This is a silly question and contains spoilers for Deep Space Nine, Season 7.
So late in the season, there’s an episode where the new Ezri Dax discusses the Klingon Empire with Worf and points out that despite all their talk about being proud & honorable warriors, they’re actually a corrupt aristocracy which is barely functional and basically evil. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as886JnsjtQ
Now this goes back to at least TNG, but also most of DS9. Does anyone know if this was long laid plan, or late realization that what was being said and what was being done didn’t match up?
Also, just a comment on fiction, this scene actually made a LOT of earlier scenes/episodes better for me, because there wasn’t a show-tell contradiction, there was someone lying to themselves and others. I’m struggling to think of other examples of scenes which have that effect.
Also, just a comment on fiction, this scene actually made a LOT of earlier scenes/episodes better for me, because there wasn’t a show-tell contradiction, there was someone lying to themselves and others
This is similar to the “hanging a lampshade on it” trope, where a character will point out an inconsistency or plot hole, even if not specifically addressed (Like, hypothetically, “Too bad we could fly into Mordor on Eagles, Mr Frodo.” “Ha, keep dreaming Sam”) You feel better knowing that the inconsistency is intentional and not just the author failing to communicate properly, though that’s a little different in a work with multiple writers and producers.
In this case, I think Picard was aghast at the Klingon political system and the Federations need to accomodate it back with Whorf was exiled early in the TNG run.
Hang on a Lampshade is almost it. That shows that the writer sees the problem, which makes things better in that I’m not trying to pretend it doesn’t exist. In this case, however, the fictional universe recognizes it as a problem and then goes on to attempt to fix it (I’m not sure how convinced I am that replacing the current corrupt leader with a single relatively non-corrupt leader will actually fix it, but the show ends before that question can be resolved).
In this case, I think Picard was aghast at the Klingon political system and the Federations need to accomodate it back with Whorf was exiled early in the TNG run.
I think so as well, but it’s hard to tell because no one was really willing to push the point with Worf at that juncture, for obvious reasons.
It wasn’t a long laid plan, but Ron Moore wrote sins of the farther (The TNG episode where Worf gets his discommendation), became known as the klingon guy, went on to either write or substantially contribute to virtually all of the worf/klingon episodes on TNG and DS9. So that arc, even if not planned out in advance, does really represent one writer’s vision of the empire with a fair bit of consistency.
I don’t think they needed anything to retroactively explain the contradiction. Despite being aliens, Klingon politics is so very human. You got the true believer(notably an outsider), the truly contemptible, and then most of them are somewhere in the middle. They talk about their ideals, and they really believe them, but they’ll often betray them to get ahead. And everyone is impulsive and quick to do something stupid but sometimes they stop bickering to unite against a common enemy. That kind of mess is politics 101.
Eh, I’m not sure. It’s been a while since I sat down and worked my way through them all (which I’ve been considering doing again, at least TNG and DS9 in prep for Picard), but my recollection was that there was quite a lot of acceptance of the Klingon definition of themselves.
That may be more a fandom/expanded universe thing though.
I remember a dissonance between A: the characters accepting the Klingon definition of themselves and B: all Klingons not named Worf or Kang so blatantly failing to meet that standard.
My read was that Klingon society nominally valorized qualities like honor and, um, valor, but that it was difficult to ascend to leadership and simultaneously maintain those qualities.
Worf, who grew up outside the Empire, had a naive and uncomplicated view of those qualities, and the dissonance between his beliefs and Gowron’s corruption led to the Empire finally taking its place as a docile client-state to the Federation.
(Quark’s “root beer” speech might be the best thing about the series, although I have a sentimental attachment to “especially the lies.”)
@J Mann,
I haven’t been able to find the scene on YouTube, but IIRC Quark’s root beer and the Federation speech was lifted almost verbatim from the 1961 cold war Berlin comedy 1,2,3 with a Soviet agent speaking of Coca-Cola and Americans.
Great film directed by Billy Wilder and starring James Carney.
I can accept that a Christian is sincere in his beliefs without being surprised when they lie or steal.
Remember that the Klingon situation was always delicate, so it’s not like Picard could go full lecture mode on them. And of course, Worf saw Klingon culture through a very different perspective.
Right, but if every Christian you observe save one, regularly lies or steals, would you accept the self-definition of Christianity as a culture of honesty?
Nearly every Christian lies, as do all people. So the question would be whether I think Christians have a culture of honesty. But I’m not sure exactly what counts as “culture of honesty” and what doesn’t. It does seem to be some kind of motivating force, but yeah, it’s clear many people can’t be bothered to care. When I watch a Martin Scorsese movie, his characters display this tension between sincere religiosity and their lifestyle with a stunning lack of self-awareness. But those characters are a reflection of reality. If no characters points out this absurdity, I don’t consider it a flaw with the movie. And “honor” is much more nebulous than something like honesty.
I would be interested in everyone’s comments on the following question/proposition:
When is separation of a region from a nation-state supportable?
Imagine the following idealized thought experiment, from which messy pratical
details have been removed, to allow us to focus on the pure case.
A the population of a certain region of a country, unanimously and as a matter of its
considered, settled, judgement, wants to separate and found a sovereign nation.
Doing so will pose no economic nor military/security threats. Problems of joint
property, liability for debts, pensions — all will be settled with serious inconvenience
to the country which is losing territory.
It seems to me that under such (idealized) conditions, the right to leave and form a
sovereign state is a fundamental democratic right. It’s a logical extension of the logic
of democracy. (Note that I’m speaking about the right, not the wisdom, of separation.)
There’s also the question of preservation of the rights of former citizens of the larger country, in the newly separate bit. Now, accepting your premise that they are unanimous (and not in the ‘we asked all the voters, after we’d successfully restricted the vote to me and the other five people in this room’) a lot of this is resolved and I would tend to agree that it is the right of this region to withdraw, though there will be edge cases that need to be addressed in negotiation.
Always, assuming that the separation leaves both states as viable, independent entities. Why should any group of people have a right to force others into a single polity?
I don’t really know how to justify this, but my instinct is to say that, while your idealized case is not necessarily supportable, it’s not necessarily _not_ supportable either. Whether I’d support it would depend on the specifics which you’ve abstracted away. In my mind there’s a wide difference between (for example) “we want to secede because you conquered us recently/your legal system denies us rights” and “we want to secede because we are a distinct ethnic group and this gives us the right of self-determination.”
(Also, not really important, but do you mean “settled with serious inconvenience to the seceding region” or “settled withOUT serious inconvenience to the larger nation”? “Settled with serious inconvenience to the country which is losing territory” seems to bias the abstract case towards not allowing secession.)
Be strong enough (in economic leverage, political leverage, and force of arms) to make it stick against efforts at economic sanctions and/or conquest by your neighbors/former state. And it’s worth noting that in practice, economic and political leverage tends to really mean “Make a third party with sufficient force of arms use force or the threat of force on your behalf”, so to reduce it even further:
Be strong enough to defeat (via insurgency or conventional war) attempts to conquer/reconquer you, or be able to convince someone else strong enough to defeat those people to act in your interests.
Comrade Lysenko has put it well. But let’s not go there, although of course as adults we all know that old Bismarck was right when he said that all serious questions facing mankind are finally settled not by parliamentary majorities, but by blood and iron.
Democracy isn’t a God-given thing with sacred powers. It’s just a system that seems to work, in its very various implementations. Also, it’s very much not about just voting, but about rules, institutions, culture and so on. Two wolves and a sheep voting what to have for dinner is valid majority voting, but I wouldn’t bet on the welfare of the sheep.
To translate this to your example – a region voting to secede may or may not be a good idea. For an obvious counter-example: the 90% richest parts of the country could always vote to secede from the poorest 10%. Repeat until you are left with just London.
There are also other considerations. For example, it may not be “just”, for various reasons.
The string of secession votes we’re seeing lately mostly (all?) happen in EU, where, to be perfectly honest, it’s mostly a matter of labeling. People, money and trade can still move freely regardless of the vote.
I think in every real world case, tribal identity will trump the sort of economic motivations you suggest. The economics may determine some swing votes in a referendum, but if there isn’t a large base who emotionally identify as a nation distinct from the larger existing state, as in Scotland or Catalonia, the movement will never get off the ground. And in every case where such a sense of national identity exists and there is evident widespread desire for independence, it is appropriate to determine the matter in some democratic way, probably most often a referendum.
Usually, that is the case. The Selfish Gene wants to be ruled by its near replicants. But … consider the Americans. Consider the Confederacy. Consider the South Koreans and the Taiwanese.
My own reading of news from America, and my experience on various on-line forums, is that the hatred that exists between Left and Right in America today is at least equal to Hutus vs Tutsis, or Sinhalese vsTamils, or Greeks vs Turks, or Sunni vs Shia. And if the two American cultures were geographically separated even more than they are now .. if there were a cluster of 90% Red states surrounded by a ring of 90% Blue ones… then perhaps separation would begin to move out of the realm of the ridiculous and unthinkable into the realm of a possible solution that would remove the two sides from each others’ detested embrace.
With Scotland, just speaking from experience, there is a large base who emotionally identify as a nation distinct from England. It’s more a difficult questions of whether the structure of the UK is enough to express than within the existing framework. Arguably economic motivations were the main detractor from the independence argument here, and that’s part of why we voted No. If they’d had a better counterargument on the currency and were realistic about economic prospects i know a lot more people would have felt comfortable going with their heart instead of their head.
Yes, I think that was Slovenia’s motive in getting quickly out of the Yugoslav republic — they didn’t want to keep paying for the Albanians’ welfare. Similarly, Northern Italy has a very haughty attitude towards the South of Italy. And when the Protestants of Northern Ireland looked like making trouble over the Good Friday agreement, I noted a very chilly attitude towards them at dinner parties in the South of England — not pro-IRA, but “Who needs these people anyway?”.
I would urge the two new states to have a total free trade and free movement agreement, but of course they would be sovereign states, few of which take my advice.
Just using your example above with London, it would be fantastic if London seceded!
Then the rest of the UK could charge them 500% tariffs on food imports and electricity and everything else that London seems to take in from the rest of the country, instead of hoping for some outward investment in return but never getting it. If London had it’s own currency then when people try to take their money out to move back to wherever they came from/send we could see a real exchange rate effect.
I’m hope you’re not serious, but London could just buy everything (including electricity, if really needed) from somewhere else.
Plus, I doubt they’re “taking” anything as much as “buying”. If London would become a glassy crater today, most of the areas around it would be bankrupt in a month for lack of a market to sell their products.
Always, given a sufficiently strong majority of the population of that region agrees, if we believe democratic principles have meaning.
That said, I would argue that this is an entirely separate question from matters of ownership of property, settlement of liability, etc.
And of course, if the reasons for the separation is particularly acrimonious, it seems entirely right to me for the nation-state to say “Yes, of course, Ambassarod, we recognize the Sovereign State of Regionia. Congratulations, Ambassador. By the way, as of noon today, a state of war exists between NationState-istan and Regionia.”
This seems like one of those things that follows intellectual fashions, over generations. At one point, self-determination was not a thing – subjects belonged to whatever ruler had most recently conquered the place they lived, unless they picked up and left [successfully]. Rulers swapped territories with no more concern for the inhabitants than a couple of fashonable ladies trading hats. And nobody had a problem with this, conceptually.
They might find some particular ruler to be a “bad king”, and another to be a “good king”, and prefer to have a better ruler. They might rebel against the “bad king” – or flee to another ruler’s territory. But the only thing wrong with England owning half of France was that the French king also wanted that terrain. And even later on Alsace-Lorraine got traded/conquered back and forth like a prize for winning a military victory. What the inhabitants wanted only mattered to the extent that they might actively make trouble.
In the first part of the 20th century, regional self-determination was something that victors in wars used to break up empires – not something that applied to areas controlled by the victors before the war, or for that matter areas the victors decided to claim as spoils. Before that, part of the US fought a very bloody war to force the other part to remain “united” with it – in spite of traditions of democracy etc.
It seems to me that the main justification for some areas being political units and others being split among many larger units, or incorporated into some larger unit, is always a mix of naked power, and tradition. Currently liberal democracies occassionally allow seperatist referenda – but for every UK/Scotland there’s a Spain/Basque country. And precious few national divorces have come about as a result of these – usually countries split after and because of bloodshed.
Of course it’s also true that nothing is ever unanimous. Your thought experiment doesn’t happen in real life. But even if it did, I’d expect the containing country to insist on keeping the breakaway region, unless the breakaway region was also costing the country a lot more than it was producing – with production including such things as “national pride” in the containing country.
Would that be “right”? Frankly, I’d love to see people who consistently made decisions on grounds of what was right, rather than what was to their benefit, but I’m not expecting to see that often, or at the aggregate level of nations. Mostly they invent morals and ethics that support what they wanted already 🙁
Thanks for all the replies, of the high quality to which I have become accustomed here.
Now … move away from the pure case and appproach ugly reality: not everyone in the break-away wants to leave. Assuming you support the right of separation in the pure case, what percentage of the population should be able to excercise a veto on separation?
Assume all else remains the same: full rights for ‘remainers’, no negative security or economic issues.
My own rough rule of thumb is: 1/3. That is, for separation you need a 2/3 majority of those voting.
The reason I’m asking is I would like to get an idea of the thinking of the intelligentsia on this issue. I’m putting together a case for the future break-up of the United States, along political lines, and am interested in how people think about territorial integrity.
There is an apparently near-unanimous case; Norway’s vote to leave its union with Sweden. Though in that case the Swedes seemed to be more trying to push them away than keep them, and anyway for lizardman constant reasons I find reports of the vote tally hard to believe (I don’t know if any scholars have questioned them, or if anyone was suspicious at the time). And in any event I suppose someone could quibble that the Sweden/Norway union wasn’t really a nation state.
Yes … the Swedish/Norweigian split was always held up by Lenin and others as an example of where the Right of SD avoided national clashes, and allowed the workers to get down to class warfare. The real problem arises when you have two peoples who are geographically interpenetrated. Then, the question becomes, who gets what. And the ultima ratio regnum rules.
This seems obvious to me. Of course, I come from a country that venerates a separation substantially less popularly supported, where attacks on loyalists were somewhat of a byword, so of course I would.
Shhhhhh!!!!! We’re not supposed to talk about what happened to Loyalists, or to the property they left behind when they fled to Canada (I think the latter issue was raised once by people addressing the lost property of Cuban exiles now in the US, their argument being tu quoque.)
I am all for it as long as people have open borders to move between the new states.
If you don’t like the new state, you should be able to move out (I am ignoring here those costs), and if you like the new country, you should be able to move in.
Exasctly. I always thought that was part of the genius of federalism. Mississippi can make homosexuality illegal, California can make it compulsory, and if you don’t like it, move.
The problem in America since very early is that has never been acceptable to the strong horse.
When the slaveholders are in power, you get Dred Scott, when the abolitionists are in power, you get the Civil War.
So when liberals were weak on gay marriage, the federal government couldn’t stop Massachusetts, and now that they’re strong, the feds need to quash Alabama.
The right has the exact same set of principles on different issues.
Absolutely. It’s a case of whose Ox is Gored. I recall growing up in Texas in the 1950s, when it was liberals who defended free speech, the right of a Commie physics professor to teach physics, etc. and it was the Right who wanted loyality oaths, who did an Anti-Fa-raised-to-the-fifth-power when the CP tried to hold a concert at Peekskill. Although … Hubert Humphrey, the Bernie Sanders of his day, did author the Communist Control Act of 1953 which outlawed the CP.
Plumber: I’m an Ancient-of-Days, so have had more time to snap up unconsidered trifles than many others have. And I’m an ex-Marxist (Trotzkyite variant) so I know something about the history of the American Left. Peekskill ought to be rubbed in the faces of made familiar to every free-speech-loving conservative, so that they (we) don’t get too self-righteous when condemning anti-Fa and campus snowflakes who attack Charles Murray etc. America recovered from that illness, but it didn’t give us immunity, and in fact the second time around looks like being fatal.
I find it hard to think of reasons against it. I’d be interested to see if anyone here does oppose it (so far all the responses seem to agree).
One issue (that I think you should address per your comment below about motivations) would be migration rights across the border and how the seceding state handles the rights of people who were born in it but now live in the parent state (i.e. broader issues about citizenship). E.g. I’m British and have English and Scottish heritage – if Scotland were to secede (which is possible in the next 5 years), would I be able to obtain Scottish citizenship.
There’s also an issue regarding who gets to vote in a possible referendum. When Scotland voted against independence in 2014, English, EU and Commonwealth citizens resident in Scotland could vote, but Scottish people living in England could not. That seems a bit weird and complicates the idealised conditions you set out.
If I were advising the Council of Secession I would first advise them not to use that name, given its unfortunate connotations. And then I would advise them to bend over backwards to make every conceivable concession to ‘remainers’.
The only really tricky part would be immigration rights. Would the new state still be required to admit as citizens, everyone that the ‘mother state’ recognizes as citizens. I would argue yes, for the first five or ten years, but after that, mother-state would-be immigrants are treated like everyone else.
As a limiting case, I certainly don’t think that individual households should have the right to secede and from sovereign states. I mean, I don’t have a moral problem with it or anything, but as a practical matter I don’t think you can form much of a government if you allow it.
Yes, there has to be a practical limit. As the world economy changes, this limit might get smaller and smaller, as — hopefully — national boundaries become less and less significant. In the meantime, I would be pretty liberal in my calculations for who is ‘big enough’ to run their own state, i.e. to govern themselves.
I wonder if the PolySci people have ever taken up this question? If not, it might make an interesting topic for a Master’s thesis, maybe even a PhD.
In a sense, allowing self-determination is just running the film of nation-building in reverse, as many nation-states were consolidated out of previously-autonomous tribes, not without violence in many cases.
I haven’t raised this out of idle speculation. I think something like this might be key to avoiding some very nasty developments in the America that is coming.
It seems to me that under such (idealized) conditions, the right to leave and form a sovereign state is a fundamental democratic right. It’s a logical extension of the logic of democracy.
Depends on what political units you take to be pertinent to the question.
Let’s assume that a majority of the population of the country as a whole does not want the region to secede. Then its secession is not the “democratic” outcome from the perspective of the nation as a whole. So you’re talking about a (super)-majority of a particular subset of the country.
But how is this subset selected? What is a legitimate delineation? What if I drew lines to enclose a particular highly gerrymandered district in which support for secession was high. Why should the nation accept this partition?
I look at it from a mathematical perspective. We are considering a two-dimensional surface on which we associate two numbers with every point (density of support for secession and remain), and we are considering partitions of this space such that the integral of the first density exceeds the second. We can partition it however we like — clearly there will be rather a lot of possible outcomes.
So we must restrict ourselves to only considering certain kinds of partitions as “legitimate”. What standards should we use? Obvious candidates are things like contiguity, compactness, historical boundaries, differences in culture or language, and so forth.
But if you want to argue from democracy, it seems to me that the only case in which a solid conclusion exists is that of mutual affirmation — the nation as a whole must support secession, and the region itself, preferably by a supermajority. The supermajority requirement can be seen as a practical way of guaranteeing that any reasonable partition of the region would also support secession (with high probability), which seems a desirable thing. Otherwise you would get situations where region X wants to secede, the people of country Y (X in Y) agree. But the people in town Z in region X *don’t* want to secede.
In the end democracy is not a cure all. You have to decide when the vote is held, who can vote, and so forth. Look at the bloody failure of popular sovereignty in settling the question of the western frontier in the run up to the American civil war (which itself featured secession, and was settled by force of arms — incidentally, the principle of self-determination in international affairs owes much to Wilson, himself a Southerner, probably not coincidentally).
A very interesting reply. In real life, the criteria you raise are usually decided by appealing to national identifies: that is, the secessionists will attract legitimacy to their cause by being of a different national identity from the people from whom they wish to secede. Then we can argue about just what difference is difference enough: Lenin had Stalin write a whole pamphlet on this, and the question of ‘what is a nation’ occupied Marxists for decades: the CPUSA applied it to American Blacks, and you can Google ‘the Black Belt’ and find a proposed Black Nation, which cnsisted of the Southern counties where Blacks were a majority. I don’t think this insane idea lasted more than a few years.
The argument that what is ‘democratic’ depends on how you draw the boundaries of the demos is, of course, the ‘tyranny of the majority’ question in disguise. The majority of French citizens considered Algeria an integral part of France. For a while, it might have been the case that the majority of inhabitants of North America — north of hte Rio Grande that is, considered that Canada should be added to the acquisitions of the USA.
I think it’s like the question of at what age should we be allowed to vote, or have sex with someone fifty years older than we are. It’s necessarily somewhat arbitrary.
At any rate, I do hope the future secessionists from the US draw boundaries as sensitively as possible, even allowing Kaliningrads for ‘remainers’. It’s the fate of the latter that really decide whether secession is peaceful or not — when leavers and remainers of different tribes (best word I can find to encompass ‘nations’, ‘religions’, ‘races’) and are geographically highly interpenetrated — then you have trouble.
Wise secessionists will make every possible accommodation to remainers, including things like (subsidized) house swaps with ‘leavers’ in the original homeland. Maybe, when/if this question appears on the historic agenda in the US, we can avoid bloodshed.
It seems to me that under such (idealized) conditions, the right to leave and form a
sovereign state is a fundamental democratic right. It’s a logical extension of the logic
of democracy.
It’s not clear to me that the right of succession has any direct relation to democracy. If we take democracy to the the “will of the majority”, then the question of succession would need to also survey how people who lived outside that particular region would have voted. Because it’s possible that more people in total opposed succession, despite all of the people within a subset of that population supporting it. If that were the case, then succession would be an anti-democratic outcome.
So to answer your question: I am agnostic on the question of their succession until I get more information.
This is really interesting to me, because it seems non-intuitive.
Do you think it would be democratic for China to hold a referendum on whether Mongolia should be part of their country? Basically any majority would swamp the entire population of that country.
It would indeed be the democratic outcome. If you want to make an argument against it, you should point to something other than the will of the majority.
This ends with the result that no democratic outcome has ever really occurred, which is sort of odd to me. I mean, China didn’t vote on whether the South should leave the Union either, and their votes would’ve swamped both parties (and been hilarious).
Note: Not a serious argument, more of an interesting thought. I’m not fervently democratic at all.
While its true that no maximally democratic outcome has ever occurred (a world-wide vote), we can still compare whether a vote is more democratic than another, comparatively speaking.
E.g., we can say that the US became more democratic when African-Americans were allowed to vote, but an even more democratic process was theoretically possible (giving women the ability to vote).
This makes me kind of want to rank things by “democraticness” in silly ways. Brexit is more democratic than Scottish independence, but less democratic than if the EU had been allowed to vote on it.
Also, should you rank it by percentage of total populace or raw numbers? Brexit is more democratic than Switzerland has EVER BEEN!
The issue at hand, is that people too often use “democratic” to mean things other than “will of the majority”. Like, I get what doug1943 was hinting at, that succession is comparable with certain liberal values such as “consent of the governed” or “individual sovereignty”.
Have you ever read an article that’s like “X country isn’t a democracy, because they don’t have free speech”. It’s the same thing: the term “democracy” being used in place of “liberal values”, resulting in confusion.
In general there is not one “the democratic outcome”, because the result of any particular vote varies according to a number of variables, including when the vote is held, who holds it, what people are allowed to vote, and other conditions.
As I noted above, the lead up to the American civil war well illustrates the limitations of democracy. This is apart from the secession crisis itself (incidentally, many states that did vote to secede had regions with strong (probably majority) unionist sentiment, and one state (Virginia) actually split over secession).
While its true that no maximally democratic outcome has ever occurred (a world-wide vote), we can still compare whether a vote is more democratic than another, comparatively speaking.
E.g., we can say that the US became more democratic when African-Americans were allowed to vote, but an even more democratic process was theoretically possible (giving women the ability to vote).
As much as I’d like to make a meme of Maximally Democratic Man (he’s a Victorian African-American captioned “Where da women at?!”), I’m not sure this can logically hold.
It would be more democratic to give women the vote, but then it would be even more democratic to invade Canada and make its population American voters, even if they’re an equally-democratic separate population.
It would be more democratic to give women the vote, but then it would be even more democratic to invade Canada and make its population American voters
The “invading Canada” part is unnecessary, if your goal is to allow Canadians to vote in US elections.
@Eponymous
So a large nation in which only a privileged majority can vote is more “democratic” than a smaller nation with full democratic participation?
But the smaller nation doesn’t have “full democratic participation”, because it’s excluding a very sizable chunk of people: those who are not citizens.
“Citizen” is equally as arbitrary an exclusion category as “white” or “female”.
No that’s still facile, unless you’re also asserting that I am, in fact, “affected” by what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms and should get a say in what’s allowed
Oh, but you are in fact, “affected” by what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Their choice precludes you from partaking in a sex act that you might desire, and the State uses coercion to prevent you from doing so. “It’s coercion all-the-way-down,” so we need to finally start talking about what the optimal sex-distribution system is!
unless you’re also asserting that I am, in fact, “affected” by what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms and should get a say in what’s allowed
“This doesn’t affect you” is an incorrect argument for any occasion.
If that’s the only thing keeping you from going full-on sexual authoritarian, I would first stop to consider if there are any other reasons why the state might not want to regulate that behavior.
It could be that sex simultaneously affects other people, and is also best not to regulate.
@ControlsFreak
Their choice precludes you from partaking in a sex act that you might desire, and the State uses coercion to prevent you from doing so. “It’s coercion all-the-way-down,” so we need to finally start talking about what the optimal sex-distribution system is!
I mean, you’re mocking me but I’m right.
Cleanse your mind of liberalism and you will understand.
Cleanse your mind of liberalism and you will understand.
Liberalism and anti-liberalism mean a lot of things to a lot of people. You’re going to have to help me out a little bit. Why does the fact that Person A having sex with Person B at Time T prevents me from also having sex with Person B at Time T (even though I might want to) mean that we should jettison laws against rape?
Yikes … How did we get from Self-Determination to Consenting Adults? Via the confusion, as someone pointed out, of ‘democratic’ with ‘liberal’ or ‘liberal democratic’. This has been a meme (?) on the Old Right for a long time … back in the early 60s, you would see (in Texas anyway) bumper stickers with the slogan, ‘This is a Republic, not a Democracy’, which was a John Birch Society campaign at the time. Tyranny of the majority, limited government, super–majorities to amend the Constitution — we’ve been here before.
My own take on when it would be ‘wrong’ for an external majority to deny the right to secession to a geographically-compact minority would be when that act would deeply negatively affect the welfare of the majority. Here we begin to speak of self-interest, and the eternal problem that A’s rights may clash with B’s self-interest, so B is motivated to define his self-interest in terms of rights also.
Isn’t this the argument of those who believe that they have the right to shut down meetings on campus where the speaker might say something that would upset them? They have a right not to hear arguments from conservatives or libertarians.
May I thank everyone who has contributed their opinions here. I don’t think I could find a smarter group of people to run these ideas by.
Coming soon: a proposal to end the bitter political conflict within the US, by allowing part of it to secede.
Not bad faith. I genuinely don’t see how you get from [private property means A can’t use B’s stuff] to [we should jettison private property] and also not [private sexuality means A can’t use B’s junk] to [we should jettison private sexuality]. Please please please help me figure it out. I’m actually quite good at coming up with plausibility arguments in many aspects (including my professional life, which requires vague plausibility arguments when reviewing academic proposals), but I can’t see this one without some help. That’s part of why I asked you to define what liberal/anti-liberal means to you. You’re giving me literally zero help, literally zero indication of how any of this is supposed to work, and then yelling bad faith when I ask, “PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE TELL ME HOW THIS IS SUPPOSED TO WORK! I DESPERATELY WANT TO KNOW!” (Worse, you’ve told me that I’m basically right in interpeting you so far, with, “you’re mocking me but I’m right,” leaving an atrocious mess of ambiguity for how we get from Point A to Point B.)
