the joint stock corporation is the best* system of peacefully organizing humans to achieve goals. the closer governmental structure conforms to a joint-stock system the more peaceful and prosperous it will become (barring getting nuked by a jealous democracy). (99%)
The proposition strikes me as either circular or wrong, depending on your definitions of “peaceful” and “prosperous.”
If by “peaceful” you mean “devoid of violence,” and by “violence” you essentially mean “transfers of wealth that are contrary to just laws,” and by “just laws” you mean “laws that honor private property rights above all else,” then you should not be surprised if joint stock corporations are the most peaceful entities the world has seen so far, because joint stock corporations are dependent on private property rights for their creation and legitimacy.
If by “prosperous” you mean “full of the kind of wealth that can be reported on an objective balance sheet,” and if by “objective balance sheet” you mean “an accounting that will satisfy a plurality of diverse, decentralized and marginally involved investors,” then you should likewise not be surprised if joint stock corporations increase prosperity, because joint stock corporations are designed so as to maximize just this sort of prosperity.
Unfortunately, they do it by offloading negative externalities in the form of pollution, alienation, lower wages, censored speech, and cyclical instability of investments onto individual people.
When your ‘goals’ are the lowest common denominator of materialistic consumption, joint stock corporations might be unbeatable. If your goals include providing a social safety net, education, immunizations, a free marketplace of ideas, biodiversity, and clean air, you might want to consider using a liberal democracy.
Using the most charitable definitions I can think of for your proposition, my estimate for the probability that a joint-stock system would best achieve a fair and honest mix of humanity’s crasser and nobler goals is somewhere around 15%, and so I’m upvoting you for overconfidence.
Coming from the angle of competition in governance, I think you might be mixing up a lot of stuff. A joint stock corporation which is sovereign is trying to compete in the wider world for customers , i.e. willing taxpayers.
If the people desire the values you have mentioned then the joint-stock government will try to provide those cost effectively.
Clean Air and Immunizations will almost certainly be on the agenda of a city government
Biodiversity will be important to a government which includes forests in its assets and wants to sustainably maintain the same.
A free marketplace of ideas, free education and social safety nets would purely be determined by the market for people. Is it an important value enough that people would not come to your country and would go to another? if it is, then the joint stock government would try to provide the same. If not, then they wouldn’t.
Good response, but I have to agree with wedrifid here: you can’t compete for “willing taxpayers” at all if you’re dealing with hard public goods, and elsewhere competition is dulled by (a) the irrational political loyalties of citizens, (b) the legitimate emotional and economic costs of immigration, (c) the varying ability of different kinds of citizens to move, and (d) protectionist controls on the movement of labor in whatever non-libertopian governments remain, which might provide them with an unfair advantage in real life, the theoretical axioms of competitive advantage theory be damned.
I’d be all for introducing some features of the joint stock corporation into some forms of government, but that doesn’t sound very much like what you were proposing would lead to peace and prosperity—you said the jsc was better than other forms, not a good thing to have a nice dose of.
Or how I would call it, no representation without taxation. Those who contribute equity to society rule it. Everyone else contracts with the corporate in some way or another.
England had property-rights based monarchy. It’s basically gone now. So pace Mencius Moldbug, it can’t be especially good a system—else it would not have died.
England was never a ‘corporate’ monarchy in the sense of a limited-liability joint-stock company with numeric shares, voting rights, etc. I never said it was, though, but that it was ‘property-rights based’, which it was—the whole country and all legal privileges were property which the king could and did rent and sell away.
This is one of the major topics of Nick Szabo’s blog Unenumerated. If you have the time, I strongly recommend reading it all. It’s up there with Overcoming Bias in my books.
Moldbug calls this a joint-stock republic, though he mixes it with some of his more fringe ideas.
I’ll second gwern’s recommendation on Nick Szabo’s blog—he has a post on Government for Profit, which I think was written as a rebuttal to some of Moldbug’s ideas (see the comments in this post)
Another recommendation for Nick Szabo’s blog. The only online writings I know of about governance and political economy that come close are the blogs of economist Arnold Kling and the eccentric and hyperbolic Mencius Moldbug. (Hanson’s blog is extremely strong on several subjects, but governance is not IMHO one of them.)
Another recommendation for Nick Szabo’s blog. The only online writings I know of about governance and political economy that come close are the blogs of economist Arnold Kling and the eccentric and hyperbolic Mencius Moldbug.
I agree with all these recommendations, and I’d add that these three authors have written some of their best stuff in the course of debating each other. In particular, a good way to get the most out of Moldbug is to read him alongside Nick Szabo’s criticisms that can be found both in UR comments and on Szabo’s own blog. As another gem, the 2008 Moldbug-Kling debate on finance (parts
(1),
(2), (3),
(4), and
(5)) was one of the best and most insightful discussions of economics I’ve ever read.
Hanson’s blog is extremely strong on several subjects, but governance is not IMHO one of them.
I agree. In addition, I must say I’m disappointed with the shallowness of the occasional discussions of governance on LW. Whenever such topics are opened, I see people who otherwise display tremendous smarts and critical skills making not-even-wrong assertions based on a completely naive view of the present system of governance, barely more realistic than the descriptions from civics textbooks.
the joint stock corporation is the best* system of peacefully organizing humans to achieve goals. the closer governmental structure conforms to a joint-stock system the more peaceful and prosperous it will become (barring getting nuked by a jealous democracy). (99%)
*that humans have invented so far
The proposition strikes me as either circular or wrong, depending on your definitions of “peaceful” and “prosperous.”
