I always wondered why the Less Wrong community was so “libertarian” (US-style, ie, pro-free market).
It seems at odds to me with LW views on other topics. Free market is akin to evolution : it’s at optimisation process which, given enough time and space, will end up finding local maxima, but it’s a blind, uncaring force that doesn’t care about the sufferings it produces, that has no long-term vision. It’s Azathoth. The same way that good engineering is more efficient than evolution (show me a bird flying as fast as a plane), wouldn’t a good partially planned economy be better than free market ?
Or if you look at it from a CS view, especially with the SIAI view on AI (which is not shared by all Less Wrongers, but by most) : we use Azathoth-like solutions (neural network, genetic algorithms, …) when we don’t have a classical engineering solution. Shouldn’t we do the same in economy ? Try to have more “engineered” solution when we can do so, and resort to the “free market” as a suboptimal but working default when we don’t have an engineered solution ? If you look at EDF or SNCF (french electricity and railroads), it seems there are domains in which the “engineered solution” works well.
It would seem more coherent with the rest of the LW view to support things like Cybersyn rather than Azathoth.
Also (but my comment is already too long so I won’t elaborate that one), a rational view on human psychology and cognitive biases should tell us that Homo Economicus just doesn’t exist, and things like “consent” and “free will” are always a bit fuzzy, humans are prone to error and manipulation, so we should have safeguards to ensure the errors done by individual don’t completely ruin their (or others) life, which argue for a strong social safety net.
I’m not a principled libertarian who will defend the “free market” consistently (in fact, I think the very notion is rather incoherent), but the sort of “engineering” you’re talking about runs into two problems:
We still lack the epistemological means to obtain the expertise necessary for such engineering, except for some basic simple insights that were already known to governments of civilized countries centuries ago. Insofar as any economic engineering interventions have been successful historically, they have been based on this ancient common-sense knowledge. Practically all the other stuff dreamed up by economists during the last hundred (or maybe even two hundred) years is a frightful abomination of cargo-cult science, anti-epistemology, and rationalizations for ideology and rent-seeking. (This also goes for the bulk of “social science” in general.)
Even insofar as such expertise can be obtained, there is still the problem that the intervention must be executed by a realistic government, whose agents have their own venal interests and ideological aims (and delusions). And given the above-described state of the economic “science,” even the most delusional ideology and the most blatant venal interest can be given a perfectly respectable veneer of “scientific” economics, if only some high-status and appropriately credentialed economists will vouch for it. So even insofar as we have some sound insights about the possible interventions, they are unlikely to be recognized as such unless there’s a lucky alignment of interests and incentives. (But that is extremely unlikely in contemporary political systems.)
So, basically, you can see my view as roughly equivalent to someone who is sick but lives in a society where the only physicians available are crazed charlatans and superstitious witch-doctors (and where, in addition, institutionalized incentives are strongly against anything resembling valid medicine). Passively hoping for mercy from Azathoth (i.e. that your immune system will win out on its own) may well be the most rational strategy in this situation.
I understand this point of view, but it doesn’t feel to really watch the situation we are in right now.
We are more like with current medicine : we don’t yet how to build a purely synthetic body that will not age, be sick, tired, … and the best we have is the Azathoth-built biological frame, but yet we can do lots to improve that biological frame (like vaccines) or fix its flaws (glasses, painkillers, pacemaker).
Looking at the world, we can see that even if not perfect, there are many cases of things which are done “outside of the market” but does works, from CERN to Appolo project, EDF/SNCF as I said in my original comment, European-style universal healthcare, … it feels to me that being libertarian in this context is more like akin to refusing vaccines and keeping Azathoth alone.
And it also strikes me as odd that while here at LW we are so enthusiast in mind upload and the like (to fix what Azathoth did imperfectly in our bodies) the common LW opinion is much more to keep Azathoth for the economy than to try to think and test alternatives.
Blood transfusions often failed before we knew about blood groups, but the rational reaction was to consider that sometimes they succeed, and try to tell when they fail and when they succeed, so you can use them, not giving up.
Looking at the world, we can see that even if not perfect, there are many cases of things which are done “outside of the market” but does works, from CERN to Appolo project, EDF/SNCF as I said in my original comment, European-style universal healthcare, … it feels to me that being libertarian in this context is more like akin to refusing vaccines and keeping Azathoth alone.
When you mentioned economic “engineering,” the first thing that occurred to me were various schools of macroeconomics and their proposed measures for economic planning via monetary, fiscal, trade, and other policies. Speaking as someone who has spent considerable effort trying to make sense of this supposed “science,” I really don’t see anything there but pseudoscience driven by ideology, hubris, political expediency, and rent-seeking.
What you mention here, however, is in the domain of those much older kinds of interventions that I spoke of: public infrastructure spending, wealth redistribution, and patronage of arts and sciences. Unlike the modern macroeconomic “science,” you could have an interesting discussion about those even with an ancient Roman statesman. I am definitely not opposed to them in principle, and I think they should be judged on a case-by-case basis.
