I wish that both the “tip top” and the “medium top” of educated people had consensus that both “property is downstream of power” and “prices are downstream of supply and demand”.
I really don’t like that quote. I can see multiple interpretations for “property is downstream of power”, many of them subject to debate, and none of the firm grounding (and non-ambiguity) of Econ 101 enjoyed by “price are downstream of supply and demand”.
It looks like to me a false equivalence, trying to say “see ? both sides clearly have a point”, where one point is actually clear, and the other isn’t so clear.
Would you mind clarifying what the consensus should be exactly on this point ? Maybe I’m just not interpreting “property is downstream of power” correctly.
Well, the government could take all your property away at a whim; millions of people have experienced that. Plus there are things like eminent domain.
Also, the government can tax your property (and punish you if you don’t pay e.g. by taking away that thing), which is kinda weird philosophically… on one hand, something already belongs to you, on the other hand, you need to keep paying to keep it so—but this is how renting is supposed to work, not owning.
A more obvious example is the intellectual property. There are no Schelling points; twenty years of copyright versus hundred years, there is no number that seems obviously correct.
And if after Singularity, the superintelligent AIs decide that they won’t respect human property claims (but may respect each other’s property), then… that’s just the new reality. Just like a human ignores how the ants in his garden have distributed the territory among themselves.
So the fact that you have a property at all is downstream from “there is a consensus among those with power that this definition of ‘property’ is generally a good thing to have”.
There is the way these things are generally done in the Western civilization, but if you asked some people living in tribes, they probably would have wildly different intuitions about what a person can own.
I can only own something if I am strong enough to defend it, or if there is a consensus among the others that they should let me keep it.
Ah, sorry yeah I think it was a mistake on my part to mostly make the post a verbatim Discord reply. Lots of high-context stuff that I didn’t explain well.
This specific part is (in my usage/interpretation; if you click the link, the initial context was an Emmett Shear tweet) basically a shorthand for one or more “basic” leftist views, along the lines of these similar-but-somewhat-distinct claims:
Capitalism more-reliably rewards power-maximizers than social-utility-maximizers.
Under capitalism and similar incentive-structures, we’d expect conflict theory to predict entities’ wealth better than mistake theory.
General outcomes, under capitalism and similar incentive-structures, are downstream of “brute power” (from guns to monopolies) far more than the things we’d “want” to reward (innovation, good service, helping people, etc).
I think it was correct to ask the question, because, no, sorry, I don’t think you can equate that specific understanding of “property is downstream of power” with the same level of consensus/reasonableness as “prices are downstream of supply and demand”, whereas the understanding given by Viliam is pretty much inside of what I would expect to be as consensual as “prices are downstream to supply and demand”.
For example, regarding your second point : I think most economists would reply that that distinction is fallacious when considering creative destruction, both mistake (having a more correct view of the market and business organization) and conflict (and thereby driving your competitors bankrupt, forcing the reallocation of their resources elsewhere) as the two sides of the same coin.
And “innovation” not being a strong path to successful outcomes in capitalism ? Do you really think it is going to be consensual outside of leftist spheres ? Because that’s what the overall quote/tweet is about, right, creating a common understanding across political chasms under some reasonable assumptions ?
First point is really interesting tho. It’s one my libertarian self is screaming to reject, but the rationalist me readily accepts. With a caveat : I don’t think “Capitalism” does a lot of work here. Almost all (and all known ?) societal organizations do that. Which, conceded, does not it makes less problematic.
I really don’t like that quote. I can see multiple interpretations for “property is downstream of power”, many of them subject to debate, and none of the firm grounding (and non-ambiguity) of Econ 101 enjoyed by “price are downstream of supply and demand”.
It looks like to me a false equivalence, trying to say “see ? both sides clearly have a point”, where one point is actually clear, and the other isn’t so clear.
Would you mind clarifying what the consensus should be exactly on this point ? Maybe I’m just not interpreting “property is downstream of power” correctly.
Well, the government could take all your property away at a whim; millions of people have experienced that. Plus there are things like eminent domain.
Also, the government can tax your property (and punish you if you don’t pay e.g. by taking away that thing), which is kinda weird philosophically… on one hand, something already belongs to you, on the other hand, you need to keep paying to keep it so—but this is how renting is supposed to work, not owning.
A more obvious example is the intellectual property. There are no Schelling points; twenty years of copyright versus hundred years, there is no number that seems obviously correct.
And if after Singularity, the superintelligent AIs decide that they won’t respect human property claims (but may respect each other’s property), then… that’s just the new reality. Just like a human ignores how the ants in his garden have distributed the territory among themselves.
So the fact that you have a property at all is downstream from “there is a consensus among those with power that this definition of ‘property’ is generally a good thing to have”.
There is the way these things are generally done in the Western civilization, but if you asked some people living in tribes, they probably would have wildly different intuitions about what a person can own.
I can only own something if I am strong enough to defend it, or if there is a consensus among the others that they should let me keep it.
Ah, sorry yeah I think it was a mistake on my part to mostly make the post a verbatim Discord reply. Lots of high-context stuff that I didn’t explain well.
This specific part is (in my usage/interpretation; if you click the link, the initial context was an Emmett Shear tweet) basically a shorthand for one or more “basic” leftist views, along the lines of these similar-but-somewhat-distinct claims:
Capitalism more-reliably rewards power-maximizers than social-utility-maximizers.
Under capitalism and similar incentive-structures, we’d expect conflict theory to predict entities’ wealth better than mistake theory.
General outcomes, under capitalism and similar incentive-structures, are downstream of “brute power” (from guns to monopolies) far more than the things we’d “want” to reward (innovation, good service, helping people, etc).
I think it was correct to ask the question, because, no, sorry, I don’t think you can equate that specific understanding of “property is downstream of power” with the same level of consensus/reasonableness as “prices are downstream of supply and demand”, whereas the understanding given by Viliam is pretty much inside of what I would expect to be as consensual as “prices are downstream to supply and demand”.
For example, regarding your second point : I think most economists would reply that that distinction is fallacious when considering creative destruction, both mistake (having a more correct view of the market and business organization) and conflict (and thereby driving your competitors bankrupt, forcing the reallocation of their resources elsewhere) as the two sides of the same coin.
And “innovation” not being a strong path to successful outcomes in capitalism ? Do you really think it is going to be consensual outside of leftist spheres ? Because that’s what the overall quote/tweet is about, right, creating a common understanding across political chasms under some reasonable assumptions ?
First point is really interesting tho. It’s one my libertarian self is screaming to reject, but the rationalist me readily accepts. With a caveat : I don’t think “Capitalism” does a lot of work here. Almost all (and all known ?) societal organizations do that. Which, conceded, does not it makes less problematic.