So, Moldbug’s Cold War explanation is total nonsense? I thinks the Cold War follows after WWII even if the USA was ruled by King Truman I and the USSR was rule by King Stalin I. More formally, I think political realism is the empirically best description of international relations.
Anyway, you asked about patches and realms, and I said that governments do the unprofitable. If it were profitable, government wouldn’t need to do it. Moldbug seems to say that we ought not to want government to do the unprofitable. That explains his move to a corporate form of government, but it doesn’t justify the abandonment of the role that every government in history has decided it wanted to do.
You completely missed my point. Who gets to decide what is unprofitable?Who decides which unprofitable things are worth doing? The set of all possible unprofitable activities is vastly larger than the set of profitable ones.
If it were profitable, government wouldn’t need to do it.
You do realize we where talking about the USSR just a few seconds ago right? I guess Russia was a bad place to make cars so the government had to step in and do that.
Communism (and socialism in general) have inefficient (i.e. not wealth-maximizing) preferences for wealth distribution. So no, it doesn’t surprise me that that massive government planning was required to try to implement the communist preference. If equal wealth distribution were wealth-maximizing, then the government wouldn’t have needed to intervene to make it happen.
This isn’t a groundbreaking point. It falls out straightforwardly from the economic definition of efficiency.
You completely missed my point. … Who decides which unprofitable things are worth doing?
Unless you are arguing Communist preferences of wealth redistribution and the opportunity cost that entails where automatically representative of those of “the Russian people” because duh they had the October revolution and a civil war in which Communists won. In which case I will ask why they would not be in North Korea, and would also ask you if all regimes deciding things are representative of “the people” why do we even need this democracy thing? Obviously Ancient Egyptian peasants wanted to be involved in the unprofitable business of building Pyramids for Pharaoh.
If we are not sure the ancient Egyptian Monarchies captured people’s preferences for unprofitable activities that should be done according to the values of those indirectly funding them, if the same cannot be said of Rome, if the same cannot be said of Communism … why do you think it can be said of say the US government? Why do you think this is more efficient than having government be a money making machine that gives its citizens free money because they own stock and lets them spend it on whatever charity (which also by definition do unprofitable things) or indulgence (which often are also unprofitable—whenever I go stop to smell the flowers or go watch a movie I don’t do this to maximize my profit in currency, but to hopefully maximize my utility) they want? Or if it interferes with the operation of the state why not have the stockholders spend it in some other part of Patchland that specializes in being a great place to spend your money for good causes or fun?
And if you don’t think people’s preferences even matter when deciding what unprofitable stuff to spend resources on … well whose preferences should then?
I want unprofitable stuff that I like done too. Like helping people not having to die if they don’t want to. All else being equal I don’t however much care who does them. BTW I’m not too sure about Moldbug’s government type either, I wouldn’t volunteer to live there just based on his arguments, but I do think he does a good job of dealing with regular arguments in favour of democracy. I do think a city or patch of desert somewhere to test the form of government might be a good idea.
Who decides which unprofitable things are worth doing?
For Moldbug, the answer is . . . not you. Unless the CEO of the realm put your charity on the cleared list. But I suspect that most of the things I would want to do with my dividends would be prohibited as security risks. Political control without thought control has never happened, and I don’t think that super weapons could make it happen.
Political control without thought control has never happened, and I don’t think that super weapons could make it happen.
That is a good argument. Overall I think Moldbug does a better job of giving decent explanatory power for the modern world than providing workable solutions (if there are any) for its ills. :)
Please elaborate on how, completely disregarding political realism in favor of an overarching conspiracy theory (as already mentioned above) and just ignoring the whole iceberg of neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, etc, one can arrive at a decent explanation for it all. “The leftist social sciences professor down the street is a witch, she did it” is not up to my standards of “decent”.
“The leftist social sciences professor down the street is a witch, she did it”
That is not Moldbug’s model. How much have you read?
He has decent models in my mind for many things including the genesis of the leftwards social movement for the past few decades or centuries, the genesis of modern morality, US foreign policy, the sociological aspect development of ideology ect.
I don’t think I’m that much of a outlier in my estimation here, I’ve heard many people I know from LessWrong express interest in his thought (for example gwern, or Vladimir_M). He even had a live recorded debate with Robin Hanson back in 2010 on Futarchy (though he lost, everyone looses debates to RH ;) ). Top posters like Yvian and Eliezer also seem to have read some of Moldbug since they refer to his writing occasionally, ect. People sometimes agree and other times disagree with him, but I think they generally don’t view him as a “crank” .
