David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom is half Libertarianism 101: Introduction To Libertarianism, and half Libertarianism 501: Technical Diagrams For Constructing An Anarcho-Capitalist State.

And aside from either of these, it’s interesting as a historical artifact. The first edition was published in 1973; the Third Edition copy I read is from last year, but the updates are minor and the book keeps its 1973 feel – including a discussion of health care economics which puts the price of a doctor’s visit at $10.

One of my takeaways was how new libertarianism was in 1973. The introduction says:

These peculiar views of mine are not peculiar to me. If they were, I would be paying Harper and Row to publish this book instead of Harper and Row paying me. My views are typical of the ideas of a small but growing group of people, a ‘movement’ that has begun to attract the attention of the national media. We call ourselves libertarians.

This book is concerned with libertarian ideas, not with a history of the libertarian movement or a description of its present condition. It is fashionable to measure the importance of ideas by the number and violence of their adherents. That is a fashion I shall not follow. If, when you finish this book, you have come to share many of my views, you will know the most important thing about the number of libertarians – that it is larger by one than when you started reading.

There is something very innocent about expecting someone to become a libertarian after reading a book arguing for libertarianism, something very much a product of the time when the movement was new and anything was possible. Friedman discusses and debates the views of Ayn Rand not as some sort of ascended cultural archetype, but as a fellow theorist who happens to be writing around the same time. It makes the book somehow fresher than one that starts from the perspective of “Okay, you’ve heard all of these arguments before, so let me preach to the choir and see what happens.”

But sometimes the book is dated in ways less innocuous than ten-dollar doctor visits. For example, in Chapter 5, “The Rich Get Richer And The Poor Get Richer,” Friedman argues against excessive concern with inequality, saying:

In absolute terms, the rich have gotten richer, but the gap between rich and poor seems, so far as very imperfect statistics make it possible to judge, to have ben slowly closing…we can note that both the rise in the general standard of living and the decreasing inequality appear to have been occurring fairly steadily over a long period of time, in a variety of different more or less capitalist societies…in the previous chapter I argued that liberal measures tend to injure the poor, not benefit them, and to increase, not decrease inequality. If that has been true in the past, then the increasing equality we have experienced is in spite of, not because of, such measures…

Even if the capitalist invests all the income from his capital and consumes none of it, his wealth will only grow at the rate of return on capital. If the interest rate is less than the rate at which the total wages of workers increase, the relative wealth of the capitalists will decline. Historically, the rate of increase in total wages has run about 5 to 10 percent a year, roughly comparable to the interest rate earned by capital. Furthermore, capitalists consume part of their income; if they did not, there would be little point in being a capitalist. The share of the national income going to capital in this country has varied over time but not consistently increased, as shown in Appendix III.

The heartbreaking thing is that every word of this was true in 1973. In fact, 1973 is frequently given as the inflection point, when for some reason middle-class wages stopped rising at the same rate as the wealth of the top 1% and capital’s share of income started a steady climb (this is frequently blamed on Reagan, but started almost a decade before his presidency).

There are enough issues like this that they make the book’s arguments less compelling, or at least cry out to be addressed. Likewise, the book’s statistics are fascinating and in many cases very counterintuitive and convincing, but I have a lot of trouble double-checking them because they’re mostly 1970s statistics.

I can’t do justice to the Libertarian 101 arguments in this review because there are too many of them on too many different topics. This is too bad because they are excellent and fascinating and you should really read them. Aside from recommending you get the book, I’ll shove those into a separate Highlights post later this week. But for now I want to focus on the claim that I found most interesting: Government claims legitimacy partly from its role in helping the poor, but the costs fall disproportionately on the poor and it screws them over more than any other group:

Suppose that one hundred years ago someone tried to persuade me that democratic institutions could be used to transfer money from the bulk of the population to the poor. I could have made the following reply: “The poor, whom you wish to help, are many times outnumbered by the rest of the population, from whom you intend to take the money to help them. If the non-poor are not generous enough to give money to the poor voluntarily through private charity, what makes you think they will be such fools as to vote to force themselves to take it?

I think I have a good answer to this question. Nobody’s vote makes very much difference, so people are happy to vote for signaling/psychological reasons rather than financial ones. If casting my vote to help the poor makes me feel like a good person, but losing money in redistribution schemes makes me poorer, well, my vote 100% determines whether I feel good or not, but only 1/300-million determines whether I get poorer. This might also be profitably mapped onto construal level theory, ie Robin Hanson’s Near Mode vs. Far Mode.

Anyway, having determined that democracy should not be expected to help the poor, he gets on to demonstrating that in fact it doesn’t:

There are some programs that give money to the poor – Aid to Families With Dependent Children, for instance. But such programs are vastly outweighed by those having the opposite effect – programs that injure the poor for the benefit of the not-poor. Almost surely, the poor would be better off if both the benefits that they now receive and the taxes, direct and indirect, that they now pay were abolished.

He then goes on to list examples, including Social Security, food subsidies (which increase food prices and go to rich farmers), state universities (since they cost tax money and mostly rich people go to university), and urban renewal projects (which bulldoze low-quality housing that the poor can afford to create high-quality housing that they can’t, thus pushing up their housing prices).

I don’t know much about the 1973 situation, but a lot of these don’t seem very convincing nowadays. Social Security no longer appears regressive: as per Wikipedia, “for people in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution, the ratio of [Social Security] benefits to taxes is almost three times as high as it is for those in the top fifth.” And by my understanding, people who earn less than about $20,000 don’t pay federal income taxes at all, meaning the burden of universities, etc don’t fall upon them. A Cato Institute study finds that poor people on welfare can get benefits packages worth up to about $20,000. It seems really unlikely that whatever they have to pay because of farm subsidies or whatever compensates for that.

But Friedman also makes the stronger point that when government programs fail, it’s the poor who are most affected and who have the fewest other options. For example, he notes that the cost per capita of law enforcement/police/courts is $40 (remember, this is 1973!) and estimates that minus government waste and corruption, the free market could provide extremely competent policing for $20. He says:

There are many inhabitants of the ghetto who would be delighted to pay twenty dollars a year if in exchange they actually got protection; many of them have more than that stolen every year as a result of the poor protection they get from our government-run protection system. They would be even happier if at the same time they were relieved of the taxes that pay for the protection that the government police does not give them. In spite of popular myths about capitalism oppressing the poor, the poor are worst off in those things provided by government, such as schooling, police protection, and justice. There are more good cars in the ghetto than good schools.

I somewhat agree with the spirit of this quote, but certainly some of the problem is that poor people live in poor areas that collect little tax revenue and underfund their social services. Bigger government could solve this problem – just have school district funding set at the state or federal level. It’s less obvious that smaller government could – poor people would still have X dollars to spend on schools, for low values of X. But here we get into complicated proposals like vouchers and private policing that I’ll leave for later.

II.

Let’s get to what we’re really here for – the crazy anarcho-capitalist utopia.

This quote is very long, but it’s worth it:

How, without government, could we settle the disputes that are now settled in courts of law? How could we protect ourselves from criminals?

Consider first the easiest case, the resolution of disputes involving contracts between well-established firms. A large fraction of such disputes are now settled not by government courts but by private arbitration of the sort described in Chapter 18. The firms, when they draw up a contract, specify a procedure for arbitrating any dispute that may arise. Thus they avoid the expense and delay of the courts.

The arbitrator has no police force. His function is to render decisions, not to enforce them. Currently, arbitrated decisions are usually enforceable in the government courts, but that is a recent development; historically, enforcement came from a firm’s desire to maintain its reputation. After refusing to accept an arbitrator’s judgment, it is hard to persuade anyone else to sign a contract that specifies arbitration; no one wants to play a game of ‘heads you win, tails I lose’.

Arbitration arrangements are already widespread. As the courts continue to deteriorate, arbitration will continue to grow. But it only provides for the resolution of disputes over pre-existing contracts. Arbitration, by itself, provides no solution for the man whose car is dented by a careless driver, still less for the victim of theft; in both cases the plaintiff and defendant, having different interests and no prior agreement, are unlikely to find a mutually satisfactory arbitrator. Indeed, the defendant has no reason to accept any arbitration at all; he can only lose–which brings us to the problem of preventing coercion.

Protection from coercion is an economic good. It is presently sold in a variety of forms–Brinks guards, locks, burglar alarms. As the effectiveness of government police declines, these market substitutes for the police, like market substitutes for the courts, become more popular.

Suppose, then, that at some future time there are no government police, but instead private protection agencies. These agencies sell the service of protecting their clients against crime. Perhaps they also guarantee performance by insuring their clients against losses resulting from criminal acts.

How might such protection agencies protect? That would be an economic decision, depending on the’-costs and effectiveness of different alternatives. On the one extreme, they might limit themselves to passive defenses, installing elaborate locks and alarms. Or they might take no preventive action at all, but make great efforts to hunt down criminals guilty of crimes against their clients. They might maintain foot patrols or squad cars, like our present government police, or they might rely on electronic substitutes. In any case, they would be selling a service to their customers and would have a strong incentive to provide as high a quality of service as possible, at the lowest possible cost. It is reasonable to suppose that the quality of service would be higher and the cost lower than with the present governmental system.

Inevitably, conflicts would arise between one protective agency and another. How might they be resolved?

I come home one night and find my television set missing. I immediately call my protection agency, Tannahelp Inc., to report the theft. They send an agent. He checks the automatic camera which Tannahelp, as part of their service, installed in my living room and discovers a picture of one Joe Bock lugging the television set out the door. The Tannahelp agent contacts Joe, informs him that Tannahelp has reason to believe he is in possession of my television set, and suggests he return it, along with an extra ten dollars to pay for Tannahelp’s time and trouble in locating Joe. Joe replies that he has never seen my television set in his life and tells the Tannahelp agent to go to hell.

The agent points out that until Tannahelp is convinced there has been a mistake, he must proceed on the assumption that the television set is my property. Six Tannahelp employees, all large and energetic, will be at Joe’s door next morning to collect the set. Joe, in response, informs the agent that he also has a protection agency, Dawn Defense, and that his contract with them undoubtedly requires them to protect him if six goons try to break into his house and steal his television set.

The stage seems set for a nice little war between Tannahelp and Dawn Defense. It is precisely such a possibility that has led some libertarians who are not anarchists, most notably Ayn Rand, to reject the possibility of competing free-market protection agencies.

But wars are very expensive, and Tannahelp and Dawn Defense are both profit-making corporations, more interested in saving money than face. I think the rest of the story would be less violent than Miss Rand supposed.

The Tannahelp agent calls up his opposite number at Dawn Defense. ‘We’ve got a problem. . . .’ After explaining the situation, he points out that if Tannahelp sends six men and Dawn eight, there will be a fight. Someone might even get hurt. Whoever wins, by the time the conflict is over it will be expensive for both sides. They might even have to start paying their employees higher wages to make up for the risk. Then both firms will be forced to raise their rates. If they do, Murbard Ltd., an aggressive new firm which has been trying to get established in the area, will undercut their prices and steal their customers. There must be a better solution.

The man from Tannahelp suggests that the better solution is arbitration. They will take the dispute over my television set to a reputable local arbitration firm. If the arbitrator decides that Joe is innocent, Tannahelp agrees to pay Joe and Dawn Defense an indemnity to make up for their time and trouble. If he is found guilty, Dawn Defense will accept the verdict; since the television set is not Joe’s, they have no obligation to protect him when the men from Tannahelp come to seize it.

What I have described is a very makeshift arrangement. In practice, once anarcho-capitalist institutions were well established, protection agencies would anticipate such difficulties and arrange contracts in advance, before specific conflicts occurred, specifying the arbitrator who would settle them.

In such an anarchist society, who would make the laws? On what basis would the private arbitrator decide what acts were criminal and what their punishments should be? The answer is that systems of law would be produced for profit on the open market, just as books and bras are produced today. There could be competition among different brands of law, just as there is competition among different brands of cars.

In such a society there might be many courts and even many legal systems. Each pair of protection agencies agree in advance on which court they will use in case of conflict. Thus the laws under which a particular case is decided are determined implicitly by advance agreement between the protection agencies whose customers are involved. In principle, there could be a different court and a different set of laws for every pair of protection agencies. In practice, many agencies would probably find it convenient to patronize the same courts, and many courts might find it convenient to adopt identical, or nearly identical, systems of law in order to simplify matters for their customers.

Before labelling a society in which different people are under different laws chaotic and unjust, remember that in our society the law under which you are judged depends on the country, state, and even city in which you happen to be. Under the arrangements I am describing, it depends instead on your protective agency and the agency of the person you accuse of a crime or who accuses you of a crime.

In such a society law is produced on the market. A court supports itself by charging for the service of arbitrating disputes. Its success depends on its reputation for honesty, reliability, and promptness and on the desirability to potential customers of the particular set of laws it judges by. The immediate customers are protection agencies. But the protection agency is itself selling a product to its customers. Part of that product is the legal system, or systems, of the courts it patronizes and under which its customers will consequently be judged. Each protection agency will try to patronize those courts under whose legal system its customers would like to live.

The idea is that these protection agencies are companies like any other, and so will try to provide a good product at a low cost that satisfies their customers. People can choose their favorite, and so in some sense decide which laws to be bound by. Although they will not have complete flexibility in choosing their laws, lawmaking bodies will be sort of subject to consumer demand.

He correctly points out that contrary to what you might expect this system does not by definition exclude victimless crimes. If you want to hire a police agency that things being gay is a crime, you can pay them money to go find gay people and throw them out of town. Then the gay people will hire their own police agency to defend themselves. I think Friedman believes that opposing homosexuality has a major free rider problem, and that most people like to signal virtue by complaining about them but very few people would be willing to pay money for it. By comparison, gay people would be willing to pay a lot of money to be protected from this sort of thing, so their protection agencies would be stronger than the agencies of whoever wants to kick them out, and they’d stay.

This seems to me overly optimistic. After all, back when only a tiny percent of the country was tolerant of homosexuality, it might be that church groups could raise a lot of money to enforce anti-gay laws, and gay people were mostly poor and couldn’t raise very much money to defend themselves. I think I know what Friedman’s response would be, which is “Yes, and during that time in your real-world statist society, homosexuality was also illegal. Yes, you would have to wait for cultural norms to change before homosexuality would be legalized, but it would very likely be easier to do my way than yours.” I think he’s possibly right.

My overall conclusion is that I am delighted by this fascinating and elegant system and would very much like to see it tried somewhere very far away from me.

I am sure Friedman has to listen to so many objections that he can recite most of them by memory and is sick to death of them. Indeed, he admits this and devotes no small amount of space to rebutting many of them. Will we get taken over by one giant protection racket? Probably not, monopolies are rare in practice. Will criminals get their own protection and arbitration agencies that say crime is okay? Probably not; no other protection agency would agree to arbitrate on their terms, and without arbitration they would be in a war with all the other agencies, which the other agencies would win since legitimate business can mobilize more money than crime can. Would there be constant bloody battles? Probably not; profit-seeking corporations would be too smart to lose money that way when better options like arbitration are available. Would the heads of protection agencies form a pact, then use their combined might to take over the country and become kings? Probably not; right now police chiefs and military generals don’t do this, even though they are in a good position to.

Here are some objections of mine I didn’t see rebutted:

1. People who don’t purchase protection are pretty much fair game for anyone to rob or murder or torture or whatever. This seems harsh, especially since this society is likely to have a sizable underclass. I don’t know if “$20 for a year of police protection” was a reasonable estimate for the 70s, but I expect this would be much costlier now. Compare the percent of people who, pre-Obamacare, still didn’t have health insurance, and how much higher it would have been if there weren’t government programs that kind of got health insurance bundled in with employment.

2. Protection agencies are going to be engaged in constant brinksmanship for the same reason nation-states are engaged in constant brinksmanship. If Agency 1 wanted concessions from Agency 2, it has an incentive to seem kind of crazy and like it might actually declare real war, however unprofitable, in order to bluff Agency 2 into complying. Remember, countries have the same economic incentives to avoid war that companies do, but they still occasionally get involved in them. Even when they don’t, the threat of such leads many resources to be wasted in military buildup.

3. Security companies and their clients are very unlikely to want to pay for the cost of incarcerations. There’s no incentive to pay extra for criminal rights, so convicted criminals are likely to end up facing something like corporal punishment Never mind, this went an unexpected direction and is probably a good thing.