However, I believe you are far too optimistic in evaluating the outcomes of the contemporary such policies. For example, if properly done, government patronage of science can work wonders, but if not, it can give rise to a diabolical system of perverse incentives that will thoroughly corrupt the entire field of science in question—and in a way that will still make it look fully legitimate to the general public, and make the critics who understand the terrible truth seem like laughable crackpots. Similar things can be argued about other government enterprises too, with corruption and disastrous bungling often rampant under a veneer of perfect respectability and (often sincerely deluded) pretense of success. And while we clearly won’t agree about the extent this is happening, given the confident off-hand style of your examples, I definitely think you’re badly underestimating this extent.
At least one problem with this is that any attempt to actually control the market will almost definitely get sidetracked by politics instead of what works. With lobbyists involved, I wouldn’t trust the government to do what’s best for the country. See farm subsidies for an example.
I understand the issue, but I’m at odd with it for three reasons :
If the problem is lobbying and corporate corruption of the government, I don’t see how getting rid of the proxy and putting directly the corporations in charge will make anything better. Regulations may be imperfect and biased by lobbying, but having the corporations directly in charge seems even worse to me.
It seems to me by looking around the world than when a reasonably democratic government starts providing real services to the population (universal healthcare and education, social safety net, …) the people become less apathetic towards the government, and will get more involved with how the government is runned. It also seems to me that countries with higher wealth redistribution, like Scandinavian countries, have lower corruption.
This is a kind of defeatist arguments. Here at Less Wrong, we speak of defeating death itself, conquering the stars, breaking the FAI problem, getting to the “level above” in understanding of the world, and yet, on this specific issue of politics/economics, we concede defeat so easily ? There are countless ways to “actually control the market” that we could imagine. Shouldn’t we try to find a political system that ensures the market is controlled in a reasonably efficient way, rather than giving up ? Doesn’t sound harder than solving the FAI problem. Corruption and lobbying ? What about making a jury trial for every law after the Parliament voted it, with 20 randomly selected citizen, held isolated from pressures like in normal jury trial, decide if the law goes through or not ? That’s just one random idea in the enormous space of possible mechanisms. Why do we give up so easily ?
It also seems to me that countries with higher wealth redistribution, like Scandinavian countries, have lower corruption.
I wonder about cause and effect here. I would trust the government more to redistribute wealth fairly if it weren’t so very corrupt and incompetent.
What about making a jury trial for every law after the Parliament voted it, with 20 randomly selected citizen, held isolated from pressures like in normal jury trial, decide if the law goes through or not ?
I can think of several objections. Some laws are very complicated and require a lot of staff work by experts to formulate, and the jury won’t be able to do a good job. Or did you want to require the jury to spend six months listening to testimony before delivering their verdict?
Do you mean an American or British-style jury, that requires unanimity? If so, you will reliably get hung juries on any controversial law.
There’s a lot of laws that are time-sensitive. If the appropriations bills don’t pass, the government shuts down. And we don’t want to allow indefinite delays in restarting the government until the jury reaches consensus. (In America, there is probably 10% of the country who would reliably vote for shutting down the government, so you really cannot keep the country running if they can derail the jury.)
If the problem is lobbying and corporate corruption of the government, I don’t see how getting rid of the proxy and putting directly the corporations in charge will make anything better.
That’s the thing, it wouldn’t be corporations in charge of setting prices, there wouldn’t be anyone setting the prices. Except in the case of monopolies, it would be the combined market.
It seems to me by looking around the world than when a reasonably democratic government starts providing real services to the population (universal healthcare and education, social safety net, …) the people become less apathetic towards the government, and will get more involved with how the government is runned. It also seems to me that countries with higher wealth redistribution, like Scandinavian countries, have lower corruption.
Okay, if that’s true then that’s a good argument for those forms of government control. But, that doesn’t argue for involving the government in the other parts of the market.
As to the third point, I’m not sure we know how to reliably make changes to the market that results in positive changes. I’d appreciate the input of an economist here, but from the basic econ I’ve learned, except in the cases of monopolies or other failure modes of the free market, government intervention mathematically always results in a net loss. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss)
If the problem is lobbying and corporate corruption of the government, I don’t see how getting rid of the proxy and putting directly the corporations in charge will make anything better. Regulations may be imperfect and biased by lobbying, but having the corporations directly in charge seems even worse to me.
I agree that putting the corporations in charge of government would be bad. That’s why libertarians oppose crony capitalism.
This is a kind of defeatist arguments. Here at Less Wrong, we speak of defeating death itself, conquering the stars, breaking the FAI problem, getting to the “level above” in understanding of the world, and yet, on this specific issue of politics/economics, we concede defeat so easily ? There are countless ways to “actually control the market” that we could imagine. Shouldn’t we try to find a political system that ensures the market is controlled in a reasonably efficient way, rather than giving up ? Doesn’t sound harder than solving the FAI problem.