It could be that sex simultaneously affects other people, and is also best not to regulate.
How?! What are the principles? How do we determine whether it’s best to abolish private property? In other words:
how you get from [private property means A can’t use B’s stuff] to [we should jettison private property] and also not [private sexuality means A can’t use B’s junk] to [we should jettison private sexuality]
You’ve gotta give me something. You’ve got to at least try.
A disjointed rant. I both love and hate my Industrial Engineers, but that’s only because I really hate everyone else.
Okay, so high level background, in two parts. You probably know all the stories about how crazy efficient Japanese firms are, how every employee has permission to stop everything on the line, how we all need to be Six Sigma and need to Kaizen and blah blah blah.
A lot of that is driven by your Industrial Engineers. The Wiki definition is:
Industrial engineering is an engineering profession that is concerned with the optimization of complex processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy and materials
Basically they try to make factories run better, not necessarily by designing machines, but by making processes run better. They are the kinds of guys that do time studies and try to figure out optimum placement of your arm in relation to the direction of the Moon and ask you to fill out a bunch Gannt/Ghant/Gennt/Gary charts about how your project is going.
They might try to patch machines, but their attitude is as follows (paraphrased from boss’ boss)
And when you’re having a world class production shift, you should stop, nail everything in place, and then start up again so nothing will change
We have a lot of them. A lot of them. They are everywhere throughout the whole organization. I never encountered an Industrial Engineer prior to working at a factory, and heard nothing but bad things prior to starting: my friends and family engineers basically don’t consider them “real” engineers. They don’t do math, they don’t design electrical systems, they don’t really design machines: they aren’t engineers as you might understand them.
But my god do they understand how to improve a goddam factory. Or, rather, they are the only people that care to improve a goddam factory.
I’ll relay a story from a former coworker, who worked at a food processing company that made….let’s say pizzas. And let’s say you have a production line that fires up the dough, just enough to parcook it to get out some of the nasties, and then it goes under a big cannon that shoots the dough full of tomato sauce.
For some odd reason, the cannon would misfire on every fifth pizza, and shoot tomato sauce all over the floor.
For years, no one really noticed or cared about this problem. It wasn’t until the Industrial Engineer saw it, stopped the line, and did a 5Y (why is this broken? Why is that broken? Why is that broken? Ask “why” at least 5 times in the hopes it leads to a correctable behavior) that they actually identified the problem and fixed it.
Our plant, and other plants, are full of stupid losses like misfiring tomato sauce cannons. People at my factory still tell me stories of how some management trainee right out of college improved several lines that have been there for 15 years. You’d think the people with decades of experience would have got these pretty close to optimum. Nah. Clearly, the guy shotgunning beers a year ago is our best option.
Plus, our Industrial Engineers are far more data-driven than anyone else on our team. There’s real benefit, especially around budget season, to data, because now we have historical trending going back years, right up to the point where the IE folk started running things.
So, why do I like our IE folk? Because no one else knows how to problem solve and run a business. It’s all tribal knowledge, duct tape, and a lot of luck. That’s good enough to keep a business going for quite a while, but it’s hell when you start running into problems, because no one knows how to prioritize and fix problems. I’d consider everything IEs do “common sense,” but apparently it’s not common at all.
So, why do I dislike IE? Jesus H, there’s no need to complicate everything!
For instance, if you don’t hit your production, there’s no immediate reason to get a damned meeting of 6 people together. Just go out to the production line and see what’s broke. You might need a more in-depth meeting to figure out how to fix what’s broke, but initial problem-solving shouldn’t be that damn hard.
What’s particularly annoying are those damn fish-bone diagrams, where you try to find everything that can possibly be wrong. Here’s the thing about manufacturing, everything that can go wrong is at least a little wrong, unless you’re doing some real precision stuff where tolerances are low. It’s just not worth the time or money to fix everything. So if you try to diagnose everything wrong with the line, you’re going to find a lot of problems. And most of them, we’ve already decided aren’t worth the time to fix.
Really, you need some rough idea of what baseline operations are, and when you aren’t performing to rate, an idea of what your general failure points are. You also need a plan to improve your baseline when capital becomes available, so you don’t have to brainstorm every year. All of this stuff should be documented and saved (another thing that Industrial Engineering likes, that Production doesn’t: record retention).
Plus, there is an assumption that a magical “standard” will fix everything. Let’s go back to what my industrial engineering boss’ boss said:
And when you’re having a world class production shift, you should stop, nail everything in place, and then start up again so nothing will change
That’s not how this works! That’s not how any of this works!
I’ll give an example. We have a production line with a couple different stations, with a central vacuum pulling dust from each station. Turns out, the vacuum pressure was too high, and actually damaging the product. We can’t actually turn down the vacuum, so we installed dampers to regulate the pressure.
Some Industrial Engineer had the bright idea to centerline each damper. Now, I am abusing the term “centerline,” but I am using it as the Engineer actually used it (and he didn’t use it the correct way AFAICT, but let’s ignore it). Basically, each damper had a line drawn it to show its exact position when we were having a world-class shift. So, theoretically, no more problems from the vacuum!
So what happens when one of the stations goes down?
Oops. Guess it wasn’t so simple to just set one uniform standard for every situation for all time.
Stuff like this irritates me. The solutions are one-size catch-all, and assumed to be permanent solutions. There’s also an obsession with standards, when standards need to be audited for them to really take. But there’s no concern about the effort it really takes to audit standards, so that all gets hand-waved away.
So ends my rant. We have a few weeks left to finish a budget, and our Industrial Engineers just finished updating all of our production estimate. Once we get a sales forecast (on Monday…hopefully….) we should be able to guess how many labor hours we need this year, which means we should also know how many labor dollars we need to spend. That clock is ticking, and it’s starting to sound like a bomb.
Sympathies. Sounds not dissimilar to being at the customers trying to figure out why your product is malfunctioning, with both sides pointing fingers at each other.
I’d say give it a shot. We have a bunch of people with IE backgrounds in our company. You can rise pretty far with relatively modest education.
I can only emphasize that you will be graded on your GSD. You need to take on projects and you need to complete them on time, or else no one will take you seriously. These IE guys, particularly the ones that advance, are very project focused. They are basically mini project managers.
Is the profession of industrial engineering in decline? I seem to remember hearing something about programs being closed at some colleges. I don’t remember what the symptom was, perhaps a lack of quality applicants or graduates having trouble finding relevant employment.
I am currently in my last year of undergrad, and this is pretty much exactly what I am studying. However, it isn’t what you’ll see on my degree, since as you said, it doesn’t exist as a department at the school I attend (or any of the schools I applied to). I don’t know if the need for the profession is decreasing, but for whatever reason the masters of credentialism seem to think so. I had to put together a double major in order to learn everything I wanted to and have had no trouble at all looking for work even so.
There’s a certain amount of detail orientation and desire for structure needed to do a job like that, and its failure mode is for the structure to take over while the meaning drains out.
In software, that leads to waterfall design. So eventually, the improvisor personality types who have an instinctual sense for where meaning lies (and whose failure modes are to never unpack their suitcases because who knows, maybe they’ll take another trip someday, and frequent existential crises) come up with extreme programming, which over time morphs into slavish devotion to the latest agile buzzword. It’s the circle of life.
What’s particularly annoying are those damn fish-bone diagrams, where you try to find everything that can possibly be wrong.
+1 on this, and fault trees for the win. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it is broke, start at the point where it is broke. What, immediately, is the cause for the break? The tomato-juice cannon is either being fired to command at the wrong time, or it is firing without being commanded. See if you can rule out one of those by, e.g., monitoring the command line to the tomato-juice cannon. Then go back one immediate step for each branch you haven’t pruned, adding a small number of sub-branches for possible immediate causes. Lather, rinse, repeat until you’ve got something you are willing to consider root cause.
Fishbones, listing everything that could possibly go wrong, er, is on the standardized list of things that often go wrong, and checking off each one without logic or common sense, are a recipe for wasted effort. Their one virtue is that they can be used by rote by people who aren’t experts in failure analysis, and guard against their carelessness missing something important. I’d think it would be a sign of professional incompetence for anyone calling themselves an “Industrial Engineer” to use such a thing.
And then there’s the abomination my old manager calls a “fishtree”, where someone makes a halfhearted attempt at a fault tree but insists on filling out all the branches before doing any pruning and uses their memory of a standard fishbone to lay out those branches.
In my experience, fishbone diagrams are a symptom of a classic failure mode, that being the “a smart person did a thing once, but we no longer have the smart person, so we are trying to get a bunch of stupid people to do the thing the smart person did by copying their methods”. Honestly, that’s not even a bad strategy, especially if you only have stupid people to work with. But it becomes a nightmare when a new smart person shows up, but can’t do the work their way because the organization is stuck in somebody else’s ways.
Did you ever read Cheaper By the Dozen? It’s the story of one of the founders of this kind of analysis, as told by two of his kids, the family being large enough that he applied his professional expertise to making the family work.
You are invited to describe how to reform English spelling. Do not dwell on the actual reforms themselves. There are many reasonable proposals. Instead, describe how to bring them about, as an institutional, political, and cultural matter.
Local (small country) spelling changes went like this:
– highest scientific forum said “now spelling is X”
– schools started teaching X
– television said “spelling is now X”.
This may work for english as well, with the biggest caveat that any change that hopes to be successful needs to start simultaneously in at least 3 major english speaking countries (UK, US and one other).
The US federal government tried to move the country to metric back in the seventies. The effort was broadly unpopular, and failed. Americans can be an ornery bunch.
Wait, why does it need to start in 3 countries at the same time? The weird British obsession with the letter u persists to this day. Your best option is definitely to start in the US and hope it spreads via osmosis to the rest of the Anglosphere.
The weird British obsession with the letter u persists to this day.
That’s why :)) Unless it gets enough momentum from the start…
On the plus side, in 20 years we’ll have enough specialized AI that we can all be using different spellings and have software auto-convert between them.
The following assumes you’re already president of the US and your party has a complying majority in both chambers of congress and in the supreme court.
Step 1: propaganda – using, on all avalaible channels, a wide network of bipartisan media personalities sympathetic to the idea of a spelling reform, run many regular documentaries, inquirries, op-eds, etc on various negative aspect of English spelling: the many exceptions, the etymological nonsenses, the cost of teaching such a complicated system, the wasted opportunities of competent people with bad people turned away from jobs, etc – fit the angle to the audience, emphatize taxpayer costs for republicans and inequalities and outdated norms for democrats. Also show that English spelling and pronunciation have constantly evolved since the language first appeared in the middle age, but do not mention the idea of a spelling reform directly. Do this for at least 6 months.
Step 2: introduce the idea of a spelling reform. If step 1 worked, it should now have wide bipartisan support.
Step 3: have the new spelling voted as a constitutional amendment. The implementation needs to adress three critical points: publication, government usage and teaching.
For publication, put into the amendment that new publications in English will be refused a legal deposit if they do not comply with the new spelling.
For government, seemingly require that all English written communication by all branches and levels of government should conform to the new spelling only.
For education, require that any college entrance examination or college aptitude test require a small composition exercice in English, which must conform to the new spelling or get a failling grade (that is, the student must show they are aware of the new spelling, even if the composition ends up containing many mistakes).
Make sure cases of States defying this amendment are judged in priority by the supreme court.
Step 3 should all be done as fast as possible before the whole thing loses steam.
Edit: it is assumed other English speaking countries will follow, since nowadays America pretty much sets the norms for English.
I think your edited-in assumption is… bold. The British public would go ballistic if you tried to get them to change their spelling simply because America had. People would no doubt familiarise themselves with the new system, because there’s a lot of Amerenglish on the internet, but they wouldn’t start using it.
The following assumes you’re already president of the US and your party has a complying majority in both chambers of congress and in the supreme court.
Assuming you’ve got all that, your priority is spelling reform?
Surely you can work on more than one project at once (especially since the spelling one requires at least 6 months where you’re just letting the propaganda roll out)/
Brazil reformed spelling some 10-ish years ago, as part of a treaty with other Portuguese speaking countries, to iron over differences before the languages drift apart to much.
I could be wrong, but AFAIK they just made it the only acceptable spelling in all government, including the highly sought exams for civil service and free college, and it’s mostly working, though taking a long- ish time.
Create a new technology that is convenient and desirable for young people to use to communicate. Severely restrict the method of input to that technology, such that it is easier to communicate with the reformed spelling than it is with the previous spelling. The changes should work themselves out in the long run.
imo, its not 2 long b4 ev1 uses it!!!
On a similar note, I’ve noticed a lot fewer misspellings ever since autocorrect has become standard. Changing the spellings there would probably be a quick way to get people to adopt new spelling.
*chuckle* I notice many more incorrect spellings, particularly things like random choices between its and it’s. Some auto-corrected messages approach verbal salad, but the components are all real words.
Galaxy-brain: it will be much easier to reform the English spelling system if we first replace the Latin script with another. Nothing too complicated, not an abugida or anything, but an alphabet with plenty enough letters to cover a good fraction of the sounds. Pick something that looks cool, too. Georgian would do, though we might want to repurpose some of its letters for non-English sounds as vowel letters, since, like English, it only has five vowel letters and we need some more. But once we’ve agreed on the new writing system, agreeing to spell everything phonetically in it shouldn’t be too difficult. თის კუდ ვირკ.
Suborn the people at Microsoft, Google, and Apple that standardise the word lists in their various spell-checkers to introduce your preferred spelling. Reform can be slow – small changes in your preferred direction, so long as you can keep those people on board. You may want to get the folks at Corel, IBM, and the keepers of /usr/dict/words on board, but they’re less necessary.
Kids these days. What do we think of how social media is affecting teen girls in particular? Haidt did an interview with rogan, highlights of which are that Haidt says girls and boys are equally aggressive, but boys are physically so while girls are relationally so. With smartphones and social media, he thinks the doubling to tripling of self-harm or depression rates among girls (depending on age group) is something that requires to a changing of norms to deal with.
Also hits upon callout culture, nanny state, and overall fragility
I don’t know any teenage girls, but if you’re interested in what seemed to me an astonishingly perceptive fictional take on the question, I cannot recommend the recent movie 8th Grade highly enough.
Your comment made me go watch the movie. Agreed it was very perceptive (and shockingly well acted). Concerning @DragonMilk’s question, the movie seemed kinda neutral. It largely avoided bullying and cyberbullying as topics, which made it more nuanced. But it easily could have gone that direction, and things would’ve gotten a lot darker fast, I’d suspect.
@Peffern,
I haven’t seen any new statistics in years, but IIRC more girls/women attempt suicide then boys/men do, most often by trying to poison or cut themselves, boys/men are much more likely to use a gun in their attempts and do kill themselves
Hospitalization for self harm (e.g., cutting) is higher. Actual suicide may well have boys succeed in the act more than girls in line with men shooting themselves vs. women trying to OD.
The charts show baseline rates for boys rising much less than girls.
From my very, very limited and restricted experience in EMS, almost all of the suicides or suicide attempts I’ve encountered have been men or boys. I think I’ve only encountered a single woman/girl.
Presenting: Slate Star Showdex.
-#-
Scott Alexander leans back in his chair. He brings a smooth, hot MealSquare to his lips.
Scott ‘Slate’ Alexander. He’s scholarly. Hard-working. Unflappable. A psychiatrist by day, he leads a double life as an investigator — and nothing escapes his notice.
“There’s only one thing I don’t understand,” Scott says.
He scowls at the the lizardman.
“Why are you here?”
-#-
This episode of Slate Star Showdex brought to you by: MealSquare.
“The only rational choice.”
At MealSquare, we’ve maximized smoothness for your enjoyment. Nothing delivers flavor with more efficiency than MealSquare. Meet your needs with four MealSquares — or use a competitor’s product twice as often? You don’t need decision theory for that choice.
MealSquare will satisfy — so you should believe that MealSquare will satisfy. Don’t delay: “make it a MealSquare.”
They’re not actually very smooth at all; the texture is pretty chunky and dense. Not exactly in a bad way, but putting some smooth peanut butter on them makes them more palatable, so I usually do that in the morning. Having to reheat them would defeat the point of “easy to grab and consume”.
I have eaten over 500 mealsquares over the past 2 years and I usually eat them cold right out of the refrigerator. Sometimes they sit in my car and get hot which is fine, but the melting chocolate usualy leaves a mess.
I usually put them in the microwave for 30 seconds. They’re mildly enjoyable when warm; when cold, they’re so dense and dry that eating them is a chore.
I agree that cold MealSquares end up dense and dry, but heating them introduced this strange acidic taste that lingered in my throat after eating. Had almost a hint of dairy in it, so I wondered if it might be the lactase enzyme they add to help with lactose intolerance.
I tend to take the remaining mild choreness of the texture as a benefit. With foods that go down too easily, it’s also easier to eat too much, especially with the delay on hunger signals. A beverage is also obligatory—currently black coffee for me, though I want to start putting a little cream(er) in it.
The other main alternative I’ve tried for “easy nutritious breakfast food” has been the Nabisco belVita packets, and that’s much cereal-ier, less complete. And it’s easy to be tempted to have two and then I feel kind of sick afterwards; I don’t know whether that’s because of an overdose of the B-vitamin enrichment in those or what.
Here’s something I didn’t see mentioned on last OT’s discussion about virtue signalling (defined herein as doing something that looks virtuous even when you know it’s not): is it fair to use virtue signalling as a tactic in asymmetric negotiation?
I started thinking about it because of this tweet*. The negotiation to reduce GHG emissions is asymmetric because most emissions are produced by a small number of companies. Your attempts to e.g. recycle or install solar panels on your house will have close to zero or even negative effect on worldwide GHG reduction. Assuming you care about this issue, should you do those things anyway in order to credibly state to large companies, “I’ve done my part, now you do yours!”
*Full disclosure: on digging up that tweet for this post I came across other claims that Johnson misrepresented the cited study by not distinguishing direct and downstream emissions. I’m posting anyway because I think “do a small thing to guilt others into doing big things” is still a common dynamic falling under the umbrella of virtue signalling. If the example above is too distracting, feel free to substitute your own.
>The negotiation to reduce GHG emissions is asymmetric because most emissions are produced by a small number of companies.
No, they’re produced by a large number of customers, customers who would suffer a huge amount if those companies stopped producing the fuels they’re burning. The quote is nonsense, implying that companies are making carbon for funsies, not because people want to hear their homes and drive their cars.
As I’ve said, my views on global warming are non-standard for a liberal, but I will point out that this is literally the first response and discussion which occurs below the tweet in question, at least on my screen. To which he replies:
I don’t think anyone thinks Exxon is extracting oil for the lolz. It’s important to note who the driver of the problem is and blaming it on nebulous market demands leaves everyone guilty and thus no one guilty.
when it comes to smoking-related illness we long ague decided to start stigmatizing tabacoo companies and producers while gently nudging individual consumers. We don’t talk about the problem of smoking without targeting those producing and profiting off of it.
I don’t necessarily buy that, but his position is more nuanced then you’re suggesting.
market demand isn’t nebulous, and exxon isn’t driving the problem. People who like driving cars are. Exxon is just serving their need, and the author falling back to “well I don’t think exxon is really to blame, but we have to blame someone and they’re an easy target” is a wierd sort of motte and bailey and deeply immoral to boot. And we absolutely do talk about the problem of smoking without targeting producers, cynical legal cash grabs by lawsuit aside.
Exxon in particular took the same strategy as tobacco companies and devoted a lot of money to obscuring the science around the effects of their business. While any company and industry might be expected to do this, it suggests a level of culpability beyond “satisfying consumer desire”.
They presumably also lobby for the various tax breaks and subsidies that artificially cheapen fossil fuels and are continuing to lock the economy into fossil fuels in the short to medium term.
I think there are a couple fundamental differences between tobacco and oil that break down that metaphor:
1. Society at large can continue to function without tobacco. Yes, the elimination of smoking is a noticeable change, but not one that would completely upturn modern civilization.
2. Tobacco contains a chemical that literally hacks your brain to make you want more of it. Gasoline doesn’t.
3. Cigarette companies pretty aggressively advertise their products to get people to try and get hooked on them (see point 2). Oil producers and gas stations barely need to at all–if you drive a car, you’re going to need to fill it up with gasoline. No persuasion required.
That’s stretching the definition of “produced” further than I’m willing to tolerate. Customers want heat and personal vehicles, they’re not paying the company to ship in those products from who knows where. Even if they were, “I was paid to do it” isn’t a great defence against criticism.
The problem with putting the onus on the customer to vote with their wallet is that multinational supply chains are pretty much (intentionally) illegible to outsiders more than one or two steps back, and put disproportionate pressure on the end mile distributor. That information imbalance is part of why I consider pollution an asymmetric problem.
The problem with putting the onus on the customer to vote with their wallet is that multinational supply chains are pretty much (intentionally) illegible to outsiders more than one or two steps back
If you look at the list of 100 corporations, it’s mostly fossil fuel companies and they’re counting the emissions from the product as well as incidental emissions. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the supply chain, gasoline or oil or natural gas are going to be responsible for roughly the same amount of fossil fuel emissions no matter where you get them. Electricity a little less so, but only a little; if you’re not literally an aluminum company you likely won’t go much wrong by assuming you’re using the mix of fuels in your grid region.
Even if they were, “I was paid to do it” isn’t a great defence against criticism.
Criticism for what? Pumping oil out of the ground results in essentially zero GHG emissions, ditto pumping gasoline into a customer’s tank. There’s some overhead in the intermediate stages, but ExxonMobil’s part of the process could be made net carbon-neutral without too much trouble, if anyone cared. No one cares.
The part that releases GHG into the atmosphere, is the part where a retail consumer burns his gasoline in his car because he wants to drive somewhere and didn’t want to accept the limitations of a ZEV. And yet we’re arguing about whether the oil companies have a defense against criticism.
The part of smoking that kills is when the customer smokes the cigarette. Not when Philip Morris harvests tobacco or rolls the cigarette or lies about the health effects of smoking. Philip Morris is totally innocent here, right?
For making and selling cigarettes, yes, and even more so than the oil companies – it is at least possible to use cigarettes in a responsible manner that doesn’t endanger third parties. Tobacco companies have also been accused of other misdeeds (e.g. corrupting the relevant science) for which a different defense would be required and maybe no adequate defense is available.
And the same could be said of the oil companies, though I think it would be a bit more of a stretch in their case. But when so much of the criticism is simply for EvilBigCompanies having manufactured tobacco or gasoline, or guns or sugary soft drinks or whatnot, I’m pretty confident that I’m seeing people who want a sufficiently unpopular scapegoat, not a fair assessment of responsibility.
The frustrating bit from the tobacco company lawsuits is that the claim was that the tobacco companies lied and misrepresented the science to mislead customers into buying their cancer-causing product, leading to many deaths and illnesses. If we accept that claim, then those companies should have been wiped out, but no additional restrictions should have been placed on new companies that rose to take their places, which didn’t misrepresent science or mislead customers. (“Smoke Coffin Nails brand–it’ll have you walking around with an oxygen tank before you’re collecting Social Security!”). But the actual goal was to impose political and regulatory changes, not to do any kind of justice.
Getting fewer people to smoke is a public health goal, but has nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of tobacco companies in slowing public knowledge/acceptance of the dangers of smoking. To do justice w.r.t. that bad behavior would not necessarily decrease the number of people smoking, it would just sue the offending companies into oblivion and give the proceeds to their victims.
One pretty big difference between the two cases is that when the truth finally came out about smoking, people started doing a lot less of it– while they still seem about as willing to burn fossil fuels now that The Science Is Settled as they did back when the oil companies had the science locked up in the secret vault next to the 300-mpg carburetor.
Smoking causes you, personally, to have a bunch of health problems. Driving an SUV may contribute in a very small way to your grandchildren someday having some climate-related remediation or adaptation to do.
The frustrating bit from the tobacco company lawsuits is that the claim was that the tobacco companies lied and misrepresented the science to mislead customers into buying their cancer-causing product, leading to many deaths and illnesses. If we accept that claim, then those companies should have been wiped out, but no additional restrictions should have been placed on new companies that rose to take their places, which didn’t misrepresent science or mislead customers. (“Smoke Coffin Nails brand–it’ll have you walking around with an oxygen tank before you’re collecting Social Security!”). But the actual goal was to impose political and regulatory changes, not to do any kind of justice.
What was the guarantee that the new companies would not do the same again?
You may reply “the threat of getting destroyed like the companies of yore”, but the new companies may try to bribe politicians and corrupt the system so it does not happen again. Whereas if the regulation is in place, they will have to corrupt the system to first remove the regulations, so that’s a step removed from doing the same again.
The companies that had done the harm weren’t sued into oblivion, they were sued for a lot of money and strong-armed into not opposing a change in regulation. This may well have been a good direction for our policies w.r.t. smoking to move, but it didn’t have much to do with justice.
There’s two separate things going on:
The negative effects of smoking and the ethical problem of misrepresenting the science.
Given that tobacco is so addictive, I don’t see a problem in banning advertising and imposing a sin tax. My liberalism is based on the fact that people generally do what’s best for themselves, and lots of smokers say they wish they could stop.
Saying misleading things about the health effects of your product is its own issue. The tobacco compaines are in the same bucket as VW was with the emissions scandal. The companies involved should be punished pour encourager les autres.
What was the guarantee that the new companies would not do the same again?
Do what? Lie to people and tell them that smoking tobacco is perfectly safe? I suppose there’s no guarantee that they wouldn’t do that, but since nobody with three functioning brain cells would now believe them, it would be both pointless and harmless so I’m not terribly worried.
R.J. Reynolds et al, at least fibbed and probably frauded when it still mattered.
Do what? Lie to people and tell them that smoking tobacco is perfectly safe? I suppose there’s no guarantee that they wouldn’t do that, but since nobody with three functioning brain cells would now believe them, it would be both pointless and harmless so I’m not terribly worried.
They would lie again to people and people would believe them again. Maybe not as many people as the first time, but they would be believed.
evidence: global warming deniers, flat earthers, all the constant studies funded by food companies promoting this or that diet, all kinds of cults, etc, etc, etc, etc.
If the future market for cigarettes is comparable in scale to e.g. flat-earthers and religious cultists, I’m going to declare the problem close enough to solved as makes no difference and not really care very much about whoever is serving that market. Your other examples are in no way settled science the way the tobacco/cancer link is, no matter how much you would like to believe otherwise.
You think that in the counterfactual world where tobacco companies got destroyed, salt was sown where they stood, and then no legislation was passed against tobacco would have _less_ smokers than this world?
re: global warming: Exxon helped fund studies and orgs denying global warming. Like tobacco companies did at some points.
If the previous companies have just been sued into bankruptcy for lying about the risks of smoking to their customers, then I’d expect the replacement companies to avoid doing that so they don’t follow their predecessors into bankruptcy.
I’m not talking about the best policy for decreasing smoking, but rather about seeing justice done. I also don’t think that the policy that most decreases smoking is automatically the best one. (Though it’s overall a good thing that fewer people are smoking.)
And I am really, really uneasy about the precedent that says that you can be sued into oblivion for financially supporting research that led to some bad social outcome, or for expressions of opinion/ideas that would normally be protected by the first amendment. I can imagine this precedent being used for really bad things. Indeed, every couple years someone proposes suing the oil or gun companies on the same theory. In both those cases, the way it looks to me is that the folks wanting to sue recognize that they can’t get their policy enacted via normal democratic processes, and hope to bypass those and get them enacted a different way. In some hypothetical future where Republicans have a dominant position in the courts, I expect this very idea to be applied to abortion clinics and pro-abortion organizations. At which point Republicans and Democrats will mostly swap positions about whether this is reasonable, because most people don’t have principles, just a side.
