Thank you for the link. I read it but not super carefully. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with superior alternatives to democracy.
I suppose the implicit background knowledge I have is the quote from Churchill:
Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
If you have looked at fascism in its various tried forms, communism in its various tried forms, religious and other dictatorships in their various tried forms, I think it is hard to disagree with that statement, and I can even see the feedback mechanism that democracy has for keeping things from getting too crappy for too many people.
In light of this knowledge, a “Boo, democracy” in the absence of some other form of government that would surprise and impress Churchill seems to be missing something that people with an adequate grasp of modern history would want.
If you have looked at fascism in its various tried forms, communism in its various tried forms, religious and other dictatorships in their various tried forms, I think it is hard to disagree with that statement, and I can even see the feedback mechanism that democracy has for keeping things from getting too crappy for too many people.
Here I disagree, controlling for technology I’m not at all sure that limited franchise Republics weren’t superior to democracy (indeed modern democracy is limited franchise as well, ask the children, felons and illegal immigrants). Monarchy doesn’t look obviously worse to me either. You have to admit that our society as a whole, basically any modern source you pick will have a pro-democracy bias. I’m not saying this means Democracy isn’t as great as you think it might not be that big a bias, but it is clearly there.
And it seems hard to figure out how strong this bias is. How does a single individual doing research fix that? Remember that North Korean society has constructed a narrative that lets them feel they have a superior system of government to all previous ones (I hope you agree classical Monarchy is better than that) and that it is the logical conclusion of centuries of moral progress. Aren’t you a bit scared that they can do that? Where does power come from in a democracy? Good military skill? Management skill? No whoever convinces the most people of his or her agenda will have that agenda enacted… the power of flesh Conan. If the entire planet was North Korea how would you know something radically better is possible and not even that hard to acheive?
It didn’t seem to have anything to do with superior alternatives to democracy.
Right it didn’t, I’m sorry I should have made it more explicit. It is basically an argument that democracy is a very local optimum or not an optimum at all and is holding back technological progress. If you are reading Moldbug for the very first time I actually recommend you start with “An open letter to open-minded progressives”, but if you don’t enjoy his writing so far don’t bother because he is verbose.
To give three possible superior alternatives to democracy I will cite:
Robin Hanson’s Futarchy, which is basically just updating democracy to use prediction markets (great institutions). Vote for what you want, the markets discover the best way to get it by pooling together expert knowledge and incentivizing truth seeking.
Neocameralism by Moldbug which is basically to have the state be guided by the profit motive and have such overwhelming military force that uses crypto lock technology to enforce it has no reason to brainwash its citizens since they don’t have the military force to matter politically. They can’t seize the government/compaines assets. The profit motive together with the corporate structure keeps most of them from being hijacked by its CEO as well as keeps most of them nice to its customers (citizens). You can make sure it will be nice by give stock options to specialized efficient charities. Basically divide the state between the rent extracting part and the goodness generating part people expect, min-max both, pair them up in a single adventuring party and enjoy your munchkinized society. Obviously it kind of sucks if you discover things people really really like spending money on but hurt them, but hey democracy would collapse at that too.
Singapore’s authoritarian free market friendly technocracy (theoretically a normal democracy)
The post you referenced didn’t really talk much about neocameralism’s structure. If indeed we do sell stock in the state, and the state then operates to maximize it’s stock price, that sure strikes me as way worse than a republic.
First off, I’m not even sure what it means to own stock in the gov’t. To own stock in a company is a highly complex thing whos meaning is spelled out in exquisite detail both in legislation and in the recorded court cases which have interpreted that legislation. As a result, we know there are real rights associated with the ownership that will be enforced by a very powerful government in an extremely predictable way.
If I buy stock in the sovcorp, who protects my property rights? The sovcorp? The sovcorp is run by executives. Why would they not simply, essentially, steal the corporation? It wouldn’t be illegal for them to do so because being the sovcorp, they write AND interpret AND enforce the laws. Even for regular corps, we find the executives giving themselves large stacks of equity in the company every year. What is even the feedback mechanism to keep a board of directors and an executive management team from awarding themselves a majority of the voting power of the sovcorp? Of diluting the ownership outside the board and the executives until they get all the return?