Eliezer would probably argue that it’s more-or-less equivalent to the FAI problem. Personally, depending on what one means by FAI I think it may well be harder. Specifically it may well be possible to create at FAI capable of managing an economy composed of humans, said FAI would not be capable of managing an economy composed of AIs of comparable complexity to itself, more or less due to the pigeon-hole principal.
All economic systems not of the form “free market plus some government intervention” have failed horribly. Are you arguing for one of these, or just for more regulation in what’s basically a free market?
I make a difference between long-term and short-term goal, like I make for the rest. If you take the medicine comparison made above, I’m aware that for now we don’t know how to completely replace our Azathoth-made organic bodies with better, engineered ones. So for the short I’m advocating improving/fixing the body as we can. But for the long term, I would like us to find a solution to get rid of that Azathoth frame, and have an engineered body that is free of all the defects.
I made the same stance for the economy. On the long term, I want to get rid of free market, this Azathoth process that may end up finding solutions to problems, but doing so without caring for the suffering it produces, and without long-term vision. Every time a company goes bankrupt, it’s a huge amount of waste in term of energy, time and resources, and a huge amount of suffering, broken families, … and so on. Natural selection is cruel, and it is as much as in the economy.
But I’m aware we can’t get rid totally of free market for now. We don’t know how to do it. But we should try to improve what we can improve, fix what we can fix. Organs that can be made in a non-Azathoth way should be made so (EDF, SNCF, CERN for example). Safety measures should be added (unemployment money, working code, …). Universal free healthcare and education. Things like that, that have working implementation already.
And we should also continue looking and experimenting for ways to make deeper change. We have a very small amount of workers control over companies in France, a “Comité d’Entreprise” elected directly by the workers in the company, and that have a say on safety/hygiene related issues within the company. We should increase its power and see if it does really improve working conditions or not. I spoke of Cybersyn in my initial comment. This project was made 40 years ago, with much reduced computing power, in only 3 years, and yet it gave interesting results, before it was drawn in blood by Pinochet. Couldn’t try to make things like that, limited in some sectors, and see how they work ?
Wouldn’t a working theory of utilitarianism “solve” the economy directly? Similarly if everyone had perfect market knowledge they would know from the prices set on goods and services (including “live forever” and “be free of pain and suffering”) what everyone’s utility preferences were and it would be possible in theory to calculate a course of action that maximized wealth and at the same time maximized utility.
The problem is that people produce artificial prices and utility values that don’t reflect reality or their true preferences. Fixing that problem can only be done with more rationality, I think.
Wouldn’t a working theory of utilitarianism “solve” the economy directly? Similarly if everyone had perfect market knowledge they would know from the prices set on goods and services (including “live forever” and “be free of pain and suffering”) what everyone’s utility preferences were and it would be possible in theory to calculate a course of action that maximized wealth and at the same time maximized utility.
That runs into pigeon hole problems, even in theory.
Say a theoretical human can have M preferences and there are N humans so we need to store MN utilities. Clearly humans can’t consciously hold that much information in their head even for just themselves, but I can currently store about 142 32-bit integers for every person alive on earth on a single relatively cheap hard drive. A centralized world economy could keep track of individual price-preferences of all products that have a UPC assigned using about 7x10^19 prices, or a little over 10 exabytes. Difficult, but not intractable.
Say a theoretical human can have M preferences and there are N humans so we need to store M*N utilities. Clearly humans can’t consciously hold that much information in their head even for just themselves, but I can currently store about 142 32-bit integers for every person alive on earth on a single relatively cheap hard drive.
Assuming the other humans aren’t similarly using hard drives to extend their effective memory.
Assuming the other humans aren’t similarly using hard drives to extend their effective memory.
I guess there’s an limit on the percentage of wealth owned by the people, then. In the worst case the government would need at least 50% of the total wealth to devote to mirroring the memory storage used by all the people. Pretty steep tax rate, and that doesn’t include effective taxation by wealth redistribution that might result from the central government’s calculations.
The most popular political view, at least according to the much-maligned categories on the survey, was liberalism, with 376 adherents and 34.5% of the vote. Libertarianism followed at 352 (32.3%), then socialism at 290 (26.6%), conservativism at 30 (2.8%) and communism at 5 (.5%).
Compare to the philpapers survey results for philosophy faculty and PhDs below. The differences are moderate, and can be explained by the disproportionate presence of computer science, hard science, male gender, Anglosphere origins, and industry (as opposed to academia; comparing people with equal IQ and education, those with more ‘right’ political views are more likely to enter non-academic fields) in the LW population.
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?
Other 672 / 1803 (37.2%)
Accept or lean toward: egalitarianism 595 / 1803 (33%)
Accept or lean toward: communitarianism 294 / 1803 (16.3%)
Accept or lean toward: libertarianism 242 / 1803 (13.4%)
For “philosophy of computing,” which may be especially relevant for comparison to LW:
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?