Setting a precedent where company owners can reasonably expect that if they lie to and harm their customers they will not lose commensurable money for doing so even when they’re discovered seems like a No Good Very Bad Thing. I would be pretty tempted to err on the side of financial over-punishing than under-punishing
If the previous companies have just been sued into bankruptcy for lying about the risks of smoking to their customers, then I’d expect the replacement companies to avoid doing that so they don’t follow their predecessors into bankruptcy.
Well the replacement companies may just not lie about it anyway; without legislation, why would they even need to? just buy more marketing than the general surgeon and now you can advertise to children anyway, to make up the difference in smokers who quit due to health concerns. To be fair, it’s not like in the current world they don’t try to sneakily advertise to kids anyway, but still.
And I am really, really uneasy about the precedent that says that you can be sued into oblivion for financially supporting research that led to some bad social outcome, or for expressions of opinion/ideas that would normally be protected by the first amendment.
That’s a fair concern, tho dunno if it should be extended to companies who have internal research that clearly says bad-social-outcome-will-happen and then fund research that says bad-social-outcome-won’t-happen, without the part in the middle of funding research that tries to avoid bad-social-outcome
The frustrating bit from the tobacco company lawsuits is that the claim was that the tobacco companies lied and misrepresented the science to mislead customers into buying their cancer-causing product, leading to many deaths and illnesses. If we accept that claim, then those companies should have been wiped out, but no additional restrictions should have been placed on new companies that rose to take their places, which didn’t misrepresent science or mislead customers. (“Smoke Coffin Nails brand–it’ll have you walking around with an oxygen tank before you’re collecting Social Security!”). But the actual goal was to impose political and regulatory changes, not to do any kind of justice.
That is probably frustrating because the plaintiffs never proved such a thing in court. Phillip Morris never lost a major class action to smokers, instead they lost various lawsuits to Medicaid on dubious legal theories that boil down to: We have these programs, and paid for additional medical care as a result of cigarettes. This theory is a perfect example of lawlessness, because we would never allow a private charity that takes care of DUI victims recover against Budweiser on such a theory.
So yeah, cigarette company comparisons are rarely good analogies. I’m basically here to inform you a significant part of this thread was based on a lie.
That is probably frustrating because the plaintiffs never proved such a thing in court. Phillip Morris never lost a major class action to smokers, instead they lost various lawsuits to Medicaid on dubious legal theories that boil down to: We have these programs, and paid for additional medical care as a result of cigarettes. This theory is a perfect example of lawlessness, because we would never allow a private charity that takes care of DUI victims recover against Budweiser on such a theory.
Ah, the companies extracting fossil fuels, I take it? If so, the solution is easy: just buy the companies and shut them down. Oh, you¹ don’t care that much to save the planet, you say? You would rather that somebody else’s money were used according to your wishes at no cost to yourself?
Virtue signaling. Plonk.
¹ In case it wasn’t clear, not any particular ‘you’.
I don’t think that’s how these things work.
Once you’ve checked behind the sofa and found $950,000,000,000 in loose change and bought out the entire petrochemical industry, somebody else is going to go and start mining coal somewhere else.
‘Blame’ is one of those things that creates more trouble than it’s worth.
It’s not terribly mysterious that fossil fules make very cheap sources of energy, especially for cars. There’s plenty of natural embedded incentive to extract and refine those resources for use.
‘Assymetric Burden’ feels like it’s missing the mark here. No matter what *specific policy* is adopted, the outcome would be roughly the same. INDIVIDUALS must be kept from using fossil fuels for energy and as a result, people who extract and refine those resources need to find something else to do. If a policy targets [blames] individual consumers, the businesses that supply those goods are affected, if a policy targets [blames] companies, the consumers are effected.
If you outlawed fossil fuel extraction completely [or taxed it to the point of doing the same] you drive an industry out of existence but in the short term and possibly the long term greatly increase the cost of electricity and transportation.
If you imposed punitive carbon taxes based on fuel type, assuming consumer behavior shifted sufficiently, this would also raise energy prices in the short term and encourage people to shift over to alternatives. This has the same effect on oil/coal companies.
Alternatively think of it in terms of consumer profit. If a ZGHG energy bill is double what you’re paying now, that’s the individual’s ‘profit’ from fossil fuels. Add that up across all consumers and you get a number that is in all likelihood much higher than the commodity profits of the oil industry. Also bear in mind that since all industrial processes use energy to some extent, the cheapness of energy is embedded into all consumer products not just personal electricity bills.
[…]In the pre-dawn hours when all is dark and quiet, Amanda Lucas leaves her house and begins the long drive to her job at a hospital an hour away.
In years past, it was the men who would empty out of the hollows of Letcher County before sunrise. All day long they would be underground, digging out coal as their fathers and often their grandfathers had done. Ms. Lucas’s husband, Denley, had a job with one of the big mining companies, with good benefits and an income approaching six figures when all the overtime was added. She stayed at home to raise their four children.
“We had a good life,” she said.
Then everything changed.
It has been a hot and mean summer in Letcher County, with a rash of coal mine bankruptcies and layoffs even crueler than the ones that came before. From the barstools at the American Legion post to the parking lot of the unemployment office, there was little debate: The coal business around here is going under. The only question was what would keep everyone afloat.
These days, the answer has been: women. From 2010 to 2017, Letcher County saw a greater shift in the gender balance of its labor force than almost any other county in the United States.
The share of women in the work force rose substantially in places throughout Central Appalachia, as well as in parts of the industrial Midwest and the rural South. But few places have seen a more dramatic change than Letcher County, in hilly Eastern Kentucky, where for generations the archetypal worker was a brawny, coal-dusted man in reflective overalls. Just 10 years ago, nearly three-fifths of the work force was male. Now the majority is female.
“The mines have shut down and the women have gone to work,” said Billy Thompson, a district director of the United Steelworkers union, which represents thousands of medical support workers in the region. “It’s not complicated at all.”
There are over a thousand fewer coal mine jobs in Letcher County than there were a decade ago, and virtually all of those lost jobs were held by men. The number of mining jobs, according to state figures, fell to under 50 in 2017, from over 1,300 at the beginning of 2009. The number has inched back up; this summer it was 100.
Coal mining has always been boom-and-bust, but it is hard to shake the feeling that this might be the last bust. Some men picked up and left at word of mining jobs elsewhere, some went to work as linemen or truck drivers, and others, figuring they were too old or physically broken to start over, just dropped out of the labor force. It was as if the very identity of a Letcher County man had been declared insolvent.
“I could always tell the man who worked in the mines,” said Debbie Baker, a cleaner in Whitesburg, the Letcher County seat. For one thing, “they had money.”
She recalled a family who lived comfortably where she grew up; the father worked underground and his sons followed, one by one. “The next would get old enough and get a wife and go working in the coal mines,” she said. “I don’t think any of the men did anything else.”
“When the mines left, they all ended up on drugs,” Ms. Baker added. “And their women went to work.”
Women in coal country always found paying work in greater numbers during the lean times, cleaning houses or making burgers, earning enough to get the family by until the mines picked up again. When that happened — and it always did — wives often returned home or cut back on hours because they could and because someone had to, child care being an elusive commodity. But just tiding the family over is not enough anymore.
There is little hope of finding work that could replace a miner’s income; women in Letcher County still on average make substantially lower salaries than men. But in a place stricken by chronic disease and opioid overdoses there is one area where workers are in constant demand: health care. Signing bonuses for nurses can reach into the five digits.
It is impossible to miss driving into Whitesburg. Heading in from the east, there is an outpatient mental health clinic taking up a roadside mall and then, on a perch overlooking downtown, the county’s major hospital, founded by the miners’ union in the 1950s and recently expanded. Coming in from the west, there is a brand-new heart, vascular and neurology clinic that opened in the old Super 8 hotel building, and just beyond it, across from the grocery store, is the 75,000-square-foot Mountain Comprehensive Health Corporation clinic.
This is the region’s economy now, and its work force. At the regional network of M.C.H.C. clinics alone, there more than 110 nurses, according to Mike Caudill, the chief executive. Four of them are men.
“We wouldn’t have half the nurses that we do if we still had coal mines,” said Ciara Bowling. She certainly wouldn’t have decided to go to work herself. As far back as she can remember, she wanted only to be a coal miner’s wife.
But Ms. Bowling, 25, came out of high school into the coal bust. Her boyfriend, already laid off, drove the county roads asking about openings at the mines, while she earned their living at the dollar store, then the Pizza Hut, then the McDonald’s. Most of the women she worked with, she said, were wives of out-of-work miners.
The idea was always to quit when the men found jobs. This was the arrangement articulated by a friend of Ms. Bowling’s, a former miner named Jody Ray Rose: “A man works and does what he’s supposed to do, or has to do,” Mr. Rose said, “to take care of his family.”
But without the mines this was nearly impossible. Ms. Bowling and her boyfriend sold their TV and refrigerator; at one point they had their water cut off. He never found a mining job. After they split up and Ms. Bowling started seeing a new man — also looking for work underground — she enrolled at the local community college to become a medical assistant.
“Take care of your husband, that’s all you want to do,” she said. “But when that doesn’t work out, you’ve got to go to work.”
This is the conversation Ms. Lucas, the hospital worker, and her husband began having when the coal business started falling apart. Even before he was laid off, the Lucases, with four young children and a mortgage, had been watching mines shut down one after another. More than a decade after dropping out of college, Ms. Lucas, 38, raised the idea of going back to school.
“To be honest, I wasn’t real crazy about it to start,” her husband said, sitting with Ms. Lucas in a living room noisy with children on a Fourth of July afternoon. He saw it as his obligation to ensure that she didn’t have to work, an obligation he’d kept for 18 years. But she wanted this, he said, so he didn’t get in the way.
As it was, they needed it. A state program for miners’ families not only paid tuition but, critically, also provided money for living expenses. Ms. Lucas spent long days studying while her mother and sister-in-law helped Mr. Lucas with the children.
After graduation, Ms. Lucas went straight to work as a respiratory therapist. The job comes with health insurance, but it doesn’t draw the salary Mr. Lucas used to earn in the mines. That is a reality common to care workers, looking after people who made more money than they likely ever will. She sees former miners suffering from black lung and other ailments she has known firsthand in her own extended family. She thinks of the work as an act of reciprocity.
“They helped us to establish everything around here, and now I can help them,” said Ms. Lucas, who is now training other wives of out-of-work miners at the college. “I’ve always heard if you love what you do it don’t seem like a job, and that’s how I feel right now.”
The family has learned to live on less. Mr. Lucas works construction jobs when the opportunity arises, but he hasn’t ruled out going back underground.
“I liked it pretty good the way it was and I’m sure she did too,” he said, nodding toward his wife. It was true that working in the mines was rough, and he appreciates his wife’s success. “I’m sure she’s glad she’s done what she did, and I understand that,” he said.
“But,” he repeated, “I did like it pretty good the way it was.”
“Things Have Just Changed”
Ms. Bowling had ultimately found a life like the way it was, or the way she’d long wanted it to be. Her fiancé, Blake Johnson, had found a job in the mines. Every day he went in before sunup and came home 12 hours later, exhausted and coated in coal dust.
“We as a community are so proud of our miners,” Ms. Bowling said. She was sitting on a hot afternoon at the Hemphill Community Center, in a building that once housed a long-shuttered grade school. In the parking lot stands a shrine to those who died in the nearby mines, the names listed on black marble of miners “who gave so much that future generations may benefit with a better life.”
Mr. Johnson’s father was killed in the mines. His brother was laid off this summer, after decades with one company. He had few illusions about coal work. He wanted to go back to school himself and when he got a good job, he said, Ms. Bowling would no longer have to work.
She has different ideas. “Things have just changed,” she said[…]
[…]A short drive from the community center up Coal Miner’s Highway, in a house his grandfather built, Mr. Rose considered the way Ms. Bowling went about things, and the way preferred by men like himself.
“We’re definitely a dying breed,” he said. He had been released from prison a few weeks earlier — drugs — and was now delivering merchandise for a hardware store. Getting back underground was the aim, but he wanted his sons to see how it was supposed to be: him hard at work and their mother at home with them.
This was getting harder to sustain, though. And fewer people seemed interested in holding onto it.
“The way of life is changing so bad,” Mr. Rose said. He grew quiet. “You’ll get overwhelmed if you think about it too hard.”
I can already imagine some responses:“”They should’ve moved and learned to code”, coal has to die to save polar bears’, “This empowers women”, , and it reads like a dying community of broken men, and working women that is increasingly supported by semi-nationalized health insurance.
For me the parallels with the Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco after so many shipyards jobs disappeared in the ’70’s are obvious. These folks weren’t raised their whole childhood that their chief goal in life is to fashion yourself to go away to a selective college and then again move for ambition, and they don’t have family tales of striving immigrant grandparents, instead much of their families have been their for centuries, and they have deep roots where they live.
If past is prologue, and their fate of these rural whites does follow the once majority black neighborhoods of the San Francisco bay area I don’t inagine much to be optimistic about, I suppose subsidies to move to places with more opportunities, but I’m not sure how many would want to move far from the graves of their ancestors anyway.
These folks weren’t raised their whole childhood that their chief goal in life is to fashion yourself to go away to a selective college and then again move for ambition, and they don’t have family tales of striving immigrant grandparents, instead much of their families have been their for centuries, and they have deep roots where they live. … I suppose subsidies to move to places with more opportunities, but I’m not sure how many would want to move far from the graves of their ancestors anyway.
How many centuries are we talking here? San Francisco has only really existed since 1849, only 170 years ago and 1) how many of those shipyard workers are descended from ’49ers and 2) those ’49s weren’t exactly homebodies if we think wanderlust is heritable. The coal mining towns of West Virginia are even younger, dating from the 1880s or after. Those mine workers were by and large new-commers to the region (African-Americans from the deep south and new immigrants from Europe).
@brad,
I was thinking of parallels and differences, and I failed to communicate that
Folks who lived in the Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco (and similar near shipyard neighborhoods in Oakland, Marin City, and Richmond) in the ’70’s and ’80’s mostly came or their parents in the ’40’s and ’50’s, and San Francisco is filled with newcomers, the general impression I had of Kentucky and the rest of Appalachian ‘coal country’ was of folks who’s ancestors mostly arrived in the 17th century, and I thought that with those deep roots it would be even harder to move.
What you said about West Virginia surprised me, so thanks!
Appalachian history is pretty interesting. There are the famous (at least ’round here) boarders, but they were hardly the only wave. Before the big coal mine influx there were waves of German* and Irish immigration coming to the area almost continually from the early 19th century. And even after coal mining took off it still competed for quite a long time with logging and associated industries.
* and much of the country for that matter, the extent of German immigration is for various reasons not that well known in the US
Yeah, this is brutal. And there’s no obvious way to fix it, unfortunately. Telling people to move away is essentially telling them to gamble their communities and their family ties on the possibility of getting a better job somewhere, but where can an older person without a college degree get a job today in the US?
The worst part is, there’s no real chance of this fixing itself the way these people want it to. As long as natural gas remains cheap and mini-mills remain more efficient than conventional blast furnaces for steel production, coal will continue to die. Environmental regulation is only one (unfortunately necessary) element of what’s killing coal.
I live in a former coal-mining area where the government made the decision to close all the mines (which were all state-owned) in 1965 due to the discovery of natural gas fields which were a more economical source of energy. The last mine closed in 1976.
There was a period of high unemployment, but it is now not hugely above the national average, as the government worked to provide alternative employment (and the former state mining company transitioned into chemical processing while staying in the region).
In order to consider joining the Border Patrol, an applicant must possess the following qualifications:
U.S. citizenship 39 years old or younger
Valid driver’s license
No prior criminal convictions
Possess minimum vision and hearing functionality
Ability to perform strenuous physical activity
…
U.S. Customs and Border Protection does not require that applicants possess a college degree, but it may be necessary or advisable to have an associate’s or bachelor’s in criminal justice to be considered for some of the more challenging or demanding positions.
… Spanish is a requirement to serve in the Border Patrol, so those applicants already proficient in Spanish have a competitive advantage, especially if they are assigned to the southern border. Spanish does not have to be an applicant’s major, as interactions with a wide variety of foreign nationals is highly common; demonstrating proficiency in any foreign language should be sufficient to convince the US CBP that the applicant has the ability to readily learn to converse in Spanish.
If the applicant does not possess a college degree, they may also satisfy the requirements for some advanced positions in the Border Patrol by serving in law enforcement or the military.
…
The GL-5 entry level position is also available to prospective Border Patrol agents without a college degree or law enforcement experience, but applicants may not be very competitive while in the running for these in-demand jobs.
This is not intended as a rebuke, I was just interested in what the listed requirements actually were. I’m surprised by the hard age limit, and find the Spanish requirement interesting.
A Border Patrol agent is a variety of law-enforcement. There are many Federal/State/Local jobs of that type: police officer, game warden, State-University campus security officer, Federal Marshal, Postal Inspector, welfare-fraud investigators, Transportation inspectors, Border Patrol Agent, etc.
All of these jobs have a minimum physical fitness requirement, almost always with an age limit. It’s not that all people over age 39 are unfit for duty. It is that the bell-curve for physical endurance/stamina in that age range has a very small section for ‘can pass the physical part of training’.
People can remain in those jobs past the age of 39, by passing physical fitness tests (or being re-assigned/promoted to positions which have lower physical fitness requirements).
Insofar as they already do up-front and recurring physical fitness testing, I am skeptical that the 39-year requirement is based in the statistically superior fitness of youth. Rather, I believe it is about culture formation. Law enforcement cares very deeply about its institutional culture, moreso than almost any corporation (but less so than the military), believing that shared culture is necessary for mission success. Young people can usually be indoctrinated or assimilated into a new culture in a way that old people can’t.
As long as natural gas remains cheap and mini-mills remain more efficient than conventional blast furnaces for steel production, coal will continue to die.
and it would die much faster if we properly penalized it for all the lung cancer deaths it causes.
The issue does not appear to be ‘where can a person with no college degree get a job’ but a combination of ‘where can you earn near 6 figures with no degree’ and ‘why won’t these unemployed people move to where jobs are’.
There’s definitely a boom. You can hardly get construction contractors right now, everybody’s so busy. However, it’s not a huge mass of people with a “strong back and a weak mind” anymore. While there are some laborers, even much of that work is done with mechanization which requires skills, and even the fewer laborers will add more value if they don’t need to be closely supervised to get anything done.
Steel prices are through the roof, so we’ll see if that has a slowing effect; it’s negatively impacted a couple of contracts I’ve tried to let, but it’s hard to disentangle the more expensive steel from the more expensive contractor profit to get them out to your site given that it’s a seller’s market.
Miners fit the bill. You don’t thrive… well, you don’t even survive in the mines with a weak mind. They should convert relatively easy to construction.
I had a conversation with someone in the local 911 dispatcher business. Apparently, they are unable to hire/retain employees, despite typically paying around $25/h. No credentials required, though some background in public safety is preferred. They are hiring/training dozens at a time and only a few accept job offers afterwards. Obviously this is not a huge sink for unskilled workers. But I was surprised at how much trouble they are having staffing/retaining these positions given the pay.
Possibly it’s the stress of listening to 911 calls all day every day (with a non-trivial chance that you are listening to someone die). Certainly the person I know elsewhere online who worked as a 911 call dispatcher found the job extremely difficult for that reason.
Interesting. Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be any reason 911 dispatchers couldn’t be outsourced to e.g. Appalachia, whereas there are reasons (linguistic and cultural fluency, politics) why one might not want to outsource it to India. This isn’t going to be a cure-all for what ails the coal towns, but it might offer a little bit of help.
I think that some level of local knowledge is desirable for a 911 dispatcher (callers may not know exactly where they are, a dispatcher might be able to help locate them).
British company call centres are often in the North-East of England, which is a former mining area. Part of the reason for this is the high unemployment in the area after the loss of both mining and a lot of the other major industries (like shipbuilding), and part of it is that British people associate the local accent with friendliness and trustworthiness.
I can already imagine some responses:“”They should’ve moved and learned to code”, coal has to die to save polar bears’, “This empowers women”, , and it reads like a dying community of broken men, and working women that is increasingly supported by semi-nationalized health insurance.
Nah, I’m going to say something else. This looks a lot like a return to normality, after a very non-normal period where men could make enough money to sustain a one-income family. Same thing that happened to everybody 50 years ago.
I’m not being cynical here, that’s, I think, a critical observation if you want to fix things. Mind tends to go to different kinds of solutions in the specific vs general scenarios.
It’s a good thing, obviously. But well, I’m not going to have very warm feelings towards former miners in Jiu Valley. Also, they’re the poster child for high incomes: both while working, and with legendary lay off bonuses (which I understand were quickly wasted).
Also the major layoffs were already decades ago. Problem is mostly solved, those retrained now probably started their career when the mines were already shrinking.
My response isn’t ‘they should learn how to code’, but it is ‘why are some of these men so inflexible? Ok, I get the 55 year old who has spent 30 years as a coal miner being lost when the jobs dry up, but the article talks about a 25 year old woman who had two different out of work coal miner boyfriends and a 38 year old married women. Unless these people are dating/marrying much older men you have guys with 10-20 years in the mines basically giving up on any other work.
One half of it is sticky wages, where most people are unwilling to take a nominal (never mind real) pay cut. The other half is the existential despair of going from a miner who can support his family to a grocery bagger who can maybe keep his family off welfare if his wife works too.
I’d like to see how some of the glibber posters here would react if they woke up and found out that the only paying work they could get is scrubbing toilets for minimum wage. I don’t think that any of us are more “flexible,” we just have much more marketable skills which allow us to avoid demeaning work.
One half of it is sticky wages, where most people are unwilling to take a nominal (never mind real) pay cut. The other half is the existential despair of going from a miner who can support his family to a grocery bagger who can maybe keep his family off welfare if his wife works too.
The latter jobs are a gross exaggeration contradicted by the piece. The wives/girlfriends of these people are taking zero job history and going back to school and are making more than minimum wage.
I’d like to see how some of the glibber posters here would react if they woke up and found out that the only paying work they could get is scrubbing toilets for minimum wage.
I made significant money playing online poker years ago until federal regulations killed it, after that I worked part time as an entry level tech in a biology lab for less than $15 an hour, and when grant money dried up and jobs were scarce during the great recession I eventually shifted to midnight to 8am shifts at a bakery that started at $10 an hour. I have also literally scrubbed toilets (summer job in high school) worked basically every job in restaurants including high volume/low pay dish washing, and moved 500 miles away from my parents, 5 siblings and 9 (and counting) nieces and nephews (only 2 at the time of the move) to get married because my wife kept her income during the GR and I lost mine.
I imagine it’s somewhat harder to retrain as a nurse than as a grocery bagger. It might even be harder than retraining as a coder, depending on talents, personality, and what sorts of coder are in demand at the moment.
I’d like to see how some of the glibber posters here would react if they woke up and found out that the only paying work they could get is scrubbing toilets for minimum wage. I don’t think that any of us are more “flexible,” we just have much more marketable skills which allow us to avoid demeaning work.
No work is demeaning. Toilets need to be scrubbed and the scrubbing of them is honorable and necessary and contributes to society. If it is judged demeaning this tells us something about the judger, not the work.
My wife and I are retired and live on less than we would take home with minimum wage jobs like you describe. If social security disappeared and we had to go to work scrubbing toilets we would both gladly do so and experience no diminution of quality of life nor would we find the change stressful in any way.
You’re talking about people taking a huge loss of income and prestige. You can expect people to do that to survive, but they’re never going to like it!
I recommend the following substitution:
“Learn to code” –> “Learn to play NBA-level basketball”
or
“Learn to code” –> “Learn to do publishable work in theoretical physics”
Say, if someone tells me that the way I can get back to a respectable middle-class income level is to become a professional athlete/theoretical physicist, it turns out that’s just another way of saying I can’t get back to a respectable middle-class income.
baconbits9 already said that their reaction isn’t “learn to code.” It was literally their first sentence. Their reaction is similar to mine, though, which is if there are these job openings that all of these women with little to no job history/training are taking (which are not coding, either), men could be taking those same jobs.
These folks weren’t raised their whole childhood that their chief goal in life is to fashion yourself to go away to a selective college and then again move for ambition, and they don’t have family tales of striving immigrant grandparents, instead much of their families have been their for centuries, and they have deep roots where they live.
This might be the single most point anyone has made on this subject that I’ve ever read. Specifically, this cuts right to the core of why I’ve found it so difficult to really understand the closing-the-coal-mines/opioid-epidemic/middle-america-unemployment cultural force:
The concept of people having fundamental “roots”/deep ties to the land they live on and their way of life is fundamentally alien and confusing to me. It’s hard for me to explain just how strange this concept is to someone who was brought up in an environment of “family tales of striving immigrant grandparents” (I’m fourth-generation not third- but the point stands. I knew my great-grandmother long enough to hear it from her).
Part of the reason this is so hard for me to wrap my head around is that I cannot see myself or my family (either my ancestors or my hypothetical descendants) arriving in this kind of situation. I basically don’t understand how these “roots” come about from a place where they don’t already exist. I think it’s in some way tied to nationalism – I’ve always seen through the lens of “I live in this country” not “I am this country” and I can imagine how someone with deeper ties to the land might think in terms of the second.
This does explain why arguments about retraining for new industries, or impetus from environmental protection, or invocations of the dangers of lung cancer and other safety hazards seem to fall on deaf ears.
I don’t have a point, I just felt like I suddenly had an epiphany upon reading your comment and wanted to let you know.
Also, I’ve deliberately avoided stating my specific ethnic background for this comment since I want to avoid assumptions, but I’m wondering if it’s pretty obvious.
I think the concept of ethnicity has a built-in tension between “We are this land. The food it grows becomes the cells of our body. We are literally it.” and “In other lands, everyone whose language I can understand is more kin to me than the rest of humanity.”
I’ll bet the tendency toward feeling a strong connection with the land/town of your birth/etc. varies a great deal by individuals, and also to some extent across cultures and may be partly genetic.
The US, especially the West, was settled by a lot of people who pulled up stakes and moved somewhere more promising a few times. Whatever of that is genetically driven, plus whatever of that is cultural and has been passed on, is presumably still with us.
Bignum*Dunbar’s Number of atomic individuals moving from the Bay Area to the Pacific Northwest, does not necessary constitute the movement of even a single social network. Those individuals may have each decided to abandon their Bay Area social network in the expectation of joining a new social network drawn from the same general culture.
Not having lived in either the Bay Area or the Pacific Northwest, have you seen examples of actual social networks, as opposed to individuals, migrating as a unit?
@John Schilling – the only time I’ve seen full social networks migrate is the annual migration to Gerlach, Nevada, and from the Bay Area to Irwindale (RenFaire). But they come back.
“…I’m fourth-generation not third- but the point stands. I knew my great-grandmother long enough to hear it from her…”
“…I’ve deliberately avoided stating my specific ethnic background for this comment since I want to avoid assumptions, but I’m wondering if it’s pretty obvious”
I have a guess based entirely on projection and my memories of one of my great-grandmothers.
FWLIW, so you don’t have to guess, my great-grandparents were:
One born in the U.S.A., family name Irish or Scottish (Mc….)
One from Ireland, family name unknown.
One from Ireland, family name Irish (O’…)
One from Germany, family name German.
One from Austro-Hungarian Empire, family name unknown.
One born in U.S.A., family name English, allegedly descended from 17th century immigrant to Massachusetts.
One unknown to me, gave birth in Kansas.
One unknown to me, gave birth in Massachusetts.
Grandparents are:
One from Massachusetts, family name Irish or Scottish.
One from either New Jersey or Ireland (I’ve heard both stories, both of her parents were Irish in either version), family name Irish.