If by “peaceful” you mean “devoid of violence,” and by “violence” you essentially mean “transfers of wealth that are contrary to just laws,” and by “just laws” you mean “laws that honor private property rights above all else,” then you should not be surprised if joint stock corporations are the most peaceful entities the world has seen so far, because joint stock corporations are dependent on private property rights for their creation and legitimacy.
If by “prosperous” you mean “full of the kind of wealth that can be reported on an objective balance sheet,” and if by “objective balance sheet” you mean “an accounting that will satisfy a plurality of diverse, decentralized and marginally involved investors,” then you should likewise not be surprised if joint stock corporations increase prosperity, because joint stock corporations are designed so as to maximize just this sort of prosperity.
Unfortunately, they do it by offloading negative externalities in the form of pollution, alienation, lower wages, censored speech, and cyclical instability of investments onto individual people.
When your ‘goals’ are the lowest common denominator of materialistic consumption, joint stock corporations might be unbeatable. If your goals include providing a social safety net, education, immunizations, a free marketplace of ideas, biodiversity, and clean air, you might want to consider using a liberal democracy.
Using the most charitable definitions I can think of for your proposition, my estimate for the probability that a joint-stock system would best achieve a fair and honest mix of humanity’s crasser and nobler goals is somewhere around 15%, and so I’m upvoting you for overconfidence.
Coming from the angle of competition in governance, I think you might be mixing up a lot of stuff. A joint stock corporation which is sovereign is trying to compete in the wider world for customers , i.e. willing taxpayers.
If the people desire the values you have mentioned then the joint-stock government will try to provide those cost effectively.
Clean Air and Immunizations will almost certainly be on the agenda of a city government
Biodiversity will be important to a government which includes forests in its assets and wants to sustainably maintain the same.
A free marketplace of ideas, free education and social safety nets would purely be determined by the market for people. Is it an important value enough that people would not come to your country and would go to another? if it is, then the joint stock government would try to provide the same. If not, then they wouldn’t.
All of this makes sense in principle.
(I’m assuming you’re not thinking that any of it would actually work in practice with either humans or ideal rational agents, right?)
Good response, but I have to agree with wedrifid here: you can’t compete for “willing taxpayers” at all if you’re dealing with hard public goods, and elsewhere competition is dulled by (a) the irrational political loyalties of citizens, (b) the legitimate emotional and economic costs of immigration, (c) the varying ability of different kinds of citizens to move, and (d) protectionist controls on the movement of labor in whatever non-libertopian governments remain, which might provide them with an unfair advantage in real life, the theoretical axioms of competitive advantage theory be damned.
I’d be all for introducing some features of the joint stock corporation into some forms of government, but that doesn’t sound very much like what you were proposing would lead to peace and prosperity—you said the jsc was better than other forms, not a good thing to have a nice dose of.
Or how I would call it, no representation without taxation. Those who contribute equity to society rule it. Everyone else contracts with the corporate in some way or another.
What is the term for this mode of governance? Corporate Monarchy? Seems like a good idea to me.
England had property-rights based monarchy. It’s basically gone now. So pace Mencius Moldbug, it can’t be especially good a system—else it would not have died.
I don’t understand this. England never was a corporate monarchy, though.
England was never a ‘corporate’ monarchy in the sense of a limited-liability joint-stock company with numeric shares, voting rights, etc. I never said it was, though, but that it was ‘property-rights based’, which it was—the whole country and all legal privileges were property which the king could and did rent and sell away.
This is one of the major topics of Nick Szabo’s blog Unenumerated. If you have the time, I strongly recommend reading it all. It’s up there with Overcoming Bias in my books.
Moldbug calls this a joint-stock republic, though he mixes it with some of his more fringe ideas.
I’ll second gwern’s recommendation on Nick Szabo’s blog—he has a post on Government for Profit, which I think was written as a rebuttal to some of Moldbug’s ideas (see the comments in this post)
Another recommendation for Nick Szabo’s blog. The only online writings I know of about governance and political economy that come close are the blogs of economist Arnold Kling and the eccentric and hyperbolic Mencius Moldbug. (Hanson’s blog is extremely strong on several subjects, but governance is not IMHO one of them.)
rhollerith_dot_com:
I agree with all these recommendations, and I’d add that these three authors have written some of their best stuff in the course of debating each other. In particular, a good way to get the most out of Moldbug is to read him alongside Nick Szabo’s criticisms that can be found both in UR comments and on Szabo’s own blog. As another gem, the 2008 Moldbug-Kling debate on finance (parts (1), (2), (3), (4), and (5)) was one of the best and most insightful discussions of economics I’ve ever read.
I agree. In addition, I must say I’m disappointed with the shallowness of the occasional discussions of governance on LW. Whenever such topics are opened, I see people who otherwise display tremendous smarts and critical skills making not-even-wrong assertions based on a completely naive view of the present system of governance, barely more realistic than the descriptions from civics textbooks.
Open source.