Accept or lean toward: communitarianism 4 / 11 (36.3%)
Accept or lean toward: libertarianism 3 / 11 (27.2%)
Other 2 / 11 (18.1%)
Accept or lean toward: egalitarianism 2 / 11 (18.1%)
And for “social and political philosophers”:
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?
Accept or lean toward: egalitarianism 101 / 203 (49.7%)
Other 51 / 203 (25.1%)
Accept or lean toward: libertarianism 30 / 203 (14.7%)
Accept or lean toward: communitarianism 21 / 203 (10.3%)
For philosophers of the physical sciences:
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?
Other 37 / 90 (41.1%)
Accept or lean toward: egalitarianism 24 / 90 (26.6%)
Accept or lean toward: libertarianism 16 / 90 (17.7%)
Accept or lean toward: communitarianism 13 / 90 (14.4%)
The runtime complexity of modelling an economy is non-trivial, and a ‘band-aid’ reactionary approach to fixing issues in a system as complicated as the free market with an instrument as blunt as law is catastrophic in the long run (I subscribe to the Austrian school).
I’m against central planning, because computers fast enough to actually do it well don’t exist—and, if they ever do, a centrally planned society should be able to function perfectly well under capitalism. It should turn a profit, and people should join it voluntarily. No coercion involved.
And since the runtime complexity of the human body is non-trivial, we should give up on medicine and methods as blunt as surgery and drugs ? Sorry, but complexity is not an excuse to let Azathoth rule alone and not try to improve things. Or we would have given up on science and medicine since long.
As for coercion, capitalism relies on it too : coercion to enforce private property, even when it means, for example, expelling a family from its house and sending it to the street because they can’t pay the mortgage. If you reject coercion, you reject private property which is enforced by coercion. If you accept some amount of coercion to defend private property, why not some amount of coercion to ensure people have a roof and food ?
The human body is subject to a number of reductionist approximations which allow us to work with it predicatively. These approximations and models are extremely well supported experimentally. So far, the only such approximations that apply to the economy are the Keynesian ideas, and those produce results that are intuitively nonsense, and have no experimental backing. Modifying the economy without causing more harm than good is much, much harder than it is in medicine right now. We are not surgeons here. We are plague doctors with masks, and leeches.
Capitalism (more specifically, classical liberalism or Minarchist Libertarianism) does accept a minimal level of governmental coercion, as the loss of freedom associated with anarchy is even greater, and because you must draw lines between the rights of individuals, and property and contract is a reasonable place to draw it. You’ll note that property rights are fairly straightforward. They’re easy to enforce, they’re inexpensive, and they’re intuitive. Once you start cobbling on new laws in a patchwork attempt to fix current problems, though, it all goes to hell in a handbasket rather quickly. Adding new laws is costly.
Because I’m not a strawman capitalist, I’m not going to claim that all poor people are lazy, or even that all poor people on welfare are lazy. However, I am going to say that there is a tendency for welfare to be abused by the lazy. It’s like a magnetic cooling system. High energy particles escape, so after a while, all of the particles left in the trap are the cold, low-energy ones. Same basic principle applies.
Additionally, the government is fantastically bad at spending money. Orders of magnitude worst than essentially any private organization. I’ve seen the way they buy chairs. It’s terrifying. In general, putting them in charge of any significant sum of money is an excellent way to ensure that much of it will wind up being expended as economic waste heat.
The human body is subject to a number of reductionist approximations which allow us to work with it predicatively. These approximations and models are extremely well supported experimentally. So far, the only such approximations that apply to the economy are the Keynesian ideas, and those produce results that are intuitively nonsense, and have no experimental backing. Modifying the economy without causing more harm than good is much, much harder than it is in medicine right now. We are not surgeons here. We are plague doctors with masks, and leeches.
And yet we’ve gotten past leeches, and developed medicines that work. Don’t you think we should try some economic models to see if they work? Who cares if Keynesian ideas don’t make intuitive sense? You just explained why that the economy is too complicated to understand intuitively. The evidence isn’t very good (for or against), because it’s never been properly tested.
property rights are fairly straightforward.
No they aren’t. How do people come to own property in the first place? (are the descendants of native Americans due reparations? Who has the land rights to Israel / Palestine?) How much do polluters have to pay for the damage they’re doing to everyone else’s property? Do I have the right to sell myself into slavery? What ideas can be patented (copyrighted) and when do those patents (copyrights) expire? Unfortunately, to try to sort out who owns what, is to mire yourself in as twisted and complicated a political issue as any.
Additionally, the government is fantastically bad at spending money. Orders of magnitude worst than essentially any private organization. I’ve seen the way they buy chairs. It’s terrifying. In general, putting them in charge of any significant sum of money is an excellent way to ensure that much of it will wind up being expended as economic waste heat.
Be specific. How does the government buy chairs?
Also, overpaying for something doesn’t make the extra money simply disappear as “economic waste heat.” The people who sold those chairs can spend the extra money again. The actual cost is bad information being fed to the market, which can result in workers making too much of one thing, when everyone would have been better off if they’d made something else. And it’s not as if private consumers always spend their money perfectly in accordance with their values either. If anything qualifies as “economic waste heat”, it’s the tobacco industry.