One from Kansas, family name English.
One from California, family name German.
My parents were from California and New Jersey.
I’m born in California and both work and live within 20 miles of my birthplace, and my wife wasn’t, her mother is still alive and foreign born, so my son’s are the fourth generation born in California, have ancestors that have been on this continent for even more generations than that, and also have still living immigrant ancestors, and since they’re both mixed race it’s likely that they won’t just get called “one of the Irish guys” at work as I have been, but maybe they will just based on the name?
Hard to tell what will be in decades to be, last and previous years had plenty in the San Francisco Saint Patrick’s Day parade that visibly have at leassome non-Irish ancestors, cause that’s how just we roll!
Two from the Great Lakes region, German surnames
Five from Virginia, English surnames (these go back to Jamestown)
Two from Pennsylvania, English surnames (these go back to Plymouth)
Two from the Great Lakes region, Norwegian surnames
Seven from Iowa, Irish surnames.
All born in the United States, although at the fifth generation back (great-great-greats) the Norwegians and Germans are immigrants (they were born here and married in their own communities). The Irish are tougher to tell, but they were probably immigrants in that same generation because that’s when the first wave of Irish showed up (1830s-50s)
The German and Norwegian lines I can trace back to point of immigration, but I haven’t gone foreign language to go further than that.
The Irish are always tough to tell as they’re bad at record-keeping in America, let alone in Ireland and they generally arrived before detailed immigration records were kept, but I am pretty sure the prior generation were the immigrants. It’s also possible they were Scots-Irish (Borderers) who went to Iowa to blend into the Irish immigration there, but no records either way to prove it.
in 1533 Rich was knighted and became the Solicitor General for England and Wales in which capacity he was to act under Thomas Cromwell as a “lesser hammer” for the demolition of the monasteries, and to secure the operation of Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy. Rich had a share in the trials of Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher. In both cases his evidence against the prisoner included admissions made in friendly conversation, and in More’s case the words were given a misconstruction that could hardly be other than wilful.[8]
On 19 April 1536 Rich became the chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, established for the disposal of the monastic revenues. His own share of the spoil, acquired either by grant or purchase, included Leez (Leighs) Priory and about a hundred manors in Essex. Rich also acquired —and destroyed— the real estate and holdings of the Priory of St Bartholomew-the-Great in Smithfield. He built the Tudor-style gatehouse still surviving in London as the upper portion of the Smithfield Gate.[11] He was Speaker of the House of Commons in the same year, and advocated the king’s policy. In spite of the share he had taken in the suppression of the monasteries, the prosecution of Thomas More and Bishop Fisher and of the part he was to play under Edward VI and Elizabeth, his religious beliefs remained nominally Roman Catholic.
Rich was also a participant in the torture of Anne Askew, the only woman to be tortured at the Tower of London. Both he and Chancellor Wriothesley turned the wheels of the rack to torture her with their own hands.[12]
Rich took part in the prosecution of bishops Stephen Gardiner and Edmund Bonner, and had a role in the harsh treatment accorded to the future Mary I of England. However, Mary on her accession showed no ill-will to Rich. Lord Rich took an active part in the restoration of the old religion in Essex under the new reign, and was one of the most active of persecutors.
I’m from one of the migrating families that Plumber finds odd; in three generations, one person has settled down and raised kids in the same state where he or she grew up.
Paternal grandparents born in California and Iowa, grew up in Iowa, settled in Massachusetts (he was a lawyer.) Both were of long-term American ancestry, English and Scottish surnames.
Maternal grandparents born in New York and Connecticut, settled in NY (he was an engineer). At least some of his family had been in Connecticut since the founding of the New Haven colony, her grandparents included one German, one daughter of German immigrants, and two mixed Scottish/Irish/long-term American.
Parents settled in Ohio; the four of us are now in California, Colorado, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire. All of this was following jobs.
I’ve moved several times, and rebuilt a network through things like finding a church, the local Society for Creative Anachronism group, other music or dance groups, depending on what I could find.
And my husband has four immigrant grandparents, his father born here and his mother came over with her family as a toddler.
Plumber is right that we grew up expecting to go to college and then go where the jobs were, though once we got there most of us settled down–I’ve moved more than any of the others have, and I have still been where I now am for 25 years.
You have some of the deepest attachment to place of anyone I’ve even heard of and not especially long-standing generational ties. It makes me think that the two aren’t as connected as you are saying but is instead more of an individual personality trait.
I agree that class probably has something to do with it, but my point is that probably once you have grandparents, parents, and your generation all growing up in the same place additional generations don’t contribute much to the chances that someone is going to be extremely place oriented.
sounds a lot like what happened when industry and shipbuilding left the west coast of scotland, with local men turning to heroin and alcohol instead in areas like Greenock and Glasgow.
This same scene is playing across the north of england, scotland, wales, and ireland, and also in the north of Queensland in Australia where I am now. Sad and difficult problem that seems impossible to fix.
I’m not sure why it has to be impossible to fix. The answer is probably to let the 55-year-olds whose jobs have just plain disappeared to retire early, (funded if necessary,) tell the 35-year-olds whose jobs have just plain disappeared to find other work and offer assistance with retraining. The 15-year-olds who grew up expecting to follow their fathers into jobs that have just plain disappeared don’t need anything; they should already have gotten the message that the world has changed.
So we just crowd everyone into a few major cities except for farmers and their support? I’m not saying we should fund people who prefer living in rural areas instead of cities, but surely we can manage society in such a way that not everyone has to live in their countries megacity?
Or should london comprise roughly 65 million further down the line?
On the other hand I don’t see why that needs to be the equilibrium. It looks to me like smallish countries with their capital co-located with their commercial center get one mega metro area e.g. Ireland, Austria, SK, and Japan. But plenty of other countries don’t–like Germany, US, France, and China.
I think it’s a cyclical thing. Some bit of Glasgow or Brum or London is nasty and run-down. Then either investment comes in top-down or it builds a reputation from the bottom up. Then it gentrifies. Then whatever sustained it moves away or it just decays over time back into a bit of a dump.
General post-industrialism is a broader problem, but places like Manchester and Leeds seem to be on the up right now.
the cities are on the up, places like Blackpool or the Highlands and Islands are slowly bleeding out. Is the ultimate goal to have everyone in the country commuting into the city for their service job, with a lucky few who want to work with their hands able to make the few things that are not cost-efficient to automate?
In Michigan, there are many areas that used to be mining boom towns.
I became familiar with the story of one of the mining regions while I studied at Michigan Tech University (formerly Michigan College of Mining and Technology) in the city of Houghton. In the 1840s, surveyors discovered copper deposits in the region. By 1880, the area around Houghton was a major population center in Michigan, and millions of dollars of copper were mined and shipped annually. Peak production was during World War I, though production remained high until the time of the Great Depression, and recovered somewhat during World War II.
Population of the region also peaked in the boom years between 1910 and 1930. Since then, most towns are half their peak size, or less. Many towns have a few nice-looking buildings that are relics of the opulent years a century ago.
Local business is now almost all support for tourism, or support for the lumber business, or support for institutions like Michigan Tech. Though apparently some mines have re-opened in limited ways since I was in the area.
During the decline, many people shifted to whatever local business they could find…or moved to the growing industrial areas elsewhere. Alcohol was the drug-of-choice for people who hit hard times and didn’t/couldn’t move. The Prohibition came and went during part of this time, but I can’t tell if it had any impact at all on the choices of people who were hard up.
I had no family or historical connection to that area. I was a student, one of a large population that comes in, stays for a few years, and moves elsewhere. Yet learning that history gave me a little perspective–and empathy–for the stories about declining towns in the Rust Belt, or in Coal Country, or other areas that have seen business dry up.
The only Youtuber I watch regularly is CarlSagan42, who streams mostly Mario Maker. He hits the sweet spot of entertaining, competent, and sincere, but that’s because streaming isn’t his day job. (Every so often I also watch a bunch of GDQ footage in a row.)
Everyone else, the algorithm rat race has either made their content not appealing enough to follow regularly, or not worth it to produce content frequently.
Part of this, though, is because I’m into Japanese idols, so that fandom emotionally fulfills a large part of why people get into any particular internet celebrities.
Well now I want to ask about your interest in Japanese idols. Do you just watch lots of music videos? Do they make other content? Do you follow them like celebrities?
Consider the people at Rooster Teeth. They put out stuff as “artists,” i.e. as actors for sketches and cartoons and films. They also put out a lot of unscripted stuff, for talk shows and podcasts/vlogs and interviews and documentaries and candid self-filming.
Idols are basically that. They put out MVs and do concerts and lives, and also talk shows and act in TV/film, and do fashion photoshoots, and also radio shows, and documentaries and candid self-filming. Some of them are also doing Let’s Play streams now, even.
With regular celebrities, they have some sort of primary day job (actor, music artist), and the adulation by the fans of them as a person is a side effect. They might take advantage of that (promoting themselves on social media and in interviews), but that part isn’t the main thing.
With the idol model, promoting themselves is the main thing. Taking an acting or singing gig is the mechanism to get fans interested in the person.
The “Golden Age of Cinema,” in the heyday of the studio system, was running off of the idol model. You went to see A Judy Garland or A Cary Grant film.
Firstly, capitalism has quite decisively triumphed over communism. This is a quite remarkable fact about recent history that I don’t think is considered enough. There are still lots of problems with and competing visions of capitalism, but the theory that collectivization of property and state central planning would produce a vastly more prosperous and just society than capitalism can seems to have been seriously discredited.
I wish this were the case, but it really isn’t. just see the cheerleading that hugo chavez got a few years ago for promoting collectivization and state planning. the word communism is discredited, but not the underlying ideas.
The collapse of the Venezuelan economy, one of the worst outside actual warzones, seems to have been widely and accurately attributed to the unwise policies of Chavez/Maduro.
Those polices were celebrated as they were being implemented, the anti-democratic nature of the regime excused. They were only condemned after their inevitable failure became obvious, and even then there is not a small amount of excuse making about oil prices, US sanctions, etc.
Time seems to favor the latter model over the former.
It does in the sense that the neoliberalish policies actually work and chavismo doesn’t, but the appeal of chavismo seems to remain undimmed no matter how many times its failure is demonstrated in practice.
I think Atlas covered that with his distinction between contingent victories and fundamental victories. The rise of Chavismo seems like a near-perfect example of a contingent victory.
the word communism is discredited, but not the underlying ideas.
If anything, I feel like the opposite is true. People keep throwing around the terms “socialism” and “communism,” with less and less idea of what they actually mean. Something like Chavismo isn’t really based in Marxist or even Leninist principles, it’s just typical populist strongman rule with some half-baked leftist fiscal policies thrown in for good measure. And the “socialism” that modern American leftists support is even less socialist than that; as far as I can tell, the majority of them are really just confused welfare capitalist social democrats who only think they’re socialists because they internalized the conservative idea that socialism just means high taxes and welfare programs.
Something like Chavismo isn’t really based in Marxist or even Leninist principles, it’s just typical populist strongman rule with some half-baked leftist fiscal policies thrown in for good measure.
I disagree with this very strongly. If anything, it’s a lot of self consciously and explicitly left wing policies with some strongman rule thrown in. Chavez actively cultivated the far left, buddied up with castro for no reason other than ideology, and was largely celebrated for it by the international left.
And the “socialism” that modern American leftists support is even less socialist than that; as far as I can tell, the majority of them are really just confused welfare capitalist social democrats who only think they’re socialists because they internalized the conservative idea that socialism just means high taxes and welfare programs.
If they think that, why did they applaud Chavez so consistently and loudly? And frankly, we’re not talking about just a welfare state, we’re talking about effective nationalization/price fixing huge swathes of the economy. Healthcare, education, finance, tech. the lust for the commanding heights hasn’t abated, it’s just switched targets.
“..we’re talking about effective nationalization/price fixing huge swathes of the economy. Healthcare, education, finance, tech. the lust for the commanding heights hasn’t abated, it’s just switched targets…”
Lets go down your list;
Healthcare: How well do the Brits do with their system?
Education: The parochial schools seem to do better for most students than the majority of locally controlled public schools and maybe a fully nationalized public school system would be better, but I doubt it.
Finance:For much of the 20th century U.S. post offices also were banks, I haven’t really read that they did badly but I presume there must have been some reason that was stopped?
Tech: Oh Hell yes!
Not because I think it would be done well, but because I hope it will go badly!
The Soviet Union was notorious for allocating products badly, but in the last twenty years it’s become increasingly difficult to source replacement parts and damn near everything, with merchants and vendors telling me “Oh that’s obsolete, you can’t get that anymore, you have to buy this whole new thing” (and by the time I get familiar with the new thing, it’s obsolete), so what is there to lose!
To Hell with that!
The Soviets kept making a copy of a 1937 German motorcycle into the 1990’s!
That is AWESOME!
Stop all this ****ing change cold and let a man have time to get used to how things are!
Maybe still allow a tiny little bit of progress for the kids (like my son) who are into new stuff, but for me slowing Tech advances way the Hell down sounds like a winner!
Plus maybe the Tech workers will stop moving here and bidding up housing!
Kill that golden egg laying goose dead, dead, and DEAD!
All in on this central plan!
It’ll be great!
EDIT: I just had the thought that foreigners would still be doing innovation dagnabbit! While there’s still the side benefit of stopping Tech in this nation keeping housing from being bid way the Hell up, for the progress slowdown to work trade with other nations has to be curtailed, and since most things often require materials and parts if not the whole item coming from overseas now we’d have to deliberately keep innovations from coming across our borders, and that requires competence to do instead of just trusting that attempts at progress would be bungled by a now nationalized Tech.
Healthcare: How well do the Brits do with their system?
the NHS employs 1.5 million people just in england, with a population of 55 million. That means the US NHS would employ a minimum of 9 million people in theory, and in practice considerably more than that. However the UK does with their system, it’s not something that can be replicated in the US
Education: The parochial schools seem to do better for most students than the majority of locally controlled public schools and maybe a fully nationalized public school system would be better, but I doubt it.
Finance:For much of the 20th century U.S. post offices also were banks, I haven’t really read that they did badly but I presume there must have been some reason that was stopped?
It was deemed unnecessary given the spread of retail banking, and probably lost a lot of money.
Not because I think it would be done well, but because I hope it will go badly!
I believe we’ve discussed before how I don’t consider your desire to make the bay area more conducive to your lifestyle to be a sound basis for public policy.
The Soviets kept making a copy of a 1937 German motorcycle into the 1990’s!
That is AWESOME!
Not if you wanted a modern motorcycle it wasn’t. Or modern cancer treatments, or a house that didn’t leak, or the million other things the soviet union was deficient in because of it’s low productivity.
“If a Neo-Nazi walked up to you while you were waiting for the bus and asked you to skim/read a 5-page essay on why they believe Hitler was right, what would you do?”
Could this question be used to determine whether someone is extremely open-minded? For example, if they say they would read it, then they are very open-minded, if they scoff at the idea then they are too close-minded to see past their initial views of an idea, and if they say no because it’s boring then neither?
This is something I have not fleshed out, just an interesting thought. I think it would be interesting if you could come up with one question that could weed out very open minded people from somewhat open-minded or close-minded people.
One obvious confounder is if the person being asked is generally very busy. If they are the sort who studies flashcards or reads books at bus-stops, then they might prefer those activities to reading about why Hitler was right.
Are they handing me a leaflet to read in my own time like the people who sell charity “newspapers” like the Big Issue, or are they hovering around demanding my thoughts on it?
Ok, well I would definitely read it then. I already have some strong expectations about what would be in the leaflet, but any kind of political extremism is fascinating to me (kind of in the same way as a train anorak), and I would be low key excited to find it in my area even if I would be upset and worried to see it become popular on a national level. I have enough white privilege (and I mean this seriously, not mockingly) to be amused and entertained by silly Nazi men as long as they remain a weird minority.
Not really, too many confounders. E.G., I would blow them off (politely if possible, about the same way I respond to unsolicited religious tracts, please-sign-this-petition political activists, and the like), but not because I’m not willing to consider the merits of Hitler’s theories of race, politics, and world order. Precisely because I have read a fair amount on the subject of National Socialism, World War Two, and various Anti-Semitic theories of history that my prior for a random dude at a bus stop having an argument I haven’t heard before is very, VERY low.
They would have to be -extremely- convincing with their verbal pitch to make me think there’s something completely novel in their five page essay.
I’m kind of in the same boat as you, but there’s also a (very big) part of me that would want to pull a Daryl Davis. Later he’d have to tell his buddies “Hey, I walked up to this Jewish-looking guy with the essay, and he was totally cool about it. He read the essay, didn’t get offended or dismiss any of the points out of hand, and even said he could understand one or two of the conclusions in it. Then we talked for a while until the bus came. He was friendly and interested in what I had to say. We even swapped email addresses so we could talk more.” That’s a guy who isn’t going to stay a neo-Nazi for long.
True, I was looking for one question that could be used to quickly gauge someone’s open-mindedness, while the Big Five is a battery of questions. But perhaps I could find a question in there that itself is a good enough indicator openness.
This hypothetical Neo-Nazi reminds me of two minor characters in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Universe from a very, very religious country, named Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets and Smite-the-Unbeliever-with-Cunning-Arguments.
I would definitely read it. I am sure of it. I think I can lend 10 minutes of my time to see how someone justifies something I believe to be utter nonsense.
I’d at least skim it, but with a low threshold for dismissing it. I’m not going to go out of my way to parse poorly-worded sentences, bad spelling, whatever. Likewise for substantially unsupported claims.
But I’d skim it at least to see if there was anything I hadn’t heard before. And then later on research any claims which seemed to be even passably correct to stick in my head.
I think this was discussed somewhere on LessWrong. Exposing yourself to a biased but skilled persuator is not “information”, in the sense of improving your view of reality. Depending on specific conditions, this may still be so even if you’re aware of it and trying to compensate – but that’s a lot less likely.
I’d read it while being aware it’s propaganda. The small risk of becoming biased pro-hitler is more than compensated by a general tendency to be open to counter-arguments to your current views. And one document is well within reasonable limits. Hell, sometime I’ll have to find the time and finish Mein Kampf – I got bored well before I got to the saucy bits.
As an aside, I find Christchurch manifesto prison-enforced ban to be morally repugnant. No strong opinions on the voluntary media ban.
Isn’t that how courts work – exposing the judge/jury to biased but skilled persuators from each side? Does anyone have a better idea for how to obtain justice? And why should political discussions be different from criminal justice in this regard?
The courts work in a context that’s carefully tuned to balance the two sides. But OP’s question was about a singular event. Note that my final decision is to read it – more variety of persuators means better view of reality overall. Key word here being “variety”, not sheer number.
Do you know of the LessWrong post? I’d love to read it. The only two relevant ones I can think of are SSC but are the epistemic learned helplessness one and hardball questions about the superintelligent AI changing your view.
That’s fair, no worries.
But along your point of a biased but skilled persuader, how do you function during meetings or 1:1 debates if someone is advocating for a certain point and is not backing down? In the end you have to make a decision, but you also know that you may become biased towards their view (just like becoming slightly biased pro-hitler) if you only hear their side of the argument.
It’s perfectly ok to get a bit biased towards hitler after that conversation, it would be odd if you weren’t. It would mean he was very shitty persuader. Fortunately it’s just one interaction among many, so long term it evens out to a (hopefully) accurate image.
I remember this post and was able to find it by searching for the metaphor it used: The Bottom Line, by Yudkowsky. It’s part of the original sequences. IIRC there’s a few later, related posts, but this is the core post on how to update on evidence present by a source you know to be both biased and highly persuasive.
if a sterotypical Neo-Nazi (intimidating skinhead) walked up to me while I were waiting for the bus… that’d probably be a tad intimidating and my interest would be in getting the hell away rather than their leaflet.
In a personally safe format like online I know my response:
“skim through it and if it’s totally batshit dismiss the person as mentally unwell, if it’s sort of coherent pick out the factual inaccuracies and respond pointing them out”
Unless it’s the same old copy-pasta in which case you know the person is just parroting and it’s boring to respond to the same thing over and over.
Do you have time for everyone who approaches you to hear the good news about _(whoever)_, let alone a neonazi?
I mean a bunch of them are scammers, or they are trying to sell you some product, which may or may not be a scam in itself independent of what the person approaching you believes/knows about it.
Telling the well intentioned true believers, it’s hard, but a good rule of thumb is “ignore them all”. Which would include the neonazi guy in my case.
People have abused the social etiquette of approaching another random person for help to sell stuff, and it is a shame.
I think it’d depend on the guy. If he seemed a little off-kilter, I’d probably decline and remember that I forgot something at home. Interacting with crazy people is always a risky endeavor. If he otherwise seemed normal, I’d probably go for it. Bus rides tend to be rather boring and it might even lead to an interesting conversation.
I’m likely to treat it as a personal threat, since Hitler would have had me killed.
ETA: Also, you’ll want a non-political one, otherwise the political skew would probably swamp your results. At least (this is not an accusation) unless the goal of the study is to produce a study with the headline: Neo-Nazis Most Openminded Group!
Sounds like he mistakes >500 year processes and cycles for eternal trends.
One could have said in the year 100 that Imperium has made astonishing strides since the Punic Wars.
That any defeats by barbarians are mere contingent events. etc.
I don’t think that the Roman Empire’s impact on European/world history was negated by its eventual fall
No, but the Roman Empire both as a state and as its institutions and form of government definetely collapsed and were replaced by different states with different institutions, mostly feudal monarchy (with some instances of oligarchic republics more similar to the ancient Greek poleis than to SPQR).
So would a first century Franciscus Fukuyamus declare that Imperial burocracy was clearly the “End of History”? According to this logic, he should have.
In fact, there were Romans who claimed exactly that. The Greco-Roman scholar Polybius once said that the only task left to future historians would be to explain how the Roman Republic accomplished so many great victories and triumphs. (Compare and contrast Karl Rove’s quote that “we’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”)
So what separates Fukuyama from Polybius? For starters, Fukuyama never claimed the U.S. or any other existing nation would dominate the world forever – although some of his readers, like the aforementioned Mr. Rove, may have interpreted him that way. Nor did Fukuyama claim that specific systems of government or societal structures or modes of production would remain in place indefinitely; the governments and societies of the future may look very different than the governments and societies of today. His claim was merely that future sociopolitical systems will be built upon the foundation of liberal democracy, rather than on opposing systems like fascism, communism, or monarchism.
I wouldn’t go so far as to propose cycles, let alone periodic cycles – but I basically agree.
There is a difference between “who’s in power” and “has the Overton window moved (far enough to exclude the old ways)” – I actually thought that was what the OP meant by “contingent” vs “decisive”. Reading e.g. a defense of the “divine right of kings”, or for that matter one *against* it, feels like walking into delerium to a modern person. (I.e. it’s well outside the window). And yet – I actually see a resurgence of ideas tending in that direction over the past 60 or so years with similar cultural spaces being explored in fiction, rather than merely attributed to “benighted” or “barbaric” ancestors.
Ideas and ways of seeing the universe come back. Sometimes they become dominant again, though often with new names and other important differences.
China is often raised as an example of a state offering a sustainable non-democratic political model, but I don’t think that it falsifies this theory, at least not yet. China industrialized recently and is still a middle-income country, with a PPP adjusted GDP per capita of around $18,000, lower than those of Argentina, Greece, Portugal and Chile. It’s certainly conceivable that it won’t follow the trajectory of South Korea, Taiwan and Japan in eventually becoming and staying democratic as it develops, but it’s not clear to me that that’s a sure thing.
I think Francis Fukuyama would agree with a version of this argument-he recently appeared on bloggingheads.tv with Bob Wright and argued his vision of “history” meant an end state. He did not think anything other than liberal democracy would be the final stage and in the discussion with Wright he talks he was more worried about the rise of right wing populism in established states than the rise of China as disproving his theory. The reason for his concern more with right wing populism is Fukuyama was talking about the triumph of “Western liberal democracy” in his essay and he talks about “illiberal democracy” as a threat in the discussion with Wright. That is not quite the same thing as diversity but he sees, say, Modhi’s actions in Kashmir or Erdogan’s rise in the Turkey as threats to his thesis, not because they will abolish democracy or capitalism but because they are degrading constitutionalism and separation of powers ect the “liberal” components in “liberal democracy”. If you say the end of history triumph of “nationalistic illiberal democracy as the end state of history” his thesis changes.
Still…I can’t help feel the comparison to Japan and Taiwan may be the wrong goalpost. As you point out, China’s per capita income is basically second world level or 25% of America’s. But it was third world level in the early 90s (equivalent to India) and more importantly China’s GDP now is about 70% of America. That is closer than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever came (lazy googling gives me Soviet GDP of less than 50% of America in 1977 for example-.7 trillion vs. 2 trillion vs China’s 12 trillion vs America 19 trillion in 2017.)
You can say thats a function of capitalism and you may be correct but its decidedly a non-Western style of capitalism. China also seems to be growing more authoritarian as it gets richer (see Xi becoming leader for life) not less.
In some ways America and European geopolitical planners better desperately hope China never hits S. Korea or Japanese GDP per capita income/first world status-if it comes to pass that 1.3 billion Chinese have gdp per capita of over 50% of America’s 300 million then you aren’t talking about a Chinese economy that is narrowly surpassing America’s. You are talking about a Chinese state that has a GDP what, 3x-4x America’s? Such a state would be clearly dominant over the nearest Western rival (although maybe an India that also somehow achieved first world gdp per capita could give it a run for its money.) Maybe a mishmash of all these predictions will happen and 2050 will feature a faceoff between a newly (illiberal) democratic and fiercely nationalistic China and a democratic India suffused with Hindu nationalism and led by a right wing populist that is not overly concerned with diversity. That world wouldn’t be completely foreign to an observer in 1991 but it also wouldn’t resemble a world dominated by “Western liberal democracy.”
I think something to bring into this is that we won’t see an end of history if you believe that superintelligent general AI is coming soon (mid this century/early next century), since that will completely disrupt the current battles between competing systems without us being able to see them come to their fundamental conclusion.
Sure. Fukuyama’s predictions likewise won’t come to pass if another Chicxulub-sized asteroid strikes the Earth, or if the Zeta Reticulans take over the world and force us all into slavery, or if the Evangelical Protestants were right all along and the Rapture suddenly occurs. But it would be rather exhausting for social scientists to preface every new theory with “assuming some unforeseen, unprecedented, and incredibly unlikely event doesn’t wipe out or irreparably alter human civilization first…”
That said, Fukuyama has addressed the subject of transhumanism and the dangers it could potentially pose to liberal democracy.
Yeah, but very smart people working in the relevant field consider it likely within the stated time period, whereas I don’t give the Zeta Reticulan apocalypse theorists much credibility.
That said, Fukuyama has addressed the subject of transhumanism and the dangers it could potentially pose to liberal democracy.
Sadly can’t read this due to the pay wall, but I’m glad he’s addressed it, because to me the weird thing would be if it wasn’t relevant.
Yeah, but very smart people working in the relevant field consider it likely within the stated time period, whereas I don’t give the Zeta Reticulan apocalypse theorists much credibility.
While I do think there are plenty of ways for advanced AI to cause massive economic and infrastructural problems, largely just due to systemic overreliance on it, the Skynet scenario seems incredibly unlikely to me, especially within the next few decades. An actual AI cataclysm is much more likely to be along the lines of “we have this one AI controlling the world’s air traffic systems and it suddenly broke down,” which could still be devastating but wouldn’t end humanity and probably wouldn’t end modern civilization.
I made quite a substantive response to this but it keeps being eaten, so apologies. I’m trying to find what banned word is doing it. Hopefully multiple versions don’t appear at once.