I really don’t have the time right now to discuss all of this but there are a few older discussions in the comment sections of various articles (just search for “Moldbug” on the site), LessWrong that may interesting you if you’d like to learn more about his stuff and why people find it interesting.
My recent thread on one of his post also had some discussion.
He has decent models in my mind for many things including the genesis of the leftwards social movement for the past few decades or centuries, the genesis of modern morality, US foreign policy, the sociological aspect development of ideology ect.
I have read all of that, at first glance expecting a fun and intriguing contrarian ride. It came across as considerably more insane (in the LW/OB sense) and less grounded in reality than the milder forms of ol’ good fascism to me.
I generally don’t see what’s so insane about WASP Blue State Protestant progressivism being the sociological, philosophical and cultural predecessor of WASP Blue State progressivism.
Or say that modern ethics aren’t the product of pure reason and moral progress but a clear descendant of older Western morality.
Or that US foreign policy is often crazy and mixed up because the US isn’t a monolithic entity and that more specifically the interests of the State department and the Pentagon diverge.
Or that in a modern parlimentary democracy power is wielded by opinion makers (academia and journalists) who create the intellectual fashion of the rich and well positioned subscribe to and with a twenty or so year lag the general population (they adopt it not just to copy the elites but because legislation and education are updated to push new beliefs on them) which then vote for representatives that are supposed to keep the unelected elites in check and working for their interests. Culturally any ethical ideas or value sets adopted by elite academia are assured long term victory.
I think that covers my examples.
I have read all of that, at first glance expecting a fun and intriguing contrarian ride. It came across as considerably more insane (in the LW/OB sense) and less grounded in reality than the milder forms of ol’ good fascism to me.
Meh, fascists are often too mystical for my tastes (try reading Julius Evola. Religious Paleocons are a bit better but their axioms are all messed up, believing in God and all that. The few irreligious ones are often lots of fun.
So we can separate California’s expenses into two classes: those essential or profitable for California as a business; and those that are unnecessary and wasteful, such as feeding the poor, etc, etc. Let them starve! Who likes poor people, anyway? And as for the blind, bumping into lampposts will help them build character. Everyone needs character.
I am not Steve Jobs (I would be very ill-suited to the management of California), and I have not done the math. But my suspicion is that eliminating these pointless expenses alone—without any other management improvements—would turn California, now drowning in the red, into a hellacious, gold-spewing cash machine. We’re talking dividends up the wazoo. Stevifornia will make Gazprom look like a pump-n-dump penny stock.
And suddenly, a solution suggests itself.
What we’ve done, with our separation of expenses, is to divide California’s spending into two classes: essential and discretionary. There is another name for a discretionary payment: a dividend. By spending money to heal the lame, California is in effect paying its profits to the lame. It is just doing it in a very fiscally funky manner.
Thus, we can think of California’s spending on good works as profits which are disbursed to an entity responsible for good works. Call it Calgood. If, instead of spending $30 billion per year on good works, California shifts all its good works and good-workers to Calgood, issues Calgood shares that pay dividends of $30 billion per year, and says goodbye, we have the best of both worlds. California is now a lean, mean, cash-printing machine, and the blind can see, the lame can walk, etc, etc.
Furthermore, Calgood’s shares are, like any shares, negotiable. They are just financial instruments. If Calgood’s investment managers decide it makes financial sense to sell California and buy Google or Gazprom or GE, they can go right ahead.
So without harming the poor, the lame, or the blind at all, we have completely separated California from its charitable activities. The whole idea of government as a doer of good works is thoroughly phony. Charity is good and government is necessary, but there is no essential connection between them.
Of course, in real life, the idea of Calgood is slightly creepy. You’d probably want a few hundred special-purpose charities, which would be much more nimble than big, lumbering Calgood. Of course they would be much, much more nimble than California.Which is kind of the point.
We could go even farther than this. We could issue these charitable shares not to organizations that produce services, but to the actual individuals who consume these services. Why buy canes for the blind? Give the blind money. They can buy their own freakin’ canes. If there is anyone who would rather have $100 worth of free services than $100, he’s a retard.