If you accept some amount of coercion to defend private property, why not some amount of coercion to ensure people have a roof and food ?
We have this in America and I think most other wealthy countries. We spend many tens of billions of dollars on food assistance for the poor, and a substantial amount on housing assistance. It’s not even all that controversial, politically.
(The food part works much better than the housing—public housing projects in the US are notorious for sometimes being badly run to the point of being unsafe.)
1) I think it’s very possible that in systems with a huge number of agents with varying preferences that an aggregate of those preferences like the free market can lead to better outcomes on average than any but the most advanced systems of control (which we don’t have and don’t seem close to having).
2) In general I think it makes sense to oppose many non free-market solutions simply because of the evidence we have for how terrible they are in practice. Sort like how I wish we could be governed by Plato’s philosopher kings, but would not elect the philosophy departments of universities as our oligarchs.
Given that you only do this when the “engineered solution” is workable, sure, whatever. Please remember though, that all policies that are ever implemented anywhere in the real world are (at best) what from this perspective should be called “a suboptimal but working default” which are resorted to because “we don’t have a … [usable] engineered solution.”
But then shouldn’t we try to find the “engineered solution” instead of defending the “suboptimal but working default” as a matter of principle ? And shouldn’t we use it in the domains where we do have a working one ?
It’s interesting that the only proposed alternative to Azathoth in this discussion so far is government intervention of one form or another (the government itself is just another creation of Azathoth). But there exist many more such as changing the fundamental institutions of our society, including our very notions of property and democracy.
I honestly pondered making a “discussion” post on that topic elaborating a bit more, but since there is a “no politics” rule on Less Wrong, I decided not to. When I’m part of community, I respect the rules of that community, even if I don’t agree totally with them. To a point of course ;)
Well, that’s more about economics than politics per se, and some similarly politics-reated themes (racism, religion, criminalization of drugs, women’s rights, etc.) have been discussed on LW quite often.
I always wondered why the Less Wrong community was so “libertarian” (US-style, ie, pro-free market).
It seems at odds to me with LW views on other topics. Free market is akin to evolution : it’s at optimisation process which, given enough time and space, will end up finding local maxima, but it’s a blind, uncaring force that doesn’t care about the sufferings it produces, that has no long-term vision. It’s Azathoth. The same way that good engineering is more efficient than evolution (show me a bird flying as fast as a plane), wouldn’t a good partially planned economy be better than free market ?
Or if you look at it from a CS view, especially with the SIAI view on AI (which is not shared by all Less Wrongers, but by most) : we use Azathoth-like solutions (neural network, genetic algorithms, …) when we don’t have a classical engineering solution. Shouldn’t we do the same in economy ? Try to have more “engineered” solution when we can do so, and resort to the “free market” as a suboptimal but working default when we don’t have an engineered solution ? If you look at EDF or SNCF (french electricity and railroads), it seems there are domains in which the “engineered solution” works well.
It would seem more coherent with the rest of the LW view to support things like Cybersyn rather than Azathoth.
Also (but my comment is already too long so I won’t elaborate that one), a rational view on human psychology and cognitive biases should tell us that Homo Economicus just doesn’t exist, and things like “consent” and “free will” are always a bit fuzzy, humans are prone to error and manipulation, so we should have safeguards to ensure the errors done by individual don’t completely ruin their (or others) life, which argue for a strong social safety net.
I’m not a principled libertarian who will defend the “free market” consistently (in fact, I think the very notion is rather incoherent), but the sort of “engineering” you’re talking about runs into two problems:
We still lack the epistemological means to obtain the expertise necessary for such engineering, except for some basic simple insights that were already known to governments of civilized countries centuries ago. Insofar as any economic engineering interventions have been successful historically, they have been based on this ancient common-sense knowledge. Practically all the other stuff dreamed up by economists during the last hundred (or maybe even two hundred) years is a frightful abomination of cargo-cult science, anti-epistemology, and rationalizations for ideology and rent-seeking. (This also goes for the bulk of “social science” in general.)
Even insofar as such expertise can be obtained, there is still the problem that the intervention must be executed by a realistic government, whose agents have their own venal interests and ideological aims (and delusions). And given the above-described state of the economic “science,” even the most delusional ideology and the most blatant venal interest can be given a perfectly respectable veneer of “scientific” economics, if only some high-status and appropriately credentialed economists will vouch for it. So even insofar as we have some sound insights about the possible interventions, they are unlikely to be recognized as such unless there’s a lucky alignment of interests and incentives. (But that is extremely unlikely in contemporary political systems.)
So, basically, you can see my view as roughly equivalent to someone who is sick but lives in a society where the only physicians available are crazed charlatans and superstitious witch-doctors (and where, in addition, institutionalized incentives are strongly against anything resembling valid medicine). Passively hoping for mercy from Azathoth (i.e. that your immune system will win out on its own) may well be the most rational strategy in this situation.