How does the sovcorp prevent its own collapse in to a kleptocratic dictatorship?
In the case of a republican democracy, there is a kernel in place called a constitution. In some important sense, everyone with the franchise has one and only one non-transferrable share in the control of the sovcorp. These shares are just one form of control over one part of the structure, turns out money also gives people avenues of control, and money is not distributed even close to evenly. But having at least one portion of the control based, by kernel or constitution, on inalienable limited control rights prevents a small minority, even a tiny minority, from capturing the returns from the entire sovcorp by accruing all the control.
Of course a democracy as could a neocameral with transferrable stock, can still have coalitions form within it to the benefit of the coalesced at the expense of those outside the coalition. But with inalienable voting shares, an upper limit of inequality is essentially in place: the coalitions must be quite gigantic, requiring more than half of the enfranchised to consent, whereas in the transferrable stock case the coalitions could be quite small.
If I have missed the real point of the neocamera, please do tell.
If I buy stock in the sovcorp, who protects my property rights? The sovcorp? The sovcorp is run by executives. Why would they not simply, essentially, steal the corporation?
There are cryptographic solutions to this problem: Suppose the stock/money of the corporation consists of crypto signatures. You can use threshold signatures to make heavy weapons only work for the leader most recently authorized by a majority of the board most recently authorized by majority of shareholders.
Of course the leaders could furtively @#$%^ the crypto in the heavy weapons but then democratic leaders can, and regularly do, furtively @#$%^ the vote.
Indeed, it is probably easier to @#$%^ the vote than the crypto, since most voters are idiots, and any one vote is not worth much, but most shareholders are smart, and the votes of the most important (and powerful) shareholders are worth quite a lot, so there are more concentrated interests upholding the integrity of the crypto, than the integrity of the democratic vote.
My objection is that Moldbug’s solution ignores the dynamics of ruling elites—but then so does democracy.
There are cryptographic solutions to this problem: Suppose the stock/money of the corporation consists of crypto signatures. You can use threshold signatures to make heavy weapons only work for the leader most recently authorized by a majority of the board most recently authorized by majority of shareholders.
I don’t see how any amount of crypto can keep the management+board from favoring themselves in how they account the wealth. We have ALWAYS had good crypto available for money: gold is a sort-of atomic crypto. But gold does not stop the treasurer from embezzling, and if you control the accounting rules, embezzelment per se becomes unnecessary, you just write those expenses off mendaciously as some sorts of necessary expenses.
A sovcorp is just a business operation that operates outside of the law of secondary property rights corporations. We have plenty of natural experiments in this. Organized crime is a sovcorp. Fighting it out with other sovcorps associated with competiting criminal organizations, but also fighting it out with sovcorps we associate with gov’t: police, da’s, fbi, dea, etc.
If the mafia promised to pay you a “dividend” on its operations, you could expect to receive that dividend until they decided it was cheaper to NOT pay you. Crypto guarantees I am not buying counterfeit shares in your mafia, your sovcorp. Counterfeiting is not the problem if the sovcorp decides what property rights it owes to its non-controlling shareholders in real time, and by definition of a sovcorp, unconstrained by any outside rules of interaction.
My objection is that Moldbug’s solution ignores the dynamics of ruling elites—but then so does democracy.
Democracy as implemented in the US republic certainly doesn’t ignore this. We have FOIA laws, a gigantic structure of oathes of offices and internal controls on the enhanced powers sovcorp agents have. We have a system of “checks and balances” built in from the ground level, and enhanced much since it started.
What our republic does not manage is to make the dynamics of ruling elites disappear. What it does manage is to keep the ruling elites from running away with control over the whole system with no oversight and no transparency.
Constantly dealing with a real issue in human nature is the OPPOSITE of ignoring it.
I don’t see how any amount of crypto can keep the management+board from favoring themselves in how they account the wealth.
