The principle of indifference. — The idea that from an altruistic point of view, we should care about people who are unrelated to us as much as we do about people who are related to us. For example, in The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty, Peter Singer makes the case that we should show a similar degree of moral concern for people in the developing world who are suffering from poverty as we do to people in our neighborhoods. I’d venture the guess its popularity among rationalists is an artifact of culture or a selection effect rather than a consequence of rationality. Note that concern about global poverty is far more prevalent than interest in rationality (while still being low enough so that global poverty is far from alleviated).
Without deliberately bringing up mind-killy things, I would have to ask, if we tie together Effective Altruism and rationality, why Effective Altruists are not socialists of some sort.
Rawls does not deny the reality of political power, nor does he claim that it has its roots elsewhere than in the economic arrangements of a society. But by employing the models of analysis of the classical liberal tradition and of neo-classical [welfare] economics, he excludes that reality from the pages of his book.
-- Understanding Rawls: A Reconstruction and Critique of a Theory of Justice, by Robert Paul Wolff
I actually picked that up on the recommendation from an LW thread to read about Rawls, but I hope the highlight gets Wolff’s point across. Elsewhere, he phrases it roughly as: by default, the patterns of distribution arise directly from the patterns of production, and therefore we can say or do very little about perceived distributional problems if we are willing to change nothing at all about the underlying patterns of production producing (ahaha) the problematic effect.
Or in much simpler words: why do we engage in lengthy examinations of sending charity to people who could look after themselves just fine if we would stop robbing them of resources? The success of GiveDirectly should be causing us to reexamine the common assumption that poor people are poor for some reason other than that they lack property to capitalize for themselves.
Anyway, I’m going to don my flame-proof suit now. (And in my defense, my little giving this year so far has already included $720 to CareerVillage for advising underprivileged youth in the First World and $720 to GiveDirectly for direct transfer to the poor in the Third World. I support interventions that work!)
I would have to ask, if we tie together Effective Altruism and rationality, why Effective Altruists are not socialists of some sort.
I’m a loyal tovarisch of Soviet Canuckistan, and I have to say that doesn’t seem like a conundrum to me: there’s no direct contradiction between basing one’s charitable giving on evidence about charitable organizations’ effectivenesses and thinking that markets in which individual are free to act will lead to more preferable outcomes than markets with state-run monopolies/monopsonies.
The whole point of the second quotation and the paragraph after that was to… Oh never mind, should I just assume henceforth that contrary to its usage in socialist discourse, to outsiders “socialism” always means state-owned monopoly? In that case, what sort of terminology should I use for actual worker control of the means of production, and such things?
“Anarcho-syndicalism” maybe? All’s I know is that my socialized health insurance is a state-run oligopsony/monopoly (and so is my province’s liquor control board). In any event, if direct redistribution of wealth is the key identifier of socialism, then Milton Friedman was a socialist, given his support for negative income taxes.
Prolly the best thing would be to avoid jargon as much as possible when talking to outsiders and just state what concrete policy you’re talking about. For what it’s worth, it seems to me that you’ve used the term “socialism” to refer to two different, conflated, specific policies. In the OP you seem to be talking about direct redistribution of money, which isn’t necessarily equivalent to the notion of worker control of the means of production that you introduce in the parent; and the term “socialism” doesn’t pick out either specific policy in my mind. (An example of how redistribution and worker ownership are not equivalent: on Paul Krugman’s account, if you did direct redistribution right now, you’d increase aggregate demand but not even out ownership of capital. This is because current household consumption seems to be budget-constrained in the face of the ongoing “secular stagnation”—if you gave poor people a whack of cash or assets right now, they’d (liquidate and) spend it on things they need rather than investing/holding it. )
For what it’s worth, it seems to me that you’ve used the term “socialism” to refer to two different, conflated, specific policies. In the OP you seem to be talking about direct redistribution of money, which isn’t necessarily equivalent to the notion of worker control of the means of production that you introduce in the parent; and the term “socialism” doesn’t pick out either specific policy in my mind.
Ah, here’s the confusion. No, in the OP I was talking about worker control of the means of production, and criticizing Effective Altruism for attempting to fix poverty and sickness through what I consider an insufficiently effective intervention, that being direct redistribution of money.
How would you respond to (what I claim to be) Krugman’s account, i.e., in current conditions poor households are budget-constrained and would, if free to do so, liquidate their ownership of the means of production for money to buy the things they need immediately? Just how much redistribution of ownership are you imagining here?
Basically, I accept that critique, but only at an engineering level. Ditto on the “how much” issue: it’s engineering. Neither of these issues actually makes me believe that a welfare state strapped awkwardly on top of a fundamentally industrial-capitalist, resource-capitalist, or financial-capitalist system—and constantly under attack by anyone perceiving themselves as a put-upon well-heeled taxpayer to boot—is actually a better solution to poverty and inequality than a more thoroughly socialist system in which such inequalities and such poverty just don’t happen in the first place (because they’re not part of the system’s utility function).
I certainly believe that we have not yet designed or located a perfect socialist system to implement. What I do note, as addendum to that, is that nobody who supports capitalism believes the status quo is a perfect capitalism, and most people who aren’t fanatical ideologues don’t even believe we’ve found a perfect capitalism yet. The lack of a preexisting design X and a proof that X Is Perfect do not preclude the existence of a better system, whether redesigned from scratch or found by hill-climbing on piecemeal reforms.
All that lack means is that we have to actually think and actually try—which we should have been doing anyway, if we wish to act according to our profession to be rational.
I would define it here as any attempt to attack economic inequality at its source by putting the direct ownership of capital goods and resultant products in the hands of workers rather than with a separate ownership class. This would thus include: cooperatives of all kinds, state socialism (at least, when a passable claim to democracy can be made), syndicalism, and also Georgism and “ecological economics” (which tend to nationalize/publicize the natural commons and their inherent rentier interest rather than factories, but the principle is similar).
