject of normative ethics (or both, or neither)?
When you first used the phrase “Divine Right of Crowds” you immediately explained in parentheses that you meant “human rights” or something similar. Now you seem to be talking about democracy instead. The two aren’t the same, though probably approval of one is correlated with approval of the other.
Anyway, “crowds” in the literal sense still aren’t involved (it needs N people to get something voted on, but that doesn’t require them to be colocated or to know one another or anything else crowd-like other than sheer numbers; and if you’re now using “Divine Right of Crowds” to mean “a political system that tries to favour outcomes preferred by more people rather than fewer” then, again, I suggest that you’re picking terminology simply to make the other side look as silly as possible.
Speaking of dubious origins: [...]
It is possible that those words from the Declaration of Independence show that in the 18th century people believed in something like a “Divine Right of Crowds”. (It’s not entirely obvious, though. Perhaps they actually just believed in a Right of Crowds and thought what they said would sound better if they included “created” and “by their Creator”; compare the mention of a Creator at the end of some editions of the Origin of Species, or Einstein’s “God does not play dice”.)
But that doesn’t mean that people who now favour democracy, or human rights, or independence of the US from the UK, have to believe (or commonly do believe) that those things are divinely ordained. Similarly, there are people now who want kings without believing in a Divine Right of Kings, and pretending that they do would be a shabby rhetorical trick.
[...] incompatibility of typical intuitions [...] with what (the most popular flavors of) utilitarianism seems to indicate [...]
Yup, there are indeed such incompatibilities (though I think one could make a reasonable argument that, given human nature, overall utility is likely to be higher in a society where people care more about themselves and those closer to them than in one where they truly care equally about everyone. Surely not nearly so much more as our intuitions lead to, though.
the same sequence of backpedalling
I’ll take your word for it, but I’m a bit surprised: I’d have thought an appreciable fraction of LWers advocating utilitarianism would start from the position that it’s an expression of their preferences rather than an objective fact about the world.
(For my part, not that it particularly matters, I do indeed care most about myself, and less about people less connected to me, physically further from me, more unlike me, etc., but I find that as I reflect more on my preferences in any given case they shift nearer to egalitarianism, though they often don’t get all the way. Something like utilitarianism seems like a pretty decent approximation to what I’d want in law.)
am I mind-killed [...]?
I can’t tell, obviously, but I do tend to think that things like switching ground without noticing (“human rights” --> democracy) and insisting on using question-begging language (“Divine Right of Crowds”) are often signs of someone not thinking as clearly as they might be.
I think we can assume aristocracy is a dead duck along with the Divine Right of Kings and other theological relics.
Counterpoint: it offers stability, which is useful regardless of theology. See the Fnargle World thought experiment and various other neo-reactionary stuff on Why Democracy Is Bad.
Let me put it this way: would you rather we’re ruled by someone who’s skilled at persuading us to elect him, and who focuses resources on looking good in four years; or someone who’s been trained since birth to govern well, and knows they or their descendants will be held accountable for any future side-effects of their policies?
These arguments may be deeply flawed, but hereditary aristocracy doesn’t stand of fall with the Divine Right Of Kings.
Counterpoint: it offers stability, which is useful regardless of theology.
Stability Is good if governance is good and bad if not.
Let me put it this way: would you rather we’re ruled by someone who’s skilled at persuading us to elect him, and who focuses resources on looking good in four years;
...and you can get rid of..
or someone who’s been trained since birth to govern well, and knows they or their descendants will be held accountable for any future side-effects of their policies?
OK. Looks like democracy with a supply of candidates from Kennedy-style political dynasties is the best of all possible systems...;-)
Kinda. In practice a lot of the power of government wrests in agencies that offer advice to the currently ruling party, and those agencies often embody significant powers themselves. It would be a mistake to confuse the elected executive branch of government with government entire. It’s not even clear to me that they have the majority share of influence over what actually happens.
Under democracy, the people can decide if their stable government has outstayed its welcome after so many years.
Except that due to problems with rational ignorance they frequently make bad choices. Furthermore, this system encourages politicians to made shortsighted decisions.
There’s an ordinary selection mechanism for politicians, and an ordinary selection mechanism for lords of the manor.