An actual AI cataclysm is much more likely to be along the lines of “we have this one AI controlling the world’s air traffic systems and it suddenly broke down,” which could still be devastating but wouldn’t end humanity and probably wouldn’t end modern civilization.
That’s just one system. Technology fundamentally changes everything. I don’t know about “destroy humanity”, but you don’t need to do that to disrupt human centred politics like liberal democracy and its populist antagonist. I was only born in 1987 and things have radically changed in my lifetime in such a way that liberal democracy is more in peril, not less, and many of the reasons may have a lot to do with modern communication technology. At least many esteemed media outlets put a lot of weight on f4ke news being behind the right populist push, and the nature of social media allowing powerful interests to manipulate the outcome in a way that is assumed to be predictable enough to be worth putting resources into. Trump then adopted it and all sides now throw the charge at each other. You add deep f4kes to that and produce something like deep f4ke news, and the ability to have faith in information is harmed, and since information is very important for the democratic process the implications aren’t minor.
There’s definitely something to historical materialism (though I think technology broadly is the factor, and “the means of production” is a bit too narrow). The industrial revolution provided the material base for liberal democracy AND populism, and it may be that the information and intelligence revolution provides the basis for something else entirely. We’re still reeling from the impact of the internet, and now smart systems are entering the scene. Even if their capability tops out at a human level that’s going to radically change everything, because suddenly you have access to rapidly reproducible and near perfectly loyal slave armies.
This paper shows how non-violent democracy movements can succeed with very small numbers behind them. Unless the liberal democratic countries have the power to conquer and forcibly convert all of the autocratic countries, this will be the main mechanism by which the slow convergence towards the liberal democratic end of history occurs. Even human level automation radically disrupts this mechanism, by allowing the military to shrink towards the command level.
From the paper:
Internally, members of a regime—including civil servants, security forces, and members of the judiciary—are more likely to shift loyalty toward nonviolent opposition groups than toward violent opposition groups. The coercive power of any resistance campaign is enhanced by its tendency to prompt disobedience and defections by members of the opponent’s security forces, who are more likely to consider the negative political and personal consequences of using repressive violence against unarmed demonstrators than against armed insurgents.
Divisions are more likely to result among erstwhile regime supporters, who are not as prepared to deal with mass civil resistance as they are
with armed insurgents. Regime repression can also backfire through increased public mobilization. Actively involving a relatively larger number of people in the nonviolent campaign may bring greater and more sustained pressure to bear on the target, whereas the public may eschew violent insurgencies because of physical or moral barriers.
The ability for the above mechanisms to affect autocratic regimes is diminished if technologies arise that
A: Make the opinions of the masses easier to centrally coordinate
B: Make the masses redundant
We’re arguably in the early stages of A due to social media, and in the future automation is going to fulfil B in the economic and military field. Strikes won’t work because there will be very few workers, and the government can simply lower your s0cial credit score, lowering your privileges and government stipends. If people do try to organize and go Ghandi, the backfire effect will be quenched when the government needs fewer loyal subjects to enforce order, and relies on a much much smaller group of well paid techs, rather than masses of lower paid grunts whose sympathies lie among the populace.
There will still be the international dimension to consider, and it’s possible that liberal democratic countries could go to war to free other peoples, but ultimately I think the jig will basically be up for democracy once A and B are even halfway fulfilled. You start talking about superintelligent AI and then maybe the jig is up for everyone, and perhaps not due to a lurid Terminator scenario, but simply because we slip into comfy irrelevance as a species.
It’s possible liberalism in the sense of a permissive legal system may still persist, but this would effectively have to be granted at the behest of the real power, as the material basis for bottom up “people power” would have been undermined.
Mostly that is correct. But in some places, like Syria and Bahrain, it was Sunnis rebelling against Shiites or the reverse – an ethnic identity basis, not far from nationalism.
Sorry if I’m misreading, but I think you can clearly have nationalism even if the rebelling and rebelled against are both members of the same ethnic group.
The American Revolution is an interesting example because the revolutionaries invented a new nationality; the old one was too closely identified with the Crown and government.
Going back to my point, I didn’t mean that the Arabs aren’t nationalist. I meant that nationalism didn’t make sense as a reason for Arabs to fight other Arabs.
I think it does. You can have nationalism which is not ethnic nationalism. Now, whether this is the case for the Arab spring is a question I don’t have an answer for.
Generally speaking, the largest groups they recognize an allegiance to are tribes or tribal confederations with sizes ranging from ten thousand to one million people. Membership to tribes is defined by patrilinear ancestry: a man can never join another tribe, a woman can only join another tribe through marriage, but this is discouraged too, most marriages are endogamic. This pattern of social organization is replicated in a fractal-like fashion down to the level of individual family units. In fact marriages between first cousins, double cousins or uncles and nieces are common. Within a tribe, there isn’t a clear cut difference between relatives and strangers, trust and allegiance smoothly decrease with ancestral distance: “I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger”.
There used to be a pan-Arab nationalist movement between the 19th and early 20th century, mostly appealing to intellectuals and politicians, but it is now mostly dead. The Salafi movement and its attempted implementations such as al-Qaeda and ISIS sought to establish a Sunni Muslim theocracy, but these were never broadly popular with the general Arab population, or even with the Sunni Arabs, and are now mostly defeated.
Most of the conflict in the Arab world can be attributed to them being stuck into post-colonial nation-states ultimately resulting from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, which map poorly to the existing tribal divisions. Thus in each state you have an emir or strongman president supported by a single tribe or small alliances of tribes and propped up by foreign interests, ruling with an iron fist on mostly unwilling subjects who don’t recognize his legitimacy. When the power balance shifts, as in the Arab Spring, conflict ensues, and finding new stable equilibria has proved to be very hard.
Arabs are diverse. Libya and Syria are tribal. Tunisia and Egypt are not. Don’t trust me, consult Lee Kuan Yew. That fact yields a pretty good prediction of the divergent paths of the Arab Spring.
Well, the Arab Spring in Egypt, while nowhere approaching the mess of Libya and Syria, didn’t really improve over the status quo. el-Sisi is as much of a dictator as Mubarak, if not more. Heck, Trump recently called him “his favorite dictator” to his face.
Tunisia seems to be the only country where the Arab Spring really succeed. But it’s a small country at the margin of the Arab world, both geographically and culturally, hence I would consider it a non-central example.
They marry their nieces? The Koran has a clear list of which relatives a man isn’t allowed to sleep with, and nieces are on the list. (Cousins aren’t.)
Get back to me when the liberal capitalist social democracies have had stable debt-to-GDP ratios, and TFRs of ~2.1 excluding immigration, for a few generations. Until then, the supposed “end state of history” is sustaining itself by consuming non-renewable resources at a non-trivial rate. Any actual end state of history will be, A: some non-trivial development of liberal capitalist social democracy or B: Mad Max and its sequels(*) or C: whatever outmoded forgotten systems cling to life on the ash heap of history until LCSD is too weak to stop them from taking charge.
* Possibly including optimistic far-future sequels that I could imagine if I felt like it.
I don’t understand why this is an issue either. The obsession that people on the right have with reproduction and birth rates is downright baffling to me. The chances of human civilization breaking down simply because we don’t reproduce enough seem negligible.
Because old age retirement programs exist and are, essentially immortal in a traditional neoliberal political sense. In other words, they will only be reformed/dismantled in a revolution or in the wake of a breakup.
Just in America we have Social Security and Medicare, which have payout projections that mirror or eclipse total government revenues in the near future, even with tax rate increases.
Because old age retirement programs exist and are, essentially immortal in a traditional neoliberal political sense. In other words, they will only be reformed/dismantled in a revolution or in the wake of a breakup.
Just in America we have Social Security and Medicare, which have payout projections that mirror or eclipse total government revenues in the near future, even with tax rate increases.
I’m going to ask for a source for this, as what I’m able to find indicates:
“The annual cost of Social Security benefits represented 4.0% of GDP in 2000 and 5.0% GDP in 2015. This is projected to increase gradually to 6.4% of GDP in 2035 and then decline to about 6.1% of GDP by 2055 and remain at about that level through 2086.” Wikipedia, referencing the Social Security Trustee’s report from 2012 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_debate_in_the_United_States)
While federal receipts as a percentage of GDP sit at about 16%. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S. Again, I’m not an economist, or particularly economically literate, so perhaps I’m misunderstanding, or misreading.
That doesn’t help clarify the issue particularly because that doesn’t seem a plausible outcome to many people. The confusing thing is why that seems like it needs to be combated.
Why would it be implausible? White Americans will no longer be the majority in our own country within my expected lifetime. That seems pretty plausible to me.
That doesn’t help clarify the issue particularly because that doesn’t seem a plausible outcome to many people. The confusing thing is why that seems like it needs to be combated.
Well the people for whom this outcome doesnt seem to be plausible are not the ones obsessing over birth rates, obviously. And the people for whom it does seem plausible have an interest in publicizing the issue as much as possible.
The underlying facts however, are not really in dispute, and are even celebrated by some.
“No longer a majority” is far from “disappear or be dispossessed”. There will still be 180 million or so white Americans. That’s not disappearing (although it is fewer than there are now), and dispossession seems unlikely.
@jermo sapiens
A charitable interpretation would be that people weren’t mourning the decline in the disproportionate influence of a certain group of people. It’s insensitive but is hardly an endorsement of the disappearance or dispossession of white people.
As I said above, it is likely that the US will become a majority non-white country soon, but I don’t see why it should be interpreted as an existential crisis for white America.
Fair enough. I would like to understand the position though. I struggled to articulate a response to jermo sapiens that wouldn’t seem obviously ridiculous to someone for whom this was a concern (not sure I managed it).
If Scott wants a “discuss the roots and mentality of WN” thread he’s welcome to allow it, but like certain other buzzwords on his policy page, we steer clear of that here.
A charitable interpretation would be that people weren’t mourning the decline in the disproportionate influence of a certain group of people. It’s insensitive but is hardly an endorsement of the disappearance or dispossession of white people.
I dont fear the disappearance of white people, nor am I a WN (to also answer EchoChaos’s last comment). But disappearance could occur as a result of very low birth rates, which is why I mentioned it initially.
Much more likely is dispossession, by which I mean “losing their majority status”, the sense that they will lose their influence over the affairs of their country, as you note yourself in the above quote.
So, what is the charitable interpretation of an intentional reduction in an ethnic group’s influence within their society? Is there anyway to view that policy as anything but aggression against that group? Are there other ethnic groups for which it is OK to dispossess of their influence in society?
I know this is dangerous territory, but I have difficulty listening to Paul Krugman in that clip I linked above and thinking this would be ok to say about anyone else. I’m genuinely curious as to what is going on here. If I were asked by a WN to defend what Krugman is saying, I’m not sure I could do a good job.
One non-WN reason to be unhappy about low birth rates is that it suggests that things aren’t working out very well for a lot of people–they’re not able to get set up in a stable marriage and have kids, which is one of the best ways we know for people to have worthwhile and satisfying lives. To the extent that the low birth rate reflects people feeling too pressed by their circumstances to be able to afford kids, or unable to find a satisfactory partner to have them with, this seems like a bad thing we should care about. To the extent it’s just people deciding that life with no kids and more money is a better deal for them, I’m not sure it’s much of a problem. (Other than the potential for population collapse or big changes in population makeup that might be unhealthy for other reasons.).
I’ve seen the argument (I think from Interfluidity) that you can say the same thing about unwed births. The idea is that women at the bottom of the social/income/intelligence distribution tend not to have a lot of great choices available for husband material, and so face a choice of no husband + a kid or no husband + no kid, and opt for at least having a kid. This reflects, not just some kind of bad cultural values or something, but a lousy situation in which lots of left-tail-of-the-bell-curve men have few prospects and jailhouse tattoos, and so the approximately matching women don’t marry at all rather than marrying as poorly as they’d have to. (Mass incarceration also has a huge impact here!)
To the extent that the Republicans get most of their voters from whites, it’s probably also pretty easy to see why Republicans who are worried about the future of their party might not be thrilled to see a declining fraction of the population be white–they’re worried they’re going to start losing elections. (This is also part of why one thread in the party involves outreach, particularly to hispanics. The Bushes are closely linked to this, but it’s not so popular with a lot of the base.). And similarly, it’s not hard to see why both ethnic activists and Democrats might view more hispanics in the US with enthusiasm–it will make their jobs easier.
Low TFR and falling population isn’t a problem necessarily, even from the perspective of a “For ourselves and our posterity” (foaop for short).
It does tend to put strain on old age/retirement programs.
It *is* a problem from the foaop perspective if it’s combined with replacement migration. Since replacement migration means that the countervailing pressures of rising wages and falling property values don’t kick in and automatically subsidize family formation.
Also replacement migration doesn’t even necessarily solve the retirement issue if the replacements aren’t life-time net taxpayers. People often migrate at peak working [taxpaying] age so the short-run tax outlook is rosier than it appears.
Ultimate “foaop” anxieties are about the answers to these questions:
1. how long the sub replacement TFR will continue
2. given #1, how small a % of the population the “op” in “foaop” will remain.
3. Without being too explicit, will the anti-racism of the future be an inclusive, understanding, and morally consistent type, or a cynical, triumphalist, and opportunistic variety.
The obsession that people on the right have with reproduction and birth rates is downright baffling to me.
You know the whole thing about the meaning of life? A lot on the right think they’ve got it figured out. The traditional find it in religion, and most surviving religions are pretty big on the whole “be fruitful and multiply” thing. The less religious seem to be even MORE traditional, holding that propagation of their line (and of allied lines) is itself the point of life.
One non-WN reason to be unhappy about low birth rates is that it suggests that things aren’t working out very well for a lot of people–they’re not able to get set up in a stable marriage and have kids
Your point is well taken. But I find it unfortunate that you need to qualify this reason as being non-WN. Shouldnt we be concerned about birthrates being lower than replacement for basically any living thing (maybe not the cane toad in Australia, but any non-invasive species)? I just want to express my dismay that concern for lower than replacement birth rates is coded as WN such that you felt the need to formulate your opinion with an anti-WN disclaimer.
If the green spotted newt of central california was exhibiting lower than replacement fertility, it would be normal to express concern, global warming would be blamed, and legislators would be petitioned to act now to save the green spotted newt from extinction.
Similarly, I can express concern for the low birth rates in Japan and nobody will accuse me of being a japanese nationalist. It should be entirely natural to express concern for lower than replacement birthrates of anybody or anything.
It’s a reason for being concerned with low birthrates that doesn’t turn on any form of white nationalism. This seems relevant, in a discussion in which it seems like some people think that only white nationalists are concerned with the issue.
Shouldnt we be concerned about birthrates being lower than replacement for basically any living thing
Not if that living thing has increased its population by orders of magnitude in recent history, and you’re coming at it from a strictly ecological perspective?
From some environmentalist perspectives, at any rate, there’s a great deal in common between the cane toad and humanity.
Not if that living thing has increased its population by orders of magnitude in recent history, and you’re coming at it from a strictly ecological perspective?
From some environmentalist perspectives, at any rate, there’s a great deal in common between the cane toad and humanity.
Well, at least that’s honest. In the context that we are discussing this however, replace environmentalist with progressive, and humanity with white americans.
Consider the counterfactual. What if Europeans/whites had a TFR of 6 and Africa (or wherever else has a high TFR) had a TFR of 1.3, tens of millions of whites were emigrating to Africa each year, Africa would soon be majority white and was trending more and more white over time, etc. Would anyone be concerned about that at all, and would that concern seem in any way justified?
How do you feel about Hawaii? Native Hawaiians are now about the same population as pre-contact. Do you think they should have been at all concerned about immigration or reproduction?
Wouldn’t that concern apply a lot more to trying to slow down places with extremely fast population growth, rather than to opposing efforts to get TFR back up to replacement levels?
Also, it really does seem like a life well-lived, for most people, involves marrying and raising some kids. People not doing that seems like a bad outcome.
@LadyJane > “…The obsession that people on the right have with reproduction and birth rates is downright baffling to me…”
On this and that among “the Right’s” wishlist I think they should get their way, or I just wouldn’t be much bothered if they did, but on most of the stuff that most motivates me to vote I’m still “on the Left” so I really can’t speak for “The Right”, but I do worry about birthrates, not because (as I’ve heard some “on the Right” say) of a fear of cultural changes, in many ways newer immigrants and their children seem to me to be more interested in preserving aspects of American culture than those who were born here of parents born here are, plus I have a strong belief in the “founder effect” – otherwise (judging by the plurality of where Americans ancestors are from) we’d be speaking German instead of English.
Instead what worries me about low birthrates is what they seem to be symptoms of: historically people tend to have more children when they’re optimistic about future prosperity – i.e. low in the ’30’s during the Great Depression, and high in the ’50’s during the post war boom.
Birthrates dropped in 2009 in the wake of the Great Recession but, despite an improving economy since 2011, birthrates haven’t come back, that plus the lower life expectancy of Americans after 2014 (largely due to alcohol, drugs, and suicide) indicates lingering despair – and that worries me.
Wouldn’t that concern apply a lot more to trying to slow down places with extremely fast population growth, rather than to opposing efforts to get TFR back up to replacement levels?
Depends on how worried you are about the change in population over the entire globe, in which case you want to decrease population overall (which, honestly, I think I do).
@TheNybbler: Even from that perspective, I don’t really get it. White Europeans are not being overtaken by some alien species; their “replacement” does not have to entail the end of any White European’s individual bloodline. If I reproduce, and my children and their children reproduce, then I’ve succeeded at passing on my genes. And if some of my descendants end up mating with Blacks, or Asians, or Latinos, or non-European Caucasians, that doesn’t erase my genetic contribution to the species. Some of my descendants might not look like me, but that’s a shallow concern, and it wouldn’t be true for all of them anyway, since some mixed people look mostly or entirely White. It’s only a cause for concern if you believe that non-European races are genetically inferior (or at least genetically distinct in ways that go far beyond appearance and climate tolerance), or if you adhere to some modern version of the one drop rule. Needless to say, I reject those notions.
And if you’re coming from a religious rather than Darwinian perspective, it makes even less sense. If your goal is to ensure the survival of your faith, then surely American Christians should be thrilled about the fact that there are so many devout Christians immigrating here from the southern border. (Granted, Latino immigrants are almost exclusively Catholic, while most conservative Christians in the U.S. are Evangelical Protestantism, but I don’t think that’s the central issue here.)
Shouldnt we be concerned about birthrates being lower than replacement for basically any living thing (maybe not the cane toad in Australia, but any non-invasive species)?
If the green spotted newt of central california was exhibiting lower than replacement fertility, it would be normal to express concern, global warming would be blamed, and legislators would be petitioned to act now to save the green spotted newt from extinction.
Humanity as a whole is not in danger of going extinct, and comparing a human ethnic group to an entire species or even sub-species is a false equivalence. There are “races” (i.e. phenotype groups) of gray wolves that are endangered, and even a few that have recently gone extinct, but they seem to be very low on the priority list for most conservationists.
Now, would I be sad if calico cats stopped existing? Sure, and I don’t want to see a world where humans with pale skin or blonde hair or blue eyes or Caucasian facial features stop existing either. But I don’t think that’s what “White extinction,” as the ethno-nationalists describe it, would entail. Not only are human races not real species or sub-species, they don’t even correspond to actual human phenotype groups that well. In terms of genetics, claiming there’s a “White race” makes as much sense as saying that all white-furred dogs, from pomeranians to great danes, comprise a “White breed.”
The genetic difference between “Pygmy” and “Non-Pgymy Sub-Saharan African” is much greater than the genetic difference between “Non-Pgymy Sub-Saharan African” and “European,” and I’d say Pygmies are far closer to extinction than Europeans are, yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone claiming we need to take drastic efforts to preserve their genetic heritage. 200 years ago, most people didn’t consider Irish and Italian people to be truly White. 100 years ago, most people didn’t consider Jewish or Slavic people to be truly White. Today, people don’t consider Middle Easterners or Indians to be White, even though many ethnic groups from the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent are fair-skinned and nearly all of them have Caucasian facial features. One of the most Aryan-looking people I know, a pale woman with blonde hair and blue hair and sharp features, is actually Persian.
So really, I see no more reason to mourn the eventual disappearance of the poorly-defined ethno-cultural grouping known as The White Race than I do the mourn the disappearance of the Scythians. This “extinction” won’t involve the mass extermination of individuals, or the end of specific bloodlines, or the disappearance of genetic or phenotypal traits; it will merely be the end of a specific categorization, one that wasn’t even internally consistent and didn’t particularly match the actual reality of the world.
Similarly, I can express concern for the low birth rates in Japan and nobody will accuse me of being a japanese nationalist.
Clearly you don’t spend a lot of time in progressive groups! There are a lot of immigration enthusiasts who use the Japanese birth rate crisis as a perfect example of why we need immigration, and harshly criticize the Japanese government and Japanese culture for being so strongly opposed to it. Among leftists and progressives with a focus on immigration rights, Japan is basically the ultimate example of what we should strive to not be like.
For instance, this was recently posted to a pro-immigration Facebook page I follow:
“no joke tho japan really is on the brink of a massive demographic disaster
their extreme nationalism that rejects nearly all would-be immigrants, combined with their extremely low birthrate (a common feature in post-industrial, urban economies–the us is seeing this as well), has led to a median age in japan of almost FORTY SEVEN years old–immensely, dangerously higher than the world median of just over 26
a shrinking population means fewer people to fill job positions, fewer people to innovate ans start businesses, fewer people to buy products and services, and more. a declining population is devastating for the economy, and that’s without even mentioning the cost of caring for the nation’s elderly
however, all this could change, all these negative effects could be avoided, if the land of the rising sun can manage to just get the fuck over itself, stop being so xenophobic and conservative, and just TAKE IN SOME DAMN IMMIGRANTS”
White Europeans are not being overtaken by some alien species; their “replacement” does not have to entail the end of any White European’s individual bloodline.
I would surmise that’s not what most anti-immigration Europeans are concerned about. Even the right-wing democratic leaders of Hungary told the EU “Give us Christian immigrants. Those are the only ones we’ll accept.” White men worrying about the extinction of their haplogroup has got to be a very non-central thing.
Japan is going to have a harder time perpetuating its culture with immigrants than, e.g, Hungary, because where are you going to get high TFR Mahayana Buddhists who will also practice Shinto?
On Latinos: the IQ-100 objection to an open border with Mexico is “Speak English!”, IME.
@Le Maistre Chat: That explains why conservative Christians in both the U.S. and Europe would oppose immigration by Muslims, but not why they’d oppose Latino immigrants (most of whom are devoutly Catholic), or Christian immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, or Christians refugees from Muslim countries. Or why their British equivalents would be so opposed to Polish immigrants, who are both White (at least by the current American definition of the term) and largely Christian.
My point is that I don’t think the demographics issue is really about religion, except to the limited extent that religion serves as a proxy for race and/or culture. I’m not sure if the primary motivator here is race (either in the strict genetic sense, or in a looser tribal sense) or culture, but I think both of those are more central to the debate than faith is.
@LadyJane: I mean, do Americans oppose Christian refugees and English-speaking African Christians? I grew up Midwestern Red and have zero experience of that. Complaining that Latinos won’t learn English, yes, but that’s all.
Working-class Britons being mad that Poles took their jobs processes as “Sounds weird but OK, seems to be a true truth claim.”
@Le Maistre Chat: That was actually a recent source of conflict between the religious right and the nationalist right. A lot of the Evangelical Protestants pleaded that Trump’s ban on immigration from Muslim countries should include exceptions for Christian refugees, whereas the more secular branches of the social/cultural right (especially the alt-right ethno-nationalist types) wanted blanket bans for everyone in those countries. In the end, the latter group won, although largely due to outside intervention in the form of the explicitly religious ban being declared unconstitutional by the federal courts.
There are some physical differences across racial groups. They’re usually not very important except in a social sense, but occasionally they are. Forensic anthropologists and DNA tests can both distinguish racial groups pretty well from dead bodies/DNA. There are real differences that go down to genes and basic functioning of the body, though the most striking of these tend to be for smaller groups than a whole race. (Sherpas have a ton of high-altitude adaptations, for example.) Doctors do and should sometimes provide different medical advice to members of different racial groups, and some medicines are known to work differently in different racial groups.
Whether race is a useful category for analysis depends on what you’re doing–this isn’t some moral question, just a practical one. For medical research, for example, it’s a better world when the people researching drug side effects and dosing and such check it out for members of multiple races. In at least that context, race is a valid and worthwhile scientific category. Similarly for using DNA to unravel prehistoric populations and migrations. And probably dozens of other things.
But what I think you’re trying to argue for is that race isn’t a useful or meaningful moral category. That is, what you seem to be arguing for is that nobody should be especially concerned if they see (say) all the Australian Aboriginees disappearing from the Earth via some kind of voluntary action like not having kids. Or that if it turned out that the black population in the US were collapsing, but not because of anything bad, just because of heavy takeup of birth control and abortion, that this would be a silly thing to be upset about. We’re all human, after all.
I don’t think you can ever get from that is-statement about whether race is a useful scientific category or has any meaning to an ought statement about whether or not anyone should care if one racial group is going away or being supplanted by another. This is purely a matter of values and priorities and tastes. Perhaps Alice is upset that whites are becoming less common in the world, Bob is upset that Catholics are becoming less common, and Carol is upset that Yiddish speakers are becoming less common in the world. I don’t think there’s an obvious way to decide which of these peoples’ concerns are more or less reasonable. (Except by pointing out actual numbers showing that their groups aren’t disappearing–which I think works out fine for Alice, is a little worrying for Bob, and isn’t going to make Carol feel any better at all.)
Now, just to be clear, whites aren’t remotely going away–shifting to no longer being the majority in the US is a change, but not an extinction. And I think much of that phenomenon turns on considering hispanics nonwhite in much the way that a previous generation wasn’t quite ready to label Italians as white. And some of the change also has to do with mixed-race children, which isn’t any kind of extinction, it’s just people marrying/having kids with people of other races.
Even from that perspective, I don’t really get it. White Europeans are not being overtaken by some alien species
Now you’re talking about white nationalists, not worries on the right about different issues. The white nationalists are easier to understand, but hard to find common ground with if you reject their ideas of racial purity.
If your goal is to ensure the survival of your faith, then surely American Christians should be thrilled about the fact that there are so many devout Christians immigrating here from the southern border.
@albatross11 says: “OTOH, I think the Catholic Church has generally been pretty comfortable with mostly-Catholic immigrants from Latin America….”
The Spanish language Mass at the Catholic church near my house,has far more attendees than the English language Mass a few hours earlier, and most of the parishoners at the Protestant churches nearby have either grey hair or Asian faces (by far most with American accents so at least second generation, or came while young), the historically black church in my old neighborhood is still going strong even though the neighborhood hasn’t been majority black since the late ’90’s, but with less parishioners than before.
As a guess, non-whites (if you include Latinos in that category) are at least half the practicing Christians within 10 miles of my house, and by far the most who are under 50 years old.
Young whites (not including Hispanics) just don’t go to chuch much in my area, and to me it looks like without the immigrants that have come here in the last 30 years there would hardly be any practicing Christians here at all.
@Plumber, @albatross11
And growing up in America, most of those young people won’t be Christians either, and in a generation or two none of them will be. Americans are better off materially, but their kids will be immensely worse off spiritually. Given what’s at stake (the soul), that’s not a happy outcome.
There are some physical differences across racial groups. They’re usually not very important except in a social sense, but occasionally they are. Forensic anthropologists and DNA tests can both distinguish racial groups pretty well from dead bodies/DNA. There are real differences that go down to genes and basic functioning of the body, though the most striking of these tend to be for smaller groups than a whole race. (Sherpas have a ton of high-altitude adaptations, for example.) Doctors do and should sometimes provide different medical advice to members of different racial groups, and some medicines are known to work differently in different racial groups.