4. If I am the church-funded protection agency charged with flogging gay people, and you are the gay-person funded protection agency charged with protecting them, it’s hard to see what kind of arbitration we would agree on. I…uh…guess this might be another one that isn’t so bad, since that might mean the agencies are forced to actually fight, which raises the cost of being anti-gay to a potentially prohibitive level.

5. There are some things which might decrease crime in an area in general instead of just involving crime against a specific person. For example, adding streetlights, fighting drug abuse, putting troubled youth in after-school programs, fighting the broken window effect. If these are public goods, nobody will be incentivized to pay extra for them.

6. In fact, protection agencies have a strong incentive to make everybody as scared of crime as possible, and in fact to raise the actual crime rate if they can, in order to get people to buy their Premium plan. Given that this is anarcho-capitalism and there are no laws against crime, this can’t possibly end well.

7. It would be hard to have large-scale public laws. Right now Saudi Arabia can have laws about how no woman can go outside unveiled, America can have laws that nobody can go outside unclothed, and some European beaches can have laws saying go ahead and be naked. Likewise, some small villages can have zoning laws saying not to build non-scenic skyscrapers, but Dubai can say to build as high as you want and then some. This seems harder under anarcho-capitalism until people start coordinating the formation of intentional communities, at which point it becomes less anarcho-capitalism and more Patchwork.

8. Gang leaders and barbarian warlords had the chance to become protection agencies like this, but never did. This suggests that this system is unstable or unnatural. It’s possible that once the equilibrium of protection and arbitration agencies is established it will be stable, but of all of the various lawless societies to exist throughout history, none of them coalesced upon this system. Suspicious.

9. An extension of this: it’s unclear that we’re not already living in this society. It’s just that one protection and arbitration agency has completely taken over from all of the others and instituted a policy of using force against those who don’t pay for its services. That’s allowed under anarcho-capitalism because everything is allowed under anarcho-capitalism. So expecting anarcho-capitalism to be stable is expecting the thing that has already happened to not happen again a second time.

10. There seems to be a lot of opportunities for rich people to purchase greater privileges not available to the masses. After all, negotiation results are often determined by a party’s BATNA. Rich people may have access to very strong security companies (or premium plans from regular companies) that could win most fights; they can use this to insist on better arbitration terms. A rich person’s company might only accept basic arbitration (eg punish the rich person for murder) if other companies agree to lopsided deals (like don’t go after the rich person for less dramatic things like sexual harassment. On the other hand, a poorer person’s company might have to accept the worse side of the deal, where the poor person can be prosecuted for a very wide range of crimes against the rich person, including giving offense and not being respectful enough. Yes, it’s easy to see how a company could arise that charges extra in exchange for not accepting these compromises, but this still suggests you’re going to have more rights if you’re able to pay more money.

But the main reason I want this tried far away from me is none of these. It’s just a general expectation that something will go wrong when we try a social system we’ve never tried before. I was very impressed to learn that very few people predicted, before the fact, that Communist countries would have terrible economies. Even the American 1950s opponents of Communism argued that okay, fine, Communist countries will probably outperform capitalist countries economically, but freedom is more important than mere wealth.

If people can’t figure out that Communism might sink the economy, I don’t trust them to figure out all of the things that might go wrong with anarcho-capitalism. Even if David Friedman replies with utterly convincing rebuttals to all of my ten points above, it’s going to be the eleventh point I didn’t think of that makes the system explode.

III.

And this leads me into one of my deepest problems with libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism: why should it work?

I don’t mean the sort of “why should it work” where you answer with specific reasons why no, monopolies won’t form, and no, people won’t routinely sell themselves into slavery, and no, protection agencies won’t form a new feudal ruling class, and no, people won’t bash their heads against public goods problems and externalities forever without any market solutions appearing, and no, the poor won’t starve to death. I mean the very Outside View question of “why is it that, by coincidence, not using force is an effective way to solve all problems?”

Good governance is a really really hard problem. The idea that the solution to this problem contains zero bits of information, that it just solves itself if you leave people alone, seems astonishing. Even if we agree that capitalism works very well by incentivizing companies to do what the consumers wants, there are still a lot of peripheral issues which that just doesn’t cover. Friedman for example is a strong supporter of child rights, because children should mostly be free from coercion from their parents, and that children treated this way turn out better. Now in addition to solving governance with zero bits of information, you have solved optimal child-rearing with zero bits of information. That is implausibly impressive.

Given that the universe is allowed to throw whatever problems it wants at us, and that it has so far gleefully taken advantage of that right to come up with a whole host of very diverse and interesting ones, why is it that none of these problems are best addressed by a centralized entity with a monopoly on force? That seems like a pretty basic structure from a game-theoretic perspective, and you’re telling me it just never works in the real world? Shouldn’t there be at least one or two things where a government, or any form of coercive structure at all, is just the right answer? And can’t we just have a small government that does that?

The closest thing I’ve found to a response here is on page 142, where Friedman makes the following very witty observation:

The internal dynamic of limited government is something with which we, to our sorrow, have a good deal of practical experience. It took about 150 years, starting with a Bill of Rights that reserved to the states and the people all powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government, to produce a Supreme Court willing to rule that growing corn to feed your own hogs is interstate commerce and can therefore be regulated by Congress.

So if we have any kind of government at all, it will eventually metastasize into the sort of thing that makes laws about whether we’re allowed to grow corn to feed our own animals, or bans us from drinking raw milk, or whatever else it feels like doing.

So which is better: moving to full anarcho-capitalism, or trying to move towards a system that can provide more of the benefits of government with fewer of the costs?

I don’t know, so it’s a good thing I don’t have to choose. The obvious next step seems to be setting up anarcho-capitalist experiments somewhere and seeing how they do, as well as continuing to experiment with new and better forms of government. Trying to predict anything from theory runs into the same problem where everyone assumed Communism would be an economic powerhouse – we’re just not that smart. Instead we need to figure out ways to produce experimentation with and competition among different governments and government-like-entities – a goal I know David Friedman agrees with.

Warning: I have not checked any of these claims for truth, I was generally not impressed with the skepticism level displayed in this book, and I highlighted the passages I found most surprising or counterintuitive. So these are quotations, not endorsements. As Ashleigh Brilliant says, “My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating.”

A good way to appreciate the Zeigarnik effect is to listen to a randomly chosen song and shut it off halfway through. The song is then likely to run through your mind on its own, at odd intervals. If you get to the end of the song, the mind checks it off, so to speak. If you stop it in the middle, however, the mind treats the song as unfinished business.

[Examination-related words] popped more frequently into the mind of the group who had been told about the exam but hadn’t made plans to study for it. No such effect was seen among the students who’d made a study plan. Even though they, too, had been reminded of the exam, their minds had apparently been cleared by the act of writing down a plan.

In 1995, Tierney did a semiscientific survey of a New York phenomenon: the huge number of intelligent and attractive people who complained that it was impossible to find a romantic partner. Manhattan had the highest percentage of single people in any country in America except for an insland in Hawaii originally settled as a leper colony. What was keeping New Yorkers apart? Tierney surveyed a sampling of personal ads in the city magazines of Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. He found that singles in the biggest city, New York, not only had the most choice but were the pickiest in listing the attributes of their desired partners. The average personal ad in New York maganize listed 5.7 criteria required in a partner, significantly more than second place Chicago’s average (4.1 criteria) and about twice the average for the other three cities.

Bob Boice looked into the writing habits of young professors and tracked them to see how they fared. Some of these professors would collect information until they were ready and then write a manuscript in a burst of intsense energy. Others plodded along at a steadier pace, trying to write a page or two every day. When Boice followed up on the group some years later, he foud that their paths had diverged sharply. The page-a-day folks had done well and generally gotten tenure. The so-called “binge writers” had fared far less well, and many of them had had their careers cut short.

As early as the 1920s, researchers reported that students who spent more time in Sunday school scored higher on laboratory tests of self-discipline. Religiously devout children were rated low on impulsiveness by both parents and teachers…But psychologists have found that people who attend religious services for extrinsic reasons, like wanting to impress others or make social connections, don’t have the same high level of self-control as the true believers.

A clear difference between Chinese and American toddlers appears when they’re asked to override their natural impulses. In one test, for instance, the toddlers are shown a series of pictures and instructed to say “day” whenever they see the moon and “night” whenever they see the sun. In other tests, the toddlers try to restrain themselves to a whisper when they’re excited, and play a version of Simon Says. The Chinese four-year-olds generally perform better on these tests than Americans of the same age. The Chinese toddlers’ self-control might be due in part to genes. There’s evidence that the genetic factors associated with ADHD are much rare in Chinese children than in American children. But the cultural traditions undoubtedly play a role as well. Asian-Americans make up only 4% of the US population but account for a quarter of the student body of elite universities like Stanford, Cornell, and Columbia. They’re more likely to get a college degree than any other ethnic group, and they go on to earn salaries that are 25% above the American norm. Their success has led to the popular notion that Asians are more intelligent, but that’s not how James Flynn explains their achievements. After carefully reviewing IQ studies, Flynn concludes that the scores of Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans are very similar to Americans of European descent. If anything their IQs are slightly lower, though they do show up more at both the upper and lower extremes. The big difference is they make better use of their intelligence. People working in elite professions like physicians, scientists, and accountants generally have an IQ above a certain threshold. For white Americans, that threshold is IQ 110, but Chinese Americans manage to get the same elite jobs with an IQ of only 103.

When asked how parents could contribute to childrens’ academic success, the mothers who had emigrated from China most frequently mentioned setting high goals, enforcing tough standards, and requiring children to do extra homework. Meanwhile, the native-born mothers of European ancestry were determined not to put too much pressure on children They most frequently mentioned the importance of not overemphasizing academic success, of stressing the child’s social development, and of promoting the idea that “learning is fun” and “not something you work at”. Another of their chief concerns was promoting the child’s self-esteem, a concept of just about no interest to the Chinese mothers in the study.

[In his preliminary marshmallow-test-style experiments in Trinidad], Mischel stumbled upon a bigger and more meaningful effect. Children who had a father in the home were far more willing than others to choose the delayed reward. Most of the racial and ethnic variation could be explained by this difference, because the Indian children tended to live with both parents whereas a fair number of the African children lived with a single mother. These findings, which were published in 1958, didn’t attract much attention at the time or in ensuing decades, since it was dangerous to one’s career to suggest that there might be drawbacks to single-parent homes…One possible explanation is that children in one-parent homes start off with a genetic disadvantage in self-control. After all, if the father (or mother) has run off and abandoned the family, he may have genes favoring impulsive behavior. Some researchers have attempted to correct this by looking at children who were raised by single parents because the father was absent for other reasons (like being stationed overseas, or dying at a young age). Predictably, the results were in between. These children showed some deficits, but their problemes were not as large as those of the children whose fathers had voluntarily left the home.”

Nurture Assumption said the opposite (children whose fathers left for valid reasons were totally indistinguishable from children with two parents), I believed them until I coincidentally found the contrary evidence, and I’m still angry at them for this.

When fat lab rats are put on a controlled diet for the first time, they’ll lose weight. But if they’re then allowed to eat freely again, they’ll gradually fatten up, and if they’re put on another diet it will take longer to lose the weight this time. Then, once they again go off the diet, they’ll regain the weight more quickly than the last time. By the third or fourth time they go through this boom-and-bust cycle, the dieting ceases to work – the extra weight stays even though they’re consuming fewer calories.

If true this would require a pretty high-level uncoupling of calories and weight gain.

An English bookmaker, the William Hill agency, has a standing offer to bet against anyone who makes a plan to lose weight. The bookmaker, which offers odds of up to 50 to 1, lets the bettors set their own target of how much weight to lose in how much time. It seems crazy for a bookmaker to let bettors not only set the terms of the wager but also control its outcome – it’s like letting a runner bet on beating a target time he sets himself. Yet despite these advantages, the bettors lose 80% of the time.”

I tried to find these people’s website to see how the numbers worked, but it wouldn’t let me in because I’m in the US. Brits might want to check this out.

Dieters have a fixed target in mind, and when they exceed it for any reason – [like being told to taste test a milkshake as part of an experiment] they regard their diet as blown for the day. So they think what the hell, I might as well enjoy myself for the day and the resulting binge often puts on far more weight than the original lapse.

People who weigh themselves every day are far more effective at preventing their weight from creeping back up.

Some of the [experimental subjects] were shown a meal from Applebees consisting of chicken salad and a Pepsi; others were shown an identical meal with some added crackers prominently labeled “Trans Fat Free”. The people were so entranced by the crackers’ virtuous label that their estimate for the meal with crackers was lower than that for the same meal without the crackers!

A new form of the Conjunction Fallacy?

To mimic the human studies [on ego depletion], experimenters depleted the willpower of one group of dogs by having each dog obey “sit” and “stay” commands from its owner for ten minutes. A control group of dogs was simply left alone for ten minutes in cages. Then all the dogs were given a familiar toy with a sausage treat inside of it. All the dogs had played with the toy in the past and successfully extracted the treat, but for this study the toy was rigged so that the sausage could not be extracted. The control group of dogs spent several minutes trying to extract it, but the dogs who’d had to obey the commands gave up in less than a minute. It was the familiar ego-depletion effect, and the canine cure turned out to be familiar too. In a follow-up study, when the dogs were given different drinks, the drinks with sugar restored the willpower of the dogs who’d had to obey the commands. Newly fortified, they persisted with the toy just as long as the dogs who’d been in cages.

People with poor self-control were likelier to hit their partners and to commit a variety of other crimes, again and again, as demonstrated by June Tangney, who worked with Baumeister to develop the self-control scale on personality tests. When she tested prisoners and then tracked them for years after their release, she found that the ones with low self-control were most likely to commit more crimes and return to prison.

In one remarkable study, researchers in Finland went into a prison to measure the glucose tolerance of convicts who were about to be released. Then the scientists kept track of which ones went on to commit new crimes. Just by looking at the response to the glucose test, the researchers were able to predict with greater than 80% accuracy which convicts would go on to commit violent crimes. These men apparently had less self-control because of their impaired glucose tolerance, a condition in which the body has trouble converting food into usable energy.”

SO SOOOOO SKEPTICAL.

When people in laboratory experiments exercise mental self-control, their pulse becomes more erratic; conversely, people whose normal pulse is relatively variable seem to have more inner energy available for self-control, because they do better on laboratory tests of perseverance than people with steadier heartbeats.

Also pretty skeptical here, given past experience.

A psychoanalyst named Allen Wheelis in the late 1950s revealed what he considered a dirty little secret of his profession: Freudian therapies no longer worked the way they were supposed to. In his landmark book, The Quest For Identity, Wheelis described a change in character structure since Freud’s day. The Victorian middle-class citizens who formed the bulk of Freud’s patients had intensely strong wills, making it difficult for therapists to break through their ironclad defenses and their sense of what was right and wrong. Freud’s therapies had concenctrated on wayhs to break through and let them see why they were neurotic and miserable, because once those people achieved ionsight, they could change rather easily. By midcentury, thought, people’s character armor was different. Wheelis and his colleagues found that people achieved insight more qui9ckly than in Freud’s day, but then the therapy often stalled and failed. Lacking the sturdy character of the Victorians, people didn’t have the strength to follow up on the insight and change their lives

This is actually sorta plausible to me. My (very limited) experience with psychoanalysis is that it’s not nearly as hard as people claim to get patients to tell you things about themselves and produce apparent “revelations”, but these rarely change behavior in interesting ways. I’d never thought before that this might be a historical change as opposed to just Freud getting it wrong.

[Subjects] wore beepers that went off at random intervals seven times a day, prompting them to report whether they were currently experiencing some sort of desire…the researchers concluded that people spend at least a fifth of their waking hours resisting desires – between three and four hours a day…Overall, they succumbed to about a sixth of the temptations.

Someone responded by my last post by pointing out a Christian philosopher saying the same thing and noting that Science always thinks it’s gotten ahead of Religion only to find that Religion’s known it all along. Nevertheless, I will venture to say no religious source on temptation includes the observation that on average people succumb to about one-sixth of them. That one totally goes to Science.

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney attracted me with the following pitch: there are only two quantities in psychology that have been robustly linked to a broad range of important life outcomes. One is IQ and isn’t changeable. The other is willpower and is easily changeable. Therefore, study willlpower.

I expected the book to center around Baumeister’s groundbreaking experiments in “ego depletion” – where people who are forced to expend willpower on one task have less willpower left over for future tasks – and “ego repletion”, where people who have been depleted of willpower get it back after taking some glucose. I’d been left kind of confused by competing claims about those studies and I hoped this book would fill out my knowledge of them and settle my confusion.