Ideally, the ordinary selection mechanism for politicians (elections) would choose people who define success the way the voter would define success. That said, we both know that this is not how things actually work. For principal-agent delegation reasons, politicians often have their own agendas that conflict with voter preferences. The politician agenda diverges increasingly from the voter agenda as the number of voters increases (i.e. national figures generally have more freedom to pursue their own ends than county officials).
Still, politician agendas cannot completely diverge from voter preferences. Observationally, many voter preferences are implemented into law. As an extreme example, bribery is illegal even though the prohibition is bad for most politicians. So there is reason to think that the ordinary selection process for politicians leads to some connection in the definition of success (teleologically, if not cognitively).
By contrast, there is no particular reason to think the ordinary selection mechanism (inheritance) picks lords of the manor who want to implement tenant farmers preferences. Unless you include revolutionary change, which does not seem like an ordinary selection process.
Inasmuch as democracy woks, they do. In an ideal democracy, representatives are servants of the people who are fired if they don’t deliver. Diverging interests are failures, not inherent to democracy.
What do you mean by “inherent to democracy”? Certain types of failures, e.g., politicians pursuing short sighted policies because they’re not likely to be around when said policies implode, are systemic to democracies.
To a certain extent. However, the bureaucrat has no motivation to care about the welfare of the people, not even the politician’s desire to get reelected or the noble’s incentive to make his estate successful. The bureaucrat’s incentive, by contrast, is to expand his bureaucratic empire, frequently at the expense of the nation as a whole.
But it’s still long termist. None of the cogs does the work of the whole machine itself. You also need a free press, even though their motivation is to sell pieces of paper.
Only if we define “interest” in a rational sense (i.e., “how rational agents embodying the role of ‘employers’ should optimally behave if their goals/values are X), rather than in an evopsych sense (i.e., “how human apes embodying the role of ‘employers’ will tend to behave, and what that implies that the encoded values of human apes actually are”).
Maintaining or improving position within the dominance hierarchy often co-opts other concerns that a human ape might have, up to and including bare survival. Often, that cognitive dissonance is “resolved” by that human ape convincing themselves that strategies which improve their position within the dominance hierarchy are actually strategies to achieve other goals that seem more palatable to the parts of their brain that cogitate palatability.
(In Anglo: “We like bossing more than we like living well, but we like thinking that we’re trying to live well more than we like thinking that we’re trying to boss. So, we trick ourselves into believing that we’re trying to live well, when we’re really just trying to boss.”)
Its in their economic interest to tax the peasantry to almost but not quite the point of starvation, and use the excess to fund land-acquisition, which is pretty much what they did for centuries. You could argue that with the benefit of hindsight, what they should have done is abandoned agriculture+war for education+industrialisation, since [by some measures] ordinary citizens of the present are wealthier than the aristocrats of the past. But I could argue right back that the industrial revoiution wasn’t that good for the aristocaracy, as a class, in the end.
You could argue that with the benefit of hindsight, what they should have done is abandoned agriculture+war for ecuation+industialisation, since ordinary citizens of the present are wealthier than the aristocrats of the past.
Only if you consider absolute gains preferable to relative/”zero-sum” gains, which our evolved psychological makeup isn’t really prepared to do very well.
Social animals with a natural dominance hierarchy will often see “how well am I doing right now, compared to how well everyone else around me is doing right now?” as a more salient question than “how well am I doing right now, compared to how well I was doing before / how well I could be doing?”.
Only if you consider absolute gains preferable to relative/”zero-sum” gains, which our evolved psychological makeup isn’t really prepared to do very well.
Except that that never happens, and it’s not in their interests to disrupt the economy that much, and it’s also
not in their interests to do something that might lead to civil unrest...and it never happens.
Well, it never happens at the 49%-51% level, but that’s because there aren’t any countries where 49% of the country is wealthy enough to be worth plundering (see Pareto). Massive redistribution of wealth away from minorities has happened quite a bit, as in Zimbabwe, Haiti, Germany, and others. The various communist revolutions seem to be an example of this, if you allow ‘democracy of the sword’, and I would suspect pogroms are as well, to the extent that property is looted as well as destroyed.