Whether race is a useful category for analysis depends on what you’re doing–this isn’t some moral question, just a practical one. For medical research, for example, it’s a better world when the people researching drug side effects and dosing and such check it out for members of multiple races. In at least that context, race is a valid and worthwhile scientific category. Similarly for using DNA to unravel prehistoric populations and migrations. And probably dozens of other things.
As I said before, race is not phenotype, and only corresponds to phenotype in a very loose way. At best, racial groups are a very rough approximation of phenotype groups.
An American doctor may be inclined to assume that a Black patient has sickle-cell anemia, since that disease predominantly affects Black people. But it’s not really “Black people” who are prone to sickle-cell disease, it’s a handful of West and Central African ethnic groups; people from Ethiopia or South Africa aren’t any more likely to be born with it than Europeans or Asians. It’s just more convenient for American doctors to think about “Black people” because that’s a category they’re much more familiar with, and most of them wouldn’t be able to visually discern between a West African and an East African. The same goes for recommendations on medicine: pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t put out an ad warning “this medicine may have harmful effects on people of Yoruba and Igbo descent,” since most Black people in the U.S. aren’t even aware of their ethnic heritage.
As for Sherpas, they’re an extremely small and isolated ethnic group, much like the African Pygmies I mentioned earlier. I’d agree that they are an actual race, in a real physical sense, but as with the Pygmies, they’re an exception that proves the rule. If someone generalized from the Sherpas and claimed that “East Asians have a greater tolerance for high altitudes than other humans,” then they’re clearly making a major categorical error. (The statement might technically be true in a statistical sense, since the Sherpa people may bring up the overall average for high-altitude tolerance enough to put East Asians as a whole slightly above other races. But even then, it’s highly misleading, since the majority of East Asian ethnic groups and the vast majority of East Asian individuals don’t have greater high-altitude tolerance.) Speaking of “the White race” and “the Black race” and “the Oriental race” is mistaking a particularly old and faded map for the territory.
Now, just to be clear, whites aren’t remotely going away–shifting to no longer being the majority in the US is a change, but not an extinction. And I think much of that phenomenon turns on considering hispanics nonwhite in much the way that a previous generation wasn’t quite ready to label Italians as white. And some of the change also has to do with mixed-race children, which isn’t any kind of extinction, it’s just people marrying/having kids with people of other races.
@TheNybbler: I agree that Christian sects aren’t fungible, but at the same time, with the sole exception of Jack Chick’s comic strips, I’ve never seen anyone oppose Latino immigration on the grounds that it would result in Catholics displacing Protestants. Anti-Catholic rhetoric like that hasn’t been a part of the anti-immigration movement – and definitely not a central part – since it was Irish and Italian immigrants that Nativists were complaining about.
@Nick: I’m not really sure what your point is. Are you saying that Catholics should oppose Latino immigration to the U.S. because it would be bad for Latinos, in the sense that they’d stop being religious? That’s certainly not an argument I’ve heard before.
@Nick: I’m not really sure what your point is. Are you saying that Catholics should oppose Latino immigration to the U.S. because it would be bad for Latinos, in the sense that they’d stop being religious? That’s certainly not an argument I’ve heard before.
@Nick,
Exactly why religious beliefs have dropped so much recently in the U.S A. is curious, my understanding is that Britain and Europe have been less religious than the U.S.A. for decades earlier and the U.S.A. was the exception to a general loss of faith among NATO countries, but that’s less true now.
African-Americans are still notably more religious than other Americans, for a long time white Evangelical Christians were actually increasing, but now there’s less of them as well, Mormonism held steady for a long time, but their numbers have started to drop lately as well, I haven’t read any reports on this, but well the decline of “mainline” Protestant churches in the U.S.A. has been long noted in my area the parishioners are increasingly second generation Asian-Americans who’s parents came from majority non-Christian nations, I suppose that Asian Christians were just more likely to emmigrate?
I’ve seen some reports Thad this is partially because of political partisanship, as the Republican Party became more identified with Christianity more Democrats became atheists, again the exceptions being new Hispanic immigrants, and African-Americans, with American blacks being just about the only subgroup that increased church attendance correlates with voting Democratic Party (atheism doesn’t correlate among American blacks with voting Republican though, it correlates with not voting at all), among most every other demographic frequent church-going correlates with voting Republican. First generation immigrants tend to be both Democrats and religious, third and up generation Americans tend to be Democrats or religious, with American blacks and to a lesser extent Jews the exceptions.
Exactly why this is the case I invite suggestions.
the decline of “mainline” Protestant churches in the U.S.A. has been long noted in my area the parishioners are increasingly second generation Asian-Americans who’s parents came from majority non-Christian nations, I suppose that Asian Christians were just more likely to emmigrate?
Vietnam has a 7% Catholic minority (higher before the Communist victory: they were converted by French missionaries, and South Vietnam had a Catholic dictator for a time) who were heavily over-represented among Vietnamese refugees to the US. There may be other examples among Asian peoples.
Because eventually those nations will no longer be high fertility. They will eventually go through the demographic transition.
More broadly, if the US sustains itself via brain drain from LDCs, what happens when LDCs catch up? This is probably more relevant for certain industries. For instance, many Western medical systems sustain themselves by poaching intelligent young doctors from South Asia. Once this talent pool is no longer available, are Western medical systems sustainable? If they aren’t sustainable, the political consensus underpinning the Western government isn’t sustainable either.
Why is immigration from high-fertility countries a non-renewable resource?
The “end state of history” hypothesis include the notion that liberal capitalist social democracies will eventually spread to most of the world. If that is the case, then where will the immigrants come from?
Of course you could weaken the claim and make the “end state of history” mean just the “end state of Western history”, assuming that large regions of the world will forever remain sh*tholes endlessly supplying the West with cheap immigrant labor. But this hardly seems like a stable equilibrium either.
The “end state of history” hypothesis include the notion that liberal capitalist social democracies will eventually spread to most of the world. If that is the case, then where will the immigrants come from?
This strikes me as a really great problem to have. I look forward to learning about the solutions my great-great-great grandchildren come up with to it.
Why is immigration from high-fertility countries a non-renewable resource?
Because, as others have noted, Fukuyama’s thesis at least strongly implies that all those high-fertility countries are going to convert into low-fertility liberal capitalist social democracies. They’ll produce some finite number of excess babies before that happens, after which “they” are “us” and we collectively are going to need a new source of babies.
More generally, it is highly unlikely that the effective TFR (i.e. after emigration) of the non-LCSD nations will exactly match that of the liberal capitalist social democracies ins the long run. Maybe the non-LCSD nations will maintain a higher net TFR in the long run and yet somehow avoid Malthusian catastrophe. If so, their population will grow so vast that the LCSD nations will be a tiny footnote in the history of humanity. Maybe the non-LCSD nations will maintain a higher net TFR for a time until they do undergo collapse. If so, that collapse and its aftermath going to look an awful lot like history continuing to happen. Also, after one multitudinous generation of refugees, the future supply of immigrants will be greatly diminished. Or maybe the non-LCDS nations will see their net TFR decline (probably by emigration or conversion to LCDS “universal culture”), in which case again the non-LCDS world will diminish to the point where it can no longer meet our demand for immigrants.
@LadyJane:
The chances of human civilization breaking down simply because we don’t reproduce enough seem negligible.
What, in the hypothetical where the future of humanity is the democratic west writ large and forever, is the alternative? Liberal capitalist democratic socialists as we know them, reproduce at less than replacement rates. Absent immigration, each generation will be smaller than the last. Eventually, there won’t be enough people to maintain the machinery of civilization, and civilization will collapse in a most historic faction. After which there won’t be any factories to make birth-control pills, and the TFR will climb again.
Or maybe, as noted, LCDS civilization will be forever a minor part of humanity, surviving and even thriving on the basis of defectors from the larger non-LCDS world. Could happen, but probably those non-LCDS types are going to keep perpetrating history. Or maybe LCDS civilization as we know it will transform itself into something whose population reproduces at replacement rates. Could happen, but that’s not a trivial change and probably implies at least one more big and unforseeable bit of history.
I’m guessing it will be a mix of all three, but what all three have in common is more inbound history and if there is a stable end state it isn’t the eternal dominion of LCDS Universal Culture as we know understand it. What else have you got?
If we knew why low TFRs were happening, it would be much easier to predict the future.
I suspect that the insatiable human drive for safety and comfort, combined with enough prosperity to achieve high levels of both has led to cultural changes in the way we live our lives and raise children. Those children have grown up to be so immature and risk averse that they shy away from risky and scary things like teenage sex, marriage. These kids are so neurotic that the “Kingdom of Fear” that Hunter Thompson wrote about in the early 2000s has entered a feedback loop, and the younger generations are convinced that the civilization will collapse by the end of the century.
And maybe they are right. There does seem to be something ‘off,’ economically, which gives a sense of foreboding about how jobs and careers and housing markets are really going to work in 30 years.
Then there is also the dropping sperm count, which as far as I’m aware has no obvious cause either.
The topic would make a good effort post for Scott, I think.
Something worth noting for TFR is that Western countries have sub-populations (not all of them ethnic in nature) that have above replacement fertility rates; the highly religious for example.
I do not believe TFR remain low indefinitely, but if whichever groups remains will be one that is largely immunized against LCDS incentive structures (urban, family planning, get a college education, etc.) — which may be a good or a bad thing depending on your POV.
Well we can infer at least these two proximate causes
1. Abortions, in the sense that Some portion of pregnancies that would have produced children do not do so anymore
2. Delayed Marriage / Delayed Childbearing — Either people delay marriage for college or they delay marriage due to economic insecurity [often both]
What remains of the TFR would be all the factors that on average encourage people of the same age to consciously have fewer total children than they did in the past (i.e. controls for age of marriage). That’s where the real uncertainty lies in my opinion.
@John Schilling: I think we’ll figure something out eventually. I tend to worry more about the actual problems of the present and the immediate future than about various potential problems that are centuries away. As Enkidum said above, that seems like a really great problem to have!
I think we’ll figure something out eventually as well. But for Fukuyama’s thesis to be correct, this unknown thing we will eventually figure out has to A: not be of historic significance and B: not fundamentally alter LCDS culture. And most of the obvious candidates would do at least one of those. Hence, my request that Fukuyama’s defenders come back when they’ve actually figured out a specific thing and shown than it works.
Then there is also the dropping sperm count, which as far as I’m aware has no obvious cause either.
Dropping sperm count, dropping testosterone level and increasing BMI.
Therefore men have reduced baseline libido due to reduced testosterone, and both them and their potential partners are more likely to be fat, making them both even less sexually attractive, thus reducing the chance of mating, and when they do mate the chance of pregnancy per intercourse is lower due to reduced sperm count, even without taking birth control into account.
What causes this is not clearly known, but my money is on “gay frog” environmental xenoestrogen pollution.
Anyway, whatever the cause, below-replacement TFR is maladaptive, which means that evolution will eventually take care of it (*). Even in the lowest fertility countries there are individuals who reproduce above replacement, whether they are less risk averse, or more resistant to xenoestrogens, or whatever, as long as the traits that give them higher fertility are heritable, they will prevail. Low TFR is on the wrong side of biology.
(* or drive us extinct, but there are too many of us for this to be a serious risk for now)
Or maybe the human population is above equilibrium, so evolution is propagating below-replacement rates to push the population to numbers better suited to thriving in the existing environment?
Isn’t that one of the cases where homosexuality occurs in the animal world?
Or maybe the human population is above equilibrium, so evolution is propagating below-replacement rates to push the population to numbers better suited to thriving in the existing environment?
This is a group selection argument. In general, group selection is very weak compared to individual selection, and arguably not existent for modern humans as a species since we don’t really compete with anything comparable to us.
Isn’t that one of the cases where homosexuality occurs in the animal world?
Why is immigration from high-fertility countries a non-renewable resource?
I understood it as immigration being a consumption of a non-renewable resource.
Suppose that one of the reasons why your country sucks less than some other country is genetic. Certain gene is more frequent in your population than in other populations. Maybe there is a loop where the genes cause certain policy, and the policy in turn gives advantage to people with the gene.
Now, if you import too many people, you are diluting the gene in your population.
The same argument could be made even if you assume that the thing that makes your country suck less is actually cultural. If the speed of immigration is greater than the speed of the immigrants acquiring your culture, you are diluting the culture.
Generally, if there is anything about people that makes the country great, immigration reduces it, unless immigrants are chosen for having the same traits.
(Arguments like “it’s not people, it’s the laws” won’t work in long term. In democracy, people will change the laws. Even before that, they can stop obeying them, or stop enforcing them. Or maybe the laws only work in combination with certain behavior, and without that behavior they do more harm than good.)
The dictatorships (China etc.) also have subreplacement fertility.
China does by design (one-child policy), other dictatorships have super-replacement fertility.
The debt ratios have never caused significant harm as far as I’m aware.
Countries with high debt/GDP like Japan or the PIGS are still considered first-world, but they do have severe economic issues primarily affecting the younger generations. Unsurprisingly, these are also the large countries with some of the lowest TFRs. PIGS countries also have the highest rates of youth unemployment among first-world countries, while the Japanese youth are usually counted as employed but many of them are financially dependent on their parents.
I don’t know which one of these phenomena causes the others, or whether they are in a self-sustaining vicious cycle, but clearly this doesn’t look like a sustainable equilibrium.
Russia and Iran also have very low fertility rates.
According to the Wikipedia article I linked, according to the 2019 UN data, they both have higher fertility rates than the EU average and the US, and in fact Iran has almost replacement TFR.
But comparing the data from 2017 to 2019, the TFR of Russia and Iran is growing while the TFR of Europe and the US is declining.
I wouldn’t be surprised if in a decade or so Russia and Iran are both comfortably above replacement, while I don’t expect this to happen for Europe or the US.
Russia and Iran are both substantially poorer than EU, and fertility generally gets lower as a country gets richer. So the fact that they have comparable fertility rates with the EU (as that wiki article you helpfully linked shows) means that they are sort of underperforming on this metric.
Btw. I do not think that year by year comparisons tell us anything useful on fertility. For any conclusions we would need longer term data.
What cruel nasty things does Iran try and do to improve fertility rates? I naturally assumed that being a theocracy they have effectively tried to make females into brood mares, but if even that isn’t increasing birthrates, then what will?
What is it about even the barest taste of modernity that makes so many people not want to breed?
A scientific theory should be able not just provide a nice sounding explanation for the things one already knows, but also to predict the things one does not. What did Fukuyama predict that actually came true?
Since 1992 (the year “The end of history” was written) no major country abandoned autocracy in favor of democracy, while several countries (notably Russia) went into the opposite direction. Several democratic countries have been successfully invaded and lost territory to their autocratic neighbors with little more than a token protest from the major democracies. If that’s what’s happening when the West still has material advantage, how will the global politics look like when China’s economy gets significantly ahead of the US?
Since 1992 (the year “The end of history” was written) no major country abandoned autocracy in favor of democracy, while several countries (notably Russia) went into the opposite direction.
Picking 1992 strikes me as a bit of cherry picking here, given it’s just after the fall of communism. But you do have countries becoming more classically liberal, like mexico. And if you look at freedom house you’ll see a big shift in the 90s to early 2000s.
Fukayama was writing in the context of post-soviet states transitioning to becoming democracies. He predicted that they’d succeed, and most of them have. You can’t leave then out, they’re a big part of his thinking.
He predicted that they’d succeed, and most of them have.
Most of them have not. Those that had are all EU members now, meaning that no “post-soviet state transitioned to becoming democracy” without ongoing external material incentives. As trust me, as a person living in one, that it’s the only thing keeping us from reverting to autocracy right now.
The reason for this is obvious. Liberals misunderstood and overplayed their hand. The liberal democracy of Fukuyama’s time was no longer the social democracy of a few decades before. Faced with grim realities of now-ruling neoliberalism, and unable to revert back, post-soviet societies took refuge in strong authoritarian states and personalities who could at least rein and counterweight the liberals’ excesses.
Maybe it’s unfair for Fukuyama personally to have become a poster child for liberal hubris, but someone had to.
I’m not convinced that Georgia or Ukraine are reasonably democratic, and to the extent that they are, it requires plenty of popular unrest (which is not treated kindly by those in power). I’m also pretty sure Russia’s aggression actually “helps” here – it makes them look away from Russia’s example. And the very fact that they look westward for allies against Russia may be distorting the perspective, making them appear more alike western democracies than they actually are. Either way, both are hardly success stories at this point.
But I believe I have missed one particular former soviet satellite state that from my faraway vantage point appears to be a functioning democracy – Mongolia.
I am now really curious how Mongolia is actually doing in a transition. It’s in a tough place caught between two authoritarian powers. Does anyone here have knowledge on that?
Indonesia in 1992 was ruled by Suharto, a dictator who had come to power in a military coup in the 1960s. I’m not sure how well it currently functions as a democracy, but it holds what at least appear to be free elections and has a 2/7 rating from Freedom House for political rights (where 1 is the best). In their words,
Indonesia has made impressive democratic gains since the fall of an authoritarian regime in 1998, establishing significant pluralism in politics and the media and undergoing multiple, peaceful transfers of power between parties.
Nigeria also came out of a period of military rule in the late 1990s. While the former dictator Olusegun Obasanjo won the first two elections after the official resumption of democracy (which were widely condemned as unfair), more recent elections have been considered free and fair by international observers. In 2015, for the first time the incumbent President lost the election and peacefully handed over power.
I wish I could be more certain. Lately I’ve been envying the kinds of people who can dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as a bigot and believe it. This is bad for the overall health of the discourse, but probably much better for the mental health of the participants to not have to agonize over the details and nuances or worry that the wrong person got cancelled. Overall, moral clarity is a good thing to have…except when it led us to trick ourselves into invading Libya…there, see what I mean?
I find myself arguing most fervently for positions that I have the most doubts about, because I’m trying to convince myself more than anyone else.
Can anyone even relate to this, or am I just a freak?
@ECD,
Well, how I induce this in myself is to work unscheduled overtime, be very tired, drink a lot of coffee or tea to be alert enough to drive, be unable to sleep, hear something on the radio or read online, and then fly into glorious umbrage at someone else’s opinion.
Not quite the same as joy, but I find it chases the blues away for a bit.
I’ve not yet had the “infuriated by something on the radio” experience yet, but I’m starting to get sick of the overtime. We’re in the middle of an emergency at work, and I finally got an 8-hour day yesterday and slept for 12 hours. Today was, thankfully, 8 hours as well.
@ECD,
Ah yes, unfortunately when you have a calm state of mind and your full facilities and empathy ones ability to do some good ranting is hindered.
It really is burdensome.
A little alcohol unfortunately increases my seeing the common humanity in others, but I imagine a lot combined with enough coffee could have the opposite effect, but then enough manual dexterity may be lost that being a keyboard warrior becomes difficult, so some trial and error is necessary for the right mix.
I used to try to believe that people we mostly generally decent.
But there’s a … particular group that I shall not name… where I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the claims of bigotry surrounding them are actually well founded and largely true for a significant majority of their group.
I’m intentionally not naming the group…
But imagine it was Alabamans. (it’s not)
It wouldn’t have affected me like that if I’d been searching out racists to argue with. I could argue with KKK members all day without it meaning anything much about the average resident of Alabama. But if I walked up to different random Alabaman’s in different places at different times regularly to talk about their views…. and they kept starting to talk about how great the KKK is…. I’d start to worry about the average Alabaman.
Topics come up where this group and their position comes up and when I look at their supporters and their post history and… 75-80% of the time it’s a string of posts about how disgusting muslims are, how asylum seekers are all criminal scum, how gay marriage is “wrong” and gays are sinful, [nation name] for the [native ethnicity] and rants about how whites are gonna be genocided if we don’t strike first.
At what point does pretending that this group **isn’t** massively bigoted and racist simply self delusion?
And the worst of it is that it’s often the same people complaining about being called biggots.
3 post ago in their post history they’re ranting about how we need to keep blacks out and how Obama is “disgusting”…. then they’re posting about how it’s totally unfair that they get dismissed as bigots.
Keep in mind that rather a lot of these “people” are almost certainly bots – this is true of all of the issues I can think of which your general description might apply to.
At any rate, I think while this might give you a decent way of predicting how a given conversation is going to go, it’s usually not a very useful way of actually governing your interactions with any given person, even according to your (let’s face it, kind of made up) statistics, 1/5-1/4 of them show no overt signs of the behaviours you’re objecting to.
I wish it was made up, I started keeping track in a notebook ticking off when one did start ranting about Muslims or similar and when they didn’t.
It’s why it’s extra depressing from a starting position of trying to believe that people are mostly decent.
If they’re bots then someone has gotten good at writing bots that can pass the Turing test.
How much of a group have to be decent to mean you have to pretend they’re decent by default?
Continuing the KKK/Alabamans comparison, I be surprised if there’s not at least one member of the KKK out there who’s actually a really nice person and doesn’t actually believe any of the stuff about non-whites.
Does that mean I should pretend they’re all non-bigoted, good and decent?
What’s the threshold? 1 in 100? 1 in 10?
When the majority of a group are actually garbage humans… there’s a point where pretending otherwise is just delusion and the sane thing to do is just model the group as a group of bigots who’s motives are highly linked to that bigotry.
Fair. I guess as EchoChaos suggests, remember that Facebook/Twitter/whatever is not necessarily representative of meatspace. But some groups are just pretty toxic, and I mean if I see someone being very vocal about their support for them, my opinion about that person will be adjusted downwards. Just the way life works.
When the majority of a group are actually garbage humans… there’s a point where pretending otherwise is just delusion and the sane thing to do is just model the group as a group of bigots who’s motives are highly linked to that bigotry.
One thing that might be good is to update your model of bigots (or anyone) from “garbage humans” to “regular humans who have this one major flaw”.
How sure are you that you’re getting a representative sample of the group? Like, maybe you think you’re talking to random Alabamans, but really you’ve unknowingly been talking exclusively to Alabaman Klansmen?
sampling is an issue, but then how much does validity apply it to people you encounter through the same sampling method?
If I sought out KKK message boards it would definitely be sampling bias if I wanted to take what I got from there and draw conclusions about a much larger group. But it seems valid to draw conclusions about KKK members from those same discussions.
If I sample by talking to a groups evangelists and the people who argue for them on online forums, sure it’s hard to say that grandma who is part of the same group but who never uses the internet is the same…..but can I eventually reasonably draw conclusions about their evangelists and people who argue for them on online forums?
When I’ve asked dozens of their evangelists encountered by method X about their beliefs and most have come back with bigotry.. at what point is the sane thing to assume that the next one you encounter by method X is probably pretty similar.
Well yes, it’s certainly valid to predict the results of your next sample based on the previous results of sampling the same way. I think that puts us in violent agreement – but your other comments seem to suggest you’re considering judging a broad group that you know you aren’t sampling based on the comments of the “evangelists” you are sampling.
1. Only say something if you have something to add to the discussion which hasn’t been said, or is unlikely to be said by someone else. Most people only talk for the sake of talking.
2. Don’t throw pearls to swine. If you aren’t going to change any minds or share understanding, don’t bother. Even Jesus didn’t waste his time with some sinners, because his time on Earth was limited. So is ours.
Both precepts are about wasting time. Don’t waste the time of others, but also don’t waste your own time. Time is better spent on other things. Like doing your laundry.
If you are constantly confronted with people who believe X and you aren’t changing their minds, then you should start ignoring them.
Well, I’d suggest to accept the prior that this group of people are… however you find them to be. If you find they statistically they’re so, then believing so it’s just a better fit to reality. (Another example that’s useful for perspective is that black people are more likely to be criminals.)
Then try to avoid thinking a lot in terms of category. Sounds like it’s a good idea, but it’s usually not.
And thirdly, remember that even the paranoid have enemies. Them being however they are doesn’t necessarily make each and every one of their opinions wrong.
The important question is how much do you need to interact with this group and why?
I have a very similar issue with some real life people I know, and my conclusion is that Facebook brings out the worst in people because of its feedback loops and non-interactive conversation.
If you don’t need to deal with them, just ignore them.
Topics come up where this group and their position comes up and when I look at their supporters and their post history
Am I to understand that “this group” and “their supporters” are two distinct collections of people? I can think of a few different ways in which judging the one by the words of the other could go wrong.
supporters = people who evangelize their belief system.
The people who go on message boards to explain/defend their beliefs and try to convert others or the people they put on stands handing out leaflets or going door to door.
“this group” is the wider group of those who have converted and throw their support behind the group.
The silent ones could all be terribly nice… but they seem to then be totally ignoring a lot of the stuff coming out of the mouths of their associated evangelists without disapproval or enough disapproval for it to put them off in any way.
The most vocal members of a group are also often the most extreme. It would be nice if people spent more time pushing back on the more fringey views of their fellow travelers, but politics, particularly online politics, being what they are, this problem is common for basically every position.
And how general is the group you are judging? The broader it is, the worst your heuristic might be. E.g. if it’s a specific policy, and the only arguments you hear in favor really are bigoted, maybe that does say something about all the “silent” supporters. But if it’s a broad coalition (e.g. Democrats or Republicans), it’s less fair to judge the whole by the sample of loud online supporters.
What would people think of you if you were judged by the most extreme proponents of the positions you hold? How much of your time online do you spend decrying the less savory ends of your own coalitions?
This is a rhetorical foul; you’re claiming a set of facts which you are careful to make unverifiable, and you’re winking in the direction of calling a certain set of people bigots while being able to deny you meant them if push comes to shove.
I was assuming he was calling a non-standard group of bigots, because if he wanted to call out Southerners (he specifically said it wasn’t us) or right-wingers he could’ve just said it.
How would you talk about it in the abstract? Because it is a general problem.
what do you do when a group appears to *actually* be mostly witch?
ignore the black hats, the gingerbread houses and way they keep cackling and flying around on broomsticks because it’s impolite to call people witches?
The goal isn’t to start a fight on the specific issue or I’d just name them.
It’s hard to avoid that some people will know what groups I argue with.
So I’m trying to make it general enough that a member of a Mormon 1978 anti-black schism group reading the comment or members of a certain Voat community would also feel attacked and think I’m talking about them.
How would you talk about it in the abstract? Because it is a general problem.
Try to avoid a sin that is perceived to belong only to one side of the culture war. I think there are as many or more lefty bigots, but that’s an idiosyncratic view.
If you just said “witches” from the start you’d get a less negative reaction, I think.
I agree with EchoChaos (or at least what I think he’s suggesting). If your goal is to remain in the abstract, use literal black-hat-wearing broomstick-flying witches. People will still wonder what group you are actually referring to, but they won’t be as distracted.[1]
But depending on your goals, I wonder if you might be better leading with the witches, and then revealing the actual group at the end. Sometimes the specificity will allow a more accurate response, possibly from someone from the inside who can explain why you are reaching an incorrect conclusion from the evidence you are seeing.
[1] Although this being the internet, it’s possible that there is a large enough population of black-hat-wearing broomstick-flying non-witches that you might get specific pushback.
Topics come up where this group and their position comes up and when I look at their supporters and their post history and… 75-80% of the time it’s a string of posts about how disgusting muslims are, how asylum seekers are all criminal scum, how gay marriage is “wrong” and gays are sinful, [nation name] for the [native ethnicity] and rants about how whites are gonna be genocided if we don’t strike first.
At what point does pretending that this group **isn’t** massively bigoted and racist simply self delusion?
So you dislike those people because they make generalizations about groups – and then you are tempted yourself to generalize about the group they belong to.
Telling you whether your conclusions are correct based on what you described is like convicting someone without seeing the evidence or letting them respond to it. It’s impossible to list all the reasons why your principles might not apply to every single case, and it’s certainly impossible for anyone familiar with the details to explain why your perceptions are just inaccurate if you haven’t told anyone any details.