The board contains major shareholders, who would mostly be in favor of honest accounting. It seems more likely to work, than that a democratic government would be in favor of honest vote counting.
The post you referenced didn’t really talk much about neocameralism’s structure.
You need to follow several of the links in the text for that. I recommend you also search in this index of his posts. More on separating the rent extraction from do gooderism in government.
Also I’m really interested on your comments on the other two possibly superior alternatives I’ve outlined.
Also I’m really interested on your comments on the other two possibly superior alternatives I’ve outlined.
I have read Robin Hanson over the years. I think prediction markets are likely a valuable methodology. They are hardly inconsistent with a republic. They can be used in determining policy, they can be supported, enhanced by legislation. I would look forward to the day that I can get an intrade account without having to jump through Irish hoops, the barriers the US has put in place are effective at least as far as stopping me from so far getting an account.
Futarchy in general is, in my semi-cursory view, not a challenge to the republic, but again a set of principles that the republic might be informed by in crafting its laws and policies. It seems to consist primarily of a lowering of the discount rate in calculating investment returns, that is, making far future returns count for more than we currently do. This is sort of simultaneously an empirical question and a values question. How much do we forego in the present to have a richer future: we all face this decision constantly in our personal lives as well as our public lives. Arguing strenuously to push the value of the future higher seems totally inbounds of what I would expect within republican (with a small r) policy debate.
SIngaporean authoritarianism seems likely to me not to scale. Singapore is smaller than the US in both diversity, size, and population. Just as one person can write a certain size computer program more efficiently than can 10, there comes a size of program where you have to learn how to team up the 10 people to get it done within a lifetime. Inviting Yew to run the US probably wouln’t work, but he might do a nice job on New York City.
In any case one generally needs to formalize systems to get the benefit of scale. While conforming mortgages may have been the seeds of the recent financial world catastrophe, they were also the enablers of a gigantic growth in funding at lower costs for improving property. Sure, your personal banker treating each mortgage as piecework, not making a new mortgage until the bank had accumulated enough more capital to make the next mortgage, might not have made the mistakes the formal system practically institutionalized, the piecewise system would also have created a tiny fraction of the total mortgages at a much higher friction cost. Mass production allows you to magnify the value of good design, but it also magnifies the negvalue of your mistakes. That singapore can operate well as a Mom & Pop operation as long as Pop is Yew should give little evidence that a larger country already achieving productivity levels similar to Singapores would be anything but hurt by emulating that model.
Please let me know if I am missing anything you think is essential in Futarchy or Singapore.
Thank you for the link. I read it but not super carefully. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with superior alternatives to democracy.
I suppose the implicit background knowledge I have is the quote from Churchill:
If you have looked at fascism in its various tried forms, communism in its various tried forms, religious and other dictatorships in their various tried forms, I think it is hard to disagree with that statement, and I can even see the feedback mechanism that democracy has for keeping things from getting too crappy for too many people.
In light of this knowledge, a “Boo, democracy” in the absence of some other form of government that would surprise and impress Churchill seems to be missing something that people with an adequate grasp of modern history would want.
Here I disagree, controlling for technology I’m not at all sure that limited franchise Republics weren’t superior to democracy (indeed modern democracy is limited franchise as well, ask the children, felons and illegal immigrants). Monarchy doesn’t look obviously worse to me either. You have to admit that our society as a whole, basically any modern source you pick will have a pro-democracy bias. I’m not saying this means Democracy isn’t as great as you think it might not be that big a bias, but it is clearly there.
And it seems hard to figure out how strong this bias is. How does a single individual doing research fix that? Remember that North Korean society has constructed a narrative that lets them feel they have a superior system of government to all previous ones (I hope you agree classical Monarchy is better than that) and that it is the logical conclusion of centuries of moral progress. Aren’t you a bit scared that they can do that? Where does power come from in a democracy? Good military skill? Management skill? No whoever convinces the most people of his or her agenda will have that agenda enacted… the power of flesh Conan. If the entire planet was North Korea how would you know something radically better is possible and not even that hard to acheive?