A neat little slogan would be to say: you can’t fix inequality through charitable redistribution, not by state sponsorship nor individual effort, but you could fix it through “predistribution” of property ownership to ensure nobody is proletarianized in the first place. (For the record: “proletarianized” means that someone lacks any means of subsistence other than wage-labor. There are very many well-paid proletarians among the Western salariat, the sort of people who read this site, but even this well-off kind of wage labor becomes extremely problematic when the broader economy shifts—just look at how well lawyers or doctors are faring these days in many countries!)
I do agree that differences of talent, skill, education and luck in any kind of optimizing economy (so not only markets but anything else that rewards competence and punishes incompetence) will eventually lead to some inequalities on grounds of competence and many inequalities due to network effects, but I don’t think this is a good ethical excuse to abandon the mission of addressing the problem at its source. It just means we have to stop pretending to be wise by pointing out the obvious problems and actually think about how to accomplish the goal effectively.
For the record: “proletarianized” means that someone lacks any means of subsistence other than wage-labor. There are very many well-paid proletarians among the Western salariat, the sort of people who read this site,
The distinction you’re making with the word “proletarianized” doesn’t really make sense when the market value of the relevant skills are larger than the cost of the means of production.
but even this well-off kind of wage labor becomes extremely problematic when the broader economy shifts—just look at how well lawyers or doctors are faring these days in many countries!
Owning the means of production doesn’t help here since the broader economic shifts can make your factory obsolete just as easily as they can make your skills obsolete.
I would define it here as any attempt to attack economic inequality at its source by putting the direct ownership of capital goods and resultant products in the hands of workers rather than with a separate ownership class.
That doesn’t work in the long term. What happens to a socialized factory when demand for the good it produces decreases? A capitalist factory would lay off some workers, but a socialized factory can’t do that, so winds up making uncompetitive products. The result is that the socialized factory will eventually get out-competed by capitalist factories. If you force all factories to be socialized, this will eventually lead to economic stagnation. (By the way, this is not the only problem with socialized factories.)
I think EA very definitely targets both poverty and low quality of life, I think factual evidence shows that inequality appears to have a detectable effect on both poverty (defined even in an absolute sense: less egalitarian populations develop completely impoverished sub-populations more easily) and well-being in general (the well-being effects, surprisingly, show up all across the class spectrum), and that therefore someone who cares about optimizing away absolute poverty and optimizing for well-being should care about optimizing for the level of inequality which generates the least poverty and the most well-being.
Obviously the factual portions of this belief are subject to update, on top of my own innate preference for more egalitarian interactions (which is strong enough that it has never seemed to change). My preferences could tilt me towards seeing/acknowledging one set of evidence rather than another, towards believing that “the good is the true”, but I was actually as surprised as anyone when the sociological findings showed that rich people are worse off in less-egalitarian societies.
EDIT: Here is a properly rigorous review, and here is a critique.
To make an obvious observation, targeting poverty and targeting economic inequality are very different things. It is clear that EA targets “low quality of life”, but my question was whether EA people explicitly target economic inequality—or they don’t and you think they should?
Note that asserting that inequality affects absolute poverty does NOT imply that getting rid of inequality is the best method of dealing with poverty.
As far as I’m aware, EA people do not currently explicitly target economic inequality. I am attempting to claim that they have instrumental reason to shift towards doing so.
Note that asserting that inequality affects absolute poverty does NOT imply that getting rid of inequality is the best method of dealing with poverty.
It certainly doesn’t, but my explanation of capitalism also attempted to show that in this particular system, inequality and absolute poverty share a common cause. Proletarianized Nicaraguan former-peasants are absolutely poor, but their poverty was created by the same system that is churning out inequality—or so I believe on the weight of my evidence.
If there’s a joint of reality I’ve completely failed to cleave, please let me know.
poverty was created by the same system that is churning out inequality
Poverty is not created. Poverty is the default state that you do (or do not) get out of.
Historical evidence shows that capitalist societies are pretty good at getting large chunks of their population out of poverty. The same evidence shows that alternatives to capitalism are NOT good at that. The absolute poverty of Russian peasants was not created by capitalism. Neither has the absolute poverty of the Kalahari Bushmen or the Yanomami. But look at what happened to China once capitalism was allowed in.
There’s evidence that capitalism plus social democracy works to increase well being. You can’t infer from that that capitalism is doing all the heavy lifting.
You’re speaking in completely separate narratives to counter a highly specific scenario I had raised—and one which has actually happened!
Here is the fairly consistent history of actually existing capitalism, in most societies: an Enclosure Movement of some sort modernizes old property structures, this proletarianizes some of the peasants or other subsistence farmers (that is, it removes them from their traditionally-inhabited land), this creates a cheap labor force which is then used in new industries but who have a lower standard of living than their immediate peasant forebears, this has in fact created both absolute poverty and inequality (compared to the previous non-capitalist system). Over time, the increased productivity raises the mean standard of living, whether or not the former-peasants get access to that new higher standard of living seems to be a function of how egalitarian society’s arrangements are at that time; history appears to show that capitalism usually starts out quite radically inegalitarian but is eventually forced to make egalitarian concessions (these being known as “social democracy” or “welfare programs” in political-speak) that, after decades of struggle, finally raise the formerly-peasant now-proletarians above the peasant standard of living.
Note how there is in fact causation here: it all starts when a formerly non-industrial society chooses to modernize and industrialize by shifting from a previous (usually feudal and mostly agricultural) mode of production that involved a complicated system of inter-class concessions to mutual survival, to a new and simplified system of mass production, freehold property titles, and no inter-class concessions whatsoever. It’s not natural (or rather, predestined: the past doesn’t reach around the present to write the future), it’s a function of choices people made, which are themselves functions of previous causes, and so on backwards in time.