Instead, it spent a couple of chapters mentioning their existence and praising them as revolutionary, and then got deep enough into Pop Science Self=Help Book Mode to be almost a self-parody. Chapter three is called “The To-Do List From God To Drew Carey” and illustrates why to-do lists are a great idea with anecdotes from Drew Carey’s life and the Bible. Chapter four is the same but with Eliot Spitzer. Chapter six is David Blaine, Chapter seven is H.M. Stanley, Chapter eight is Eric Clapton, and Chapter ten is Oprah. All of these people apparently have important lessons about willpower to teach us, of which the interesting ones are:

– Willpower is a limited resource that is depleted by use and restored by glucose

– Having to make too many small decisions in a day causes “decision fatigue”, leading you to be exhausted and make bad decisions.

– Using willpower a lot strengthens your willpower, allowing you to be more effective.

– People with more willpower do much better in life; for example, in the famous “marshmallow test”, children who were able to resist eating a marshmallow for a few minutes in order to get two marshmallows had better life outcomes twenty years later.

– Careful quantification of goals, setting precommitments, and publicizing your success or failure to other people helps you stick to resolutions. (If you are wondering exactly how to do this, this might be a good time to mention there’s a new ad on the sidebar for Beeminder, a company that manages this for you with some neat evidence-based tricks.)

– Religious people have more willpower than non-religious people for some reason. But you have to believe if you want to get this benefit – you can’t just hang out at church and go through the motions in order to reap the willpower gains.

= Chinese-Americans do better than white Americans on willpower tests from toddlerhood toward adulthood. This is the most likely reason Chinese people outperform whites in the real world, and in fact although average white and Chinese IQ are pretty similar, Chinese people can break into “elite” professions at a lower IQ threshold than whites because their increased self-control compensates. The book admits this may be partly genetic, but also attributes some of it to Chinese parents teaching their children discipline and setting hard goals, which they contrast with white parents who tell their kids to “have fun” and “have high self-esteem” and “be self-directed”. Obviously in order to believe this result you’d have to believe parenting styles can affect children, which this book takes on faith but which is on shaky ground.

– Amount of self-control does not affect body weight (!) or success at dieting (!!) very much.

Overall there were some interesting findings in here, even if I found the pop sci tone a little bit over-the-top after a while.

II.

But I was disappointed. The reason I got this book is that there’s a big debate going on over “willpower”, “ego depletion”, and their younger cousins “growth mindset” and “grit”. All of these are slightly different constructs, but they’re all measures of stick-to-it-ness, and all of their proponents make grand claims about how small interventions to make people have them will bring those people success at school, work, and life. On the other hand, there are a lot of other people who think this whole area is a load of bunk.

For example, Mischel’s marshmallow test started all this off by “proving” that children who were able to delay gratification longest had higher SAT scores, higher parent-rated competence, and better coping skills. But now the test is under fire as people question whether it just shows that people from good environments learn to be more trusting and so more likely to believe the researcher’s promise of extra rewards for delayed gratification. Other people ask if it just shows that kids who are smart enough to think of good strategies to distract themselves are also smart enough to get good SAT scores and all of the other positive correlates of high IQ. Still other people point out the very low sample size, the reverse correlation in other subgroups, and an apparent failure to replicate. Mischel fires back in an Atlantic article where he says of course he took these things into account, that the test was done on a homogenous upper-class population.

This book just says the marshmallow test proves willpower is important, and leaves it at that.

Or how about the idea that glucose is the limited resource that willpower depletes? Robert Kurzban very correctly points out that the metabolic math doesn’t come close to adding up – we know how much glucose things in the body use, and these short little willpower tasks aren’t really going to affect blood glucose levels at all. Also, turns out that if you rinse your mouth out with a tasty glucose solution, you get just the same amount of ego replenishment even though none of the glucose actually entered your body. And for that matter, how come I can’t get infinite willpower just by snacking while I work? How come M&Ms don’t work as a poor man’s Adderall?

Kurzban goes further and says he doesn’t believe in willpower as a limited resource at all. He notes that even when you’ve stopped studying because you’re too ego-depleted and exhausted to make yourself go on any further, if I offer you a million dollars to study another hour then you’ll do it. Guess that resource wasn’t so depleted after all. He proposes a different model of willpower, where it’s your brain’s way of nagging you about the opportunity cost of your actions – “you’ve been studying three whole hours, don’t you think you could use that lobe of your brain for something else now?” But this strikes me as ridiculous – my brain is very concerned that it has better things to do than study, but is perfectly happy with me playing Civilization IV: Fall From Heaven forever or simply lying in bed doing nothing?

Finally, Carol Dweck finds that willpower is only depletable if you think it is, which sounds like exactly the sort of thing Carol Dweck would find. If Carol Dweck ever became an oncologist, we would have to revise all the medical textbooks to say that people only get cancer if they think they will.

There is a meta-analysis of about a hundred studies said Baumeister was basically right about everything. On the other hand, Baumeister’s theory failed what sounds like a formal replication. So it’s complicated.

I really want to know what willpower is. It seems like one of the big challenges of my life; I never have enough willpower for everything I want to do, and I’d at least like to have a theory of what I’m up against. This book did not give me enough information to navigate the controversy. Instead, it totally denied there was any controversy and spent chapter after chapter on cute pieces of trivia interspersed with stories about Drew Carey and Oprah.

III.

So let me end this with some thoughts that a good explanation of willpower should take into account.

First, mental willpower seems a lot like physical willpower – by which I mean our ability to push through exhaustion to keep exercising. Kurzban complains that willpower can’t be a limited resource, because even after it’s all depleted you can still force yourself to keep going for a big enough reward. But the same is true of exercise. I’ll get exhausted and stop running after a certain number of miles, but if you offer me $1 million to run another one I’ll probably make it. And the studies showing that rinsing your mouth out with glucose gives you the same willpower boost as actually drinking is identical to the results of similar studies measuring exercise duration.

So it’s probably worth asking what exactly causes exercise fatigue. This is less firmly known than I expected, but it seems to be a combination of decreasing levels of inputs (especially glycogen stores in the muscles), buildup of toxic metabolic waste (including heat, lactic acid, etc), and cellular damage. Exercise long enough and your muscles need time to replenish their stores, clear away waste, and repair themselves.

Second, mental willpower seems to do something a lot like budgeting. Money, despite being pretty much the classic example of a limited resource, shares some of the features of willpower that Kurzban mocks. A few days ago a pipe burst, my house flooded, and I may have to spend several thousand dollars unflooding it. This means I will have no money for the next forever and then some, and if you ask me to meet you at a fancy restaurant I’ll probably refuse on financial grounds. But if my mother is on her deathbed and her final wish is to see me one last time, I will find the money to get an expensive flight to California. How’s that any different from me not having enough willpower to keep studying until you offer me a million dollars to do so?

Likewise, if tomorrow my boss offers me a $5000 bonus to be handed out next month, I’ll probably relax my budgetary constraints and start buying myself nice things even before I get the paycheck. How’s that any different from the body reacting to sugar when it’s in the mouth but not the bloodstream?

Finally, the question that I as a psychiatrist find most interesting – how come drugs can change willpower so dramatically? The guy who can’t concentrate on a project for more than five minutes straight will pull a whole week of all-nighters when he’s on Adderall or modafinil. Those certainly aren’t increasing blood glucose, so what’s up?

The model that makes the most sense to me is of a stupid default system running on short-term reinforcement learning, plus an evolutionarily novel (and therefore poorly implemented) executive system that can overrule the default. The executive system’s overrule isn’t a simple veto, but a constant action, the same way holding your hand high in the air for a long period requires constant action by your muscles. This effort is metabolically costly in the same way that using muscles is metabolically costly, and so your body runs a general-purpose budgeting function on it that convinces you to turn it off before it overheats. Given enough incentive, you can let it overheat, but then it’s going to be damaged and need to repair itself for a few days before you can use it effectively again. This seems to fit all the evidence except the drugs, which I interpret as acting on the default system so that you don’t need to bring in the executive planner. I freely admit this is sort of cheating.

Overall I recommend Willpower if you want a quick and fun survey of a bunch of loosely connected psychology topics, but not if you want a deep and balanced exploration into the literature of anything.

It’s too bad that most people will probably shy away from reading it, because it gets a lot of stuff really right.

The article’s thesis is also its subtitle: “There’s a treatment for heroin addiction that actually works; why aren’t we using it?” To save you the obligatory introductory human interest story: that treatment is suboxone. Its active ingredient is the drug buprenorphine, which is kind of like a safer version of methadone. Suboxone is slow-acting, gentle, doesn’t really get people high, and is pretty safe as long as you don’t go mixing it with weird stuff. People on suboxone don’t experience opiate withdrawal and have greatly decreased cravings for heroin. I work at a hospital that’s an area leader in suboxone prescription, I’ve gotten to see it in action, and it’s literally a life-saver.

Conventional heroin treatment is abysmal. Rehab centers aren’t licensed or regulated and most have little interest in being evidence-based. Many are associated with churches or weird quasi-religious groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. They don’t necessarily have doctors or psychologists, and some actively mistrust them. All of this I knew. What I didn’t know until reading the article was that – well, it’s not just that some of them try to brainwash addicts. It’s more that some of them try to cargo cult brainwashing, do the sorts of things that sound like brainwashing to them, without really knowing how brainwashing works assuming it’s even a coherent goal to aspire to. Their concept of brainwashing is mostly just creating a really unpleasant environment, yelling at people a lot, enforcing intentionally over-strict rules, and in some cases even having struggle-session-type-things where everyone in the group sits in a circle, scream at the other patients, and tell them they’re terrible and disgusting. There’s a strong culture of accusing anyone who questions or balks at any of it of just being an addict, or “not really wanting to quit”.

I have no problem with “tough love” when it works, but in this case it doesn’t. Rehab programs make every effort to obfuscate their effectiveness statistics – I blogged about this before in Part II here – but the best guesses by outside observers is that for a lot of them about 80% to 90% of their graduates relapse within a couple of years. Even this paints too rosy a picture, because it excludes the people who gave up halfway through.

Suboxone treatment isn’t perfect, and relapse is still a big problem, but it’s a heck of a lot better than most rehabs. Suboxone gives people their dose of opiate and mostly removes the biological half of addiction. There’s still the psychological half of addiction – whatever it was that made people want to get high in the first place – but people have a much easier time dealing with that after the biological imperative to get a new dose is gone. Almost all clinical trials have found treatment with methadone or suboxone to be more effective than traditional rehab. Even Cochrane Review, which is notorious for never giving a straight answer to anything besides “more evidence is needed”, agrees that methadone and suboxone are effective treatments.

Some people stay on suboxone forever and do just fine – it has few side effects and doesn’t interfere with functioning. Other people stay on it until they reach a point in their lives when they feel ready to come off, then taper down slowly under medical supervision, often with good success. It’s a good medication, and the growing suspicion it might help treat depression is just icing on the cake.

There are two big roadblocks to wider use of suboxone, and both are enraging.

The first roadblock is the #@$%ing government. They are worried that suboxone, being an opiate, might be addictive, and so doctors might turn into drug pushers. So suboxone is possibly the most highly regulated drug in the United States. If I want to give out OxyContin like candy, I have no limits but the number of pages on my prescription pad. If I want to prescribe you Walter-White-level quantities of methamphetamine for weight loss, nothing is stopping me but common sense. But if I want to give even a single suboxone prescription to a single patient, I have to take a special course on suboxone prescribing, and even then I am limited to only being able to give it to thirty patients a year (eventually rising to one hundred patients when I get more experience with it). The (generally safe) treatment for addiction is more highly regulated than the (very dangerous) addictive drugs it is supposed to replace. Only 3% of doctors bother to jump through all the regulatory hoops, and their hundred-patient limits get saturated almost immediately. As per the laws of suppy and demand, this makes suboxone prescriptions very expensive, and guess what social class most heroin addicts come from? Also, heroin addicts often don’t have access to good transportation, which means that if the nearest suboxone provider is thirty miles from their house they’re out of luck. The List Of Reasons To End The Patient Limits On Buprenorphine expands upon and clarifies some of these points.

(in case you think maybe the government just honestly believes the drug is dangerous – nope. You’re allowed to prescribe without restriction for any reason except opiate addiction)

The second roadblock is the @#$%ing rehab industry. They hear that suboxone is an opiate, and their religious or quasi-religious fanaticism goes into high gear. “What these people need is Jesus and/or their Nondenominational Higher Power, not more drugs! You’re just pushing a new addiction on them! Once an addict, always an addict until they complete their spiritual struggle and come clean!” And so a lot of programs bar suboxone users from participating.

This doesn’t sound so bad given the quality of a lot of the programs. Problem is, a lot of these are closely integrated with the social services and legal system. So suppose somebody’s doing well on suboxone treatment, and gets in trouble for a drug offense. Could be that they relapsed on heroin one time, could be that they’re using something entirely different like cocaine. Judge says go to a treatment program or go to jail. Treatment program says they can’t use suboxone. So maybe they go in to deal with their cocaine problem, and by the time they come out they have a cocaine problem and a heroin problem.

And…okay, time for a personal story. One of my patients is a homeless man who used to have a heroin problem. He was put on suboxone and it went pretty well. He came back with an alcohol problem, and we wanted to deal with that and his homelessness at the same time. There are these organizations called three-quarters houses – think “halfway houses” after inflation – that take people with drug problems and give them an insurance-sponsored place to live. But the catch is you can’t be using drugs. And they consider suboxone to be a drug. So of about half a dozen three-quarters houses in the local area, none of them would accept this guy. I called up the one he wanted to go to, said that he really needed a place to stay, said that without this care he was in danger of relapsing into his alcoholism, begged them to accept. They said no drugs. I said I was a doctor, and he had my permission to be on suboxone. They said no drugs. I said that seriously, they were telling me that my DRUG ADDICTED patient who was ADDICTED TO DRUGS couldn’t go to their DRUG ADDICTION center because he was on a medication for treating DRUG ADDICTION? They said that was correct. I hung up in disgust.

So I agree with the pessimistic picture painted by the article. I think we’re ignoring our best treatment option for heroin addiction and I don’t see much sign that this is going to change in the future.

But the health care system not being very good at using medications effectively isn’t news. I also thought this article was interesting because it touches on some of the issues we discuss here a lot:

The value of ritual and community. A lot of the most intelligent conservatives I know base their conservativism on the idea that we can only get good outcomes in “tight communities” that are allowed to violate modern liberal social atomization to build stronger bonds. The Army, which essentially hazes people with boot camp, ritualizes every aspect of their life, then demands strict obedience and ideological conformity, is a good example. I do sometimes have a lot of respect for this position. But modern rehab programs seem like a really damning counterexample. If you read the article, you will see that this rehabs are trying their best to create a tightly-integrated religiously-inspired community of exactly that sort, and they have abilities to control their members and force their conformity – sometimes in ways that approach outright abuse – that most institutions can’t even dream of. But their effectiveness is abysmal. The entire thing is for nothing. I’m not sure whether this represents a basic failure in the idea of tight communities, or whether it just means that you can’t force them to exist ex nihilo over a couple of months. But I find it interesting.

My love-hate relationship with libertarianism. Also about the rehabs. They’re minimally regulated. There’s no credentialing process or anything. There are many different kinds, each privately led, and low entry costs to creating a new one. They can be very profitable – pretty much any rehab will cost thousands of dollars, and the big-name ones cost much more. This should be a perfect setup for a hundred different models blooming, experimenting, and then selecting for excellence as consumers drift towards the most effective centers. Instead, we get rampant abuse, charlatanry, and uselessness.

On the other hand, when the government rode in on a white horse to try to fix things, all they did was take the one effective treatment, regulate it practically out of existence, then ride right back out again. So I would be ashamed to be taking either the market’s or the state’s side here. At this point I think our best option is to ask the paraconsistent logic people to figure out something that’s neither government nor not-government, then put that in charge of everything.

Society is fixed, biology is mutable. People have tried everything to fix drug abuse. Being harsh and sending drug users to jail. Being nice and sending them to nice treatment centers that focus on rehabilitation. Old timey religion where fire-and-brimstone preachers talk about how Jesus wants them to stay off drugs. Flaky New Age religion where counselors tell you about how drug abuse is keeping you from your true self. Government programs. University programs. Private programs. Giving people money. Fining people money. Being unusually nice. Being unusually mean. More social support. Less social support. This school of therapy. That school of therapy. What works is just giving people a chemical to saturate the brain receptor directly. We know it works. The studies show it works. And we’re still collectively beating our heads against the wall of finding a social solution.