One counterexample is sufficient to break a “never.” To the extent that ‘good’ democracies do not do this, it is not a statement about the incentive structure of democracy, but a statement about the preferences of the voters of that particular polity.
Like Vaniver said, it’s never happened this explicitly, but demanding that [group you’ve just demonized] pay their “fair share” is relatively common rhetoric. And yes, politicians are willing to do this even as it gradually destroys the economy as is happening right now in Europe.
that [group you’ve just demonized] pay their “fair share” is relatively common rhetoric.
Quite. It’s hard to make it stick unless it is seen as fair.
And yes, politicians are willing to do this even as it gradually destroys the economy as is happening right now in Europe.
You mean southern Europe? I don’t know who you think the 49% are. (In fact, given the tendency of democracies to alternate between parties of the left and right, one would expect the 49% and 51% to switch roles, leading to an averaging out).
In any case, if Greek or Spanish voters vote for unsustainable benefits, more fool them, It wasn’t done to them, they did it to themselves.
(In fact, given the tendency of democracies to alternate between parties of the left and right, one would expect the 49% and 51% to switch roles, leading to an averaging out).
I think you’re overestimating the amount of difference between the two parties. Also, this still screws the economy.
In any case, if Greek or Spanish voters vote for unsustainable benefits, more fool them, It wasn’t done to them, they did it to themselves.
Well, I suppose all govt. is unstable, then. Which dynasty has been in power forever?
Stability is a matter of degree, as you’re well aware. Few dynasties lose power after four years of rule.
What good is that going to do a peasant like me? It’s not like they are going to knock off the cost of electioneering from my taxes.
Even a massive amount of spending on election campaigns is less likely to succeed (and thus less stable) than a (relatively) small amount of spending an safeguarding from assassination.
Also, election campaigns have negative effects on, among other things, the rationality of the populace; and they encourage polarization in the long term—in contrast, bodyguards discourage trying to off your rich uncle for the inheritance.
Your alternative would be to think an aristocratic or meritocratic principle is true. (It’s either equal or unequal, right?)
I think we can assume aristocracy is a dead duck along with the Divine Right of Kings and other theological relics.
Meritocracy in some form I believe has been advocated by some utilitarians. People with Oxford degrees get 10 votes. Cambridge 9. Down to the LSE with 2 votes and the common ignorant unlettered herd 1 vote…
This is kind of an epistemocratic voting regime which some think might lead to better outcomes. Alas, no one has been game to try get such laws up. There is little evidence that an electorate of PhDs is any less daft/ignorant/clueless/idle/indifferent on matters outside their specialty than the general public.
From a legal rights perspective, egalitarianism is surely correct. Equal treatment before the law seems a lot easier to defend than unequal treatment.
But put something up that assumes a dis-egalitarian principle and see how it flies. I’d be interested to see if you can come up with something plausible that is dis-egalitarian and up to epistemic scratch...
Hint: plutocracy...
I wouldn’t use those terms, since they bring in all kinds of unnecessary connotations. I would say the opposite of the egalitarian principle is the non-egalitarian principle. I was thinking less along the lines of nobles/commoners and more along the lines of my children/other people’s children. I find the idea (that I think the egalitarian principle entails) that I have as much obligation to perfect strangers as to my wife to be extremely counter-intuitive.
I don’t consider the Divine Right of Crowds (‘human rights’, or whatever the cool kids are calling it these days) to be any less silly than those ‘theological relics’.
This part isn’t really relevant to what I’m talking about, since I’m not discussing equal weight in decision-making, but equal weight in a social welfare function. My infant son’s interests are one of my greatest concerns, but he currently has about zero say in family decision-making.
Equal treatment before the law does not necessarily mean that individuals interests are weighted equally. When was the last time you heard of jurors on a rape trial trying to figure out exactly how much utility the rapist got so they could properly combine that with the disutility of the victim?
Of course what “the cool kids” are actually talking about is more like a Divine Right of People; it’s got nothing to do with treating people differently when there’s a mass of them. And of course adding the word “divine” is nothing more than a handy way of making it sound sillier than it otherwise would (whereas in “Divine Right of Kings” it is a word with an actual meaning; the power of kings was literally thought to be of divine origin).