I understand this point of view, but it doesn’t feel to really watch the situation we are in right now.
We are more like with current medicine : we don’t yet how to build a purely synthetic body that will not age, be sick, tired, … and the best we have is the Azathoth-built biological frame, but yet we can do lots to improve that biological frame (like vaccines) or fix its flaws (glasses, painkillers, pacemaker).
Looking at the world, we can see that even if not perfect, there are many cases of things which are done “outside of the market” but does works, from CERN to Appolo project, EDF/SNCF as I said in my original comment, European-style universal healthcare, … it feels to me that being libertarian in this context is more like akin to refusing vaccines and keeping Azathoth alone.
And it also strikes me as odd that while here at LW we are so enthusiast in mind upload and the like (to fix what Azathoth did imperfectly in our bodies) the common LW opinion is much more to keep Azathoth for the economy than to try to think and test alternatives.
Blood transfusions often failed before we knew about blood groups, but the rational reaction was to consider that sometimes they succeed, and try to tell when they fail and when they succeed, so you can use them, not giving up.
When you mentioned economic “engineering,” the first thing that occurred to me were various schools of macroeconomics and their proposed measures for economic planning via monetary, fiscal, trade, and other policies. Speaking as someone who has spent considerable effort trying to make sense of this supposed “science,” I really don’t see anything there but pseudoscience driven by ideology, hubris, political expediency, and rent-seeking.
What you mention here, however, is in the domain of those much older kinds of interventions that I spoke of: public infrastructure spending, wealth redistribution, and patronage of arts and sciences. Unlike the modern macroeconomic “science,” you could have an interesting discussion about those even with an ancient Roman statesman. I am definitely not opposed to them in principle, and I think they should be judged on a case-by-case basis.
However, I believe you are far too optimistic in evaluating the outcomes of the contemporary such policies. For example, if properly done, government patronage of science can work wonders, but if not, it can give rise to a diabolical system of perverse incentives that will thoroughly corrupt the entire field of science in question—and in a way that will still make it look fully legitimate to the general public, and make the critics who understand the terrible truth seem like laughable crackpots. Similar things can be argued about other government enterprises too, with corruption and disastrous bungling often rampant under a veneer of perfect respectability and (often sincerely deluded) pretense of success. And while we clearly won’t agree about the extent this is happening, given the confident off-hand style of your examples, I definitely think you’re badly underestimating this extent.
At least one problem with this is that any attempt to actually control the market will almost definitely get sidetracked by politics instead of what works. With lobbyists involved, I wouldn’t trust the government to do what’s best for the country. See farm subsidies for an example.
I understand the issue, but I’m at odd with it for three reasons :
If the problem is lobbying and corporate corruption of the government, I don’t see how getting rid of the proxy and putting directly the corporations in charge will make anything better. Regulations may be imperfect and biased by lobbying, but having the corporations directly in charge seems even worse to me.
It seems to me by looking around the world than when a reasonably democratic government starts providing real services to the population (universal healthcare and education, social safety net, …) the people become less apathetic towards the government, and will get more involved with how the government is runned. It also seems to me that countries with higher wealth redistribution, like Scandinavian countries, have lower corruption.
This is a kind of defeatist arguments. Here at Less Wrong, we speak of defeating death itself, conquering the stars, breaking the FAI problem, getting to the “level above” in understanding of the world, and yet, on this specific issue of politics/economics, we concede defeat so easily ? There are countless ways to “actually control the market” that we could imagine. Shouldn’t we try to find a political system that ensures the market is controlled in a reasonably efficient way, rather than giving up ? Doesn’t sound harder than solving the FAI problem. Corruption and lobbying ? What about making a jury trial for every law after the Parliament voted it, with 20 randomly selected citizen, held isolated from pressures like in normal jury trial, decide if the law goes through or not ? That’s just one random idea in the enormous space of possible mechanisms. Why do we give up so easily ?
I wonder about cause and effect here. I would trust the government more to redistribute wealth fairly if it weren’t so very corrupt and incompetent.
I can think of several objections. Some laws are very complicated and require a lot of staff work by experts to formulate, and the jury won’t be able to do a good job. Or did you want to require the jury to spend six months listening to testimony before delivering their verdict?
Do you mean an American or British-style jury, that requires unanimity? If so, you will reliably get hung juries on any controversial law.
There’s a lot of laws that are time-sensitive. If the appropriations bills don’t pass, the government shuts down. And we don’t want to allow indefinite delays in restarting the government until the jury reaches consensus. (In America, there is probably 10% of the country who would reliably vote for shutting down the government, so you really cannot keep the country running if they can derail the jury.)
That’s the thing, it wouldn’t be corporations in charge of setting prices, there wouldn’t be anyone setting the prices. Except in the case of monopolies, it would be the combined market.
Okay, if that’s true then that’s a good argument for those forms of government control. But, that doesn’t argue for involving the government in the other parts of the market.