In fact, he is quite to-the-point about exactly what he thinks the problem is:

Now, to reiterate my title, this is what is wrong. This is the huge modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul…it is the huge heresy of Precedent. It is the view that because we have got into a mess we must grow messier to suit it; that because we have taken a wrong turn some time ago we must go forward and not backwards; that because we have lost our way we must lose our map also.

Examples are clearly needed, but before we continue, a digression.

Chesterton is a brilliant writer and a genius in understanding the human soul. Sometimes these are good things – in Chesterton’s case, it’s a big part of what makes his fiction so amazing. Other times they aren’t. There’s a famous failure mode where some brilliant scientist who is a genius at understanding particle physics sees a social problem, pulls a few equations out of his tool kit, and declares the issue solved.

In the same way, I worry that Chesterton pulls a few emotions and brilliant turns of phrase out of his tool kit and thinks he’s solved everything. And the difference between brilliant physicists and brilliant students of human experience is that physicists are less likely to convince anyone else.

The trademark style of What Is Wrong With The World is to take some common-sense proclamation, like “feminism is about fighting for women” and come up with some incredibly clever reason why exactly the opposite is true:

By the beginning of the twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is really more important than the private house; that politics are not (as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may kneel; that the talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but enviable; that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence, surely) that taverns are not a waste of money. All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right; humbly imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer court, from which she may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits which her erring sisters had so thoughtlessly scorned.

Now this development naturally perturbs and even paralyzes us…We knew quite well that nothing is necessary to the country except that the men should be men and the women women. We knew this; we thought the women knew it even more clearly; and we thought the women would say it. Suddenly, without warning, the women have begun to say all the nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed when we said it. The solemnity of politics; the necessity of votes; the necessity of Huggins; the necessity of Buggins; all these flow in a pellucid stream from the lips of all the suffragette speakers. I suppose in every fight, however old, one has a vague aspiration to conquer; but we never wanted to conquer women so completely as this.

Do you follow? Men have from time immemorial been pushing the importance of male pursuits like politics and public life; women have been equally pushing the importance of family, virtue, and the private household. Feminists are then a group of women who have given up, admitted men have always been right about everything and all female pursuits are a waste of time; now women are desperately pleading that men allow them to join in their superior ways.

Therefore, Chesterton opposes feminism not because he is against women being equal to men, but precisely because he wants to keep women equal to men. The entire book is like this – paragraph after paragraph of verbal judo in which you end up opposing conservativism because you want things to stay the same, or supporting rebellion to protect the integrity of the state, or whatever other crazy inverted idea Chesterton has turned his brilliant but twisted mind to.

At its best, this is a form of narrative reversal that helps break through our preconceptions and see things in a different light. At its worst, I worry Chesterton has actually lost, through atrophy, the ability to think in a straight line. Like, there must be at least one thing which is approximately the way it appears, and I’m not convinced Chesterton will be able to notice it. Ask him whether we should drown puppies, and he will come up with an extremely convincing argument that we should drown puppies precisely because we abhor cruelty to animals.

II.

To very briefly sum up the main argument of What’s Wrong:

1910s Britain has a lot of social problems, many of them caused by the Industrial Revolution steamrolling over human values. Conservatives demand that we keep things exactly as they are, social problems and all. Progressives correctly point out that the new industrial economy conflicts with human values, but “solve” the problem by demanding we destroy whatever human values are left in people to make them better cogs in the industrial machine. For example, women traditionally value having a home of their own and getting to spend time raising children, but this is inconsistent with women working full time in factories – therefore, socialists and feminists demand we put people in communal housing, have children raised communally, and promote women taking on the male gender role – so that all barriers to women doing factory work full-time are removed. Possibly the Conservatives and Progressives are secretly in cahoots – the Conservatives protect the interests of the upper class directly, and the Progressives remake the lower class into a form compatible with serving the system that the upper class run, all upon “humanitarian” grounds.

Chesterton, on the other hand, believes that we should promote human values against the Industrial Revolution and the upper classes who intend to benefit from it. The values he wants seem to be of the “everyone lives in their own nice cottage with a nice garden and a nice picket fence and the men have stable fulfilling jobs and the women stay home and raise children” type. This will require undoing a lot of “progress”, and admitting that the medievals were better than us in a lot of ways, but it’s better than continuing to slide toward doom. It will also involve redistributing property so that everybody has enough money to make this vision a reality. Chesterton has a perfectly marvelous solution for how to do this, which unfortunately this book is too small to contain. But he did warn us by calling the book What Is Wrong With The World and not What Is Wrong With The World And How I Propose To Fix It, so it’s okay.

III.

I wasn’t too sure what to make of all this. The political landscape of the 1910s when the book was published is recognizable, but only barely. In particular, although I can’t tell if Chesterton’s claims fairly described the Left of his own time, they don’t seem to describe the Left of ours. Chesterton’s Left was obsessed with industrial order and optimization, hoping to replace a society ruled by traditions with one ruled by nearly fanatical efficiency and conformity. The modern Left seems to have switched tactics entirely, and insofar as it can be accused of falling too far to one side of the chaos-order dichotomy I think both its friends and enemies would admit it is squarely allied with Chaos, and with a fertility of difference and distinction that borders on the cancerous. As the book was at least in part a polemic against a position that no longer seems to exist, one that barely even seems to have any cladistic descendents, I’m not really sure what to make of it.

There were a lot of digressions into individual issues, some convincing, others less so. But there were two parts I consider central to the whole idea, and which I want to go into at more length:

My point is that the world did not tire of the church’s ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of Christians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the churchmen. But at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun to end it long before it could have done its work. In the nature of things it needed a common scheme of life and thought in Europe. Yet the mediaeval system began to be broken to pieces intellectually, long before it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. The huge early heresies, like the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse in moral superiority. And it is actually true that the Reformation began to tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull it together. The Prussians, for instance, were not converted to Christianity at all until quite close to the Reformation. The poor creatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they were told to become Protestants. This explains a great deal of their subsequent conduct. But I have only taken this as the first and most evident case of the general truth: that the great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

This is one of those times when writing in 1910 makes things too easy. If Chesterton had been writing in 1990, he might have thought to ask – has Communism been tried and found wanting? Or has it been found difficult and left untried?

And with our modern hindsight, he might decide there’s not so big a difference as he thinks. Like, Chesterton is defining “Everyone was super-obsessed with Christianity all the time for hundreds of years” as “Christianity was left untried”. The definition only works if by “try Christianity” he means “everyone lives exactly according to the Christian ideal.” But “make everyone live exactly according to the Christian ideal” is not a primitive action.

At the very least, the medievals tried to try Christianity. They reserved political power for Christians, gave immense wealth and clout to the clergy, gave religion a monopoly on education, required everyone to go to church, and persecuted atheism and heresy. If, as per Chesterton’s definition, this didn’t result in people trying Christianity, then that means that trying to try Christianity has failed. If an idea is impossible to implement, that is a strike against the idea. Unless Chesterton has a better idea for how to implement Christianity than the way the medievals tried, his argument is wrong and it is perfectly legitimate to say that the failure of the Christian project during the Middle Ages doesn’t bode well for it today.

And I understand that making a medieval-level effort to retry Christianity isn’t exactly in the Overton Window, but this ties into the other passage of Chesterton’s I want to talk about:

A little while ago certain doctors and other persons permitted by modern law to dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order that all little girls should have their hair cut short. I mean, of course, all little girls whose parents were poor. Many very unhealthy habits are common among rich little girls, but it will be long before any doctors interfere forcibly with them. Now, the case for this particular interference was this, that the poor are pressed down from above into such stinking and suffocating underworlds of squalor, that poor people must not be allowed to have hair, because in their case it must mean lice in the hair. Therefore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. It never seems to have occurred to them to abolish the lice.

Yet it could be done. As is common in most modern discussions the unmentionable thing is the pivot of the whole discussion. It is obvious to any Christian man (that is, to any man with a free soul) that any coercion applied to a cabman’s daughter ought, if possible, to be applied to a Cabinet Minister’s daughter. I will not ask why the doctors do not, as a matter of fact apply their rule to a Cabinet Minister’s daughter. I will not ask, because I know. They do not because they dare not.

But what is the excuse they would urge, what is the plausible argument they would use, for thus cutting and clipping poor children and not rich? Their argument would be that the disease is more likely to be in the hair of poor people than of rich. And why? Because the poor children are forced (against all the instincts of the highly domestic working classes) to crowd together in close rooms under a wildly inefficient system of public instruction; and because in one out of the forty children there may be offense. And why? Because the poor man is so ground down by the great rents of the great ground landlords that his wife often has to work as well as he. Therefore she has no time to look after the children, therefore one in forty of them is dirty. Because the workingman has these two persons on top of him, the landlord sitting (literally) on his stomach, and the schoolmaster sitting (literally) on his head, the workingman must allow his little girl’s hair, first to be neglected from poverty, next to be poisoned by promiscuity, and, lastly, to be abolished by hygiene. He, perhaps, was proud of his little girl’s hair. But he does not count.

First of all, either the misuse of the word “literally” is more ancient than I had supposed, or else the customs of the 1910s class system are indeed weird and wonderful. But putting that aside…

I am clearly one of the people whom Chesterton is talking to. I have yet to prescribe any particular remedy for lice, but that is because lice aren’t so much of a problem today, or if they are they don’t make it to a psychiatrist. But I have given antidepressants.

And this seems a lot like Chesterton’s lice. Once again, people are crowded together into squalor, oppressed by landlords and schoolmasters, and so some of them – usually the poor – become depressed. Antidepressants are moderately effective against this problem, although they have physical side effects in some people and are considered embarrassing by many more. To take an antidepressant is a sacrifice in much the same way that cutting your hair is a sacrifice. Its only possible justification is that it does treat depression, just as haircuts do treat lice.

So I can imagine Chesterton coming at me, fire in his eyes, demanding “Why are you solving this problem by giving pills?! You should be solving this by improving society so that poor people don’t end up depressed!”

And all I could answer is “If I wrote a prescription for ‘improve society’, I’m not sure the pharmacist would know how to fill it.”

Like, I want society to be improved. And I try. I give money to charity. I vote. I try to argue persuasively for good political positions. But when I’m done doing all of that, it turns out there are still depressed people left over. At that point, if I take the “high road” and say “no, I’m not going to give you an antidepressant, society should be giving you a job and better housing and more opportunities for social interaction,” then it doesn’t shame society into doing that. It just means that my patient will get more and more depressed and maybe commit suicide.

And I can imagine a 1910s doctor in my same position, who’s done what he can to help the poor, but in the meantime, he’s treating this girl, and if he doesn’t tell her to get a haircut it’s not going to make her life better, it’s just going to mean she gets lice. Which are creepy and gross and probably not very fun to have at all.

So Chesterton says “Whatever, I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to society!”

But society isn’t listening! Chesterton may be the most brilliant essayist of all time, here’s this classic book he wrote which is still justly famous over a hundred years later, and people didn’t even listen to him. They’re sure not going to listen to me.

Even if the intellectual battle were to be completely won – even if nobody objects to helping the poor on the grounds of “there’s not enough money”, or the grounds of “it would disincentivize them to work”, or the grounds of opportunity costs, or whatever – actually getting society to do something would still be just as difficult as getting it to do all the other things we all agree it should, like end corporate welfare or have less police brutality.

This is why I am so worried that Chesterton calls Christianity “left untried”. He seems to hear “This idea would work if we could get people to do it, which we obviously can’t” and answer “So you’re saying it would work! Great! Everyone who wants anything other than this idea is wrong and should stop!”

The problems Chesterton writes about are clearly the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. He doesn’t say so in so many words, but I think he considers “rolling back the Industrial Revolution” to be a perfectly reasonable solution:

There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.

There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the stage coaches if we chose. It might take some time to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do it, but certainly it is not impossible as bringing back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim: the freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose as a solution the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan, if that should seem to eliminate the largest number of evils. I claim the right to propose the complete independence of the small Greek or Italian towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton, if that seems the best way out of our troubles.

If every single person in the world wanted to roll back the Industrial Revolution, and we all had perfect coordination power and followed absolutely every command of a task force appointed for that problem – then yes, we could do it. But if even one person objects, then that person is going to start manufacturing things cheaper than the rest of us. If one country objects, that country is going to manufacture tanks and cannons and stealth bombers and the rest of us are going to have knights on horseback with which to fight them off.

The arrow of time is not nearly as bidirectional as Chesterton seems to think. The reason that the medievals could maintain deindustrialization without any effort is that nobody knew how to be industrialized even if they wanted to, and nobody wanted to because nobody knew there was such a thing as “industrialization” to want. Any modern attempt to recreate medieval society is doomed to be different than medieval society, because it will involve either industrialization, or an extremely concerted and tyrannical worldwide effort to suppress industrialization – both of which the medievals lacked.

The socialists, feminists, and other groups whom Chesterton dislikes seem to understand this. They say things like “Well, we’re never getting rid of industrialization and the pressure it puts on people to live in dingy slums. So let’s at least institute communal housing which will be a little more liveable and affordable than the other kind.” It might work or it might not, but it’s the sort of thing you can imagine coexisting with modern society. Chesterton’s argument is “No, let’s roll everything back until everyone can have a nice cottage in the Cotswolds.” It’s a very desirable solution, but it’s addressed to a hypothetical universal monarch who has the power to implement solutions against incentive gradients with no defectors ever. This is a book whose target audience is nowhere to be found, and those physicians who were cutting children’s hair to protect them from lice could justly have replied “Dammit, Gilbert, I’m a doctor, not a God-Emperor!”

There’s obviously a line of intellectual descent from Chesterton to the neoreactionaries of today. And yet the latter group seem less naive in an important way. They know that their proposals are impossible within the sphere of normal politics, so they’ve mostly stopped the “arguing for their proposals” part of the plan and started crafting alternative ways to have human societies in which apparently impossible coordination problems can get solved. Meanwhile, poor Chesterton never seems to get beyond wanting his utopian vision to become a party platform.

And I’m not sure he can. I get a weird vibe out of everything he’s written, like his brain lacks the gear that goes back and questions whether what it’s saying actually makes sense. I mean, no one does a great job having this gear, but in him it just seems completely missing, as if he is so feverishly brilliant that to try to analyze the truth-value of what he’s written or look for another side would break the spell.

But I can’t complain. It gives me paragraphs like this:

Now the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of all these pages, is this: to assert that we must instantly begin all over again, and begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl’s hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.

This is exactly the project, but it’s probably going to have to wait for after the Singularity.

There’s a story about a TV guide that summarized The Wizard of Oz as “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.”

It’s funny because it mistakes a tale of wonder and adventure for a crime spree. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is the opposite; a crime spree that gets mistaken for a tale of wonder and adventure.

On The Road is a terrible book about terrible people. Kerouac and his terrible friends drive across the US about seven zillion times for no particular reason, getting in car accidents and stealing stuff and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t.

But it’s okay, because they are visionaries. Their vision is to use the words “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic” at least three times to describe every object between Toledo and Bakersfield. They don’t pass a barn, they pass a holy vision of a barn, a barn such as there must have been when the world was young, a barn whose angelic red and beatific white send them into mad ecstasies. They don’t almost hit a cow, they almost hit a holy primordial cow, the cow of all the earth, the cow whose dreamlike ecstatic mooing brings them to the brink of a rebirth such as no one has ever known.

Jack Kerouac and his terrible friends are brought to the brinks of a lot of things, actually. Aside from stealing things and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t, being brought to the brink of things is one of their main pastimes. Enlightenment, revelation, truth, the real meaning of America, the ultimate, the sacred – if it has a brink, they will come to it. Crucially, they never cross that brink or gain any lasting knowledge or satisfaction from the experience. Theirs is a religion whose object of worship is the burst of intense emotion, the sudden drenching of their brain in happy chemicals that come and go without any lasting effect except pages full of the words “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic”.

The high priest of this religion is Kerouac’s friend Dean Moriarty. Kerouac cannot frickin shut up about Dean Moriarty. Obviously he is “holy” and “ecstatic” and “angelic” and “mad” and “visionary”, but for Dean, Kerouac pulls out all the stops. He is “a new kind of American saint”, “a burning shuddering frightful Angel”, with intelligence “formal and shining and complete”.

Who is this superman, this hero?

His specialty was stealing cars, gunning for girls coming out of high school in the afternoon, driving them out to the mountains, making them, and coming back to sleep in any available hotel bathtub in town.