So, removing some of the spin, what you’re apparently saying is that “let’s treat all people as having equal rights” seems as silly to you as “let’s suppose that one person in each country is appointed by a divine superbeing to rule over all the others”. Well, OK.
It means that people are treated unequally only according to differences that are actually relevant. (Of course then the argument shifts to which differences are relevant; but at least then one actually has to argue for their relevance rather than simply assuming it on traditional grounds.)
Having said all of which, I agree that the usual arguments for equal weighting completely fail to show that a person shouldn’t give higher weighting to herself, her family, her friends, etc.
The state in which I live has statute law initiatives, so yes, people actually do ‘rule’ only if there is a large enough mass of them. Individually, I have no such (legal) right.
Speaking of dubious origins:
I am in complete agreement with the following:
In any case, the point of my comment was not to bring up politics, but to show the incompatibility of typical intuitions with regards to how one should treat family and friends compared to strangers with what (the most popular flavors of) utilitarianism seems to indicate is ‘correct’.
I have argued with utilitarians several times on Less Wrong and the discussions seem to follow the same sequence of backpedalling. First they claim utilitarianism is true. Then, when I ask and they are unable to conceive of an experiment that would verify or falsify it, they claim that it isn’t the kind of thing that has a truth-value, but that it is a description of their preferences. Next, I demonstrate that relying on revealed preference shows that virtually nobody actually has utilitarian preferences. Lastly, they claim that intuition gives us good reason go with (even if it isn’t True) utilitarianism. My response to NancyLebovitz in this thread is yet another attempt to show that, no, it really isn’t intuitive.
Is this an accurate description of what is going on or am I mind-killed on the subject of normative ethics (or both, or neither)?
When you first used the phrase “Divine Right of Crowds” you immediately explained in parentheses that you meant “human rights” or something similar. Now you seem to be talking about democracy instead. The two aren’t the same, though probably approval of one is correlated with approval of the other.
Anyway, “crowds” in the literal sense still aren’t involved (it needs N people to get something voted on, but that doesn’t require them to be colocated or to know one another or anything else crowd-like other than sheer numbers; and if you’re now using “Divine Right of Crowds” to mean “a political system that tries to favour outcomes preferred by more people rather than fewer” then, again, I suggest that you’re picking terminology simply to make the other side look as silly as possible.
It is possible that those words from the Declaration of Independence show that in the 18th century people believed in something like a “Divine Right of Crowds”. (It’s not entirely obvious, though. Perhaps they actually just believed in a Right of Crowds and thought what they said would sound better if they included “created” and “by their Creator”; compare the mention of a Creator at the end of some editions of the Origin of Species, or Einstein’s “God does not play dice”.)
But that doesn’t mean that people who now favour democracy, or human rights, or independence of the US from the UK, have to believe (or commonly do believe) that those things are divinely ordained. Similarly, there are people now who want kings without believing in a Divine Right of Kings, and pretending that they do would be a shabby rhetorical trick.
Yup, there are indeed such incompatibilities (though I think one could make a reasonable argument that, given human nature, overall utility is likely to be higher in a society where people care more about themselves and those closer to them than in one where they truly care equally about everyone. Surely not nearly so much more as our intuitions lead to, though.
I’ll take your word for it, but I’m a bit surprised: I’d have thought an appreciable fraction of LWers advocating utilitarianism would start from the position that it’s an expression of their preferences rather than an objective fact about the world.
(For my part, not that it particularly matters, I do indeed care most about myself, and less about people less connected to me, physically further from me, more unlike me, etc., but I find that as I reflect more on my preferences in any given case they shift nearer to egalitarianism, though they often don’t get all the way. Something like utilitarianism seems like a pretty decent approximation to what I’d want in law.)
I can’t tell, obviously, but I do tend to think that things like switching ground without noticing (“human rights” --> democracy) and insisting on using question-begging language (“Divine Right of Crowds”) are often signs of someone not thinking as clearly as they might be.
Counterpoint: it offers stability, which is useful regardless of theology. See the Fnargle World thought experiment and various other neo-reactionary stuff on Why Democracy Is Bad.