Right it didn’t, I’m sorry I should have made it more explicit. It is basically an argument that democracy is a very local optimum or not an optimum at all and is holding back technological progress. If you are reading Moldbug for the very first time I actually recommend you start with “An open letter to open-minded progressives”, but if you don’t enjoy his writing so far don’t bother because he is verbose.
To give three possible superior alternatives to democracy I will cite:
Robin Hanson’s Futarchy, which is basically just updating democracy to use prediction markets (great institutions). Vote for what you want, the markets discover the best way to get it by pooling together expert knowledge and incentivizing truth seeking.
Neocameralism by Moldbug which is basically to have the state be guided by the profit motive and have such overwhelming military force that uses crypto lock technology to enforce it has no reason to brainwash its citizens since they don’t have the military force to matter politically. They can’t seize the government/compaines assets. The profit motive together with the corporate structure keeps most of them from being hijacked by its CEO as well as keeps most of them nice to its customers (citizens). You can make sure it will be nice by give stock options to specialized efficient charities. Basically divide the state between the rent extracting part and the goodness generating part people expect, min-max both, pair them up in a single adventuring party and enjoy your munchkinized society. Obviously it kind of sucks if you discover things people really really like spending money on but hurt them, but hey democracy would collapse at that too.
Singapore’s authoritarian free market friendly technocracy (theoretically a normal democracy)
The post you referenced didn’t really talk much about neocameralism’s structure. If indeed we do sell stock in the state, and the state then operates to maximize it’s stock price, that sure strikes me as way worse than a republic.
First off, I’m not even sure what it means to own stock in the gov’t. To own stock in a company is a highly complex thing whos meaning is spelled out in exquisite detail both in legislation and in the recorded court cases which have interpreted that legislation. As a result, we know there are real rights associated with the ownership that will be enforced by a very powerful government in an extremely predictable way.
If I buy stock in the sovcorp, who protects my property rights? The sovcorp? The sovcorp is run by executives. Why would they not simply, essentially, steal the corporation? It wouldn’t be illegal for them to do so because being the sovcorp, they write AND interpret AND enforce the laws. Even for regular corps, we find the executives giving themselves large stacks of equity in the company every year. What is even the feedback mechanism to keep a board of directors and an executive management team from awarding themselves a majority of the voting power of the sovcorp? Of diluting the ownership outside the board and the executives until they get all the return?
How does the sovcorp prevent its own collapse in to a kleptocratic dictatorship?
In the case of a republican democracy, there is a kernel in place called a constitution. In some important sense, everyone with the franchise has one and only one non-transferrable share in the control of the sovcorp. These shares are just one form of control over one part of the structure, turns out money also gives people avenues of control, and money is not distributed even close to evenly. But having at least one portion of the control based, by kernel or constitution, on inalienable limited control rights prevents a small minority, even a tiny minority, from capturing the returns from the entire sovcorp by accruing all the control.
Of course a democracy as could a neocameral with transferrable stock, can still have coalitions form within it to the benefit of the coalesced at the expense of those outside the coalition. But with inalienable voting shares, an upper limit of inequality is essentially in place: the coalitions must be quite gigantic, requiring more than half of the enfranchised to consent, whereas in the transferrable stock case the coalitions could be quite small.
If I have missed the real point of the neocamera, please do tell.
There are cryptographic solutions to this problem: Suppose the stock/money of the corporation consists of crypto signatures. You can use threshold signatures to make heavy weapons only work for the leader most recently authorized by a majority of the board most recently authorized by majority of shareholders.
Of course the leaders could furtively @#$%^ the crypto in the heavy weapons but then democratic leaders can, and regularly do, furtively @#$%^ the vote.
Indeed, it is probably easier to @#$%^ the vote than the crypto, since most voters are idiots, and any one vote is not worth much, but most shareholders are smart, and the votes of the most important (and powerful) shareholders are worth quite a lot, so there are more concentrated interests upholding the integrity of the crypto, than the integrity of the democratic vote.