Okay, but you have overwrought religious adjectives to describe all of this, right?

[Dean’s] “criminality” was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming.

I feel like once you steal like a dozen cars in the space of a single book, you lose the right to have the word “criminality” in scare quotes.

But please, tell us more:

[Ed and Dean] had just been laid off from the railroad. Ed had met a girl called Galatea who was living in San Francisco on her savings. These two mindless cads decided to bring the girl along [on one of their seven zillion pointless cross-country trips] and have her foot the bill. Ed cajoled and pleaded; she wouldn’t go unless he married her. In a whirlwind few days Ed Dunkel married Galatea, with Dean rushing around to get the necessary papers, and a few days before Christmas they rolled out of San Francisco at seventy miles per, headed for LA and the snowless southern road. In LA they picked up a sailor in a travel bureau and took him along for fifteen dollars’ worth of gas…All along the way Galatea Dunkel, Ed’s new wife, kept complaining that she was tired and wanted to sleep in a motel. If this kept up they’d spend all her money long before Virginia. Two nights she forced a stop and blew tens on motels. By the time they got to Tucson she was broke. Dean and Ed gave her the slip in a hotel lobby and resumed the voyage alone, with the sailor, and without a qualm.

All right, Jack, how are you gonna justify this one?

Dean was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him.

I too enjoy life. Yet somehow this has never led me to get my friend to marry a woman in order to take her life savings, then leave her stranded in a strange city five hundred miles from home after the money runs out.

Jack Kerouac’s relationship with Dean can best be described as “enabler”. He rarely commits any great misdeeds himself. He’s just along for the ride [usually literally, generally in flagrant contravention of all applicable traffic laws] with Dean, watching him destroy people’s lives, doing nothing about it, and then going into rhapsodies about how free-spirited and unencumbered and holy and mad and visionary it all is.

There’s a weird tension here, because Jack is determined to totally ignore the moral issues. He brings this kind of stuff up only incidentally, as Exhibits A and B to support his case that Dean Moriarty is the freest and most perfect and most wonderful human being on Earth, and sort of moves past it before it becomes awkward. An enthusiastic reader, caught up in the spirit of the book, might easily miss it. The only place it is ever made explicit is page 185, when Galatea (who has since found her way back to San Francisco) confronts Dean about the trail of broken lives he’s left behind him, saying:

You have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your damned kicks. All you think about is what’s hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people and then you just throw them aside. Not only that, but you’re silly about it. It never occurs to you that life is serious and there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing all the time.”

This, 185 pages in, is the first and last time anyone seriously tries to criticize Dean. Dean has stolen about a dozen cars. He has married one woman, had an affair with another, played the two of them off against each other, divorced the first, married the second, deserted the second with a young child whom she has no money to support, gone back to the first, dumped the first again so suddenly she has to become a prostitute to make ends meet. Later he will go back to the second, beat the first so hard that he injures his thumb and has to get it amputed, break into the second’s house with a gun to kill her but change his mind, desert the second again also with a child whom she has no money to support, start dating a third, desert the third also with a child whom she has no money to support, and go back to the second, all while having like twenty or thirty lesser affairs on the side. As quoted above, he dumped poor Galatea in Tucson, and later he will dump Jack in Mexico because Jack has gotten deathly ill and this is cramping his style.

So Galatea’s complaint is not exactly coming out of thin air.

Jack, someone has just accused your man-crush of being selfish and goofing off all the time. Care to defend him with overwrought religious adjectives?

That’s what Dean was, the HOLY GOOF…he was BEAT, the root, the soul of beatific. What was he knowing? He tried all in his power to tell me what he was knowing, and they envied that about me, my position at his side, defending him and drinking him in as they once tried to do

Right. That’s the problem. People are just jealous, because holy ecstatic angelic Dean Moriarty likes you more than he likes them. Get a life.

II.

But of course getting a life – in the sense of a home, a stable relationship, a steady job, et cetera – is exactly what all the characters in On The Road are desperately trying to avoid.

“Beat” has many meanings, but one of them is supposed to be “beaten down”. The characters consider themselves oppressed, on the receiving end of a system that grinds them up and spits them out. This is productively compared with their total lack of any actual oppression whatsoever.

I don’t know if it’s the time period or merely their personal charm, but Kerouac et al’s ability to do anything (and anyone) and get away with it is astounding. Several of their titular cross-country trips are performed entirely by hitch-hiking, with their drivers often willing to buy them food along the way. Another is performed in some sort of incredibly ritzy Cadillac limo, because a rich man wants his Cadillac transported from Denver to Chicago, Dean volunteers, and the rich man moronically accepts. Dean of course starts driving at 110 mph, gets in an accident, and ends up with the car half destroyed. Once in the city, Dean decides this is a good way to pick up girls, and:

In his mad frenzy Dean backed up smack on hydrants and tittered maniacally. By nine o’ clock the the car was an utter wreck: the brakes weren’t working any more; the fenders were stove in; the rods were rattling. Dean couldn’t stop it at red lights; it kept kicking convulsively over the roadway. It had paid the price of the night. It was a muddy boot and no longer a shiny limousine…’Whee!’ It was now time to return the Cadillac to the owner, who lived out on Lake Shore Drive in a swank apartment with an enormous garage underneath managed by oil-scarred Negroes. The mechanic did not recognize the Cadillac. We handed the papers over. He scratched his head at the sight of it. We had to get out fast. We did. We took a bus back to downtown Chicago and that was that. And we never heard a word from our Chicago baron about the conditio of his car, in spite of the fact that he had our addresses and could have complained.

Even more interesting than their ease of transportation to me was their ease at getting jobs. This is so obvious to them it is left unspoken. Whenever their money runs out, be they in Truckee or Texas or Toledo, they just hop over to the nearest farm or factory or whatever, say “Job, please!” and are earning back their depleted savings in no time. This is really the crux of their way of life. They don’t feel bound to any one place, because traveling isn’t really a risk. Be it for a week or six months, there’s always going to be work waiting for them when they need it. It doesn’t matter that Dean has no college degree, or a criminal history a mile long, or is only going to be in town a couple of weeks. This just seems to be a background assumption. It is most obvious when it is violated; the times it takes an entire week to find a job, and they are complaining bitterly. Or the time the only jobs available are backbreaking farm labor, and so Jack moves on (of course abandoning the girl he is with at the time) to greener pastures that he knows are waiting.

Even more interesting than their ease of employment is their ease with women. This is unintentionally a feminist novel, in that once you read it (at least from a modern perspective) you end up realizing the vast cultural shift that had to (has to?) take place in order to protect women from people like the authors. Poor Galatea Dunkel seems to have been more of the rule than the exception – go find a pretty girl, tell her you love her, deflower her, then steal a car and drive off to do it to someone else, leaving her unmarriageable and maybe with a kid to support. Then the next time you’re back in town, look her up, give her a fake apology in order to calm her down enough for her to be willing to have sex with you again, and repeat the entire process. Here is a typical encounter with a pretty girl:

Not five nights later we went to a party in New York and I saw a girl called Inez and told her I had a friend with me that she ought to meet sometime. I was drunk and told her he was a cowboy. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to meet a cowboy.”

“Dean?” I yelled across the party. “Come over here, man!” Dean came bashfully over. An hour later, in the drunkenness and chiciness of the party, he was kneeling on the floor with his chin on her belly and telling her and promising her everything ad sweating. She was a big, sexy brunette – as Garcia said, something straight out of Degas, and generally like a beautiful Parisian coquette. In a matter of days they were dickering with Camille in San Francisco by long-distance telephone for the necessary divorce papers so they could get married. Not only that, but a few months later Camille gave birth to Dean’s secnd baby, the result of a few nights’ rapport early in the year. And another matter of months and Inez had a baby. With one illegitimate child on the West somewhere, Dean then had four little ones, and not a cent, and was all troubles and ecstasy and speed as ever.

In case you’re wondering, Dean then runs off to Mexico, leaves Inez behind, screws a bunch of Mexican women, and eventually gets back with Camille, who is happy to have him. Seriously, if I had read this book when I was writing Radicalizing The Romanceless, Dean (and his friends) would have been right up there with Henry as Exhibit B. The only punishment he ever gets for his misadventures is hitting one girlfriend in the face so hard that he breaks his own thumb, which gets infected and has to be amputated. Human justice has failed so miserably, one feels, that God has to personally step in.

As bad as the gender stuff is, the race stuff is worse. This is 1950-something, so I’m prepared for a lot of awful stuff regarding race. But this is totally different awful stuff regarding race than I expected. I have never been able to get upset over “exoticization” and “Orientalism” before, but this book reached new lows for me:

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. I stopped at a little shack where a man sold hot red chili in paper containers; I bought some and ate it, strolling in the dark mysterious streets. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “white man” diillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley…a gang of colored women came by, and one of the young ones detached herself from otherlike elders and came to me fast – “Hello Joe!” and suddenly saw it wasn’t Joe, and ran back blushing. I wished I were Joe. I was only myself, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America.

Negroes are holy and ecstatic. But only in the same way barns and cows are holy and ecstatic. One gets the suspicion that Jack Kerouac is not exactly interacting with any of this stuff, so much as using it as something he can have his overwrought religious feelings about.

The “heroes” of On The Road consider themselves ill-done by and beaten-down. But they are people who can go anywhere they want for free, get a job any time they want, hook up with any girl in the country, and be so clueless about the world that they’re pretty sure being a 1950s black person is a laugh a minute.

On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat.

But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.

III.

The viewpoint of a character in a book is not necessarily the viewpoint of its author. One can write about terrible people doing terrible things and not necessarily endorse it. That having been said, it’s very hard to read Jack Kerouac-the-author as differing very much from Jack-Kerouac-the-character in his opinions. He still has a raging man-crush on Dean and thinks that he is some kind of holy madman who can do no wrong.

The nicest thing I can say about On The Road is that perhaps it should be read backwards. It is a paean to a life made without compromise, a life of enjoying the hidden beauty of the world, spent in pursuit of holiness and the exotic. Despite how I probably sound, I really respect the Beat aesthetic of searching for transcendence and finding it everywhere. There’s something to be said for living your life to maximize that kind of thing, especially if everyone else is some kind of boring disspirited factory worker or something. Kerouac wrote around the same time as Sartre; it’s not difficult to imagine him as one of the first people saying you needed to try to find your True Self.

Read backwards, there was a time when to spend your twenties traveling the world and sleeping with strange women and having faux mystical experiences was something new and exciting and dangerous and for all anybody knew maybe it held the secret to immense spiritual growth. But from a modern perspective, if Jack and Dean tried the same thing today, they’d be one of about a billion college students and aimless twenty-somethings with exactly the same idea, posting their photos to Instagram tagged “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic”. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t seem like a good stopping-point for a philosophy. It doesn’t even seem like good escapism. I’d be willing to tolerate all the pointless criminality if it spoke to the secret things that I’ve always wanted to do in my hidden heart of hearts, but I’d like to think there’s more there than driving back and forth and going to what seem like kind of lackluster parties.

When I read Marx, I thought that his key mistake was a negative view of utopia. That is, utopia is what happens automatically once you overthrow all of the people and structures who are preventing there from being utopia. Just get rid of the capitalists, and the World-Spirit will take care of the rest. The thought that ordinary, fallible, non-World-Spirit humans will have to build the post-revolution world brick by brick, and there’s no guarantee they will do any better than the pre-revolutionary humans who did the same, never seems to have occurred to him.

Kerouac was a staunch anti-Communist, but his beat philosophy seems to share the same wellspring. Once you get rid of all the shackles of society in your personal life – once you stop caring about all those squares who want you to have families and homes and careers and non-terrible friends – once you become a holy criminal who isn’t bound by the law or other people’s needs – then you’ll end up with some ecstatic visionary true self. Kerouac claimed he was Catholic, that he was in search of the Catholic God, and that he found Him – but all of his descriptions of such tend to be a couple of minutes of rapture upon seeing some especially pretty woman in a nightclub or some especially dingy San Francisco alley, followed by continuing to be a jerk who feels driven to travel across the country approximately seven zillion times for no reason.

Like the early Communists, who were always playing up every new factory that opened as the herald of the new age of plenty, in the beginning it’s easy to tell yourself your revolution is succeeding, that you are right on the brink of the new age. But at last come the Andropovs and Brezhnevs of the soul, the stagnation and despair and the going through the motions.

Kerouac apparently got married and divorced a couple of times, became an alcoholic, had a bit of a breakdown, and drank himself to death at age 49. Moriarty spent a while in prison on sort-of-trumped-up drug charges, went through a nasty divorce with whichever wife hadn’t divorced him already, and died of a likely drug overdose at age 47.

Overall I did not like this book.

If you’re writing about a crime spree you were a part of, you ought to show at least a little self-awareness.

Mysticism continues to be a perfectly valid life choice, but I continue to believe if you want to pursue it you should do it carefully and methodically, for example meditating for an hour a day and then going to regular retreats run by spiritual authorities, rather than the counterculture route of taking lots of drugs and having lots of sex and reading some books on Gnosticism and hoping some kind of enlightenment smashes into you.

Professional writing should be limited to about four overwrought religious adjectives per sentence, possibly by law.

And travel and girls are both fun, but [doctor voice] should be enjoyed responsibly and in moderation.

No! Wait! Sorry! Wrong future for socialism! This is John Roemer’s A Future for Socialism, a book on how to build a kinder, gentler socialist economy. In my review of Red Plenty, I complained about the book’s lack of gritty economic planning details, and Gilbert commented:

The least unimpressive modern detail-level explanation of how socialism could work is [A Future For Socialism]. I might regret recommending this book, because Scott is the kind of person to fall for it.

With a recommendation like that, how could I not?

A Future For Socialism makes – and I believe proves – a bold thesis. It argues that a socialist economy is entirely compatible with prosperity, innovation, and consumer satisfaction – just as long as by “socialism”, you mean “capitalism”.

The book makes proposals, but you’re not exactly hearing the Internationale playing in the background as you read them. Prices are obviously the best form of allocating goods, so a socialist economy should keep them. Central planning could never work, so a socialist economy doesn’t need it. Bosses and managers seem to be doing a good job keeping their firms profitable, so they can all keep their jobs under socialism. Everyone has different skills, so clearly in a truly socialist system they deserve different wages, in fact whatever wage the market will bear.

So where’s the socialism? Well, socialism is a system where the people own the means of production. Right now corporations control the means of production, and you own corporations by holding stock in them. So if everybody owns stock in all corporations, then if you squint that’s kind of socialist.

Roemer proposes the following: first, you nationalize large industries – or, if you’re a post-Communist country (Roemer was writing in 1992) you start with your large industries already nationalized. Then you split them into stocks. Then you give everyone an equal amount of these stocks. When the corporations make money, they pay them out in the form of stock dividends, which go to the people/stockholders. So every year I get a check in the mail representing my one-three-hundred-millionth-part share of all the profits made by all the corporations in the United States.

Question: won’t poor people immediately sell their shares to rich people, resulting in the rich people becoming wealthy means-of-production-owning capitalists again? (compare question 4.1 here). Answer: yes, obviously. So Roemer proposes a law that stocks cannot be sold for money, only coupons and other stocks. Every citizen is given an equal number of coupons at birth, trades them for stocks later on, and then trades those stocks for other stocks. This allows smart citizens to invest wisely, and allows a sort of “stock market” that sends the correct signals (this business’s stock price is decreasing so maybe they’re doing something wrong) but doesn’t allow stock accumulation by wealthy capitalists.

In this system, businesses would raise funds not by selling stock but by seeking loans from banks. Apparently this is already how it works in Japan, where companies are arranged into “business groups” called keiretsu with each having a bank in charge of lending them money. Roemer hopes his model would work even better than the keiretsu, because the flow of stock coupons would give the banks market-driven information that help them make funding decisions.

So when I read about this I got really excited, because it sounded like a Basic Income Guarantee without the awkward questions about how to fund it. If everyone owns an equal number of shares in a diverse portfolio of the nation’s companies, then corporate profits go to everyone in the form of a check in the mail. Sounds like a good way to help the poor.

Unfortunately, Roemer calculates in the back of the book how much money he expects people to get from such a scheme. Using equations I can’t exactly follow, he finds that every citizen would get about $500, which is about 5% of the 1992 poverty rate. Using slightly different assumptions weighted in his favor, he is able to increase this to $1000 per person. It looks like we will not be solving poverty today.