All we “radicals” are actually pointing out is that if we’ve seen this movie before, and know how it goes (or if we’re simply moral enough to reason in an acausal or even “acausal + veil of ignorance” mode about the transition), we can make different choices at any point in the history to achieve a more desirable result far more directly.
I am sorry, are you claiming that there was neither inequality nor absolute poverty in pre-capitalist societies??
I’m claiming, on shakier evidence than previously but still to the best of my own knowledge, that late-feudal societies were somewhat more egalitarian than early-capitalist ones. The peasants were better off than the proletarians: they were poor, but they had homes, wouldn’t starve on anyone’s arbitrary fiat, and lower population density made disease less rampant.
Huh? You can make different choices in the present to affect the future. That’s very far from “at any point in history”.
The point being: if we consider this history of capitalism as a “story”, then different countries are in different places in the story (including some parts I didn’t list in the story because they’re just plain not universal). If you know what sort of process is happening to you, you can choose differently than if you were ignorant (this is a truism, but it bares repeating when so many people think economic history is some kind of destiny unaffected by any choice beyond market transactions).
So, any idea why all attempts to do so have ended pretty badly so far?
They haven’t. You’re raising the most famous failed leftist experiments to salience and falsely generalizing. In fact, in the case of Soviet Russia and Red China, you’re basically just generalizing from two large, salient examples. Then there’s the question of whether “socialism fails” actually cleaves reality at the joint: was it socialism failing in Russia and China, or totalitarianism, or state-managerialism (remember, I’ve already dissolved to the level where these are three different things that can combine but don’t have to)? Remember, until the post-WW2 prosperity of the social-democratic era, the West was quite worried about how quickly and effectively the Soviets were able to grow their economy, especially their military economy.
In other posts I’ve listed off quite a lot of different options and engineering considerations for pro-egalitarian and anti-poverty economic optimizations. The fundamental point I’m trying to hammer home, though, is that these are engineering considerations. You do not have to pick some system, like “American capitalism” or “Soviet Communism” or “European social democracy”, and treat it as an actual goal. Unfortunately, this is what the mind-killed ideologues of the world do: they say, “Obamacare runs counter to the principles of American capitalism and interferes with the Free Market, therefore it’s bad.” They fail to dissolve the ethics of social systems into a consequentialist ethics regarding the actual people, and instead just stop thinking.
No non-paradoxical problem is unsolvable; people just don’t like thinking hard enough to solve real problems.
I’m claiming, on shakier evidence than previously but still to the best of my own knowledge, that late-feudal societies were somewhat more egalitarian than early-capitalist ones. The peasants were better off than the proletarians: they were poor, but they had homes, wouldn’t starve on anyone’s arbitrary fiat, and lower population density made disease less rampant.
I don’t think any of that is true—they neither “had homes” (using the criteria under which the proletariat didn’t), nor “wouldn’t starve”, and disease wasn’t “less rampant”, too. You seem to be engaging in romanticizing some imagined pastoral past.
Not to mention that you’re talking about human universals so I don’t see any reasons to restrict ourselves geographically to Europe or time-wise to the particular moment when pre-capitalist societies were changing over to capitalist. Will you make the same claims with respect to Asian or African societies? And how about comparing peak-feudal to peak-capitalist societies?
If you know what sort of process is happening to you, you can choose differently than if you were ignorant
Well, of course, but I fail to see the implications.
They haven’t.
At the whole-society level, they have. Besides Mondragon you might have mentioned kibbutzim which are still around. However neither kibbutzim nor Mondragon are rapidly growing and taking over the world. Kibbutzim are in decline and Mondragon is basically just another corporation, surviving but not anomalously successful.
Can you run coops and anarcho-syndicalist communes in contemporary Western societies? Of course you can! The same way you can run religious cults and new age retreats and whatnot. Some people like them and will join them. Some. Very few.
The fundamental point I’m trying to hammer home, though, is that these are engineering considerations.
I strongly disagree. I think there are basic-values considerations as well as “this doesn’t do what you think it does” considerations.
However neither kibbutzim nor Mondragon are rapidly growing and taking over the world.
I see no reason why an optimal system for achieving the human good in the realm of economics must necessarily conquer and destroy its competitors or, as you put it, “take over the world”. In fact, the popular distaste for imperialism rather strongly tells me quite the opposite!
“Capitalism paper-clips more than the alternatives” is not a claim in favor of capitalism.
I don’t think any of that is true
Ok? Can we nail this down to a dispute over specific facts and have one of us update on evidence, or do you want to keep this in the realm of narrative?
Can you run coops and anarcho-syndicalist communes in contemporary Western societies? Of course you can! The same way you can run religious cults and new age retreats and whatnot. Some people like them and will join them. Some. Very few.
Have you considered that in most states within the USA, you cannot actually charter a cooperative? There’s simply no statute for it.
In those states and countries where cooperatives can be chartered, they’re a successful if not rabidly spreading form of business, and many popular brands are actually, when you check their incorporation papers, cooperatives. More so in Europe.
Actually, there’s been some small bit of evidence that cooperatives thrive more than “ordinary” companies in a financial crisis (no studies have been done about “all the time”, so to speak), because their structure keeps them more detached and less fragile with respect to the financial markets.
I strongly disagree. I think there are basic-values considerations as well as “this doesn’t do what you think it does” considerations.
Then I think you should state the basic values you’re serving, and argue (very hard, since this is quite the leap you’ve taken!) that “taking over the world” is a desirable instrumental property for an economic system, orthogonally to its ability to cater to our full set of actual desires and values.