My objection is that Moldbug’s solution ignores the dynamics of ruling elites—but then so does democracy.
I don’t see how any amount of crypto can keep the management+board from favoring themselves in how they account the wealth. We have ALWAYS had good crypto available for money: gold is a sort-of atomic crypto. But gold does not stop the treasurer from embezzling, and if you control the accounting rules, embezzelment per se becomes unnecessary, you just write those expenses off mendaciously as some sorts of necessary expenses.
A sovcorp is just a business operation that operates outside of the law of secondary property rights corporations. We have plenty of natural experiments in this. Organized crime is a sovcorp. Fighting it out with other sovcorps associated with competiting criminal organizations, but also fighting it out with sovcorps we associate with gov’t: police, da’s, fbi, dea, etc.
If the mafia promised to pay you a “dividend” on its operations, you could expect to receive that dividend until they decided it was cheaper to NOT pay you. Crypto guarantees I am not buying counterfeit shares in your mafia, your sovcorp. Counterfeiting is not the problem if the sovcorp decides what property rights it owes to its non-controlling shareholders in real time, and by definition of a sovcorp, unconstrained by any outside rules of interaction.
Democracy as implemented in the US republic certainly doesn’t ignore this. We have FOIA laws, a gigantic structure of oathes of offices and internal controls on the enhanced powers sovcorp agents have. We have a system of “checks and balances” built in from the ground level, and enhanced much since it started.
What our republic does not manage is to make the dynamics of ruling elites disappear. What it does manage is to keep the ruling elites from running away with control over the whole system with no oversight and no transparency.
Constantly dealing with a real issue in human nature is the OPPOSITE of ignoring it.
The board contains major shareholders, who would mostly be in favor of honest accounting. It seems more likely to work, than that a democratic government would be in favor of honest vote counting.
You need to follow several of the links in the text for that. I recommend you also search in this index of his posts. More on separating the rent extraction from do gooderism in government.
Also I’m really interested on your comments on the other two possibly superior alternatives I’ve outlined.
I have read Robin Hanson over the years. I think prediction markets are likely a valuable methodology. They are hardly inconsistent with a republic. They can be used in determining policy, they can be supported, enhanced by legislation. I would look forward to the day that I can get an intrade account without having to jump through Irish hoops, the barriers the US has put in place are effective at least as far as stopping me from so far getting an account.
Futarchy in general is, in my semi-cursory view, not a challenge to the republic, but again a set of principles that the republic might be informed by in crafting its laws and policies. It seems to consist primarily of a lowering of the discount rate in calculating investment returns, that is, making far future returns count for more than we currently do. This is sort of simultaneously an empirical question and a values question. How much do we forego in the present to have a richer future: we all face this decision constantly in our personal lives as well as our public lives. Arguing strenuously to push the value of the future higher seems totally inbounds of what I would expect within republican (with a small r) policy debate.
SIngaporean authoritarianism seems likely to me not to scale. Singapore is smaller than the US in both diversity, size, and population. Just as one person can write a certain size computer program more efficiently than can 10, there comes a size of program where you have to learn how to team up the 10 people to get it done within a lifetime. Inviting Yew to run the US probably wouln’t work, but he might do a nice job on New York City.
In any case one generally needs to formalize systems to get the benefit of scale. While conforming mortgages may have been the seeds of the recent financial world catastrophe, they were also the enablers of a gigantic growth in funding at lower costs for improving property. Sure, your personal banker treating each mortgage as piecework, not making a new mortgage until the bank had accumulated enough more capital to make the next mortgage, might not have made the mistakes the formal system practically institutionalized, the piecewise system would also have created a tiny fraction of the total mortgages at a much higher friction cost. Mass production allows you to magnify the value of good design, but it also magnifies the negvalue of your mistakes. That singapore can operate well as a Mom & Pop operation as long as Pop is Yew should give little evidence that a larger country already achieving productivity levels similar to Singapores would be anything but hurt by emulating that model.
Please let me know if I am missing anything you think is essential in Futarchy or Singapore.