On the other hand, I recently learned that corporate profits have been rising dramatically lately. If you do a calculation much simpler than Roemer’s – in fact, pure division of the $2 trillion in national profits by the 300 million Americans who could receive them – you get about $6,000 per person. That’s still not enough to reach the poverty line, but it’s something, especially if you’re willing to tax the wealthy’s share to funnel it to the poor.

(on the other hand, maybe fewer than all corporations will be nationalized? I dunno here.)

But Roemer doesn’t even mention this except as an aside, and doesn’t think it’s the most interesting thing about his system. What he’s really interested in is finding a way to control what by analogy to public goods he calls “public bads”. These are all the things that coordination problems form around, like pollution and global warming and selling weapons to dictatorial regimes and so on.

He makes the following fascinating claim: poor decision-making in the current system is driven by an imbalance of costs and benefits caused by the concentration of capital. For example, suppose that using lots of fossil fuel will produce $1 trillion in good economic activity, but also $10 trillion in costs due to climate change. The Koch brothers own lots of capital (in the form of stock, ownership rights of companies, et cetera) so much of that $1 trillion in economic benefits takes the form of increased corporate profits that go directly into their pockets. However, they only suffer the same share of global warming anyone else in the US suffers – presumably 1/300 millionth of the national cost. Therefore, since they get disproportionately large benefits but only proportionate costs, they have strong incentive to try to push fossil fuels. They are rich and powerful and usually get what they want, so probably fossil fuels will continue to be used.

But imagine that we socialized stock. Now everyone in the US gets 1/300 millionth of the national profits from good economic activity, and 1/300 millionth of the national costs of global warming. Since we already said the costs are greater than the benefits, every individual wants to fight global warming. People’s incentives finally match reality.

This is a really pretty idea, but it doesn’t seem quite right to me. By my understanding, very little lobbying is done by rich capitalists personally – and I think the Koch brothers are an exception because they genuinely hold conservative principles, not because they expect the calculus to come out in their favor. See Does Class Warfare Have A Free Rider Problem? Instead, lobbying is done by businesses directly, driven by the leadership of the businesses. Exxon Mobil hires oil lobbyists, Google hires intellectual property lobbyists, Monsanto hires agriculture lobbyists.

Would enraged Monsanto stockholder/citizens launch a corporate revolt demanding the company stop hiring lobbyists to work against the American people? I don’t think so. Corporate revolts are really really hard even nowadays when most stocks are held by a few attention-paying competent rich people. Give them to millions of not-attention-paying mostly-incompetent hoi polloi, and you think they’re going to be able to coordinate something? Besides, since stocks are tradeable, it might be only a few percent of the population who own Monsanto stock in particular; everyone else traded it away for more Google and Exxon Mobil stock. Those few percent of the population would get more money from Monsanto dividends than they would lose in the inevitable revolt of the Mutant Corn People, so their incentives would still be screwed.

So the Basic Income angle isn’t really enough to be exciting, and I don’t find the public goods/game theory angle too convincing either.

There’s also a big set of questions the book leaves unanswered – how do companies get nationalized? How are new companies formed? What happens to them?

Roemer does agree that it would be hard to nationalize all companies in a large advanced nation like the United States. In particular, taking rich people’s stock away from them without compensation would be naked theft, and the government probably couldn’t afford the compensation necessary. So he suggests that something like this be tried first in the post-communist countries or some other nation that already has nationalized industries and wants to know what to do with them.

Fine. That leaves the other big question. Suppose that the US somehow nationalizes all its industries in 1992, and a few years later Page and Brin want to start Google. What happens? Does the government say “Oh, no, sorry, we already have companies, we don’t need more of them”? Are they allowed to start it small, but the government immediately seizes it once it gets past a certain size? Are they just not allowed to sell it for stock and turn it into a corporation? Or if all of those things are okay and they can build Google as normal, what happens once most of the economy is made of these new post-1992 corporations and everything is capitalist again?

Overall there’s nothing terrible about the system in A Future For Socialism. It sure beats Stalin and even Castro. It just seems like a lot of work for not necessarily very much gain.

The last chapter is the only one in which Roemer permits himself to wax rhapsodic into the optimism I normally associate with the socialist cause. He says that he hopes market socialism is just the beginning, that this system of universal stock ownership will cause people to stop promoting public bads and care about the general welfare of the country, and this will take the form of more investment in education to train the next generation of workers, and once everyone has access to good education everyone will be just about equal and able to earn just about equal wages in the free market and then all this social class nonsense will disappear. Man, people who wrote politics before we fully understood how genetics worked were so cute!

But despite my panning the economic proposals, I learned a lot from this book and am grateful to have read it.

First, I was impressed by the assumptions. Roemer starts by explaining that yes, he knows why capitalism is a good thing, it’s reasons X Y and Z, and he’s not going to challenge or ignore that. When I hear someone making a controversial claim I disagree with, my immediate instinct is to assume that person is ignorant. Roemer proves he isn’t in precisely the right way. Before you advocate socialism, you prove that you’re not just totally ignorant of capitalism; that simplifies the process of sorting out the people you can learn from from the people you can’t.

He also makes it clear that he’s not out to change human nature. He hopes human nature will eventually change (see above about education) but he also recognizes that has to track changes in society, not be the cause of them. He writes:

[These proposals should take people as they actually are today, not as they might be after an egalitarian economic policy or cultural revolution has “remade” them. We must assume, as social scientists, that people are, in the short term at least, what they are: what can be changed – and slowly at that – are the institutions through which they interact.

Well put. Roemer establishes himself early on as someone who shares some of my basic assumptions (and can express them better than I can), which means even disagreement will be productive disagreement.

But second, and more important, this book is the first time I really had to think about joint-stock corporations. Like, I know what stock is in a “you buy it and then you get very excited or upset when it goes up or down” way, but I hadn’t thought of it as an important philosophical and political idea before, and Roemer really hammers home that it is.

The book identifies three big principal-agent problems in Soviet and other communist economic systems. First, managers employ workers to make their product, but workers want to slack off or line their own pockets. Second, central planners employ managers to run plants, but managers want to slack off or line their own pockets. Third, The People employ central planners to run the economy, but central planners want to slack off or line their own pockets. The Soviets solved these problems poorly. The central planners had no responsibility to anyone except other Party bureaucrats; the central planners could only punish managers who failed to meet their cooked-up metrics, leading to Goodhart’s Law gone berserk. And managers sometimes couldn’t promote workers in a meaningful way or fire them in a meaningful way, so workers had little incentive to do a good job.

The standard capitalist narrative is that principal-agent problems are very hard and maybe impossible on such a big scale, but this is okay, because in capitalism the people making the decisions are the ones profiting off them.

Roemer points out that’s nonsense. Most real-world capitalism isn’t the plucky entrepreneur founding a startup, it’s the giant corporation, in which a bunch of investors (who profit off of good decisions) hire a manager or CEO type person (who is supposed to make good decisions). Insofar as CEOs keep companies profitable – and it seems they do – the principal-agent problem is solved. If we want the company to be run by Stalin instead of by investors, all we need to do is use current corporate governance structure, but give Stalin the stock, and the company will be just as profitable as ever (as long as Stalin doesn’t try to interfere).

Roemer credits for this the hostile takeover method, where if a stock’s price falls too low, that means some other group can buy out all the stock and fire the manager. It’s a good point, but I can’t help wondering if another part of it is immediate, hard-to-deny feedback: that is, the existence of the stock price at all. First of all, the CEO can’t remain too deluded about her decisions; there has been many a politician who sends a country to its grave all the while hearing from a bunch of toadies that she’s making things better, but stock prices are hard to fudge. Second of all, the investors and the Board of Directors and so on have a mechanism by which they can agree upon whether the company is doing well or not, short-circuiting some of the politics that might cause them to split into factions for or against the current leadership (this is not to say there are no corporate politics, just that they are more resolvable than other kinds of politics).

The principal-agent problem is at the center of a lot of different things, so it’s really interesting to think of something as humble and unassuming as the joint-stock corporation as having in some sense solved it. I’m not sure what the wider implications of this are, but the idea of futarchy is looking better and better.

So in summary, this book’s ideas on stock distribution seem potentially okay but probably not worth nationalizing all industries over, but the real gem is the lucid explanation of the importance of corporate governance.

I decided to read Red Plenty because my biggest gripe after reading Singer’s book on Marx was that Marx refused to plan how communism would actually work, instead preferring to leave the entire matter for the World-Spirit to sort out. But almost everything that interests me about Communism falls under the category of “how communism would actually work”. Red Plenty, a semi-fictionalized account of the history of socialist economic planning, seemed like a natural follow-up.

But I’d had it on my List Of Things To Read for even longer than that, ever after stumbling across a quote from it on some blog or other:

Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded.

Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on.

And what would be the alternative? The consciously arranged alternative? A dance of another nature. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all.

Needless to say, this is Relevant To My Interests, which include among them poetic allegories for coordination problems. And I was not disappointed.

II.

The book begins:

Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called “the planned economy,” which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It’s about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.

And this was the first interesting thing I learned.

There’s a very settled modern explanation of the conflict between capitalism and communism. Capitalism is good at growing the economy and making countries rich. Communism is good at caring for the poor and promoting equality. So your choice between capitalism and communism is a trade-off between those two things.

But for at least the first fifty years of the Cold War, the Soviets would not have come close to granting you that these are the premises on which the battle must be fought. They were officially quite certain that any day now Communism was going to prove itself better at economic growth, better at making people rich quickly, than capitalism. Even unofficially, most of their leaders and economists were pretty certain of it. And for a little while, even their capitalist enemies secretly worried they were right.

The arguments are easy to understand. Under capitalism, plutocrats use the profits of industry to buy giant yachts for themselves. Under communism, the profits can be reinvested back into the industry to build more factories or to make production more efficient, increasing growth rate.

Under capitalism, everyone is competing with each other, and much of your budget is spent on zero-sum games like advertising and marketing and sales to give you a leg up over your competition. Under communism, there is no need to play these zero-sum games and that part of the budget can be reinvested to grow the industry more quickly.

Under capitalism, everyone is working against everyone else. If Ford discovers a clever new car-manufacturing technique, their first impulse is to patent it so GM can’t use it, and GM’s first impulse is to hire thousands of lawyers to try to thwart that attempt. Under communism, everyone is working together, so if one car-manufacturing collective discovers a new technique they send their blueprints to all the other car-manufacturing collectives in order to help them out. So in capitalism, each companies will possess a few individual advances, but under communism every collective will have every advance, and so be more productive.

These arguments make a lot of sense to me, and they definitely made sense to the Communists of the first half of the 20th century. As a result, they were confident of overtaking capitalism. They realized that they’d started with a handicap – czarist Russia had been dirt poor and almost without an industrial base – and that they’d faced a further handicap in having the Nazis burn half their country during World War II – but they figured as soon as they overcame these handicaps their natural advantages would let them leap ahead of the West in only a couple of decades. The great Russian advances of the 50s – Sputnik, Gagarin, etc – were seen as evidence that this was already starting to come true in certain fields.

And then it all went wrong.

III.

Grant that communism really does have the above advantages over capitalism. What advantage does capitalism have?

The classic answer is that during communism no one wants to work hard. They do as little as they can get away with, then slack off because they don’t reap the rewards of their own labor.

Red Plenty doesn’t really have theses. In fact, it’s not really a non-fiction work at all. It’s a dramatized series of episodes in the lives of Russian workers, politicians, and academics, intended to come together to paint a picture of how the Soviet economy worked.

But if I can impose a thesis upon the text, I don’t think it agreed with this. In certain cases, Russians were very well-incentivized by things like “We will kill you unless you meet the production target”. Later, when the state became less murder-happy, the threat of death faded to threats of demotions, ruined careers, and transfer to backwater provinces. And there were equal incentives, in the form of promotion or transfer to a desirable location such as Moscow, for overperformance. There were even monetary bonuses, although money bought a lot less than it did in capitalist countries and was universally considered inferior to status in terms of purchasing power. Yes, there were Goodhart’s Law type issues going on – if you’re being judged per product, better produce ten million defective products than 9,999,999 excellent products – but that wasn’t the crux of the problem.

Red Plenty presented the problem with the Soviet economy primarily as one of allocation. You could have a perfectly good factory that could be producing lots of useful things if only you had one extra eensy-weensy part, but unless the higher-ups had allocated you that part, you were out of luck. If that part happened to break, getting a new one would depend on how much clout you (and your superiors) pulled versus how much clout other people who wanted parts (and their superiors) held.

The book illustrated this reality with a series of stories (I’m not sure how many of these were true, versus useful dramatizations). In one, a pig farmer in Siberia needed wood in order to build sties for his pigs so they wouldn’t freeze – if they froze, he would fail to meet his production target and his career would be ruined. The government, which mostly dealt with pig farming in more temperate areas, hadn’t accounted for this and so hadn’t allocated him any wood, and he didn’t have enough clout with officials to request some. A factory nearby had extra wood they weren’t using and were going to burn because it was too much trouble to figure out how to get it back to the government for re-allocation. The farmer bought the wood from the factory in an under-the-table deal. He was caught, which usually wouldn’t have been a problem because everybody did this sort of thing and it was kind of the “smoking marijuana while white” of Soviet offenses. But at that particular moment the Party higher-ups in the area wanted to make an example of someone in order to look like they were on top of their game to their higher-ups. The pig farmer was sentenced to years of hard labor.

A tire factory had been assigned a tire-making machine that could make 100,000 tires a year, but the government had gotten confused and assigned them a production quota of 150,000 tires a year. The factory leaders were stuck, because if they tried to correct the government they would look like they were challenging their superiors and get in trouble, but if they failed to meet the impossible quota, they would all get demoted and their careers would come to an end. They learned that the tire-making-machine-making company had recently invented a new model that really could make 150,000 tires a year. In the spirit of Chen Sheng, they decided that since the penalty for missing their quota was something terrible and the penalty for sabotage was also something terrible, they might as well take their chances and destroy their own machinery in the hopes the government sent them the new improved machine as a replacement. To their delight, the government believed their story about an “accident” and allotted them a new tire-making machine. However, the tire-making-machine-making company had decided to cancel production of their new model. You see, the new model, although more powerful, weighed less than the old machine, and the government was measuring their production by kilogram of machine. So it was easier for them to just continue making the old less powerful machine. The tire factory was allocated another machine that could only make 100,000 tires a year and was back in the same quandary they’d started with.

It’s easy to see how all of these problems could have been solved (or would never have come up) in a capitalist economy, with its use of prices set by supply and demand as an allocation mechanism. And it’s easy to see how thoroughly the Soviet economy was sabotaging itself by avoiding such prices.

IV.

The “hero” of Red Plenty – although most of the vignettes didn’t involve him directly – was Leonid Kantorovich, a Soviet mathematician who thought he could solve the problem. He invented the technique of linear programming, a method of solving optimization problems perfectly suited to allocating resources throughout an economy. He immediately realized its potential and wrote a nice letter to Stalin politely suggesting his current method of doing economics was wrong and he could do better – this during a time when everyone else in Russia was desperately trying to avoid having Stalin notice them because he tended to kill anyone he noticed. Luckily the letter was intercepted by a kindly mid-level official, who kept it away from Stalin and warehoused Kantorovich in a university somewhere.

During the “Khruschev thaw”, Kantorovich started getting some more politically adept followers, the higher-ups started taking note, and there was a real movement to get his ideas implemented. A few industries were run on Kantorovichian principles as a test case and seemed to do pretty well. There was an inevitable backlash. Opponents accused the linear programmers of being capitalists-in-disguise, which wasn’t helped by their use of something called “shadow prices”. But the combination of their own political adeptness and some high-level support from Khruschev – who alone of all the Soviet leaders seemed to really believe in his own cause and be a pretty okay guy – put them within arm’s reach of getting their plans implemented.

But when elements of linear programming were adopted, they were adopted piecemeal and toothless. The book places the blame on Alexei Kosygen, who implemented a bunch of economic reforms that failed, in a chapter that makes it clear exactly how constrained the Soviet leadership really was. You hear about Stalin, you imagine these guys having total power, but in reality they walked a narrow line, and all these “shadow prices” required more political capital than they were willing to mobilize, even when they thought Kantorovich might have a point.

V.

In the end, I was left with two contradictory impressions from the book.

First, amazement that the Soviet economy got as far as it did, given how incredibly screwed up it was. You hear about how many stupid things were going on at every level, and you think: This was the country that built Sputnik and Mir? This was the country that almost buried us beneath the tide of history? It is a credit to the Russian people that they were able to build so much as a screwdriver in such conditions, let alone a space station.