As to the third point, I’m not sure we know how to reliably make changes to the market that results in positive changes. I’d appreciate the input of an economist here, but from the basic econ I’ve learned, except in the cases of monopolies or other failure modes of the free market, government intervention mathematically always results in a net loss. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss)
I agree that putting the corporations in charge of government would be bad. That’s why libertarians oppose crony capitalism.
Eliezer would probably argue that it’s more-or-less equivalent to the FAI problem. Personally, depending on what one means by FAI I think it may well be harder. Specifically it may well be possible to create at FAI capable of managing an economy composed of humans, said FAI would not be capable of managing an economy composed of AIs of comparable complexity to itself, more or less due to the pigeon-hole principal.
All economic systems not of the form “free market plus some government intervention” have failed horribly. Are you arguing for one of these, or just for more regulation in what’s basically a free market?
I make a difference between long-term and short-term goal, like I make for the rest. If you take the medicine comparison made above, I’m aware that for now we don’t know how to completely replace our Azathoth-made organic bodies with better, engineered ones. So for the short I’m advocating improving/fixing the body as we can. But for the long term, I would like us to find a solution to get rid of that Azathoth frame, and have an engineered body that is free of all the defects.
I made the same stance for the economy. On the long term, I want to get rid of free market, this Azathoth process that may end up finding solutions to problems, but doing so without caring for the suffering it produces, and without long-term vision. Every time a company goes bankrupt, it’s a huge amount of waste in term of energy, time and resources, and a huge amount of suffering, broken families, … and so on. Natural selection is cruel, and it is as much as in the economy.
But I’m aware we can’t get rid totally of free market for now. We don’t know how to do it. But we should try to improve what we can improve, fix what we can fix. Organs that can be made in a non-Azathoth way should be made so (EDF, SNCF, CERN for example). Safety measures should be added (unemployment money, working code, …). Universal free healthcare and education. Things like that, that have working implementation already.
And we should also continue looking and experimenting for ways to make deeper change. We have a very small amount of workers control over companies in France, a “Comité d’Entreprise” elected directly by the workers in the company, and that have a say on safety/hygiene related issues within the company. We should increase its power and see if it does really improve working conditions or not. I spoke of Cybersyn in my initial comment. This project was made 40 years ago, with much reduced computing power, in only 3 years, and yet it gave interesting results, before it was drawn in blood by Pinochet. Couldn’t try to make things like that, limited in some sectors, and see how they work ?
Wouldn’t a working theory of utilitarianism “solve” the economy directly? Similarly if everyone had perfect market knowledge they would know from the prices set on goods and services (including “live forever” and “be free of pain and suffering”) what everyone’s utility preferences were and it would be possible in theory to calculate a course of action that maximized wealth and at the same time maximized utility.
The problem is that people produce artificial prices and utility values that don’t reflect reality or their true preferences. Fixing that problem can only be done with more rationality, I think.
That runs into pigeon hole problems, even in theory.
Say a theoretical human can have M preferences and there are N humans so we need to store MN utilities. Clearly humans can’t consciously hold that much information in their head even for just themselves, but I can currently store about 142 32-bit integers for every person alive on earth on a single relatively cheap hard drive. A centralized world economy could keep track of individual price-preferences of all products that have a UPC assigned using about 7x10^19 prices, or a little over 10 exabytes. Difficult, but not intractable.
Assuming the other humans aren’t similarly using hard drives to extend their effective memory.
I guess there’s an limit on the percentage of wealth owned by the people, then. In the worst case the government would need at least 50% of the total wealth to devote to mirroring the memory storage used by all the people. Pretty steep tax rate, and that doesn’t include effective taxation by wealth redistribution that might result from the central government’s calculations.
Were you aware of the LW survey results?
Compare to the philpapers survey results for philosophy faculty and PhDs below. The differences are moderate, and can be explained by the disproportionate presence of computer science, hard science, male gender, Anglosphere origins, and industry (as opposed to academia; comparing people with equal IQ and education, those with more ‘right’ political views are more likely to enter non-academic fields) in the LW population.
For “philosophy of computing,” which may be especially relevant for comparison to LW:
And for “social and political philosophers”:
For philosophers of the physical sciences:
The runtime complexity of modelling an economy is non-trivial, and a ‘band-aid’ reactionary approach to fixing issues in a system as complicated as the free market with an instrument as blunt as law is catastrophic in the long run (I subscribe to the Austrian school).
I’m against central planning, because computers fast enough to actually do it well don’t exist—and, if they ever do, a centrally planned society should be able to function perfectly well under capitalism. It should turn a profit, and people should join it voluntarily. No coercion involved.
And since the runtime complexity of the human body is non-trivial, we should give up on medicine and methods as blunt as surgery and drugs ? Sorry, but complexity is not an excuse to let Azathoth rule alone and not try to improve things. Or we would have given up on science and medicine since long.