Be warned that, to me, it looks as if you’re arguing in favor of Clippy-ness being a virtue.
There’s an argument that you should have the greatest variety of structures and institutions possible to give yourself Talebian robustness....to prevent everything failing at the same time for the same reasons.
I see no reason why an optimal system for achieving the human good in the realm of economics must necessarily conquer and destroy its competitors or, as you put it, “take over the world”.
Because, in the long term, there can be only one. If your “optimal system” does not produce as much growth/value/output as the competition, the competition will grow relatively stronger (exponentially, too) every day. Eventually your “optimal system” will be taken over, by force or by money, or just driven into irrelevance.
Look at, say, religious communities like the Amish. The can continue to exist as isolated pockets as long as they are harmless. But they have no future.
or do you want to keep this in the realm of narrative?
This seems to be a 10,000-feet-level discussion, so I think we can just note our disagreement without getting bogged down in historical minutae.
in most states within the USA, you cannot actually charter a cooperative?
Any particular reason why you can’t set it up as a partnership or a corporation with a specific corporate charter?
Besides, I don’t think your claim is true. Credit unions are very widespread and they’re basically coops. There are mutual savings banks and mutual insurance companies which are, again, basically coops.
Then I think you should state the basic values you’re serving,
That line of argument doesn’t have anything to do with taking over the world. It is focused on trade-offs between values (specifically, that in chasing economic equality you’re making bad trade-offs, of course that depends on what your values are) and on a claim that you’re mistaken about the consequences of establishing particular socioeconomic systems.
Note that systems aren’t competing to produce $$$, they are competing to produce QoL. Europeans are happy to live in countries an inch away from bankruptcy because they get free healthcare and rich cultural heritage and llow crime....
Note also that societies use each others products and services, and the natural global ecosystem might have niches for herbivores as well as carnivores.
Note that systems aren’t competing to produce $$$, they are competing to produce QoL.
That depends on your analysis framework. If you’re thinking about voluntary migrations, quality of life matters a lot. But if you’re thinking of scenarios like “We’ll just buy everything of worth in this country”, for example, $$$ matter much more. And, of course, if the push comes to shove and the miltiary gets involved...
the natural global ecosystem might have niches for herbivores as well as carnivores.
That’s a good point. But every player in an ecosystem must produce some value in order not to die out.
It’s not that accurate to describe Europeans “conquering” the Americas, more like moving in after the smallpox did most of the dirty work then mopping up the remainder. A better example is Africa, where it was unquestionably deliberate acts of aggression that saw nearly the whole continent subdued.
That too, but I think Americas are a better example because nowadays the mainstream media is full of bison excrement about how Native Americans led wise, serene, and peaceful lives in harmony with Nature until the stupid and greedy white man came and killed them all.
Maybe it’s a provincial thing. Europeans get the same or similar thing about our great-grandfathers’ treatment of Africans. Here in Britain we get both :/
For a counterexample, see WWII. Sure, overwhelming technological superiority is overwhelming. But that’s unlikely to happen again in a globalised world.
WWII was, to oversimplify, provoked by a coalition of states attempting regional domination; but their means of doing so were pretty far from the “outcompete everyone else” narrative upthread, and in fact you could view them as being successful in proportion to how closely they hewed to it. I know the Pacific theater best; there, we find Japan’s old-school imperialistic moves meeting little concerted opposition until they attacked Hawaii, Hong Kong, and Singapore, thus bringing the US and Britain’s directly administered eastern colonies into the war. Pearl Harbor usually gets touted as the start of the war on that front, but in fact Japan had been taking over swaths of Manchuria, Mongolia, and China (in roughly that order) since 1931, and not at all quietly. You’ve heard of the Rape of Nanking? That happened in 1937, before the Anschluss was more than a twinkle in Hitler’s eye.
If the Empire of Japan had been content to keep picking on less technologically and militarily capable nations, I doubt the Pacific War as such would ever have come to a head.
In the modern world, attempts at takeover produce concerted opposition, because the modern world has the techontological and practical mechanisms to concert opposition. There are plenty of examples of takeovers in theaancient world because no one could send the message,”we’ve been taken oher and you could be next”
There are plenty of examples of takeovers in theaancient world because no one could send the message,”we’ve been taken oher and you could be next”
Funny. I’ve just finished reading Herodotus’s Histories, the second half of which could be described as chronicling exactly that message and the response to it.
(There’s a bit more to it, of course. In summary, the Greek-speaking Ionic states of western Turkey rebelled against their Persian-appointed satraps, supported by Athens and its allies; after putting down the revolt, Persia’s emperor Darius elected to subjugate Athens and incidentally the rest of Aegean Greece in retaliation. Persia in a series of campaigns then conquered much of Greece before being stopped at Marathon; years later, Darius’s son Xerxes decided to go for Round 2 and met with much the same results.)
In the modern world, attempts at takeover produce concerted opposition
Remind me, who owns that peninsula in the Black Sea now..?
because no one could send the message,”we’ve been taken oher and you could be next”
I think you severely underestimate the communication capabilities of the ancient world. You also overestimate the willingness of people to die for somebody else far away.
But that’s unlikely to happen again in a globalised world.
I don’t see why not. Besides, in this context we’re not talking about world domination, we’re talking about assimilating backward societies and spreading to them the light of the technological progress :-D
There’s an object level argument against (kinds of) socialism in that they didn’t work, and there’s a meta level argument against engineering in general, that societies are too complex and organic for large scale artificial changes to have predictable effects.
there’s a meta level argument against engineering in general, that societies are too complex and organic for large scale artificial changes to have predictable effects.
That’s called an Argument From Ignorance. All societies consist mostly, sometimes even exclusively, of large-scale artificial changes. Did you think the cubicle was your ancestral environment?