Let me put it this way: would you rather we’re ruled by someone who’s skilled at persuading us to elect him, and who focuses resources on looking good in four years; or someone who’s been trained since birth to govern well, and knows they or their descendants will be held accountable for any future side-effects of their policies?
These arguments may be deeply flawed, but hereditary aristocracy doesn’t stand of fall with the Divine Right Of Kings.
Stability Is good if governance is good and bad if not.
...and you can get rid of..
OK. Looks like democracy with a supply of candidates from Kennedy-style political dynasties is the best of all possible systems...;-)
Kinda. In practice a lot of the power of government wrests in agencies that offer advice to the currently ruling party, and those agencies often embody significant powers themselves. It would be a mistake to confuse the elected executive branch of government with government entire. It’s not even clear to me that they have the majority share of influence over what actually happens.
I was suggesting that it might serve to render governance better.
You still have to focus on retaining popularity, via attacking political opponents and increasing PR skills, unless the elections are total shams.
Also, to be clear, I’m not advocating this position; just pointing out there are other arguments for it than the “Divine Right of Kings”.
Under democracy, the people can decide if their stable government has outstayed its welcome after so many years.
Whilst aristos just have to keep slipping their rivals the poisoned chalice...much more discreet.
Got that.
Except that due to problems with rational ignorance they frequently make bad choices. Furthermore, this system encourages politicians to made shortsighted decisions.
Whereas aristos can be batshit crazy due to problems with genetics. Furthermore, this system encourages them to make selfcentered decisions.
What do you mean by “self-centered”? It is after all in a noble’s self-interest to pursue the success of his manor and its inhabitants.
I’m not sure the lord of the manor and the tenant farmer define “success” the same way.
The politician and the voter in a democracy also don’t define “success” in the same way.
There’s an ordinary selection mechanism for politicians, and an ordinary selection mechanism for lords of the manor.
Ideally, the ordinary selection mechanism for politicians (elections) would choose people who define success the way the voter would define success. That said, we both know that this is not how things actually work. For principal-agent delegation reasons, politicians often have their own agendas that conflict with voter preferences. The politician agenda diverges increasingly from the voter agenda as the number of voters increases (i.e. national figures generally have more freedom to pursue their own ends than county officials).
Still, politician agendas cannot completely diverge from voter preferences. Observationally, many voter preferences are implemented into law. As an extreme example, bribery is illegal even though the prohibition is bad for most politicians. So there is reason to think that the ordinary selection process for politicians leads to some connection in the definition of success (teleologically, if not cognitively).
By contrast, there is no particular reason to think the ordinary selection mechanism (inheritance) picks lords of the manor who want to implement tenant farmers preferences. Unless you include revolutionary change, which does not seem like an ordinary selection process.
I think that is what I was trying to say, but you said it much better.
Inasmuch as democracy woks, they do. In an ideal democracy, representatives are servants of the people who are fired if they don’t deliver. Diverging interests are failures, not inherent to democracy.
What do you mean by “inherent to democracy”? Certain types of failures, e.g., politicians pursuing short sighted policies because they’re not likely to be around when said policies implode, are systemic to democracies.
In practice short-termism is ameliorated by life presidents, second chambers, career civil servants, etc.
To a certain extent. However, the bureaucrat has no motivation to care about the welfare of the people, not even the politician’s desire to get reelected or the noble’s incentive to make his estate successful. The bureaucrat’s incentive, by contrast, is to expand his bureaucratic empire, frequently at the expense of the nation as a whole.
But it’s still long termist. None of the cogs does the work of the whole machine itself. You also need a free press, even though their motivation is to sell pieces of paper.
It is also in a factory-owner’s interest to pursue the success of his factories and their workers. And yet...
What’s more, it’s in an emplyers interest to have workers who are stakeholders..
Only if we define “interest” in a rational sense (i.e., “how rational agents embodying the role of ‘employers’ should optimally behave if their goals/values are X), rather than in an evopsych sense (i.e., “how human apes embodying the role of ‘employers’ will tend to behave, and what that implies that the encoded values of human apes actually are”).