As for coercion, capitalism relies on it too : coercion to enforce private property, even when it means, for example, expelling a family from its house and sending it to the street because they can’t pay the mortgage. If you reject coercion, you reject private property which is enforced by coercion. If you accept some amount of coercion to defend private property, why not some amount of coercion to ensure people have a roof and food ?
The human body is subject to a number of reductionist approximations which allow us to work with it predicatively. These approximations and models are extremely well supported experimentally. So far, the only such approximations that apply to the economy are the Keynesian ideas, and those produce results that are intuitively nonsense, and have no experimental backing. Modifying the economy without causing more harm than good is much, much harder than it is in medicine right now. We are not surgeons here. We are plague doctors with masks, and leeches.
Capitalism (more specifically, classical liberalism or Minarchist Libertarianism) does accept a minimal level of governmental coercion, as the loss of freedom associated with anarchy is even greater, and because you must draw lines between the rights of individuals, and property and contract is a reasonable place to draw it. You’ll note that property rights are fairly straightforward. They’re easy to enforce, they’re inexpensive, and they’re intuitive. Once you start cobbling on new laws in a patchwork attempt to fix current problems, though, it all goes to hell in a handbasket rather quickly. Adding new laws is costly.
Because I’m not a strawman capitalist, I’m not going to claim that all poor people are lazy, or even that all poor people on welfare are lazy. However, I am going to say that there is a tendency for welfare to be abused by the lazy. It’s like a magnetic cooling system. High energy particles escape, so after a while, all of the particles left in the trap are the cold, low-energy ones. Same basic principle applies.
Additionally, the government is fantastically bad at spending money. Orders of magnitude worst than essentially any private organization. I’ve seen the way they buy chairs. It’s terrifying. In general, putting them in charge of any significant sum of money is an excellent way to ensure that much of it will wind up being expended as economic waste heat.
And yet we’ve gotten past leeches, and developed medicines that work. Don’t you think we should try some economic models to see if they work? Who cares if Keynesian ideas don’t make intuitive sense? You just explained why that the economy is too complicated to understand intuitively. The evidence isn’t very good (for or against), because it’s never been properly tested.
No they aren’t. How do people come to own property in the first place? (are the descendants of native Americans due reparations? Who has the land rights to Israel / Palestine?) How much do polluters have to pay for the damage they’re doing to everyone else’s property? Do I have the right to sell myself into slavery? What ideas can be patented (copyrighted) and when do those patents (copyrights) expire? Unfortunately, to try to sort out who owns what, is to mire yourself in as twisted and complicated a political issue as any.
Be specific. How does the government buy chairs?
Also, overpaying for something doesn’t make the extra money simply disappear as “economic waste heat.” The people who sold those chairs can spend the extra money again. The actual cost is bad information being fed to the market, which can result in workers making too much of one thing, when everyone would have been better off if they’d made something else. And it’s not as if private consumers always spend their money perfectly in accordance with their values either. If anything qualifies as “economic waste heat”, it’s the tobacco industry.
We have this in America and I think most other wealthy countries. We spend many tens of billions of dollars on food assistance for the poor, and a substantial amount on housing assistance. It’s not even all that controversial, politically.
(The food part works much better than the housing—public housing projects in the US are notorious for sometimes being badly run to the point of being unsafe.)
1) I think it’s very possible that in systems with a huge number of agents with varying preferences that an aggregate of those preferences like the free market can lead to better outcomes on average than any but the most advanced systems of control (which we don’t have and don’t seem close to having).
2) In general I think it makes sense to oppose many non free-market solutions simply because of the evidence we have for how terrible they are in practice. Sort like how I wish we could be governed by Plato’s philosopher kings, but would not elect the philosophy departments of universities as our oligarchs.
Given that you only do this when the “engineered solution” is workable, sure, whatever. Please remember though, that all policies that are ever implemented anywhere in the real world are (at best) what from this perspective should be called “a suboptimal but working default” which are resorted to because “we don’t have a … [usable] engineered solution.”
But then shouldn’t we try to find the “engineered solution” instead of defending the “suboptimal but working default” as a matter of principle ? And shouldn’t we use it in the domains where we do have a working one ?
It’s interesting that the only proposed alternative to Azathoth in this discussion so far is government intervention of one form or another (the government itself is just another creation of Azathoth). But there exist many more such as changing the fundamental institutions of our society, including our very notions of property and democracy.
The parent comment didn’t suggest specifically government intervention as an alternative.
I wish I could upvote this twice. It deserves being made into a top-level post.
I honestly pondered making a “discussion” post on that topic elaborating a bit more, but since there is a “no politics” rule on Less Wrong, I decided not to. When I’m part of community, I respect the rules of that community, even if I don’t agree totally with them. To a point of course ;)
It is not clear whether there is a “no politics rule” on LW. You should make your post as a test to discover whether or not there is one.
If you think there is a “no politics rule,” be specific about what you think it is and what leads you to believe that it exists.
Well, that’s more about economics than politics per se, and some similarly politics-reated themes (racism, religion, criminalization of drugs, women’s rights, etc.) have been discussed on LW quite often.