Some people are, of course, retards. Excuse me. They suffer from mental disabilities. And one of the many, many things that California, State of Love, does, is to hover over them with its soft, downy wings. Needless to say, Stevifornia will not have soft, downy wings. It will be hard and shiny, with a lot of brushed aluminum. So what will it do with its retards?
My suspicion is that Stevifornia will do something like this. It will classify all humans on its land surface into three categories: guests, residents, and dependents. Guests are just visiting, and will be sent home if they cause any trouble. Residents are ordinary, grownup people who live in California, pay taxes, are responsible for their own behavior, etc. And dependents are persons large or small, young or old, who are not responsible but need to be cared for anyway.
The basic principle of dependency is that a dependent is a ward. He or she surrenders his or her personal independence to some guardian authority. The guardian holds imperium over the dependent, ie, controls the dependent’s behavior. In turn the guardian is responsible for the care and feeding of the dependent, and is liable for any torts the dependent commits. As you can see, this design is not my invention.
At present, a large number of Californians are wards of the state itself. Some of them are incompetent, some are dangerous, some are both. Under the same principle as Calgood, these dependents can be spun off into external organizations, along with revenue streams that cover their costs.
Criminals are a special case of dependent. Most criminals are mentally competent, but no more an asset to California than Jew-eating crocodiles. A sensible way to house criminals is to attach them as wards to their revenue streams, but let the criminal himself choose a guardian and switch if he is dissatisfied. I suspect that most criminals would prefer a very different kind of facility than those in which they are housed at present. I also suspect that there are much more efficient ways to make criminal labor pay its own keep.
And I suspect that in Stevifornia, there would be very little crime. In fact, if I were Steve—which of course I’m not—I might well shoot for the goal of providing free crime insurance to my residents. Imagine if you could live in a city where crime was so rare that the government could guarantee restitution for all victims. Imagine what real estate would cost in this city. Imagine how much money its owners would make. Then imagine that Calgood has a third of the shares.It won’t just heal the lame, it will give them bionic wings.
This is why choosing the state as the actor that must bear unprofitable activities, regardless of on who’s behalf, seems to my sentiments less an aesthetic choice or one that should be based on historic preference but an economic question that deserves some investigation. The losses of utility over such a trivial preference seem potentially large.
Charity is good and government is necessary, but there is no essential connection between them.
I suppose it depends on what you see as “charity”. For example, free childhood vaccinations can be seen as charity—after all, why shouldn’t people just buy their own vaccines on the free market ? -- but having a vaccinated population with herd immunity is, nonetheless, a massive public good. The same can be said of public education, or, yes, canes for blind people.
Let’s do some [Edit: more abstract] analysis for a moment. [Edit: I suggest that] government is the entity that has been allocated the exclusive right to legitimate violence. And the biggest use of this threat of violence is compulsory taxation. Why do people put up with this threat of violence? As Thomas Hobbes says, to get out of the state of nature and into civil society. (As Moldbug says, land governed by the rule of law is more valuable than ungoverned land).
What does the government do with the money it receives. At core, it provides services to people who don’t want them. The quote mentioned letting prisoners choose their jailors. It probably would increase prisoner utility to offer the choice. It might even save money (for example, some prison systems mandate completing a GED if the prisoner lacks a high school degree). But that’s not what society wants to do to criminals. If the government uses compulsory power to fund prisons, I assert a requirement that the spending vaguely correspond to taxpayer desires for the use of the funds. (Moldbug seems to disagree).
Consider another example, the DMV. At root, the government threatens violence if you drive on the road without the required government license, on the belief that the quality of driving improves when skill requirements are imposed and the requirements will not (or cannot) be imposed without the threat of violence. It is common knowledge that going to the DMV to get the license is a miserable experience because the lines are long and the workers are not responsive to customer concerns. By contrast, the MacDonald’s next door is filled with helpful people who quickly provide you with the service desired as efficiently as possible. Why the difference? In part, it is the compulsory nature of the license and in part, it is that benefits of improved service at the DMV do not accrue to anyone working for or supervising the DMV. See James Wilson’s insightful discussion (pages 113-115 & 134-136) (There’s also an interesting discussion of the post office on pp. 122-25). I assert that much “inefficiency” in government is simply the deadweight loss inherent in compulsory taxation, which is one part of government Moldbug doesn’t want to abolish.
