Interesting but I’ve just skim so will need to come back. With that caveat made, I seem to have had a couple of thought that keep recurring for me that seem compatible or complementary with your thoughts.
First, where do we define the margin between public and private. It strikes me that a fair amount of social strife does revolve around a tension here. We live in a dynamic world so thinking that the sphere of private actions will remain static seem unlikely but as the world changed (knowledge, applied knowledge driving technology change, movement of people resulting in cultural transmission and tensions...) will be forces resulting in a change in the line between public and private.
While I’m not entirely sure it is the best framing, I do think of this in the form of externalities. Negative externalities are the more challenging form. What I think starts happening is that we live in t=0 and some set of private activities are producing very little negative impacts on others. But we find by t=10 some of the elements in that set of private activities are now producing a large enough total negative external effect that:
People are able to start seeing cause and effect
The costs to others are sufficient to over come the organizational and transactional costs of using social infrastructures to seek relief for the harms. Those can be formal in the sense of courts and government law/regulation requests. But also informal in various forms—the people engaging in the activities loose reputation, don’t get invited to the good parties any more, people don’t want to talk with them or be seen with them any more, perhaps even more aggressive responses.
At some point either most accept that a new definition of “private” exists and the old ways have changed or society reached the point that those who have not adapted will be treated as criminal and removed from society.
The other thing I’ve been thinking about is related. One hears the where’s my flying car, it’s the 21st Century already quip now and then. But I think a better one might be: It’s the 21st Century, why am I still living under and 18th Century form of government?
I think these relate some of your post in that a lot of the social conflict you point to is driven by the shifting margin between public and private sphere of action. As that margin shifts people use the government to address those new conflicts within the society. But few if any governments differ substantially from those that have existed for centuries. I would characterize that vision of government, even when thinking of representative democracies, as that of an actor/agent. Government takes actions, just like the private members of society do. It should function, as you say, in a neutral way. Part of the failing there comes from government, being an actor/agent, then has its own interests, agendas and biases.
That government as an active participant contrasts a bit with how I think most people think of markets. Markets don’t really do anything. They are simply an environment in which active entities come and interact with each other. Markets don’t set price or quality or even really type of item—these are all unplanned outputs. The market itself is indifferent to all those, it’s neutral in the sense you use that term.
Well, in the 21st Century might we not think that how governments are structured might also shift? While I am far from sure that the shift would be correctly called divestiture or privatization (which seems most people think of when talking about fixing government—or for some calling for increasing what its already doing) I do think the shift might be away from an acting entity and more into some type of passive environment that has some commonality with markets. In a very real sense governments are already a type of market setting but not a price/money exchange one (the representatives are not quite but out bids and offers on votes) but clearly these is an demand mediation and supply process going on. But currently the market-like aspect of government is about integrating voter/members of society demands and then the government makes a decision and takes the actions it wants. I would think some areas might be suitable for taking out the government being the actor and let the actions be decentralized among the people. Probably not individual action, I suspect some sub-agent presence will exist to reduce organizational/transaction costs but certainly the process would look more market-like and be a more neural setting. That might well then remove a lot of the divisiveness and conflict we see with the existing “old school” forms of government.
That is all probably a bit poorly written and expressed but it’s a quick dump of a couple of not fully thought out ideas.
Interesting but I’ve just skim so will need to come back. With that caveat made, I seem to have had a couple of thought that keep recurring for me that seem compatible or complementary with your thoughts.
First, where do we define the margin between public and private. It strikes me that a fair amount of social strife does revolve around a tension here. We live in a dynamic world so thinking that the sphere of private actions will remain static seem unlikely but as the world changed (knowledge, applied knowledge driving technology change, movement of people resulting in cultural transmission and tensions...) will be forces resulting in a change in the line between public and private.
While I’m not entirely sure it is the best framing, I do think of this in the form of externalities. Negative externalities are the more challenging form. What I think starts happening is that we live in t=0 and some set of private activities are producing very little negative impacts on others. But we find by t=10 some of the elements in that set of private activities are now producing a large enough total negative external effect that:
People are able to start seeing cause and effect
The costs to others are sufficient to over come the organizational and transactional costs of using social infrastructures to seek relief for the harms. Those can be formal in the sense of courts and government law/regulation requests. But also informal in various forms—the people engaging in the activities loose reputation, don’t get invited to the good parties any more, people don’t want to talk with them or be seen with them any more, perhaps even more aggressive responses.
At some point either most accept that a new definition of “private” exists and the old ways have changed or society reached the point that those who have not adapted will be treated as criminal and removed from society.
The other thing I’ve been thinking about is related. One hears the where’s my flying car, it’s the 21st Century already quip now and then. But I think a better one might be: It’s the 21st Century, why am I still living under and 18th Century form of government?
I think these relate some of your post in that a lot of the social conflict you point to is driven by the shifting margin between public and private sphere of action. As that margin shifts people use the government to address those new conflicts within the society. But few if any governments differ substantially from those that have existed for centuries. I would characterize that vision of government, even when thinking of representative democracies, as that of an actor/agent. Government takes actions, just like the private members of society do. It should function, as you say, in a neutral way. Part of the failing there comes from government, being an actor/agent, then has its own interests, agendas and biases.
That government as an active participant contrasts a bit with how I think most people think of markets. Markets don’t really do anything. They are simply an environment in which active entities come and interact with each other. Markets don’t set price or quality or even really type of item—these are all unplanned outputs. The market itself is indifferent to all those, it’s neutral in the sense you use that term.
Well, in the 21st Century might we not think that how governments are structured might also shift? While I am far from sure that the shift would be correctly called divestiture or privatization (which seems most people think of when talking about fixing government—or for some calling for increasing what its already doing) I do think the shift might be away from an acting entity and more into some type of passive environment that has some commonality with markets. In a very real sense governments are already a type of market setting but not a price/money exchange one (the representatives are not quite but out bids and offers on votes) but clearly these is an demand mediation and supply process going on. But currently the market-like aspect of government is about integrating voter/members of society demands and then the government makes a decision and takes the actions it wants. I would think some areas might be suitable for taking out the government being the actor and let the actions be decentralized among the people. Probably not individual action, I suspect some sub-agent presence will exist to reduce organizational/transaction costs but certainly the process would look more market-like and be a more neural setting. That might well then remove a lot of the divisiveness and conflict we see with the existing “old school” forms of government.
That is all probably a bit poorly written and expressed but it’s a quick dump of a couple of not fully thought out ideas.