But second, a sense of what could have been. What if Stalin hadn’t murdered most of the competent people? What if entire fields of science hadn’t been banned for silly reasons? What if Kantorovich had been able to make the Soviet leadership base its economic planning around linear programming? How might history have turned out differently?

One of the book’s most frequently-hammered-in points was that there was was a brief moment, back during the 1950s, when everything seemed to be going right for Russia. Its year-on-year GDP growth (as estimated by impartial outside observers) was somewhere between 7 to 10%. Starvation was going down. Luxuries were going up. Kantorovich was fixing entire industries with his linear programming methods. Then Khruschev made a serious of crazy loose cannon decisions, he was ousted by Brezhnev, Kantorovich was pushed aside and ignored, the “Khruschev thaw” was reversed and tightened up again, and everything stagnated for the next twenty years.

If Khruschev had stuck around, if Kantorovich had succeeded, might the common knowledge that Communism is terrible at producing material prosperity look a little different?

The book very briefly mentioned a competing theory of resource allocation promoted by Victor Glushkov, a cyberneticist in Ukraine. He thought he could use computers – then a very new technology – to calculate optimal allocation for everyone. He failed to navigate the political seas as adroitly as Kantorovich’s faction, and the killing blow was a paper that pointed out that for him to do everything really correctly would take a hundred million years of computing time.

That was in 1960. If computing power doubles every two years, we’ve undergone about 25 doubling times since then, suggesting that we ought to be able to perform Glushkov’s calculations in three years – or three days, if we give him a lab of three hundred sixty five computers to work with. There could have been this entire field of centralized economic planning. Maybe it would have continued to underperform prices. Or maybe after decades of trial and error across the entire Soviet Union, it could have caught up. We’ll never know. Glushkov and Kantorovich were marginalized and left to play around with toy problems until their deaths in the 80s, and as far as I know their ideas were never developed further in the context of a national planned economy.

VI.

One of the ways people like insulting smart people, or rational people, or scientists, is by telling them they’re the type of people who are attracted to Communism. “Oh, you think you can control and understand everything, just like the Communists did.”

And I had always thought this was a pretty awful insult. The people I know who most identify as rationalists, or scientifically/technically minded, are also most likely to be libertarian. So there, case dismissed, everybody go home.

This book was the first time that I, as a person who considers himself rationally/technically minded, realized that I was super attracted to Communism.

Here were people who had a clear view of the problems of human civilization – all the greed, all the waste, all the zero-sum games. Who had the entire population united around a vision of a better future, whose backers could direct the entire state to better serve the goal. All they needed was to solve the engineering challenges, to solve the equations, and there they were, at the golden future. And they were smart enough to be worthy of the problem – Glushkov invented cybernetics, Kantorovich won a Nobel Prize in Economics.

And in the end, they never got the chance. There’s an interpretation of Communism as a refutation of social science, here were these people who probably knew some social science, but did it help them run a state, no it didn’t. But from the little I learned about Soviet history from this book, this seems diametrically wrong. The Soviets had practically no social science. They hated social science. You would think they would at least have some good Marxists, but apparently Stalin killed all of them just in case they might come up with versions of Marxism he didn’t like, and in terms of a vibrant scholarly field it never recovered. Economics was tainted with its association with capitalism from the very beginning, and when it happened at all it was done by non-professionals. Kantorovich was a mathematician by training; Glushkov a computer scientist.

Soviet Communism isn’t what happens when you let nerds run a country, it’s what happens when you kill all the nerds who are experts in country-running, bring in nerds from unrelated fields to replace them, then make nice noises at those nerds in principle while completely ignoring them in practice. Also, you ban all Jews from positions of importance, because fuck you.

Baggy two-piece suits are not the obvious costume for philosopher kings: but that, in theory, was what the apparatchiks who rule the Soviet Union in the 1960s were supposed to be. Lenin’s state made the same bet that Plato had twenty-five centuries earlier, when he proposed that enlightened intelligence gives absolute powers would serve the public good better than the grubby politicking of republics.

On paper, the USSR was a republic, a grand multi-ethnic federation of republics indeed and its constitutions (there were several) guaranteed its citizens all manner of civil rights. But in truth the Soviet system was utterly unsympathetic to the idea of rights, if you meant by them any suggestion that the two hundred million men, women and children who inhabited the Soviet Union should be autonomously fixing on two hundred million separate directions in which to pursue happiness. This was a society with just one programme for happiness, which had been declared to be scientific and therefore was as factual as gravity.

But the Soviet experiment had run into exactly the difficulty that Plato’s admirers encountered, back in the fifth century BC, when they attempted to mould philosophical monarchies for Syracuse and Macedonia. The recipe called for rule by heavily-armed virtue—or in the Leninist case, not exactly virtue, but a sort of intentionally post-ethical counterpart to it, self-righteously brutal. Wisdom was to be set where it could be ruthless. Once such a system existed, though, the qualities required to rise in it had much more to do with ruthlessness than wisdom. Lenin’s core of Bolsheviks, and the socialists like Trotsky who joined them, were many of them highly educated people, literate in multiple European languages, learned in the scholastic traditions of Marxism; and they preserved these attributes even as they murdered and lied and tortured and terrorized. They were social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters. But their successors – the vydvizhentsy who refilled the CEntral Committee in the thirties – were not the most selfless people in Soviet society, or the most principled, or the most scrupulous. They were the most ambitious, the most domineering, the most manipulative, the most greedy, the most sycophantic: people whose adherence to Bolshevik ideas was inseparable from the power that came with them. Gradually their loyalty to the ideas became more and more instrumental, more and more a matter of what the ideas would let them grip in their two hands…

Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khruschev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.

And in the end it all failed miserably:

The Soviet economy did not move on from coal and steel and cement to plastics and microelectronics and software design, except in a very few military applications. It continued to compete with what capitalism had been doing in the 1930s, not with what it was doing now. It continued to suck resources and human labour in vast quantities into a heavy-industrial sector which had once been intended to exist as a springboard for something else, but which by now had become its own justification. Soviet industry in its last decades existed because it existed, an empire of inertia expanding ever more slowly, yet attaining the wretched distinction of absorbing more of the total effort of the economy that hosted it than heavy industry has ever done anywhere else in human history, before or since. Every year it produced goods that less and less corresponded to human needs, and whatever it once started producing, it tended to go on producing ad infinitum, since it possessed no effective stop signals except ruthless commands from above, and the people at the top no longer did ruthless, in the economic sphere. The control system for industry grew more and more erratic, the information flowing back to the planners grew more and more corrupt. And the activity of industry , all that human time and machine time it used up, added less and less value to the raw materials it sucked in. Maybe no value. Maybe less than none. One economist has argued that, by the end, it was actively destroying value; it had become a system for spoiling perfectly good materials by turning them into objects no one wanted.

I don’t know if this paragraph was intentionally written to contrast with the paragraph at the top, the one about the zombie dance of capitalism. But it is certainly instructive to make such a contrast. The Soviets had originally been inspired by this fear of economics going out of control, abandoning the human beings whose lives it was supposed to improve. In capitalist countries, people existed for the sake of the economy, but under Soviet communism, the economy was going to exist only for the sake of the people.

(accidental Russian reversal: the best kind of Russian reversal!)

And instead, they ended up taking “people existing for the sake of the economy” to entirely new and tragic extremes, people being sent to the gulags or killed because they didn’t meet the targets for some product nobody wanted that was listed on a Five-Year Plan. Spoiling good raw materials for the sake of being able to tell Party bosses and the world “Look at us! We are doing Industry!” Moloch had done some weird judo move on the Soviets’ attempt to destroy him, and he had ended up stronger than ever.

The book’s greatest flaw is that it never did get into the details of the math – or even more than a few-sentence summary of the math – and so I was left confused as to whether anything else had been possible, whether Kantorovich and Glushkov really could have saved the vision of prosperity if they’d been allowed to do so. Nevertheless, the Soviets earned my sympathy and respect in a way Marx so far has not, merely by acknowledging that the problem existed and through the existence of a few good people who tried their best to solve it.

The clincher was that the rare times I felt like I really understand certain thinkers and philosophies on a deep level, it’s rarely been the primary sources that did it for me, even when I’d read them. It’s only after hearing a bunch of different people attack the same idea from different angles that I’ve gotten the gist of it. The primary sources – especially when they’re translated, especially when they’re from the olden days before people discovered how to be interesting – just turn me off. Singer is a known person who can think and write clearly, and his book was just about the shortest I could find, so I jumped on it, hoping I would find a more sympathetic portrayal of someone whom my society has been trying to cast as a demon or monster.

And I don’t know if this is an artifact of Singer or a genuine insight into Marx, but as far as I can tell he’s even worse than I thought.

I.

What really clinched this for me was the discussion of Marx’s (lack of) description of how to run a communist state. I’d always heard that Marx was long on condemnations of capitalism and short on blueprints for communism, and the couple of Marx’s works I read in college confirmed he really didn’t talk about that very much. It seemed like a pretty big gap.

But I’d always dismissed this as an excusable error. When I was really young – maybe six or seven – I fancied myself a great inventor. The way I would invent something – let’s say a spaceship – was to draw a picture of a spaceship. I would label it with notes like “engine goes here” and “power source here” and then rest on my laurels, satisfied that I had invented interstellar travel at age seven. It always confused me that adults, who presumably should be pretty smart, had failed to do this. Occasionally I would bring this up to someone like my parents, and they would ask a question like “Okay, but how does the power source work?” and I would answer “Through quantum!” and then get very annoyed that people didn’t even know about quantum.

(I was seven years old. What’s your excuse, New Age community?)

I figured that Marx had just fallen into a similar trap. He’d probably made a few vague plans, like “Oh, decisions will be made by a committee of workers,” and “Property will be held in common and consensus democracy will choose who gets what,” and felt like the rest was just details. That’s the sort of error I could at least sympathize with, despite its horrendous consequences.

But in fact Marx was philosophically opposed, as a matter of principle, to any planning about the structure of communist governments or economies. He would come out and say “It is irresponsible to talk about how communist governments and economies will work.” He believed it was a scientific law, analogous to the laws of physics, that once capitalism was removed, a perfect communist government would form of its own accord. There might be some very light planning, a couple of discussions, but these would just be epiphenomena of the governing historical laws working themselves out. Just as, a dam having been removed, a river will eventually reach the sea somehow, so capitalism having been removed society will eventually reach a perfect state of freedom and cooperation.

Singer blames Hegel. Hegel viewed all human history as the World-Spirit trying to recognize and incarnate itself. As it overcomes its various confusions and false dichotomies, it advances into forms that more completely incarnate the World-Spirit and then moves onto the next problem. Finally, it ends with the World-Spirit completely incarnated – possibly in the form of early 19th century Prussia – and everything is great forever.

Marx famously exports Hegel’s mysticism into a materialistic version where the World-Spirit operates upon class relations rather than the interconnectedness of all things, and where you don’t come out and call it the World-Spirit – but he basically keeps the system intact. So once the World-Spirit resolves the dichotomy between Capitalist and Proletariat, then it can more completely incarnate itself and move on to the next problem. Except that this is the final problem (the proof of this is trivial and is left as exercise for the reader) so the World-Spirit becomes fully incarnate and everything is great forever. And you want to plan for how that should happen? Are you saying you know better than the World-Spirit, Comrade?

I am starting to think I was previously a little too charitable toward Marx. My objections were of the sort “You didn’t really consider the idea of welfare capitalism with a social safety net” or “communist society is very difficult to implement in principle,” whereas they should have looked more like “You are basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is baaaasically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out.”

II.

Conservatives always complain that liberals “deny human nature”, and I had always thought that complaint was unfair. Like sure, liberals say that you can make people less racist, and one could counterargue that a tendency toward racism is inborn, but it sure seems like you can make that tendency more or less strongly expressed and that this is important. This is part of the view I argue in Nature Is Not A Slate, It’s A Series Of Levers.

But here I have to give conservatives their due. As far as I can tell, Marx literally, so strongly as to be unstrawmannable, believed there was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable.

Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.

And:

It is evidence that economics establishes an alienated form of social intercourse as the essential, original, and natural form

Which Singer glosses with:

This is the gist of Marx’s objection to classical economics. Marx does not challenge the classical economists within the presuppositions of their science. Instead, he takes a viewpoint outside those presuppositions and argues that private property, competition, greed, and so on are to be found only in a particular condition of human existence, a condition of alienation.

I understand this is still a matter of some debate in the Marxist community. But it seems to me that if Singer is right, if this is genuinely Marx’s view, it seems likely to be part of what contributed to his inexcusable error above.

You or I, upon hearing that the plan is to get rid of all government and just have people share all property in common, might ask questions like “But what if someone wants more than their share?” Marx had no interest in that question, because he believed that there was no such thing as human nature, and things like “People sometimes want more than their shares of things” are contingent upon material relations and modes of production, most notably capitalism. If you get rid of capitalism, human beings change completely, such that “wanting more than your share” is no more likely than growing a third arm.

A lot of the liberals I know try to distance themselves from people like Stalin by saying that Marx had a pure original doctrine that they corrupted. But I am finding myself much more sympathetic to the dictators and secret police. They may not have been very nice people, but they were, in a sense, operating in Near Mode. They couldn’t just tell themselves “After the Revolution, no one is going to demand more than their share,” because their philosophies were shaped by the experience of having their subordinates come up to them and say “Boss, that Revolution went great, but now someone’s demanding more than their share, what should we do?” Their systems seem to be part of the unavoidable collision of Marxist doctrine with reality. It’s possible that there are other, better ways to deal with that collision, but “returning to the purity of Marx” doesn’t seem like a workable option.

III.

There was one part that made me more sympathetic to Marx. Singer writes:

Marx saw that the liberal definition of freedom is open to a fundamental objection. Suppose I live in the suburbs and work in the city. I could drive my car to work, or take the bus. I prefer not to wait around for the bus, and so I take my car. Fifty thousand other people living in my suburb face the same choice and make the same decision. The road to town is choked with cars. It takes each of us an hour to travel ten miles. In this situation, according to the liberal conception of freedom, we have all chosen freely. Yet the outcome is something none of us want. If we all went by bus, the roads would be empty and we could cover the distance in twenty minutes. Even with the inconvenience of waiting at the bus stop, we would all prefer that. We are, of course, free to alter our choice of transportation, but what can we do? While so many cars slow the bus down, why should any individual choose differently? The liberal conception of freedom has led to a paradox: we have each chosen in our own interests, but the result is in no one’s interest. Individual rationality, collective irrationality…

Marx saw that capitalism involves this kind of collective irrationality. In precapitalist systems it was obvious that most people did not control their own destiny – under feudalism, for instance, serfs had to work for their lords. Capitalism seems different because people are in theory free to work for themselves or for others as they choose. Yet most workers have as little control over their lives as feudal serfs. This is not because they have chosen badly, nor is it because of the physical limits of our resources and technology. It is because the cumulative effect of countless individual choices is a society that no one – not even the capitalists – has chosen. Where those who hold the liberal conception of freedom would say we are free because we are not subject to deliberate interference by other humans, Marx says we are not free because we do not control our own society.

This is good. In fact, this is the insight that I spent about fifteen years of my life looking for, ever since I first discovered libertarianism and felt like there was definitely an important problem with it, but couldn’t quite verbalize what it was. It’s something I finally figured out only within the last year or so and didn’t fully write up until Meditations on Moloch. And Marx seems to have sort of had it. I read the relevant section of Marx when I was younger, where he was talking about how capitalists would compete each other into the ground whether they wanted to or not, and I remember dismissing it with a “capitalists have not competed each other into the ground, for this this and this reason”, dismissing the incorrect object-level argument without realizing the important meta-level insight beneath it (something I have since learned to stop doing). If Marx really had that meta-level insight – really had it, and not just stumbled across a couple of useful examples of it without realizing the pattern – then that would make his fame justly deserved.