Good! So was I. The notion that societies evolve “bottom-up”—by any kind of general will rather than by the fiat and imposition of the powerful—is complete and total mythology.
The notion that societies evolve “bottom-up”—by any kind of general will rather than by the fiat and imposition of the powerful—is complete and total mythology.
So tell me, which fiat imposed the collapse of the USSR?
The committees of the Communist Party, from what I know of history. Who were, you know, the powerful in the USSR.
If you’re about to “parry” this sentence into saying, “Haha! Look what happens when you implement leftist ideas!”, doing so will only prove that you’re not even attempting to thoroughly consider what I am saying, but are instead just reaching for the first ideological weapon you can get against the Evil Threat of… whatever it is people of your ideological stripe think is coming to get you.
I find this exchange strange. My take is that Gorbachev attemopted limited reforms, from the top down, which opened a floodgat e of protest, from the bottom up.
Without deliberately bringing up mind-killy things, I would have to ask, if we tie together Effective Altruism and rationality, why Effective Altruists are not socialists of some sort.
-- Understanding Rawls: A Reconstruction and Critique of a Theory of Justice, by Robert Paul Wolff
I actually picked that up on the recommendation from an LW thread to read about Rawls, but I hope the highlight gets Wolff’s point across. Elsewhere, he phrases it roughly as: by default, the patterns of distribution arise directly from the patterns of production, and therefore we can say or do very little about perceived distributional problems if we are willing to change nothing at all about the underlying patterns of production producing (ahaha) the problematic effect.
Or in much simpler words: why do we engage in lengthy examinations of sending charity to people who could look after themselves just fine if we would stop robbing them of resources? The success of GiveDirectly should be causing us to reexamine the common assumption that poor people are poor for some reason other than that they lack property to capitalize for themselves.
Anyway, I’m going to don my flame-proof suit now. (And in my defense, my little giving this year so far has already included $720 to CareerVillage for advising underprivileged youth in the First World and $720 to GiveDirectly for direct transfer to the poor in the Third World. I support interventions that work!)
I’m a loyal tovarisch of Soviet Canuckistan, and I have to say that doesn’t seem like a conundrum to me: there’s no direct contradiction between basing one’s charitable giving on evidence about charitable organizations’ effectivenesses and thinking that markets in which individual are free to act will lead to more preferable outcomes than markets with state-run monopolies/monopsonies.
The whole point of the second quotation and the paragraph after that was to… Oh never mind, should I just assume henceforth that contrary to its usage in socialist discourse, to outsiders “socialism” always means state-owned monopoly? In that case, what sort of terminology should I use for actual worker control of the means of production, and such things?
“Anarcho-syndicalism” maybe? All’s I know is that my socialized health insurance is a state-run oligopsony/monopoly (and so is my province’s liquor control board). In any event, if direct redistribution of wealth is the key identifier of socialism, then Milton Friedman was a socialist, given his support for negative income taxes.
Prolly the best thing would be to avoid jargon as much as possible when talking to outsiders and just state what concrete policy you’re talking about. For what it’s worth, it seems to me that you’ve used the term “socialism” to refer to two different, conflated, specific policies. In the OP you seem to be talking about direct redistribution of money, which isn’t necessarily equivalent to the notion of worker control of the means of production that you introduce in the parent; and the term “socialism” doesn’t pick out either specific policy in my mind. (An example of how redistribution and worker ownership are not equivalent: on Paul Krugman’s account, if you did direct redistribution right now, you’d increase aggregate demand but not even out ownership of capital. This is because current household consumption seems to be budget-constrained in the face of the ongoing “secular stagnation”—if you gave poor people a whack of cash or assets right now, they’d (liquidate and) spend it on things they need rather than investing/holding it. )
Ah, here’s the confusion. No, in the OP I was talking about worker control of the means of production, and criticizing Effective Altruism for attempting to fix poverty and sickness through what I consider an insufficiently effective intervention, that being direct redistribution of money.
Oh, I see. Excellent clarification.
How would you respond to (what I claim to be) Krugman’s account, i.e., in current conditions poor households are budget-constrained and would, if free to do so, liquidate their ownership of the means of production for money to buy the things they need immediately? Just how much redistribution of ownership are you imagining here?
Basically, I accept that critique, but only at an engineering level. Ditto on the “how much” issue: it’s engineering. Neither of these issues actually makes me believe that a welfare state strapped awkwardly on top of a fundamentally industrial-capitalist, resource-capitalist, or financial-capitalist system—and constantly under attack by anyone perceiving themselves as a put-upon well-heeled taxpayer to boot—is actually a better solution to poverty and inequality than a more thoroughly socialist system in which such inequalities and such poverty just don’t happen in the first place (because they’re not part of the system’s utility function).
I certainly believe that we have not yet designed or located a perfect socialist system to implement. What I do note, as addendum to that, is that nobody who supports capitalism believes the status quo is a perfect capitalism, and most people who aren’t fanatical ideologues don’t even believe we’ve found a perfect capitalism yet. The lack of a preexisting design X and a proof that X Is Perfect do not preclude the existence of a better system, whether redesigned from scratch or found by hill-climbing on piecemeal reforms.
All that lack means is that we have to actually think and actually try—which we should have been doing anyway, if we wish to act according to our profession to be rational.
Good answer. (Before this comment thread I was, and I continue to be, fairly sympathetic to these efforts.)
Thanks!
An interesting question :-D How do you define “socialism” in this context?
I would define it here as any attempt to attack economic inequality at its source by putting the direct ownership of capital goods and resultant products in the hands of workers rather than with a separate ownership class. This would thus include: cooperatives of all kinds, state socialism (at least, when a passable claim to democracy can be made), syndicalism, and also Georgism and “ecological economics” (which tend to nationalize/publicize the natural commons and their inherent rentier interest rather than factories, but the principle is similar).
