Comments on: Does Class Warfare Have A Free-Rider Problem?

By: RJMeyers

RJMeyers — Sun, 05 Oct 2014 23:55:17 +0000

The rich have a simpler coordination problem to solve: There are fewer of them and they often are involved in each other’s businesses, social networks, etc. They also have more resources individually (money, connections), so not only is the pool of rich people smaller but the effectiveness of each of them is much higher. Knowing the president of a bank confers much more influence than knowing all the other tellers at one branch. Being president of said bank confers even more… As you move higher and higher up the SES scale, connections and “who you know” become ever more important and a surprising amount of important decisions are made this way.

There is also coordination over time to consider. Large institutional changes that greatly alter the fortunes of vast portions of society happen rather infrequently (think Great Depression and New Deal type changes). If sufficient coordination is temporarily achieved to influence an important crisis for your (and your associates/friends’) advantage in a new institutional regime, you can relax that coordination afterward and move to a more passive maintenance regime. That’s pretty much what institutions are designed to do–make what used to require active manipulation in violation of social/political contracts into something that is routine and mostly passively agreed on.

It also helps to have various ideologies out there supporting your views and which may be disseminated among the general public via TV, books, and other media outlets. This further decreases maintenance costs and reduces coordination burden by creating at least some limited popular support for policies that benefit you and your associates/friends.

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By: dhill

dhill — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 15:55:09 +0000

Yes and this is why the original post assumption that this kind of evil must be coordinated is just plain wrong. The bureaucrats don’t _want_ to harm anybody. It’s just that cost-benefit is negative and they depend on their job. That’s enough to stay quiet. And I’m reminded of Nicolas Taleb quote, that tries to placate this behaviour: “If you see fraud and don’t shout fraud, you are a fraud”. I know I’m myself not feeling good after reading this sentence.

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By: dhill

dhill — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 15:00:15 +0000

‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’

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By: Ebricky

Ebricky — Sun, 21 Sep 2014 00:05:17 +0000

The cognitive process that results in peoples’ sincere belief in a perverted moral philosophy and attendant “altruistic” behavior is less impressive (though perhaps every bit as spooky) when you consider that it does not “spring up” organically and independently in each individual, but is imposed through ubiquitous suggestion by calculating third parties (media, celebrities, the fabulously well-to-do, etc.). The particular value system is created and disseminated to encourage like-minded folks to do their part to support the selfish goal. It’s unsurprising that similarly interested persons would adopt the suggested moral code. The more interesting phenomenon is that those uninterested in, or even victimized by the selfish goal are often persuaded to adopt it as well.

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By: Sonata Green

Sonata Green — Sat, 20 Sep 2014 05:03:50 +0000

I don’t feel like reading through all the comments to see if this has already been said, but:

The obvious interpretation to me is that there’s a general urge to have something that feels like morality, and emotional/psychological pressures/tendencies to have beliefs that make oneself out to deserve nice things, and – in a vacuum – these tend to intersect to produce a morality that at least superficially appears to be self-serving.

However, our moralities do not form in a vacuum – we’re exposed to media and entertainment that are predominantly controlled by the rich. Thus, the beliefs that the rich hold tend to get disproportionate attention, creating a skew toward forming pro-rich moralities, and so the poor are more likely than the rich to end up holding non-self-serving beliefs. This creates a positive feedback loop of the rich accumulating more and more power, and without either coincidence or intentional conspiracy.

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By: grendelkhan

grendelkhan — Sat, 20 Sep 2014 03:47:15 +0000

cassander: Contracting would certainly explain matters, but darn it, I’ve had a hell of a time getting counts of contractors over time. Which, if the idea is to make it hard to figure out how much stuff government is actually doing, would be working as intended.

I wonder how you’d count that sort of thing. The feds acquire goods and services via a set of byzantine rules (so byzantine that you have to boil down a simpler version when you actually want to accomplish things); if you work for a company that gets half its revenue from federal contracts, are you half a fed, or are the people working on the project entirely feds for that year?

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By: AR+

AR+ — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 01:43:21 +0000

I don’t know. I’m just saying that the math of the free rider problem described above might not actually be there in the smaller groups we evolved in.

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By: Jonathan Graehl

Jonathan Graehl — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 21:35:22 +0000

I agree that the perverse incentives at play in progressives are less along the lines of “willfully make people sick” (except for psychos perpetrating hate-crime hoaxes and other false flag trolling type behavior). The expected sins are more along the lines of excessive “we need to do more” awareness-raising and promotion of schemes that involve lots of visible virtue (soup kitchen work, not effective altruism) – drawing excessive attention to keep their causes running full steam (+ funding). Inertia and use-it-all ask-for-more spending.

Sure, there are free riders, but influential activists and union leaders make sure to capture plenty of benefits and concessions for the associates who supported them.

I’d be interested in a compilation of examples of do-gooder org leaders (administrator, activist, or politician) sabotaging superior alternatives to the approach they’re promoting. I believe this happens, and it *does so* constitute willfully making things worse (than pursuing their stated values according to the most efficient proposal available, without an eye toward denying credit to rivals, without not-invented-here, without trying to grow in slice-of-GDP importance, without fear of admitting past mistakes).

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By: cassander

cassander — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 17:45:05 +0000

can you separate that effect from “the more you coordinate the higher your status rises”?

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By: David Moss

David Moss — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 15:18:31 +0000

“Either there’s some sort of spooky system that generates heartfelt moral philosophies on demand to solve coordination problems…”

… or there some completely mundane mechanisms which cause people to value (intrinsically) supporting their groups. Like, for example, rich people socialising with other rich people, developing norms likely to be popular within that group e.g. lower taxes! rich people are hardworking and deserve a break! etc.

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