Maintaining or improving position within the dominance hierarchy often co-opts other concerns that a human ape might have, up to and including bare survival. Often, that cognitive dissonance is “resolved” by that human ape convincing themselves that strategies which improve their position within the dominance hierarchy are actually strategies to achieve other goals that seem more palatable to the parts of their brain that cogitate palatability.
(In Anglo: “We like bossing more than we like living well, but we like thinking that we’re trying to live well more than we like thinking that we’re trying to boss. So, we trick ourselves into believing that we’re trying to live well, when we’re really just trying to boss.”)
Its in their economic interest to tax the peasantry to almost but not quite the point of starvation, and use the excess to fund land-acquisition, which is pretty much what they did for centuries. You could argue that with the benefit of hindsight, what they should have done is abandoned agriculture+war for education+industrialisation, since [by some measures] ordinary citizens of the present are wealthier than the aristocrats of the past. But I could argue right back that the industrial revoiution wasn’t that good for the aristocaracy, as a class, in the end.
Only if you consider absolute gains preferable to relative/”zero-sum” gains, which our evolved psychological makeup isn’t really prepared to do very well.
Social animals with a natural dominance hierarchy will often see “how well am I doing right now, compared to how well everyone else around me is doing right now?” as a more salient question than “how well am I doing right now, compared to how well I was doing before / how well I could be doing?”.
That’s what I meant.
nod I just felt it needed to be stated more explicitly.
Yes and it’s in the interest of elected politicians to take all the property of 49% of the population and divide it among the remaining 51%.
Except that that never happens, and it’s not in their interests to disrupt the economy that much, and it’s also not in their interests to do something that might lead to civil unrest...and it never happens.
Well, it never happens at the 49%-51% level, but that’s because there aren’t any countries where 49% of the country is wealthy enough to be worth plundering (see Pareto). Massive redistribution of wealth away from minorities has happened quite a bit, as in Zimbabwe, Haiti, Germany, and others. The various communist revolutions seem to be an example of this, if you allow ‘democracy of the sword’, and I would suspect pogroms are as well, to the extent that property is looted as well as destroyed.
I don’t think you have many good examples of democracies there.
One counterexample is sufficient to break a “never.” To the extent that ‘good’ democracies do not do this, it is not a statement about the incentive structure of democracy, but a statement about the preferences of the voters of that particular polity.
Or the details of the exact structure of the democracy which may create relevant incentives.
Like Vaniver said, it’s never happened this explicitly, but demanding that [group you’ve just demonized] pay their “fair share” is relatively common rhetoric. And yes, politicians are willing to do this even as it gradually destroys the economy as is happening right now in Europe.
Quite. It’s hard to make it stick unless it is seen as fair.
You mean southern Europe? I don’t know who you think the 49% are. (In fact, given the tendency of democracies to alternate between parties of the left and right, one would expect the 49% and 51% to switch roles, leading to an averaging out).
In any case, if Greek or Spanish voters vote for unsustainable benefits, more fool them, It wasn’t done to them, they did it to themselves.
I think you’re overestimating the amount of difference between the two parties. Also, this still screws the economy.
See my comment on rational ignorance above.
The two parties where?
I think you may be over generalising from (your assessment of) your own nation.
Uhhh...so democracy is not theoretically perfect. The discussion was about whether there is anything practical that is less bad, eg aristocracy.
I should have said two coalitions, sorry.
A stable government that loses power when it loses an election is, in fact “unstable”.
Eh, taste-testers, bodyguards and damn good doctors are cheaper than election campaigns.
Well, I suppose all govt. is unstable, then. Which dynasty has been in power forever?
What good is that going to do a peasant like me? It’s not like they are going to knock off the cost of electioneering from my taxes.
Stability is a matter of degree, as you’re well aware. Few dynasties lose power after four years of rule.
Even a massive amount of spending on election campaigns is less likely to succeed (and thus less stable) than a (relatively) small amount of spending an safeguarding from assassination.
Also, election campaigns have negative effects on, among other things, the rationality of the populace; and they encourage polarization in the long term—in contrast, bodyguards discourage trying to off your rich uncle for the inheritance.
I can’t seem to google up anything with the worlds “Fnargle World”
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/magic-of-symmetric-sovereignty.html
This is the reference.