A neat little slogan would be to say: you can’t fix inequality through charitable redistribution, not by state sponsorship nor individual effort, but you could fix it through “predistribution” of property ownership to ensure nobody is proletarianized in the first place. (For the record: “proletarianized” means that someone lacks any means of subsistence other than wage-labor. There are very many well-paid proletarians among the Western salariat, the sort of people who read this site, but even this well-off kind of wage labor becomes extremely problematic when the broader economy shifts—just look at how well lawyers or doctors are faring these days in many countries!)
I do agree that differences of talent, skill, education and luck in any kind of optimizing economy (so not only markets but anything else that rewards competence and punishes incompetence) will eventually lead to some inequalities on grounds of competence and many inequalities due to network effects, but I don’t think this is a good ethical excuse to abandon the mission of addressing the problem at its source. It just means we have to stop pretending to be wise by pointing out the obvious problems and actually think about how to accomplish the goal effectively.
The distinction you’re making with the word “proletarianized” doesn’t really make sense when the market value of the relevant skills are larger than the cost of the means of production.
Owning the means of production doesn’t help here since the broader economic shifts can make your factory obsolete just as easily as they can make your skills obsolete.
That doesn’t work in the long term. What happens to a socialized factory when demand for the good it produces decreases? A capitalist factory would lay off some workers, but a socialized factory can’t do that, so winds up making uncompetitive products. The result is that the socialized factory will eventually get out-competed by capitalist factories. If you force all factories to be socialized, this will eventually lead to economic stagnation. (By the way, this is not the only problem with socialized factories.)
Why not? Who says? Are we just automatically buying into everything the old American propagandists say now ;-)?
I’ve not even specified a model and you’re already making unwarranted assumptions. It sounds to me like you’ve got a mental stop-sign.
But you did refer to real world examples.
That’s a reasonable definition.
By the way, do you think that EA should tackle the issue of economic inequality, or does EA assert that itself?
I think EA very definitely targets both poverty and low quality of life, I think factual evidence shows that inequality appears to have a detectable effect on both poverty (defined even in an absolute sense: less egalitarian populations develop completely impoverished sub-populations more easily) and well-being in general (the well-being effects, surprisingly, show up all across the class spectrum), and that therefore someone who cares about optimizing away absolute poverty and optimizing for well-being should care about optimizing for the level of inequality which generates the least poverty and the most well-being.
Obviously the factual portions of this belief are subject to update, on top of my own innate preference for more egalitarian interactions (which is strong enough that it has never seemed to change). My preferences could tilt me towards seeing/acknowledging one set of evidence rather than another, towards believing that “the good is the true”, but I was actually as surprised as anyone when the sociological findings showed that rich people are worse off in less-egalitarian societies.
EDIT: Here is a properly rigorous review, and here is a critique.
To make an obvious observation, targeting poverty and targeting economic inequality are very different things. It is clear that EA targets “low quality of life”, but my question was whether EA people explicitly target economic inequality—or they don’t and you think they should?
Note that asserting that inequality affects absolute poverty does NOT imply that getting rid of inequality is the best method of dealing with poverty.
As far as I’m aware, EA people do not currently explicitly target economic inequality. I am attempting to claim that they have instrumental reason to shift towards doing so.
It certainly doesn’t, but my explanation of capitalism also attempted to show that in this particular system, inequality and absolute poverty share a common cause. Proletarianized Nicaraguan former-peasants are absolutely poor, but their poverty was created by the same system that is churning out inequality—or so I believe on the weight of my evidence.
If there’s a joint of reality I’ve completely failed to cleave, please let me know.
Poverty is not created. Poverty is the default state that you do (or do not) get out of.
Historical evidence shows that capitalist societies are pretty good at getting large chunks of their population out of poverty. The same evidence shows that alternatives to capitalism are NOT good at that. The absolute poverty of Russian peasants was not created by capitalism. Neither has the absolute poverty of the Kalahari Bushmen or the Yanomami. But look at what happened to China once capitalism was allowed in.
There’s evidence that capitalism plus social democracy works to increase well being. You can’t infer from that that capitalism is doing all the heavy lifting.
There is evidence that capitalism without social democracy works to increase well-being. Example: contemporary China.
You’re speaking in completely separate narratives to counter a highly specific scenario I had raised—and one which has actually happened!
Here is the fairly consistent history of actually existing capitalism, in most societies: an Enclosure Movement of some sort modernizes old property structures, this proletarianizes some of the peasants or other subsistence farmers (that is, it removes them from their traditionally-inhabited land), this creates a cheap labor force which is then used in new industries but who have a lower standard of living than their immediate peasant forebears, this has in fact created both absolute poverty and inequality (compared to the previous non-capitalist system). Over time, the increased productivity raises the mean standard of living, whether or not the former-peasants get access to that new higher standard of living seems to be a function of how egalitarian society’s arrangements are at that time; history appears to show that capitalism usually starts out quite radically inegalitarian but is eventually forced to make egalitarian concessions (these being known as “social democracy” or “welfare programs” in political-speak) that, after decades of struggle, finally raise the formerly-peasant now-proletarians above the peasant standard of living.
Note how there is in fact causation here: it all starts when a formerly non-industrial society chooses to modernize and industrialize by shifting from a previous (usually feudal and mostly agricultural) mode of production that involved a complicated system of inter-class concessions to mutual survival, to a new and simplified system of mass production, freehold property titles, and no inter-class concessions whatsoever. It’s not natural (or rather, predestined: the past doesn’t reach around the present to write the future), it’s a function of choices people made, which are themselves functions of previous causes, and so on backwards in time.