And there’s less justification for calling an entity with compulsory tax powers a profit making entity. In what way has Moldbug’s Calgood acted in a competitive marketplace? Voting with your feet is just as possible in the United States or Western Europe today as it would be in the patch & realm system.
So, Moldbug’s Cold War explanation is total nonsense? I thinks the Cold War follows after WWII even if the USA was ruled by King Truman I and the USSR was rule by King Stalin I. More formally, I think political realism is the empirically best description of international relations.
Anyway, you asked about patches and realms, and I said that governments do the unprofitable. If it were profitable, government wouldn’t need to do it. Moldbug seems to say that we ought not to want government to do the unprofitable. That explains his move to a corporate form of government, but it doesn’t justify the abandonment of the role that every government in history has decided it wanted to do.
You completely missed my point. Who gets to decide what is unprofitable? Who decides which unprofitable things are worth doing? The set of all possible unprofitable activities is vastly larger than the set of profitable ones.
You do realize we where talking about the USSR just a few seconds ago right? I guess Russia was a bad place to make cars so the government had to step in and do that.
Communism (and socialism in general) have inefficient (i.e. not wealth-maximizing) preferences for wealth distribution. So no, it doesn’t surprise me that that massive government planning was required to try to implement the communist preference. If equal wealth distribution were wealth-maximizing, then the government wouldn’t have needed to intervene to make it happen.
This isn’t a groundbreaking point. It falls out straightforwardly from the economic definition of efficiency.
I repeat myself:
Unless you are arguing Communist preferences of wealth redistribution and the opportunity cost that entails where automatically representative of those of “the Russian people” because duh they had the October revolution and a civil war in which Communists won. In which case I will ask why they would not be in North Korea, and would also ask you if all regimes deciding things are representative of “the people” why do we even need this democracy thing? Obviously Ancient Egyptian peasants wanted to be involved in the unprofitable business of building Pyramids for Pharaoh.
If we are not sure the ancient Egyptian Monarchies captured people’s preferences for unprofitable activities that should be done according to the values of those indirectly funding them, if the same cannot be said of Rome, if the same cannot be said of Communism … why do you think it can be said of say the US government? Why do you think this is more efficient than having government be a money making machine that gives its citizens free money because they own stock and lets them spend it on whatever charity (which also by definition do unprofitable things) or indulgence (which often are also unprofitable—whenever I go stop to smell the flowers or go watch a movie I don’t do this to maximize my profit in currency, but to hopefully maximize my utility) they want? Or if it interferes with the operation of the state why not have the stockholders spend it in some other part of Patchland that specializes in being a great place to spend your money for good causes or fun?
And if you don’t think people’s preferences even matter when deciding what unprofitable stuff to spend resources on … well whose preferences should then?
I want unprofitable stuff that I like done too. Like helping people not having to die if they don’t want to. All else being equal I don’t however much care who does them. BTW I’m not too sure about Moldbug’s government type either, I wouldn’t volunteer to live there just based on his arguments, but I do think he does a good job of dealing with regular arguments in favour of democracy. I do think a city or patch of desert somewhere to test the form of government might be a good idea.
For Moldbug, the answer is . . . not you. Unless the CEO of the realm put your charity on the cleared list. But I suspect that most of the things I would want to do with my dividends would be prohibited as security risks. Political control without thought control has never happened, and I don’t think that super weapons could make it happen.
I’m interested in your answer.
That is a good argument. Overall I think Moldbug does a better job of giving decent explanatory power for the modern world than providing workable solutions (if there are any) for its ills. :)
Please elaborate on how, completely disregarding political realism in favor of an overarching conspiracy theory (as already mentioned above) and just ignoring the whole iceberg of neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, etc, one can arrive at a decent explanation for it all. “The leftist social sciences professor down the street is a witch, she did it” is not up to my standards of “decent”.
That is not Moldbug’s model. How much have you read?
He has decent models in my mind for many things including the genesis of the leftwards social movement for the past few decades or centuries, the genesis of modern morality, US foreign policy, the sociological aspect development of ideology ect.
I don’t think I’m that much of a outlier in my estimation here, I’ve heard many people I know from LessWrong express interest in his thought (for example gwern, or Vladimir_M). He even had a live recorded debate with Robin Hanson back in 2010 on Futarchy (though he lost, everyone looses debates to RH ;) ). Top posters like Yvian and Eliezer also seem to have read some of Moldbug since they refer to his writing occasionally, ect. People sometimes agree and other times disagree with him, but I think they generally don’t view him as a “crank” .