Assume a reality where what I claim myself seeing is something I’ve actually seen.
you can assume I’m actually delusional in the real world, but if you found yourself in the universe where my claims were true, what would the sane reaction be? Pretend everyone is nice and non-biggoted or other?
If you have indeed interpreted what you’ve seen correctly, you will be able to predict how the people in question will act given a specific set of circumstances with a decent degree of accuracy.*
What you choose to do with that knowledge is up to you.
* If you can’t make such predictions accurately, it means your model is wrong.
This is, it’s not the argument I’m talking about, rather the people.
There does appear to be a small subset of people who have normal, non-racist reasons for their position, they’re a minority but they’re there.
And a subset of them have fairly reasonable arguments, they’re not arguments that personally move me, but I can recognize that they’re reasonable and fairly solid if you share their precepts.
It’s the people, the motivation of a seemingly sizable majority of the group that’s my issue.
It’s relevant because while that problem-majority mostly parrot the more socially acceptable reasons they simply flit between them as arguments-as-soldiers because they don’t actually care about those.
As such any argument/policy/sollution that addresses those publicly stated arguments is ignored because what they actually want, what they really really want is to just get rid of the muslims and everything else is just noise.
If there exists a subset of people who, in your words, “who have normal, non-racist reasons for their position,” that means that the position is not necessarily wrong. What you should then ASSUME (and I know its hard) is that all other people holding that position are simply intuiting that same position, but do no possess the rhetoric to say it in the same way.
This is simply the foil of a pretty standard argument made by “anti-racists” who oppose the normalization of IQ gaps and the like. Most anti racists do not possess the skill rhetorically or logically to persuade a child that “all humans are created equal”, there is a top 1-2% that make such arguments in a way that isn’t terribly embarrassing (children inherently perceive who in their peer group is better/worse at things). But the same is true of the “anti-anti-racists” who compose a group of people that generally have noticed that it is much safer to invite 70 year old ladies into your house than it is to let in 16 year old boys.
That sounds like a pretty normal, healthy way to approach things. I think especially if you can tune into the kind of self-awareness necessary to produce this post while you’re engaging in these arguments, recognize in the heat of the moment that you’re less sure than you might come across as, and adjust your wording accordingly. But that is a difficult skill to master.
Edited to add: I don’t think unkindness and not considering the consequences of your actions for other people should be thought of as “better for your mental health”. It’s just being a sociopath.
I would think it lies in the middle. Everyone has a point where others become other enough that they stop caring about the consequences for. For some it might extend only to themselves, or their immediate family. For others, it might be the entire country. Probably the mean is around tribe-level.
I’m much less certain about things than I used to be (‘things’ meaning politics and politics-relevant issues). I’ve become much more aware of my ignorance / lack of expertise.
Coincidentally I also argue about politics much less, although that may be because I now have a job and have less free time to argue on the internet.
Truth is a social construct. If people around me are saying “Flint still doesn’t have clean water” I don’t want to be the guy who says “well, actually, they’ve managed to bring lead levels down substantially since the scandal broke.” Nobody likes a mansplainer.
And to use your specific example, Kevin Drum still seems to be popular enough; and he’s not just pointed out “down substantially since the scandal broke”, but also that lead levels are down enormously since a generation ago and were even at the peak of the scandal, which is even more contrary to the outrage narrative.
There’s definitely a thing that is a social construct, that you will suffer social penalties if you deny. Flint having unclean water so long as any one of (Flint mayor, MI governor, POTUS) is a Republican, is a part of that thing. But I very strongly object to using the word “truth” to describe that socially-constructed thing. Indeed, I am tempted to assert that using the word “truth” to describe that socially-constructed thing will literally result in the apocalypse.
“Pravda” will do for now, but we could probably use a better word for this thing. Any ideas?
That works great, as long as you’re not using that “truth” to make any actual decisions. But as soon as you start using your socially-defined but not factually-correct truth to make decisions, you find yourself invading Middle-Eastern dictatorships in search of nonexistent WMDs, locking teenagers up for life + infinity convinced that they’re (nonexistent) superpredators, having outbreaks of measles caused by parents avoiding the (nonexistent) risk of MMR making their kids autistic, etc.
I mean, if we’re all just having a bull session with nobody making any decisions based on it, feel free to go to town with whatever the popular socially-defined truth is–young-Earth creationism, the Lizardmen secretly controlling the world, the oil companies suppressing the 100 MPG carburetor, the Fed having finally solved the business cycle so we’ll have only prosperity from now on, AIDS being caused by unhealthy lifestyle instead of HIV, etc.
The problem is, it’s natural to decide what’s true using social mechanisms that are very susceptible to “social truth” that isn’t actually literally true. This is a mostly harmless tribe-building exercise for many beliefs, but then we all get together in markets and elections and make decisions, and those decisions are largely informed by those socially-true-but-not-really-true beliefs. And the result is that we make really bad collective decisions. And also, decisionmakers in our society are mostly not all that much smarter than average people and are probably mostly not as smart as the average SSCer[1]. So they make direct decisions about court cases and government policies and employment and such, based on the socially-true-but-not-true-true knowledge in their heads.
[1] I’m thinking people like city managers/mayors, police chiefs, local prosecutors and judges, executives of large corporatioons, Congressmen, governors, military officers, high-level civil servants, school board members, etc. These folks are on average smarter than the average bear, and know their area of expertise well, but probably get their broad understanding of the world from the same place as most everyone else–vaguely remembered stuff from college, what’s been in the newspapers, maybe a popular book or two, what’s on TV every night.
There’s definitely a thing that is a social construct, that you will suffer social penalties if you deny. Flint having unclean water so long as any one of (Flint mayor, MI governor, POTUS) is a Republican, is a part of that thing. But I very strongly object to using the word “truth” to describe that socially-constructed thing. Indeed, I am tempted to assert that using the word “truth” to describe that socially-constructed thing will literally result in the apocalypse.
I find myself arguing most fervently for positions that I have the most doubts about, because I’m trying to convince myself more than anyone else.
No, over time I’ve gotten good at not arguing or even really identifying positions I don’t feel strongly for. (I think my posting history backs this up, but will update if corrected)
But on the other hand, I’ve realized my writing comes across as weak with filled with qualifiers. Say what you think, and count on people to know that if you are stating something, it’s obviously your opinion, and doesn’t have to be qualified as such unless you are really tentative. I’m trying to cut down on little fillers like “I mean” “like” or “well…” (except when used as a proper noun, of course), without sacrificing precision too much.
As far as personal presence goes, I’m not one usually brimming with confidence, but it is useful to be able to come across as self-assured if you have an interview or even just meeting people socially for the first time.
I need new business cards because of various contact info changes. I am a patent attorney. Anyone have any designs for cards that they found to be actually effective instead of the typical 95% chance of it going directly into a wastebasket after the person leaves?
Ugh. Every once in a while I get plastic spam, rather than paper spam. I resent this extra pollution. But I’m not motivated enough to remember the specific spammers and boycott them, so I suppose this is not a negative from their point of view.
Speaking of marble, it might be cool to do the marbling technique with oil-based pigments floating on water.
Like you see on the endpapers of old books.
Use pastel colours to marble the paper before having the cards printed.
I entirely reject the argument that the free market should decide how many immigrants a country can take in, how the poor should be fed/housed, or any of the other questions we agree need to be answered by a civilized society. The free market is entirely amoral and intelligence is no substitute for virtue.
DavidFriedman:
The free market is entirely amoral
So is the political system.
Morality comes in when we evaluate the outcomes of the alternative institutions.
ECD:
If you’re a pure consequentialist, which I am not.
Oh, you want to argue for the morality of the government’s treatment of migrants, the government’s feeding the poor, the government’s housing the poor with libertarians, who see taxation to be as moral as robbery to begin with (unless maybe pure consequentialism, but you’ve just rejected it). Wow.
I’ll start small and ask this: why do you assume that averaging people’s preferences by the market will produce an immoral result, but averaging people’s preferences by democracy will produce a moral result? Wouldn’t both systems, if they worked infinitely well, produce the same outcome? In the prophetic words of HL Mencken:
As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
I think the classic example is overfishing a lake. Using pure market mechanisms, everybody has individual incentive to take more than is sustainable and all the fishers lose. Using any method of shared decision making to make rules not to exceed the sustainable catch and punish anybody who does such that the individual incentives now support sustainable fishing. You could object that such rules could be made and enforced by non-democratic means, which is true, but it doesn’t contradict Eric’s claim that democracy can compensate for market failures such as this.
I’ll pre-empt the ‘make the lake private property’ counterargument by pointing out that while one person can own a whole lake, you can’t do the same for the atmosphere, ocean or airwaves.
OK, so government is useful to prevent polluting air or ocean by imposing taxes or prohibitions. Got it.
So what needs to be done when the government is doing the exact opposite?
Take air travel, for example. The Left becomes increasingly noisy about how unethical it is because carbon yadda yadda. But I’ve just checked – I can fly all across EU from London to Sofia for just 50€! How that’s even possible? Well, massive subsidies by governments of course, that’s how.
Perhaps the democracy will fix this particular case. But the natural behavior of governments is to subsidize polluting the lake to protect the country’s market share. Only when the lake is small enough to fit into one country will the government behave correctly, but then you should just make the lake private.
That is a problem neither markets nor governments have figured out how to solve yet. The free market is resisting paying for externalities such as carbon and other pollutants every step of the way. I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim such a thing as an advantage of markets over democracy.
There isn’t really anything resembling democracy operating at the global scale yet. Those rules we currently have which bind multiple nations are cobbled together out of bilateral and multilateral agreements, but democracy doesn’t have a huge amount of say in how they go. I think it’s even plausible one could argue that markets have a bigger influence on them as is, given how often industry groups get their way in such deals – although I’ll caveat that by saying that RCEP and EU trade deals are now looking like they might not include ISDS, so things might be changing right now on that score.
Perhaps there are good reasons we don’t have global democracy, perhaps it will never work, but nation states operating individually in their own interests does not a democracy make. I don’t think you can attribute the failings of that system to democracy.
Democracy can compensate for many Nash equilibria in a way that individual self interest cannot.
I assume you mean inefficient Nash equilibria. Eliminating the Nash equilibrium that keeps everyone driving on the same side of the road does not strike me as a good idea.
The problem is that democracy also replaces many efficient equilibria with inefficient ones. See the public choice explanation of why, more than two centuries after the discovery of the Principle of Comparative Advantage, two centuries during each of which one of the world’s most successful economies (U.K. then Hong Kong) practiced free trade, almost all countries still have tariffs.
The reason is not that the politicians who support them are stupid.
I think calling the market (or democracy, for that matter) “averaging people’s preferences” is missing something important. I personally make decisions very differently if I’m making them collectively as opposed to individually.
I’m not sure I follow either. I wouldn’t say politics brings out the best in me but I also don’t think shopping brings out the best in me. Perhaps it would help if you said what you don’t follow in my comment.
How is your decision making different in the collective and the individual mode? Do you optimize for well-being of your country in the collective mode and for your family only in the individual mode? Or do you arrive to a smarter decision by discussing it with everybody? Or do you do some shady individual stuff that you don’t want to show to the collective?
No, none of those. Even if I’m acting only in my own self-interest, with the opportunity to consult wise people for advice, and where my actions are open for all to see, I would make different decisions if I was part of a collective decision-making process compared to an individual.
Consider a boycott. I don’t boycott things individually because it doesn’t make a difference and I quite like the things I’m proposing to boycott. But if a large collective unit that I was a part of held a vote on whether to collectively boycott Big Bad Company then I might vote in favour.
Consider a strike. If the workers continue the strike they will lose pay in the short run but may win improved pay or conditions in the long run, but for an individual worker it might be more comfortable to scab and keep getting paid. A worker who makes a decision as part of a collective will go on strike; one who makes a decision as an individual will scab. (Probably the real reason why individualism gained so much ground as an ideology. The powerful realised, somewhat counter-intuitively, that people who think for themselves as individuals are less of a threat than people who work together and see themselves as part of something bigger than themselves… but I shouldn’t go off on that tangent right now…)
On a more local scale, a new supermarket opened in my town a few years ago. Where it was positioned was certain to mean much worse traffic getting in to my nearest city and I was opposed (silently) to its construction. Once it was built, it was cheap and convenient and I shopped there. Had I been given a say in a collective manner I would have spoken against it; instead I was only able to vote with my currency and I voted for it.
Or a smaller and more trivial example still. Suppose you and your friends are hanging out and planning to order a carryout. You want pizza and you make the case for pizza, but most people want Indian. When they order Indian you go along with them because it means it’ll all arrive at the same time and probably have cheaper delivery costs. The collective decision you would have made was pizza, but the individual decision was Indian.
I think this is almost always true. Your incentives are different as part of a collective compared to as an individual.
OK, now I see. But in terms of democracy, all that examples seem to be about having one party of like-minded people (or at least sufficiently like-minded that minor details like pizza can be swept under the rug). Now the averaging that I talked about starts when you discover another party in your neighborhood and start a race against them.
Again I’m not quite sure I follow where you’re going with that question. If two groups exist close to each other, and they’re very similar within the groups and very different between the groups, then there’s likely to be some conflict between the groups.
A given individual in group A will still have individual-mode decisions that differ from their collective-mode decisions. Perhaps their collective-mode decisions will encourage them to fight group B on behalf of group A even if it risks their well-being (or at least uses up their free time), whereas their individual-mode decisions would encourage them to avoid the fighting to preserve their own comfort even if it means group B is more likely to beat group A at whatever they may be competing over.
To be clear, I do understand that there is something a bit like averaging going on both in democracy and in the market, but it works in a very different way. I think in democracy people make collective-mode decisions — they vote for whomever they think will make better decisions. But in the market people make individual-mode decisions, making spending choices based on what will make the biggest marginal improvement to their lives. So even if we do decide to call a democracy and a market “averaging” mechanisms, they’re averaging different things.
I don’t quite see your two modes of thinking as being completely separate, as market does not in principle forbid collective action. Vegans are engaged in sending both market and political signals. Your pizza example is basically a consumer cooperative, a completely valid market move. There are many things for which a government pretty much acts like a big Kickstarter.
But there are indeed goals for which the market is very unhelpful, such as prohibiting an item or threatening another country. I guess that answers my original question as to why governments and markets arrive to different results.
Averaging people’s preferences through democracy could mean that the white…oh, wait, non-CW number, right? Er, the majority consisting of the elves vote in laws that prohibit providing certain services to dwarfs.
Averaging preferences through market mechanisms means that individual elves may choose to not provide service to dwarfs, but dwarfs will still be able to obtain the service from other dwarfs or non-complying elves.
Averaging people’s preferences through democracy could mean that the white…oh, wait, non-CW number, right?
This is a CW enabled thread. It’s only whole-number threads that aren’t.
Averaging preferences through market mechanisms means that individual elves may choose to not provide service to dwarfs, but dwarfs will still be able to obtain the service from other dwarfs or non-complying elves.
And note this is strongly correct. In the segregationist South, businesses were built to serve exclusively blacks that became very successful.
And there was a business finding jobs for blacks in parts of the South that treated blacks reasonably well for blacks in parts that didn’t. It was eliminated by state regulation which the Supreme Court, to its shame, upheld.
Exactly. Another difference would be a law enacted by a democratically-elected government limiting pollution, vs individuals polluting as much as they want and hoping other individuals stop.
I’m not planning to get into the “Boo, Libertarianism; Boo, stateism” discussion right now; just criticising the use of the word “averaging” to imply correspondences that I don’t think are present.
Averaging preferences through market mechanisms means that individual elves may choose to not provide service to dwarfs, but dwarfs will still be able to obtain the service from other dwarfs or non-complying elves.
Alex Jones is pretty much the perfect example of this, just like the segregationist South.
He has a market and can create his own platforms because there is a large group that wants to hear him that will bail if they’re excluded from regular social media.
The people who are seriously hurt are the regular Joe who gets fired from his grocery store job because he made a badthink tweet, not the big figures like Jones.
I’m not sure how well Jones is doing compared to before he was banned from all the big platforms, but even if we grant your point about Jones, the issue remains for the regular Joe fired from the grocery store.
I think that’s probably the case. Just like in the South the black business owners were partially hurt (restricted from doing business with whites), partially helped (captive and supportive black audience), but the regular working class black Joes really got it in the shorts.
The market is weighted by the personal wealth of the individuals.
If Bill has 50% of the wealth he controls 50% of the “vote”, the system considers him and his whims more important than the vital needs of every other market participant.
If Bob has no money at all he controls ~0% of the “vote” and the system effectively assigns even his life to have approximately zero value.
Democracy, everyone gets a single vote. It can be manipulated but for that you need to manipulate the voters and get them to agree to support you.
It’s effectively like saying “how is a system where 10000 members of the nobility control everything worse?”
It’s worse because all choices end up being made to benefit the nobility such that one of them with a broken nail is considered more important than a peasant kid bleeding to death.
Demoracy is awful but it’s better than the available alternatives.
Just want to note that this happens without the nobility being evil. It’s just the market that prioritizes the broken nail.
But there’s an interesting counterintuitive phenomenon here. In practice free market tends to pay a lot of attention to the common people. In a free market a company looks at the 10000 members of the nobility and realizes their needs are pretty much fully met – it’s not particularly easy to sell them yet another nail protector. But the poor(er) people have quite a lot of unmet needs, and in aggregate they’re quite wealthy. Bill Gates may “have” 100 billion, but his actual yearly expenses are probably 3-4 orders of magnitude lower. A poor(er) guy may earn $15k a year, but he’ll spend 100% of it. So the aggregate poor people market is actually quite a lot better for a prospective seller/producer.
Keep in mind: our system where few poor people actually starve to death is quite a recent thing.
For much of the poor population the fact that they have even 10-15 K worth of “market power” is almost entirely a product of intervention by a democratic government to divert cash to them.
Poor people with zero money still have zero value in the market no matter how cheap what’s being sold or how much utility they gain from it.
zero times a trillion is still zero.
Eflornithine was a particularly depressing example of such. Pills that cost a few cent… but because the people who needed them didn’t have those few cent they didn’t even keep the factories open with millions of lives on the line.
My take is the causation is in the other direction. For most of history power was political, instead of monetary/free market. People starved because they couldn’t trade stuff for food (like, for example work).
Once more or less free market become a reality people could work for food, then for shelter, then for education, then for color TVs and so on. The more they had the more tempting buyers they became and more power was accorded to them by the free market. Virtuous cycle.
Which is why I really fear an overprotective government. It’ll say “you need employment for your own protection!” and then force drivers to chose between being employed by Uber or Lyft. This puts money in government’s pockets and in Uber’s pockets, but takes even more money from drivers and clients, not to mention quite a lot of freedom. Multiply this by 1000.
Markets don’t tend to remain terribly well functioning or free without some higher body enforcing it.
For much of history there’s been an excess of available labor such that it’s value often dipped below the cost of staying alive.
A huge fraction of modern government intervention is attempting to make sure the average citizen has *something* they can trade on the market like giving every citizen 14 or more years worth of education or just simply transferring some cash to the ones who still can’t cope.
There’s no law of the universe that says that labor has to have a high enough value to keep you and your kids alive.
For much of history the solution to this was to simply let people starve to death until the supply of labor dropped enough for the price to rise.
If this an undesirable outcome then just trusting to the free market is less appealing.
@Murphy I’m not an anarcho-libertarian, or however those people are called. I’m all in favor of having institutions and property rights enforced from above. Hernando de Soto among others made the case quite well that pure chaos isn’t profitable – you need to be able to make contracts and have them enforced.
I’m less sure about the gov doing things like education and health care, in that I’m aware that there’s a commons problem and there are plenty of cases where it would be profitable for society to do X, but not for any individual actor to do X, so the state fulfills this role. I think however that the state should limit its involvement to strictly commons issues, and stop trying to solve everything, because it’s historically bad at it.
I am very much opposed to the state thinking it always knows best and directing everything, from every detail of our children’s education to how and where we can build, to how exactly businesses should be conducted. That’s just plain wrong, on many levels, from morality to efficiency.
I think we have to be clear about what you mean re: “profitable”
If something is good/desirable/high-utility for lots of poor people who have nothing to trade except low value labor, no land etc … and it’s worthless to the landed gentry….
is it “profitable”?
Keeping poor/sick/disabled people without money alive likely isn’t terribly profitable.
But is it desirable vs the alternative?
A democracy which weights the opinions of the poor people equally to rich people is likely to say yes, poor peoples lives matter a great deal too.
A market system that weights the opinions based on spending on the other hand….
Is the end goal to maximize GDP or something else?
In a a hypothetical libertopia where the land has long been claimed and there’s no undiscovered country in which to claim a farmstead… where’s the line between “state”, lords, kings, nobility and the small collection of local major landowners or the company that owns the company town.
is it somehow “better” if the company that owns the company town says no to you building a competing general store rather than the democratically elected town council of an identical town down the road?
It doesn’t really make sense to compare the market to democracy like this I don’t think. If Bill Gates prefers chunky peanut butter, it doesn’t mean I can’t have smooth peanut butter. So in that sense him being rich doesn’t mean he gets more of a say in what goods are produced, at least not in any way that matters to me.
You’d really have to get down to specifics and argue about whether a certain good or service is better provided by democracy or a free market. It is not too controversial that peanut butter is better provided by a market, and a nuclear deterrent is better provided by a democracy, for example.
Right. This seems the obvious flaw. The market is controlled by the most spending, not the most wealth. While the wealthy are also probably big spenders, contra Piketty, they’re not market dominant to the degree that the rest don’t matter.
Why? How is “certain entyties have bigger profits than others” equal to the claim “certain entyties don’t spend anything”?
Piketty’s ciaim isn’t just “bigger profits”, but rather “certain entities have profits so vastly greater than their spending that we can reasonably leave the latter out of the math”. Note the lack of a spending term in Piketty’s math.
And “certain entities have profits so vastly greater than their spending that we can reasonably leave the latter out of the math” is equal to “certain entities don’t spend anything”, in the same way that zero is equal to epsilon. Technically incorrect in the literal mathematical sense, but practically correct in any context where it is reasonable to simplify the math that way.
If the worst that can be said of Paul Z’s post is that he abstracted Piketty to “the rich don’t spend anything” instead of the more pedantically correct “the rich don’t spend enough to matter”, meh, I’m going to call that praising with faint damns and move on as the rest of you imagine you are destroying Zrimsek with your literalism.
That explicitly is Piketty’s assumption. Wealth grows at the rate r so if r>g, wealth will concentrate endlessly (because no wealth is consumed). Of course this is trivially false, but nevertheless it is his assumption. If there were consumption then wealth would not grow at the rate of r. And of course empirically it does not.
@John Schilling
Okay, sorry for beeing imprecise. Replace “profit” with “net income”.
How does entity A has an yearly average net income of 5% and entity B has an yearly average net income of 1,5% mean, that entity A does not spend anything?
I see that I am stuck on this website with singular mandate to defend Piketty from endless attempts at strawmanization by resident libertarian cohorts. Alright.
My problem with Paul Zrimsek´s comment is that he makes Piketty´s book sound like something obviously dumb.
Piketty claims that that when r>g, income inequality usually increases, and backs that up with some empirical data, whose validity certainly could be disputed. Yes, that means that according to him, consumption by wealtholders is not so high that it would compensate for the difference between r and g. Perhaps he is wrong, but that is not an obviously dumb claim.
That’s all true, and I still say free market is better than democracy.
I’ll stick to the topics highlighted by ECD: immigrants, feeding the poor, housing the poor.
The rich are in general in favor of migration: more migrants means more labor supply. It is middle class that hates migration, believing that migrants will take their jobs or will sip welfare (some manage to believe both at the same time). Thus weighting the votes towards the rich helps the poor migrants.
When somebody feeds and houses the poor, it’s not rich that object to this – it’s middle class “concerned citizens” (I’ve linked some examples in the post). The rich probably live on their own islands and don’t really care. Again, here the poor have to suffer because the middle class can outvote them.
The problem with democracy is that preference strength doesn’t count. A middle-class man who doesn’t want to meet a poor person on the street gets one vote and a poor person who doesn’t want his only abode to be demolished gets one vote.
In general, I think it’s healthy to have multiple power centers and decisionmaking processes in the society, so they all don’t end up getting captured and swallowed up by the same movement/person/party/whatever.
I agree, and this argument can be frequently heard from agorists. Governments overregulate everything, do increasingly crazy things with money supply, and are hell-bent on destroying all alternatives even up to private mail companies. This is exactly why a black market is necessary: to protect and preserve vitally needed alternative systems.
Most of my issues have been addressed by others, but I do want to flag a minor point:
I’ll stick to the topics highlighted by ECD: immigrants, feeding the poor, housing the poor.
I was mostly pulling those because of the discussion we were having below on virtue signalling where you said:
This occurs more often on the far ends. But on a lot of issues Left and Right want basically the same thing: they want the country to be prosperous, the poor to be fed, the sick to be healed, the young to study, the old to be cared for, the workers to have jobs.
(which I misremembered as including housing for the poor) and
I’m not convinced it really is about just different priorities. It would be much simpler to negotiate if that was the only problem. Something like “hey Left, how many migrants do you want? What about you, Right? OK, let’s target the average of those two figures”.
They would not be my models for moral government behavior. Historic refugee policy can be pretty good (and is still good in some places), as can some foreign aid, as can a lot (though not all) environmental regulation.
The market is weighted by the personal wealth of the individuals.
If Bill has 50% of the wealth he controls 50% of the “vote”, the system considers him and his whims more important than the vital needs of every other market participant.
Democracy works this way with everyone getting assigned a number of votes to use, but in a market Bill only gets 50% of the vote AFTER the rest of the market decides to give him 50% of the vote. Starting from this point is like saying that the electoral collage gives a handful of people the power to pick the president.
I don’t know if that’s a reasonable objection. In elections, the assigned votes go back to being equal per person every four years, whereas in markets that never happens. There is not a single time when I’ve been alive where the responsiveness of the market to my desires is the same as its responsiveness to everybody else’s.
You don’t want to reset equality every few years because that takes savings out of the picture. If every day you have an option of a Coke or a Pepsi or nothing that is a very different scenario from a Coke, or a Pepsi, or keeping your dollar and having two dollars to vote with tomorrow. The second scenario makes markets way more responsive, and the ability to save votes is one of the main reasons calling voting ‘revealed preference’ is bogus (for the economic definition of revealed preferences).
Well I don’t particularly object to that, but doesn’t that show that democracy is Not like markets in that way? That was what I wanted to point out above
Voting in the market is quite a lot like voting in party politics.
Unless you’re rich, connected or talented enough to start your own party, or, market-wise, start your own company or pay extra for a bespoke service, you’re limited to voting for the choices others decide to give you. And what they offer you is contingent on both what others are offering, and what the majority in a demographic wants. Even niche non-bespoke offerings don’t go too niche.
If Bill has 50% of the wealth he controls 50% of the “vote”, the system considers him and his whims more important than the vital needs of every other market participant.
That’s a misleading way of putting it, because market spending isn’t a vote. If I get 51% of the vote, my candidate is elected and yours isn’t. If I spend 51% of the money on the grain market, I get 51% of the grain and other people get 49%.
Further, in the market context, the usual reason I get 51% of the income is that I am producing and selling 51% of the society’s output (rough approximation–I’m blurring lots of economic details). Hence my existence does not reduce the amount the other people get.
There is no equivalent relation in the democratic context, which is one of the reasons some people oppose immigration.
“…There is no equivalent relation in the democratic context, which is one of the reasons some people oppose immigration”
Plumber:
I’m not following that train of thought, can you elaborate a bit more?