All we “radicals” are actually pointing out is that if we’ve seen this movie before, and know how it goes (or if we’re simply moral enough to reason in an acausal or even “acausal + veil of ignorance” mode about the transition), we can make different choices at any point in the history to achieve a more desirable result far more directly.
It all adds up to Genre Savvy.
I am sorry, are you claiming that there was neither inequality nor absolute poverty in pre-capitalist societies??
I don’t understand what are you trying to say about causality.
Huh? You can make different choices in the present to affect the future. That’s very far from “at any point in history”.
So, any idea why all attempts to do so have ended pretty badly so far?
I’m claiming, on shakier evidence than previously but still to the best of my own knowledge, that late-feudal societies were somewhat more egalitarian than early-capitalist ones. The peasants were better off than the proletarians: they were poor, but they had homes, wouldn’t starve on anyone’s arbitrary fiat, and lower population density made disease less rampant.
The point being: if we consider this history of capitalism as a “story”, then different countries are in different places in the story (including some parts I didn’t list in the story because they’re just plain not universal). If you know what sort of process is happening to you, you can choose differently than if you were ignorant (this is a truism, but it bares repeating when so many people think economic history is some kind of destiny unaffected by any choice beyond market transactions).
They haven’t. You’re raising the most famous failed leftist experiments to salience and falsely generalizing. In fact, in the case of Soviet Russia and Red China, you’re basically just generalizing from two large, salient examples. Then there’s the question of whether “socialism fails” actually cleaves reality at the joint: was it socialism failing in Russia and China, or totalitarianism, or state-managerialism (remember, I’ve already dissolved to the level where these are three different things that can combine but don’t have to)? Remember, until the post-WW2 prosperity of the social-democratic era, the West was quite worried about how quickly and effectively the Soviets were able to grow their economy, especially their military economy.
In other posts I’ve listed off quite a lot of different options and engineering considerations for pro-egalitarian and anti-poverty economic optimizations. The fundamental point I’m trying to hammer home, though, is that these are engineering considerations. You do not have to pick some system, like “American capitalism” or “Soviet Communism” or “European social democracy”, and treat it as an actual goal. Unfortunately, this is what the mind-killed ideologues of the world do: they say, “Obamacare runs counter to the principles of American capitalism and interferes with the Free Market, therefore it’s bad.” They fail to dissolve the ethics of social systems into a consequentialist ethics regarding the actual people, and instead just stop thinking.
No non-paradoxical problem is unsolvable; people just don’t like thinking hard enough to solve real problems.
I don’t think any of that is true—they neither “had homes” (using the criteria under which the proletariat didn’t), nor “wouldn’t starve”, and disease wasn’t “less rampant”, too. You seem to be engaging in romanticizing some imagined pastoral past.
Not to mention that you’re talking about human universals so I don’t see any reasons to restrict ourselves geographically to Europe or time-wise to the particular moment when pre-capitalist societies were changing over to capitalist. Will you make the same claims with respect to Asian or African societies? And how about comparing peak-feudal to peak-capitalist societies?
Well, of course, but I fail to see the implications.
At the whole-society level, they have. Besides Mondragon you might have mentioned kibbutzim which are still around. However neither kibbutzim nor Mondragon are rapidly growing and taking over the world. Kibbutzim are in decline and Mondragon is basically just another corporation, surviving but not anomalously successful.
Can you run coops and anarcho-syndicalist communes in contemporary Western societies? Of course you can! The same way you can run religious cults and new age retreats and whatnot. Some people like them and will join them. Some. Very few.
I strongly disagree. I think there are basic-values considerations as well as “this doesn’t do what you think it does” considerations.
I see no reason why an optimal system for achieving the human good in the realm of economics must necessarily conquer and destroy its competitors or, as you put it, “take over the world”. In fact, the popular distaste for imperialism rather strongly tells me quite the opposite!
“Capitalism paper-clips more than the alternatives” is not a claim in favor of capitalism.
Ok? Can we nail this down to a dispute over specific facts and have one of us update on evidence, or do you want to keep this in the realm of narrative?
Have you considered that in most states within the USA, you cannot actually charter a cooperative? There’s simply no statute for it.
In those states and countries where cooperatives can be chartered, they’re a successful if not rabidly spreading form of business, and many popular brands are actually, when you check their incorporation papers, cooperatives. More so in Europe.
Actually, there’s been some small bit of evidence that cooperatives thrive more than “ordinary” companies in a financial crisis (no studies have been done about “all the time”, so to speak), because their structure keeps them more detached and less fragile with respect to the financial markets.
Then I think you should state the basic values you’re serving, and argue (very hard, since this is quite the leap you’ve taken!) that “taking over the world” is a desirable instrumental property for an economic system, orthogonally to its ability to cater to our full set of actual desires and values.
Be warned that, to me, it looks as if you’re arguing in favor of Clippy-ness being a virtue.
There’s an argument that you should have the greatest variety of structures and institutions possible to give yourself Talebian robustness....to prevent everything failing at the same time for the same reasons.
Yes, there is. This certainly argues in favor of trying out additional institutional forms.
Because, in the long term, there can be only one. If your “optimal system” does not produce as much growth/value/output as the competition, the competition will grow relatively stronger (exponentially, too) every day. Eventually your “optimal system” will be taken over, by force or by money, or just driven into irrelevance.
Look at, say, religious communities like the Amish. The can continue to exist as isolated pockets as long as they are harmless. But they have no future.
This seems to be a 10,000-feet-level discussion, so I think we can just note our disagreement without getting bogged down in historical minutae.
Any particular reason why you can’t set it up as a partnership or a corporation with a specific corporate charter?
Besides, I don’t think your claim is true. Credit unions are very widespread and they’re basically coops. There are mutual savings banks and mutual insurance companies which are, again, basically coops.