But two things here discourage me. First, Marx seems so confused about everything that it’s hard to parse him as really understanding this, as opposed to simply noticing one example of it that serves as a useful argument against capitalism. I notice Singer had to come up with his own clever example of this instead of quoting anything from any of Marx’s works. Second, the insight does not seem original to Marx. Tragedy of the commons was understood as early as 1833 and Malthus was talking about similar problems related to population explosions before Marx was even born. John Stuart Mill, writing twenty years before Das Kapital, had already explained the basic principle quite well:

To a fourth case of exception I must request particular attention, it being one to which as it appears to me, the attention of political economists has not yet been sufficiently drawn. There are matters in which the interference of law is required, not to overrule the judgment of individuals respecting their own interest, but to give effect to that judgment: they being unable to give effect to it except by concert, which concert again cannot be effectual unless it receives validity and sanction from the law. For illustration, and without prejudging the particular point, I may advert to the question of diminishing the hours of labour. Let us suppose, what is at least supposable, whether it be the fact or not—that a general reduction of the hours of factory labour, say from ten to nine,*119 would be for the advantage of the workpeople: that they would receive as high wages, or nearly as high, for nine hours’ labour as they receive for ten. If this would be the result, and if the operatives generally are convinced that it would, the limitation, some may say, will be adopted spontaneously. I answer, that it will not be adopted unless the body of operatives bind themselves to one another to abide by it. A workman who refused to work more than nine hours while there were others who worked ten, would either not be employed at all, or if employed, must submit to lose one-tenth of his wages. However convinced, therefore, he may be that it is the interest of the class to work short time, it is contrary to his own interest to set the example, unless he is well assured that all or most others will follow it. But suppose a general agreement of the whole class: might not this be effectual without the sanction of law? Not unless enforced by opinion with a rigour practically equal to that of law. For however beneficial the observance of the regulation might be to the class collectively, the immediate interest of every individual would lie in violating it: and the more numerous those were who adhered to the rule, the more would individuals gain by departing from it.

So one might apply to Marx the old cliche: that he has much that is good and original, but what is good is not original and what is original is not good.

But it is interesting to analyze Marx as groping toward something game theoretic. This comes across to me in some of his discussions of labor. Marx thinks all value is labor. Yes, capital is nice, but in a sense it is only “crystallized labor” – the fact that a capitalist owns a factory only means that at some other point he got laborers to build a factory for him. So labor does everything, but it gets only a tiny share of the gains produced. This is because capitalists are oppressing the laborers. Once laborers realize what’s up, they can choose to labor in such a way as to give themselves the full gains of their labor.

I think here that he is thinking of coordination as something that happens instantly in the absence of any obstacle to coordination, and the obstacle to coordination is the capitalists and the “false consciousness” they produce. Remove the capitalists, and the workers – who represent the full productive power of humanity – can direct that productive power to however it is most useful. In my language, Marx simply assumed the invisible nation, thought that the result of perfect negotiation by ideal game theoretic agents with 100% cooperation under a veil of ignorance – would also be the result of real negotiation in the real world, as long as there were no capitalists involved. Maybe this idea – of gradually approaching the invisible nation – is what stood in for the World-Spirit in his dialecticalism. Maybe in 1870, this sort of thinking was excusable.

If capitalists are to be thought of as anything other than parasites, part of the explanation of their contribution has to involve coordination. If Marx didn’t understand that coordination is just as hard to produce as linen or armaments or whatever, if he thought you could just assume it, then capitalists seem useless and getting rid of all previous forms of government so that insta-coordination can solve everything seems like a pretty swell idea.

If you admit that, capitalists having disappeared, there’s still going to be competition, positive and negative sum games, free rider problems, tragedies of the commons, and all the rest, then you’ve got to invent a system that solves all of those issues better than capitalism does. That seems to be the real challenge Marxist intellectuals should be setting themselves, and I hope to eventually discover some who have good answers to it. But at least from the little I learned from Singer, I see no reason to believe Marx had the clarity of thought to even understand the question.

But in the end, I am not Scott Aaronson. I did not write Quantum Computing Since Democritus. To be honest, I wasn’t really even able to understand Quantum Computing Since Democritus. I knew I was in for trouble when it compared itself to The Elegant Universe in the foreword, since I wasn’t able to get through more than a few chapters of that one. I dutifully tried to do the first couple of math problems Democritus set for me, and I even got a couple of them right. But eventually I realized that if I wanted to read Democritus the way it was supposed to be read, with full or even decent understanding, it would be a multi-year project, a page a day or worse, with my gains fading away a few days after I made them into a cloud of similar-looking formulae and three-letter abbreviations.

It left me depressed. I’ve said before that my lack of math talent is one of my biggest regrets in life, and here was this book that really made you understand what it must feel like to be on the cutting edge of math, proving new theorems and drawing new connections and adding to the same structure of elegant knowledge begun by Pythagoras and Archimedes and expanded by Gauss, Einstein, Turing, et cetera. All I could do was remember my own post on burdens, remind myself that I was on record as saying that sometimes the IQ waterline in a certain area advances beyond your ability to contribute and that’s nothing to feel guilty about.

I did finish the book. But – well, imagine a book of geography. It lists all the countries of the world and their capitals, and is meant to be so comprehensive that a reader could use it to plot the most efficient journey from Timbuktu to Kalamazoo, taking into account tolls, weather, and levels of infrastructure development along the way.

And imagine a very dumb person reading that book, unable to really absorb any of the facts, but at least understanding that the world is a place with land and ocean, and the ocean is very big and blue in color, and most of the countries and cities are on the part with the land.

That is the level at which I understood Quantum Computing Since Democritus. I didn’t get as much as was in it, but more than nothing.

I think the biggest thing I got was – I had always thought of the physicists’ God as a basically benevolent guy who fine tunes constants to create a world capable of both astounding complexity and underlying simplicity.

The vision I got from Democritus was of a God who was single-mindedly obsessed with enforcing a couple of rules about certain types of information you are not allowed to have under any circumstances. Some of these rules I’d already known about. You can’t have information from outside your light cone. You can’t have information about the speed and position of a particle at the same time. Others I hadn’t thought about as much until reading Democritus. Information about when a Turing machine will halt. Information about whether certain formal systems are consistent. Precise information about the quantum state of a particle. The reason God hasn’t solved world poverty yet is that He is pacing about feverishly worried that someone, somewhere, is going to be able to measure the quantum state of a particle too precisely, and dreaming up new and increasingly bizarre ways He can prevent that from happening.

Aaronson goes one level deeper than most of the other popular science writers I know and speculates on why the laws of physics are the way they are. Sometimes this is the elegance and complexity route – in his chapter on quantum physics, he argues that quantum probabilities are the squares of amplitudes because if the laws of physics were any other way – the fourth power of amplitudes, or whatever – it would fail to preserve certain useful mathematical properties. But in other cases, it’s back to Obsessive God – the laws of physics are carefully designed to preserve the rules about what information you are and aren’t allowed to have.

Aaronson tries to tie his own specialty, computational complexity theory, into all of this. It’s hard for me to judge how successful he is. The few times he tries to tie it into areas of philosophy I know something about – like free will – I’m not too impressed. But I could be misunderstanding him.

But once again, you get the feeling that computational complexity is about what information God will and won’t let you have. It’s a little less absolute – more “you can’t have this information without doing the full amount of work” rather than a simple no – but it seems like the same principle. There are a bunch of situations in the book where Aaronson takes something we don’t really know that much about and says it has to be a certain way, because if it were any other way, it could be used to solve NP problems in polynomial time, and there’s no way God’s going to let us do that.

Aaronson ties it all together in a very interesting way – with his story of how Australian Actresses Are Plagiarizing My Quantum Mechanics Lectures To Sell Printers. He tells the story of how a printer company wanted to make a pun on “more intelligent model of printer”, so they made a commercial with intelligent models in the form of fashion models talking about quantum mechanics. And the particular quantum mechanics statement they made was a plagiarized quote from a Scott Aaronson lecture. And upon thinking about it, Aaronson decided that the quote they had chosen at random was in fact the thesis statement that tied together everything he believed and was working on. The model had said:

But if quantum mechanics isn’t physics in the usual sense — if it’s not about matter, or energy, or waves, or particles — then what is it about? From my perspective, it’s about information and probabilities and observables, and how they relate to each other.

That seems like as good a summary as any of Democritus, and a pretty good description of what I got out of it. I may not be as smart as Scott Aaronson, but on my good days I am right up there with Australian fashion models.

A list of passages I highlighted in my copy for being interesting, funny, or enlightening:

Can we prove there’s no program to solve the halting problem? This is what Turing does. His key idea is not even to try to analyze the internal dynamics of such a program, supposing it existed. Instead he simply says, suppose by way of contradiction that such a program P exists. Then we can modify P to produce a new program P’ that does the following. Given another program Q as its input, P':

1) Runs forever if Q halts given its own code as input, or
2) Halts if Q runs forever given its own code as input

Now we just feed P’ its own code as input. By the conditions above, P’ will run forever if it halts, or halt if it runs forever. Therefore, P’ – and by implication P – can’t have existed in the first place.

I…I suddenly understand what the halting problem is. And there is a short proof of it that makes total sense to me. This is a completely new experience.

Oracles were apparently first studied by Turing, in his 1938 PhD thesis. Obviously anyone who could write a whole thesis about these fictitious entities would have to be an extremely pure theorist, someone who wouldn’t be caught dead doing anything relevant. This was certainly true in Turing’s case – indeed, he spent the years after his PhD, from 1939 to 1943, studying certain abstruse symmetry transformations in a 26 letter alphabet

ಠ_ಠ

You can look at Deep Blue, the Robbins conjecture, Google, most recently Watson – and say that’s not really AI. That’s just massive search, helped along by clever programming. Now this kind of talk drives AI researchers up a wall. They say: if you told someone in the 1960s that in 30 years we’d be able to beat the world grandmaster at chess, and asked if that would count as AI, they’d say of course it’s AI. But now that we know how to do it, it’s no longer AI – it’s just search.

The third thing that annoys me about the Chinese Room argument is the way it gets so much mileage from a possibly misleading choice of imagery, or, one might say, by trying to sidestep the entire issue of computational complexity purely through clever framing. We’re invited to imagine someone pushing around slips of paper with zero understanding or insight, much like the doofus freshmen who write (a + b)^2 = a^2 + b^2 on their math tests. But how many slips of paper are we talking about! How big would the rule book have to be, and how quickly would you have to consult it, to carry out an intelligent Chinese conversation in anything resembling real time? If each page of the rule book corresponded to one neuron of a native speaker’s brain, then probably we’d be talking about a “rule book” at leas the size of the Earth, its pages searchable by a swarm of robots traveling at close to the speed of light. When you put it that way, maybe it’s not so hard to imagine this enormous Chinese-speaking entity that we’ve brought into being might have something we’d be prepared to call understanding or insight.

This is a really clever counterargument to Chinese Room I’d never heard before. Philosophers are so good at pure qualitative distinctions that it’s easy to slip the difference between “guy in a room” and “planet being processed by lightspeed robots” under the rug.

Many people’s anti-robot animus is probably a combination of two ingredients – the directly experienced certainty that they’re conscious – that they perceive sounds, colors, etc – and the belief that if they were just a computation, then they could not be conscious in this way. For people who think this way, granting consciousness to a robot seems strangely equivalent to denying that one is conscious oneself.

This is actually a pretty deep way of looking at it.

My contention in this chapter is that quantum mechanics is what you would inevitably come up with if you started from probability theory, and then said, let’s try to generalize it so that the numbers we used to call “probabilities” can be negative numbers. As such, the theory could have been invented by mathematicians in the nineteenth century without any input from experiment. It wasn’t, but it could have been. And yet, with all the structures mathematicians studied, none of them came up with quantum mechanics until experiment forced it on them.

Aaronson’s explanation of quantum mechanics is a lot like Eliezer’s explanation of quantum mechanics, in that they both start by saying that the famous counterintuitiveness of the subject is partly because people choose to teach it in a backwards way in order to mirror the historical progress of understanding. I’m sure Eliezer mentioned it many times, but I didn’t really get the understanding of amplitudes as potentially negative probability-type-things until I read Aaronson.

And that’s a perfect illustration of why experiments are necessary in the first place! More often than not, the only reason we need experiments is that we’re not smart enough. After the experiment has been done, if we’ve learned anything worth knowing at all, then we hope we’ve learned why the experiment wasn’t necessary to begin with – why it wouldn’t have made sense for the universe to be any other way. But we’re too dumb to figure it out ourselves

Compare: Einstein’s Arrogance, Negative Creativity.

Quantum mechanics does offer a way out [the philosophical puzzle about whether you “survive” a teleportation where a machine scans you on an atomic level, radios the data to Mars, another machine on Mars makes an atom-for-atom copy of you, and then the original is destroyed]. Suppose some of the information that made you you was actually quantum information. Then, even if you were a thoroughgoing materialist, you could still have an excellent reason not to use the teleportation machine – because, as a consequence of the No-Cloning Theorem, no such machine could possibly work as claimed

This is fighting the hypothetical a little, but maybe in a productive way.

[Bayesianism] is one way to do it, but computational learning theory tells us that it’s not the only way. You don’t need to start out with an assumption about a probability distribution over the hypothesis. You can make a worst-case assumption about the hypothesis and then just say that you’d like to learn any hypothesis in the concept class, for any sample distribution, with high probability over the choice of samples. In other words, you can trade the Bayesians’ probability distribution over hypotheses for a probability distribution over sample data.

I hear a bunch of people telling me Bayesianism isn’t everything, it’s the only thing – and another bunch of people telling me it’s one useful tool in an entire bag of them. I didn’t understand enough of the book’s chapter on computational learning to gain too much insight here, but I will tick off one more name as being on the “one useful tool” side. Also, it makes me angry that Scott Aaronson knows so much about computational learning theory. He already knows lots of complicated stuff about computers, quantum physics, set theory, and philosophy. Part of me wants to get angry: WHY IS ONE PERSON ALLOWED TO BE SO SMART? But I guess it’s more like how I know more than average about history, literature, geography, etc. I guess if you have high math ability and some intellectual curiosity, you end up able to plug it into everything pretty effortlessly. Don’t care though. Still jealous.

Imagine there’s a very large population of people in the world, and that there’s a madman. What the madman does is, he kidnaps ten people and puts them in a room. He then throws a pair of dice. If the dice land snake-eyes (two ones) then he murders everyone in the room. If the dice do not land snake-eyes, then he releases everyone, then kidnaps 100 new people. He now sodes the same thing: he rolls two dice; if they land snake-eyes, he kills everyone, and if they don’t land snake-eyes, then he releases them and kidnaps 1000 people. He keeps doing this until he gets snake-eyes, at which point he’s done. So now, imagine that you’ve been kidnapped. Codnitioned on that fact, how likely is it that you’re going to die? One answer is that the dice have a 1/36 chance of landing snake eyes, so you should only be a “little bit” worried (considering). A second reflection you could make is to consider, of people who enter the room, what the fraction is of people who ever get out. About 8/9 of the people who ever go into the room will die.

This interested me because it is equivalent to the Anthropic Doomsday conjecture and I’d never heard this phrasing of it before.

Finally, if we want to combine the anthropic computation idea with the Doomsday Argument, then there’s the Adam and Eve puzzle. Suppose Adam and Eve are the first two observers, and that they’d like to solve an instance of an NP-complete problem, say, 3-SAT. To do so, they pick a random assignment, and form a very clear intention beforehand that if the assignment happens to be satisfying, they won’t have any kids, whereas if the assignment is not satisfying, then they will go forth and multiply. Now let’s assume SSA. Then, conditioned on having chosen an unsatisfying assignment, how likely is it that they would be an Adam and Eve in the first place, as opposed to one of the vast number of future observers? Therefore, conditioned upon the fact that they are the first two observers, the SSA predicts that, with overwhelming probability, they will pick a satisfying assignment.

And the Lord saw Eve and said “What are you doing?”. And Eve said “I am forming an intention not to reproduce if I generate a solution to an NP complete problem, as part of an experiment in anthropic computation”. And the Lord asked “Who told you this?” And Eve said “It was the serpent who bade me compute, for he told me if I did this I would be as God, knowing subgraph isomorphism and 3SAT.” Then the Lord cast them forth from the Garden, because He was Information Theoretic God and preventing people from screwing with complexity classes is like His entire shtick.

I like to engage skeptics for several reasons. First of all, because I like arguing. Second, often I find that the best way to come up with new results is to find someone who’s saying something that seems clearly, manifestly wrong to me, and then try to think of counterarguments. Wrong claims are a fertile source of research ideas.

I said something almost exactly the same on Facebook a few days ago when Brienne asked how to generate good ideas.

There’s a joke about a planet full of people who believe in anti-induction: if the sun has risen every day in the past, then today, we should expect that it won’t. As a result, these people are all starving and living in poverty. Someone visits the planet and tells them, “Hey, why are you still using this anti-induction philosophy? You’re living in horrible poverty!” They answer, “Well, it never worked before.”

ಠ_ಠ