I really don’t have the time right now to discuss all of this but there are a few older discussions in the comment sections of various articles (just search for “Moldbug” on the site), LessWrong that may interesting you if you’d like to learn more about his stuff and why people find it interesting.
My recent thread on one of his post also had some discussion.
I have read all of that, at first glance expecting a fun and intriguing contrarian ride. It came across as considerably more insane (in the LW/OB sense) and less grounded in reality than the milder forms of ol’ good fascism to me.
I generally don’t see what’s so insane about WASP Blue State Protestant progressivism being the sociological, philosophical and cultural predecessor of WASP Blue State progressivism.
Or say that modern ethics aren’t the product of pure reason and moral progress but a clear descendant of older Western morality.
Or that US foreign policy is often crazy and mixed up because the US isn’t a monolithic entity and that more specifically the interests of the State department and the Pentagon diverge.
Or that in a modern parlimentary democracy power is wielded by opinion makers (academia and journalists) who create the intellectual fashion of the rich and well positioned subscribe to and with a twenty or so year lag the general population (they adopt it not just to copy the elites but because legislation and education are updated to push new beliefs on them) which then vote for representatives that are supposed to keep the unelected elites in check and working for their interests. Culturally any ethical ideas or value sets adopted by elite academia are assured long term victory.
I think that covers my examples.
Meh, fascists are often too mystical for my tastes (try reading Julius Evola. Religious Paleocons are a bit better but their axioms are all messed up, believing in God and all that. The few irreligious ones are often lots of fun.
source
This is why choosing the state as the actor that must bear unprofitable activities, regardless of on who’s behalf, seems to my sentiments less an aesthetic choice or one that should be based on historic preference but an economic question that deserves some investigation. The losses of utility over such a trivial preference seem potentially large.
I suppose it depends on what you see as “charity”. For example, free childhood vaccinations can be seen as charity—after all, why shouldn’t people just buy their own vaccines on the free market ? -- but having a vaccinated population with herd immunity is, nonetheless, a massive public good. The same can be said of public education, or, yes, canes for blind people.
Let’s do some [Edit: more abstract] analysis for a moment. [Edit: I suggest that] government is the entity that has been allocated the exclusive right to legitimate violence. And the biggest use of this threat of violence is compulsory taxation. Why do people put up with this threat of violence? As Thomas Hobbes says, to get out of the state of nature and into civil society. (As Moldbug says, land governed by the rule of law is more valuable than ungoverned land).
What does the government do with the money it receives. At core, it provides services to people who don’t want them. The quote mentioned letting prisoners choose their jailors. It probably would increase prisoner utility to offer the choice. It might even save money (for example, some prison systems mandate completing a GED if the prisoner lacks a high school degree). But that’s not what society wants to do to criminals. If the government uses compulsory power to fund prisons, I assert a requirement that the spending vaguely correspond to taxpayer desires for the use of the funds. (Moldbug seems to disagree).
Consider another example, the DMV. At root, the government threatens violence if you drive on the road without the required government license, on the belief that the quality of driving improves when skill requirements are imposed and the requirements will not (or cannot) be imposed without the threat of violence. It is common knowledge that going to the DMV to get the license is a miserable experience because the lines are long and the workers are not responsive to customer concerns. By contrast, the MacDonald’s next door is filled with helpful people who quickly provide you with the service desired as efficiently as possible. Why the difference? In part, it is the compulsory nature of the license and in part, it is that benefits of improved service at the DMV do not accrue to anyone working for or supervising the DMV. See James Wilson’s insightful discussion (pages 113-115 & 134-136) (There’s also an interesting discussion of the post office on pp. 122-25). I assert that much “inefficiency” in government is simply the deadweight loss inherent in compulsory taxation, which is one part of government Moldbug doesn’t want to abolish.
And there’s less justification for calling an entity with compulsory tax powers a profit making entity. In what way has Moldbug’s Calgood acted in a competitive marketplace? Voting with your feet is just as possible in the United States or Western Europe today as it would be in the patch & realm system.
Max Weber was a libertarian?
Hmm. It’s embarrassing to admit I’m not as well read as I’d like. I’d only ever heard the concept in libertarian discussions. Thanks.