That line of argument doesn’t have anything to do with taking over the world. It is focused on trade-offs between values (specifically, that in chasing economic equality you’re making bad trade-offs, of course that depends on what your values are) and on a claim that you’re mistaken about the consequences of establishing particular socioeconomic systems.
Note that systems aren’t competing to produce $$$, they are competing to produce QoL. Europeans are happy to live in countries an inch away from bankruptcy because they get free healthcare and rich cultural heritage and llow crime....
Note also that societies use each others products and services, and the natural global ecosystem might have niches for herbivores as well as carnivores.
That depends on your analysis framework. If you’re thinking about voluntary migrations, quality of life matters a lot. But if you’re thinking of scenarios like “We’ll just buy everything of worth in this country”, for example, $$$ matter much more. And, of course, if the push comes to shove and the miltiary gets involved...
That’s a good point. But every player in an ecosystem must produce some value in order not to die out.
Attempts4 at byouts and world domination tend to produce concerted opposition
For a historical example consider what happened to the Americas when the Europeans arrived en masse.
It’s not that accurate to describe Europeans “conquering” the Americas, more like moving in after the smallpox did most of the dirty work then mopping up the remainder. A better example is Africa, where it was unquestionably deliberate acts of aggression that saw nearly the whole continent subdued.
Either way, it’s not relevant to the “best” politcal system taking over, because it’s about opportunity, force of numbers, technology, and, GERMS.
And genes.
If one genotype took over, that would be fragile. Like pandas . Diversity is robustness.
I dunno man, milk digestion worked out well for Indo-Europeans.
If by genes you mean smallpox and hepatitis resistance genes, yes.
That too, but I think Americas are a better example because nowadays the mainstream media is full of bison excrement about how Native Americans led wise, serene, and peaceful lives in harmony with Nature until the stupid and greedy white man came and killed them all.
Maybe it’s a provincial thing. Europeans get the same or similar thing about our great-grandfathers’ treatment of Africans. Here in Britain we get both :/
For a counterexample, see WWII. Sure, overwhelming technological superiority is overwhelming. But that’s unlikely to happen again in a globalised world.
WWII was, to oversimplify, provoked by a coalition of states attempting regional domination; but their means of doing so were pretty far from the “outcompete everyone else” narrative upthread, and in fact you could view them as being successful in proportion to how closely they hewed to it. I know the Pacific theater best; there, we find Japan’s old-school imperialistic moves meeting little concerted opposition until they attacked Hawaii, Hong Kong, and Singapore, thus bringing the US and Britain’s directly administered eastern colonies into the war. Pearl Harbor usually gets touted as the start of the war on that front, but in fact Japan had been taking over swaths of Manchuria, Mongolia, and China (in roughly that order) since 1931, and not at all quietly. You’ve heard of the Rape of Nanking? That happened in 1937, before the Anschluss was more than a twinkle in Hitler’s eye.
If the Empire of Japan had been content to keep picking on less technologically and militarily capable nations, I doubt the Pacific War as such would ever have come to a head.
In the modern world, attempts at takeover produce concerted opposition, because the modern world has the techontological and practical mechanisms to concert opposition. There are plenty of examples of takeovers in theaancient world because no one could send the message,”we’ve been taken oher and you could be next”
Funny. I’ve just finished reading Herodotus’s Histories, the second half of which could be described as chronicling exactly that message and the response to it.
(There’s a bit more to it, of course. In summary, the Greek-speaking Ionic states of western Turkey rebelled against their Persian-appointed satraps, supported by Athens and its allies; after putting down the revolt, Persia’s emperor Darius elected to subjugate Athens and incidentally the rest of Aegean Greece in retaliation. Persia in a series of campaigns then conquered much of Greece before being stopped at Marathon; years later, Darius’s son Xerxes decided to go for Round 2 and met with much the same results.)
And Genghis and Atilla ..
Remind me, who owns that peninsula in the Black Sea now..?
I think you severely underestimate the communication capabilities of the ancient world. You also overestimate the willingness of people to die for somebody else far away.
Remind me, who’s not in G8 anymore?
Brits fought in Borneo during WWII. Yout may be succumbeing to Typical Country Fallacy.
Remind me why anyone should care about the G8?
I don’t see why not. Besides, in this context we’re not talking about world domination, we’re talking about assimilating backward societies and spreading to them the light of the technological progress :-D
Do they see it that way? Did anyone ask them?
And why not is the fact that there are ways of telling what the other people are up to:its called espionage.
There’s an object level argument against (kinds of) socialism in that they didn’t work, and there’s a meta level argument against engineering in general, that societies are too complex and organic for large scale artificial changes to have predictable effects.
That’s called an Argument From Ignorance. All societies consist mostly, sometimes even exclusively, of large-scale artificial changes. Did you think the cubicle was your ancestral environment?
I was using artificial to mean top-down or socially engineered.
Good! So was I. The notion that societies evolve “bottom-up”—by any kind of general will rather than by the fiat and imposition of the powerful—is complete and total mythology.
So tell me, which fiat imposed the collapse of the USSR?
The committees of the Communist Party, from what I know of history. Who were, you know, the powerful in the USSR.
If you’re about to “parry” this sentence into saying, “Haha! Look what happens when you implement leftist ideas!”, doing so will only prove that you’re not even attempting to thoroughly consider what I am saying, but are instead just reaching for the first ideological weapon you can get against the Evil Threat of… whatever it is people of your ideological stripe think is coming to get you.
So, the USSR imploded because the “committees of the Communist Party” willed it to be so..?
I am not sure we live in the same reality.
I find this exchange strange. My take is that Gorbachev attemopted limited reforms, from the top down, which opened a floodgat e of protest, from the bottom up.