In extremis, if all you need to get 100% of the resources is 51% of the votes, then it makes rational sense to devote your existing resources to just getting those votes. This is also true if it gives you anywhere from 52% to 99% of the resources (although the less you get, the less attractive certain strategies become, and the more likely they are to leave the table). This is especially the case since (as Friedman says in his book) money runs out, but votes never do.
If 51% of the votes only gets you 51% of the resources, then getting votes is only about as attractive as getting those resources via other means, but you still have that problem of votes never running out, as long as you can get people to keep pulling that lever. That’s why a lot of people oppose any strategy that enables that, uh, leverage.
Why would I have to be a pure consequentialist? If you have any consequentialist in your moral makeup at all, you should be able to evaluate consequences.
Anyhow, the idea that we can’t morally judge what the market does at all is an exceedingly odd one, and I doubt the continued-OP really meant to argue it.
The market represents what an individual does
It doesn’t represent what an individual thinks he ‘ought’ to do
More importantly it doesn’t represent what that individual thinks other people should do.
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High effort post
Sometimes this is a good thing, because people’s opinions about matters that don’t directly involve them often involve decision making with zero skin in the game. There’s seldom if ever a feedback mechanism between -> votes representative -> experiences policy.
Any kind of collective action problem where the benefits are diffused and only occur when a large number of people do something, but the costs are immediate tends to require a direct or indirect state solution. One example would be pollution. Though there are more or less market-oriented solutions to this. The law can assign a price to pollution [or a carbon tax in the case of CO2] and people opt for different strategies to manage this new cost. A less market oriented solution would be to control the quantity of energy use directly.
Democracy creates a new commons for there to be a tragedy of.
This sounds very pithy and cool but I’m going to confess I don’t know what it means.
At any rate, viVI_IViv gives the longer version of what I was gesturing at below. Dealing with free-riders who benefit from solutions to tragedies of the commons without themselves helping (one form of what Garrett is objecting to) is a very important part of the sustainability of societies.
This sounds very pithy and cool but I’m going to confess I don’t know what it means.
The government itself acts as a commons, it is un-owned but is highly valuable to control. It is easiest to see in kleptocracies where the graft is often explicit but in democracies it still happens (at the basic level its called rent seeking behavior).
(I’m not intentionally trying to be patronizing in my response)
Nothing justifies anything except subjectively. You condition it on some subjective criteria and then everything else follows from said criteria.
Then as long as the ‘rules’ get followed [or not in practice] some set of consequences results — consequences of rules are not subjective even if you subjectively like or dislike them.
So for example if you condition that anything is justified as long as it is the result of voluntary transactions. (Ignoring the thorniness of deciding whether voluntary means informed consent and some other things.) Then most all government actions are unjustified.
Taxation is theft in the same way abortion is murder, or if you’re a vegetarian, meat is murder. Most non-libertarians don’t accept this premise as an absolute, and they’re not necessarily going to be convinced by pointing out that state action is coercive for the same reason most people aren’t convinced to become vegans when you point out that meat is murder.
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But my OP was more narrow; if the market represents what individuals do, why doesn’t it represent what is moral [from the perspective of the individual]
I’m just conditioning on whatever morality is defined as for the individual. Pollution’s an example of something an individual might want fixed for ethical reasons but market action doesn’t necessarily facilitate it since it’s a commons or collective action problem.
Also note that ‘market vs democracy’ =/= ‘market vs state’ at least as i imagine it– a lot of people want collectively imposed solutions to problems that voters generally won’t agree to anyway. (climate change ranks very low for voter priorities) But it’s easy to imagine that voters will vote for a higher amount of government aid to the poor on average than the same voters would contribute themselves privately [because of the skin in the game issue i mentioned]
I agree that government might be useful to limit pollution, especially in the carbon tax variant. But note that all this fits entirely within consequentialist framework: let’s set a goal, compare how effective different institutions would be at achieving this goal, and then – only then – assign some moral weight to implementing the best institution. I was wondering what’s with ECD’s “Government is Moral!” button that lets them dodge all this and bring out morality from the start.
I’ll start small and ask this: why do you assume that averaging people’s preferences by the market will produce an immoral result, but averaging people’s preferences by democracy will produce a moral result?
The market doesn’t average people’s preferences, at least not to the same extent that democracy does. The market can fall into tragedy of the commons situations (essentially many-players prisoner’s dilemmas) where it will select an outcome that is not preferred by anyone.
This is relevant to the examples you are discussing here, since treatment of migrants, feeding the poor, and the housing the poor are all scenarios where there is a tradeoff between a common good and individual self-interest. E.g., I might want to use part of my disposable income to feed the poor, but if I donate to charity and my competitors don’t, they might outcompete me and drive me out of business. If instead everybody is forced to give X% of their income to feed the poor though taxation, then nobody is specifically put at disadvantage as long as X is not too large.
In general the purpose of the government is to solve hard coordination problems that can’t be easily solved by direct private negotiation or social praise and shaming.
Many instances of “we need the government to solve this hard coordination problem” can be better addressed by instituting appropriate market mechanisms.
E.G.: Government regulation isn’t necessary to solve the tragedy of the commons, property rights will usually do the trick just fine.
if I donate to charity and my competitors don’t, they might outcompete me and drive me out of business.
By this logic nobody would ever be giving to charity, with or without taxes. But people did, and still do. I remember reading that people gave much more before the advent of the welfare state but I can’t find the link now.
If your business is in an unsaturated market and you can expand it, then doing so isn’t an evil act. You create new jobs and hire people that would be receiving charity instead. Unless you’re in a luxury business, you create useful things for people, including poor people, and everybody’s better off.
But if government gives someone a job, it’s only because it destroys a job somewhere else with taxation – where else is the money coming from? If the government gives welfare to a poor person, about half the job is destroyed. And the people on welfare don’t produce anything and are disincentivized from working: by the welfare itself, by the tax on working, by occupational licensing.
So any help that the government brings happens at a great cost. California just now enacted rent control which will make sure that no cheap housing will be built, and it also ordered Kanye to destroy the homes he built for the poor. That is how the government really helps the poor. At what point is the cost of having a government too much?
In general the purpose of the government is to solve hard coordination problems that can’t be easily solved by direct private negotiation or social praise and shaming.
I think that more than 50% of government-coordinated problems could and should be solved on kickstarter, and the rest would be solvable once US society stops nonsense such as shaming billionaires for helping.
I think you’re being too absolutist on this @eigenmoon.
Sure, North Korea with it’s heavy handed government doesn’t much thrive, but neither does Somalia with no central government.
Singapore and Sweden both do thrive, and neither of them (in different ways) would I call Laissez faire.
If instead you’re arguing with full Marxists, there just aren’t that many among frequent commenters here to engage with, overwhelmingly by far Americans “on the Left” point to Canada, not Cuba, as their goal.
They’re just plain not much more who want to re-animate Stalin than there are who want to re-animate King James 2, more than 9/10th want both private industry and government.
From my perspective of having both worked in private industry and as a government employee, the Rights criticisms of government are true as are the Lefts criticism of unregulated private industry, and for me to convinced that a strong movement towards either libertarianism orfull socialism (not just a Sanderist dilute form) I want a thriving contemporary society pointed out, and so far to me right over the border in Canada looks like it, so God Save the Queen!
(we do have better cuisine and music here in the U.S.A. thanks to the southern states though, and I wouldn’t want to lose that).
US is already taking about as much government revenue as Switzerland (27.1% for US, 28.5% for Switzerland but US borrows a lot on top of that). So… why aren’t you Switzerland? As in: US got enough tax money already to have its social care on Swiss level, so…?
But you say the Left wants to be Canada. Canada gets a bit more tax revenue: 32.7%. Surely you can raise the taxes accordingly, but wouldn’t the Left then say that the new target is Sweden or Denmark? I thought that’s what they say already.
Sweden takes 44% GDP as tax revenue, Denmark does 46%. That’s about the same as Italy (42.4) and France (46.2). So can we be sure that raising the taxes will make you Sweden/Denmark and not France/Italy?
If someone told me they would rather live in Somalia than Tanzania or Kenya, I wouldn’t believe them. People have a much higher preference for not getting blown up than they do for better telecommunications.
@eigenmoon > “.wouldn’t the Left then say that the new target is Sweden or Denmark?..”
I was using “The Left” for”median Democratic Party voter”, but your quite right, historically “The Left” has meant “folks who want the full Cuba”, but if we slip in-between using “Left” as one half of the Nation that votes, and “Right” as the other half into certain select political positions held by a small minority of people it gets confusing, to give one example fully “socialized” medicine is a position of some in the Democratic Party, two of the top four polling Democratic polling Presidential candidates support it (and another sometimes does, sometimes doesn’t, depending on when you ask her), but a majority a registered Democrats say they don’t want private insurance eliminated (nor does the front runner candidate), so if you go by the “divide the Nation into a more Left half of voter and a more Right half of voters” model than fully socialized medicine isn’t the position of the whole “Left”, if instead you define “Left” as “people who believe on an ideology that I pick that word to mean”, then sure, it can be anything, this is why I like reading Gallup and Pew – to get a better idea of what most actually support.
“…So can we be sure that raising the taxes will make you Sweden/Denmark and not France/Italy?”
You hardly can in any way.
We discussed this in the last Open Thread, Democrats rule both California and Massachusetts, Republicans both Mississippi and Utah, California and Mississippi both have higher rates of poverty than Massachusetts and Utah, just as being ruled by Social Democratic Parties didn’t turn Germany into Greece, or Greece into Germany, what the ruling policies are aren’t the only factor.
Massachusetts and Utah were both founded people descended from English Puritans, so maybe that’s a factor?
California and Mississippi’s southern borders are both further south than Massachusetts and Utah, so maybe that’s a factor?
Another example is Cuba and North Korea are both ruled by Marxist regimes, and I think best will agree that North Korea is the by far worse of the two.
So if political policies aren’t the only factor why am I so confident that a social democratic capitalist welfare state is the right choice?
Because most thriving places do follow that model, and (without any other practical tools) political policies might help, and what I would think would help more, going door-to-door and convincing folks to have higher empathy/solidarity/trust in their neighbors regardless of what governments do and doesn’t do, just isn’t practical.
I have an alternative theory. Look at the freedom ratings for countries and US states ( and economic). I wish there was fiscal rating of countries, too.
You’ll see that France is #71 and Italy is #80 on the economic list (below Kyrgyzstan), while Sweden is #19, US is #12 and Canada is #8. Also Mississippi’s fiscal freedom is even below California. It fails under Republican rule precisely because they govern it like it’s New York.
To thrive, society needs economic freedom, which is basically the absence of government. You can in principle stick high tax on top like the Nordic countries do, but then all other kinds of economic freedom must be top-notch, otherwise you’ll have Italy. My problem with the Left (however you define it) is that they don’t seem to value economic freedom that much, but no society is thriving without it.
@eigenmoon.> “…To thrive, society needs economic freedom, which is basically the absence of government. You can in principle stick high tax on top like the Nordic countries do, but then all other kinds of economic freedom must be top-notch, otherwise you’ll have Italy…”
I see merit in that argument, one or two threads ago there was a discussion of the 1950’s, U.S.A., and back then there were higher top marginal income tax rates, a larger amount of direct Federal government employees relative to the total population (especially when you include the larger standing army of then and you don’t include the huge number of “government by proxy” contractors, and subsidized NGO’s of today), immigration was more restricted, plus Truman sometimes had industries nationalized, but in very many other ways the mid 20th century U.S.A. waa less regulated than now, and had an economic growth rate not equalled since.
By this logic nobody would ever be giving to charity, with or without taxes. But people did, and still do.
People donate trivial amounts compared to the taxes they are willing to pay. And yes, I said willing to pay, because it is an average preference revealed by their voting behaviors, regardless of what taxes-are-theft libertarians say.
I remember reading that people gave much more before the advent of the welfare state but I can’t find the link now.
I seriously doubt that before the welfare state people were giving to charity any amount comparable to what they now give to the welfare state through taxation.
If the government gives welfare to a poor person, about half the job is destroyed. And the people on welfare don’t produce anything and are disincentivized from working: by the welfare itself, by the tax on working, by occupational licensing.
And without welfare people who have no employable skills or inclination either starve or turn to crime. I suppose that for some people this is an acceptable outcome, but for people who value the chronically unemployed being feed, the market offers no viable solution.
California just now enacted rent control which will make sure that no cheap housing will be built, and it also ordered Kanye to destroy the homes he built for the poor. That is how the government really helps the poor.
And without housing regulations California would probably contain more slums than Kenya.
And yes, I said willing to pay, because it is an average preference revealed by their voting behaviors
As Lincoln is said to have noted, calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it so. And saying people are individually “willing to pay” taxes (as opposed to coerced into doing so) because of what their democratically elected representatives may have voted for isn’t “revealed preference”.
But of course there’s a market solution for people who value the poor to be fed, namely: if you value a poor guy having an apple more than having an apple yourself, you’re going to give it to him. Now we have a paradox: people are not willing to give enough (at least according to you) but they’re willing to vote for being forced to pay up. And the resolution is, I believe, obvious: people vote for high taxes because they hope that somebody richer than them will foot the bill. And about that they’re mistaken, since few take into account that tax burden is distributed throughout the market by prices.
And without housing regulations California would probably contain more slums than Kenya.
And that would be an improvement over sleeping in cars.
@Gobbobobble
It’s also environmentally friendly. Looks like Sweden has the solution to all problems.
The market can fall into tragedy of the commons situations
And the political system starts in a tragedy of the commons situation and never leaves it.
Your implicit assumption is that the democratic process results in the government acting like a wise and benevolent tyrant. But the government isn’t a person, it’s the outcome of a political market, one which lacks the features that make the market, at least to first approximation, actually act like a wise and benevolent tyrant.
I have an idea. Instead of voting on policy democratically, we will use a free market in “Decision Tokens”, where people place bids on policy using these tokens. The policy with the highest amount of bids wins.
The initial starting point for decision tokens will be 100 a person, with the following modifiers:
+5000 for socialists
+10000 for incomes less than $40,000 a year
-All tokens removed for incomes of more than $80,000
-50 for libertarians.
These Decision Tokens will operate in a pure free market, where anyone can use them to buy or sell any sort of policy they want, and they can even be exchanged.
As many commentators have noted, this method is superior to democracy, in that we can gauge the magnitude of preference, rather than a simple binary.
As supporters of markets, I assume you all won’t have objections to my free market proposal.
Say there’s a question of what to do with an area that is currently a vacant lot. A bid is placed on the question “what to do with the vacant lot” and the winner of the bid (the person who spends the most Decision Tokens) gets to be the decision maker. That person can later transfer that power to someone else in exchange for Decision Tokens, or anything really.
It’s just a normal free market, with the starting position being that Leftists and poor people have all the power, and wealthy people and libertarians (and maybe just a list of people I don’t like) having none.
It’s a pure free market with only voluntary transactions. Every exchange is mutually beneficial between the parties. Can’t think of any reason why people would object to this.
As long as the decision tokens are non-renewable, it would end up with an equilibrium essentially similar to free markets today.
Fools and their money would soon be parted, and we would end up with a capitalist system more intense than our current one.
If you get that many tokens every year, then there would quickly be a monetary revaluation to reduce all incomes by at least an order of magnitude, everyone would declare themselves a “socialist” and we’d move on as before.
The decision tokens is just another currency and after some initial period it will have a quasi-stable price (like Bitcoin). At this point it this system should be basically ancap. Is this what you mean?
My employer doesn’t reduce my salary when he finds out I received an inheritance. I don’t think supply/demand works like that.
Yeah, but the people in charge of the money supply are the ones losing power here. One short sharp deflation later, and they miraculously make under $40k new American dollars, each of which is a lot more valuable than before.
This real effect has happened before, incidentally. In the 1950s with sky-high marginal tax rates CEOs were making wages not much more than their employees, but got lots of benefits like company purchased cars, houses, even airplanes.
It would be based on past internet-posting history.
In the strangest coincidence, my LinkedIn with my real name now spreads the good word of socialism!
The decision tokens is just another currency and after some initial period it will have a quasi-stable price (like Bitcoin). At this point it this system should be basically ancap. Is this what you mean?
They pay the tokens to the groups who are currently holders of the decision-making titles.
The issue at hand, is that government currently has certain “properties”, e.g. the power of taxation, environmental regulation, state-owned industry. And these powers are currently controlled democratically, which doesn’t measure the magnitude of how people value them well.
The typical ancap proposal is that these government powers/properties should be divested to people who are willing to pay for them in dollars.
I propose, that instead of accepting dollars, the government should accept Decision Tokens, which will be issued to groups of people that I personally like.
This is no more arbitrary than the government choosing to issue and divest using dollars. After all, dollars aren’t distributed equally either.
There’s an important feature of ancap missing, which is that the bid must be proportional to the territory you wish to cover. Otherwise the “decision-making group” would propose a law to kill me and I would be forced to give it all my tokens to repeal this law.
Once you get ancap right, except with decision tokens, I’ll take it. Very soon socialists will lose the ability to tax me. Your distribution of tokens simply means that Ancapistan would be quite small. But it’s still better than the current territory of Ancapistan (zero).
Say there’s a question of what to do with an area that is currently a vacant lot. A bid is placed on the question “what to do with the vacant lot” and the winner of the bid (the person who spends the most Decision Tokens) gets to be the decision maker.
This part is bad enough. In particular, who gets to determine when there is a question which must be decided? Can I just pose, “There’s a question concerning whether or not Controls Freak should get all of Guy in TN’s money/possessions. Who’s going to give up Decision Tokens to decide this?”
So the winner pays tokens to who?
They pay the tokens to the groups who are currently holders of the decision-making titles.
This makes it worse. Rather than having a bidding process for each question, you’re putting a bidding process on a title (basically “representative for deciding Class X”). That means that answer to the previous question is probably, “There is a question-making Czar title, too.” But it’s still not clear how the exchange system works. I’m sure you want to say that all of the exchanges are voluntary, right? That means that if someone wants to become the new question-making Czar, they have to not only outbid everyone else, but they also have to get the current question-making Czar to voluntarily give up the title in exchange for the top offer of Decision Tokens.
It’s pretty obvious that not only is this simply a spoils system masquerading as a representative government masquerading as a market, but also whoever gets to become the first question-making Czar can trivially become dictator and never voluntarily give up his position in any exchange.
Quite aside from the reasons that this can’t be described as a market, it gives further reason to what I said in one of our previous conversations. The question is not whether there is going to be some coercion through government versus no coercion in government (sorry, DF). The question is one of political legitimacy and whether/how far that coercion is going to extend beyond, “You can’t steal people’s stuff.” This proposed spoils system fails miserably in political legitimacy.
Prediction: In a few years, your skewed initial distribution of tokens will be washed out, and the wealthiest people will own enough of the tokens to do more-or-less what they like, if they agree on it. Elections will be a matter of getting the wealthy token-holders on the same page. Perhaps a few non-corporate organizations (unions, churches, interest groups) will also collect some tokens, but when the choice is give your token to your church or sell it to ExxonComcastPalintirNabisco for $1000, well, it’s easy to see what most people will choose.
Prediction: In a few years, your skewed initial distribution of tokens will be washed out, and the wealthiest people will own enough of the tokens to do more-or-less what they like
It seem unlikely there will be any extreme wealth disparity once the poor have bought (on the free market) policies from the government such setting the taxation rate.
[You seem like a decent person albatross11, so I’ll let you in on a secret: I don’t actually support any of this policy I’ve proposed. It’s bad. But the reason my policy is bad, is the same reason that every else’s proposals to switch from democracy to a non-democracy are also bad. Namely: “Markets” are exchanges of non-market authority (property), which is inherently determined politically. So saying “let the rich people decide” is as arbitrary as saying “let people I agree with decide”. Commentator’s emphasis on the “free market”, as usual, just serves to obscure what’s really going on here.]
It seem unlikely there will be any extreme wealth disparity once the poor have bought (on the free market) policies from the government such setting the taxation rate.
The poor, collectively, won’t be buying any actual decisions, because each poor person individually will be selling all of his decision tokens for cash money to the highest-bidding oligarch in their neighborhood.
That’s not a market. Simply having an object that is transferred is not sufficient to constitute a market. It’s not exactly on point for this discussion, but this was a really good Econ Talk podcast where they discuss some of the factors that are needed. There’s not 100% agreement on every detail, but this proposal clearly misses the cut.
In general, I would recommend following Econ Talk. There are many other episodes that get into these necessary background assumptions, which cut through a lot of the silly fake market talk. He also regularly brings on folks who he disagrees with, and the conversations are generally pleasant and educational.
Okay, well, that will teach me to go to work instead of staying home (and to start at the bottom in the few comments I had time to make before work today.
Fortunately, the vast majority of the points I would make have already been ably made by other people (thanks folks)
One point however:
Oh, you want to argue for the morality of the government’s treatment of migrants, the government’s feeding the poor, the government’s housing the poor with libertarians, who see taxation to be as moral as robbery to begin with (unless maybe pure consequentialism, but you’ve just rejected it). Wow.
Not particularly. Part of being moral is the potential for immorality. If you are amoral (as, I contend the free market is) then morality is irrelevant and your immorality by external standards is equally irrelevant. It’s only if you’re playing in a moral dimension that immorality is relevant/possible.
I accept that other people have differing views on what is moral and that, in a democracy (which I contend is preferable to even ECDistan, for reasons of humility and understanding that I would not hold absolute power for long barring supernatural action) the morals of other people will sometimes win out. I don’t like to lose, but it’s inherent in democracy. But with my government, ‘you can’t do this, it’s wrong,’ is an actual argument for why they should not do it (it’s probably not a winning argument, but I’d like it to be a relevant argument), whereas making that argument in the free market is…completely orthogonal to its purpose.
Now, maybe I can make the ‘this will revolt our customers and lose us money argument,’ but those aren’t actually the same thing.
The rest of your comment has been ably addressed by others, but I’ll also say, besides the point made that averaging isn’t what’s being done in either case that my answer to this:
I’ll start small and ask this: why do you assume that averaging people’s preferences by the market will produce an immoral result, but averaging people’s preferences by democracy will produce a moral result?
Is that they’re trying to do different things. The market is trying to make money (with various caveats) the government is, or should be, trying to govern justly and morally. It should be no surprise that things with different goals end up in different places.
Now, it may well be that the government will end up being schizophrenically immoral due to the differences in moral judgments and preferences of its people, but that’s a different problem [link is to youtube and Yes Minister] and without very strong evidence of it (which cannot, alas simply be evidence of governments doing things I think are immoral for the reasons discussed above), I prefer to still be able to make moral arguments for my preferred policies.
The market isn’t there to make money. It’s there to maximize everybody’s utility. If you have voluntarily traded an apple for an orange, that means your utility has increased, otherwise you wouldn’t agree to it, and so did the utility of the other party. So every trade increases the sum total of utility. You can express the utility using money but that’s not essential.
There’s no reason why this utility shouldn’t include moral considerations, nor there is any reason why voting is about morality rather than about self-interest. If you want to build a home for a homeless person on your land, it’s a free market decision, reflecting your values. Although as Kanye’s example shows, then concerned neighbors come up and vote for those homes to be demolished.
You say that you like to make moral arguments, but you can do that without fighting for the access to the government, can’t you? What you really mean, it seems, is that you’d like to force other people to follow your morality, and you recognize that this is a tug of war, and sometimes other people will force you to follow their morality instead, but it’s OK, you prefer it that way.
Well, I have a problem with that. I don’t want to force anybody to follow my morality, I don’t want to be forced by anybody to follow their morality, I don’t want to play the tug-of-war or even care about it. The Left wants to murder their babies? Fine. I don’t approve but I can’t figure out any punishment more severe than the action itself, so whatever.
The entire morality tug-of-war fan club starts with a premise that taxation is moral, which I already disagree with. viVI_IViv here tells me that if not for the tax, the poor would remain hungry. With that I also disagree; but if not for the tax, the children of Yemen bombed by US for unclear reasons would not go hungry in the first place.
It looks like the most prudent course of action is to ensure that nobody is able to govern me ever again, especially not those who want to govern justly and morally, for it is precisely that kind of people who would ignore the strength of my own preferences.
You don’t want to impose your morality on others, just ensure that nobody is ever able to govern you ever again and bar all taxes.
Okay. I’ll think this is a contradictory position, but that’s fine.
The market isn’t there to make money. It’s there to maximize everybody’s utility. If you have voluntarily traded an apple for an orange, that means your utility has increased, otherwise you wouldn’t agree to it,
Except, you’ve smuggled in an assumption there, “voluntarily” which isn’t generally true in market interactions. All the other options are worse is not the same as ‘voluntarily.’ And I strongly disagree that the market is there to maximize everyone’s utility, it’s there (optimally and ignoring market failures/monopolies/etc.) to allow optimal allocation of resources where ‘optimal’ means most profitable available (allowing for the presence of other actors).
And I probably could make moral argument in market interactions, people do, hence the existence of various funds which invest in ‘good/moral’ companies. However, I don’t actually think the market is either good at this, or the right tool for this. It is, when properly regulated, good at what it does. Trying to make it into something else seems risky and unlikely to succeed.
What you really mean, it seems, is that you’d like to force other people to follow your morality, and you recognize that this is a tug of war, and sometimes other people will force you to follow their morality instead, but it’s OK, you prefer it that way.
If your view is taxation is theft and legislation is imposition, then yes. But I don’t actually agree with those points and so I’m not going to agree with this restatement of my position, uncharitably phrased or not.
I’m going to mostly ignore the digression into abortion politics, but in the interest of not doing what I’ve claimed is done here and ignore a potentially important point, I disagree that the “Left wants to murder their babies”.
Anyway, at this point I think we’ve hit the point of irreconcilable disagreement. Interesting conversation.
ETA: Removed irrelevant aside, which made no sense after I changed course mid-sentence.
Except, you’ve smuggled in an assumption there, “voluntarily” which isn’t generally true in market interactions. All the other options are worse is not the same as ‘voluntarily.’
There is a finite range of options available, none of which are ideal. Alice chose what, to her, seemed the best option in that range. All other options were, by her standards, worse. How is this not the essence of a voluntary transaction by Alice? What meaning does the word “voluntary” have, if this isn’t it?
If “voluntary” for Alice means that we have to coerce Bob into offering her a better option than would exist for her absent such coercion, then that’s a sort of “voluntary” that is I think skewed into meaninglessness. Also, I’m pretty sure you intend for me to play the role of Bob far more often that that of Alice in your preferred system, and so I consider myself justified in coercing the hell out of you in regards to not establishing that system.
There is a finite range of options available, none of which are ideal. Alice chose what, to her, seemed the best option in that range. All other options were, by her standards, worse. How is this not the essence of a voluntary transaction by Alice? What meaning does the word “voluntary” have, if this isn’t it?
Okay. Given that the state has the power to tax, you have a finite range of options such as 1. Paying taxes 2. Not paying and going to jail 3. Leaving the country.
You choose the best option in this range, to pay taxes to the IRS. Is this a voluntary transaction?
Also, I’m pretty sure you intend for me to play the role of Bob far more often that that of Alice in your preferred system, and so I consider myself justified in coercing the hell out of you in regards to not establishing that system.
Hey, as long as we all agree that it’s coercion all-the-way-down, then we can finally start talking about what the optimal economic system is, given that everyone here relies on coercion to achieve their ends. (i.e., thus rendering a “free market system” an ideological impossibility).
If “voluntary” for Alice means that we have to coerce Bob into offering her a better option than would exist for her absent such coercion, then that’s a sort of “voluntary” that is I think skewed into meaninglessness. Also, I’m pretty sure you intend for me to play the role of Bob far more often that that of Alice in your preferred system, and so I consider myself justified in coercing the hell out of you in regards to not establishing that system.
Yep. you’ve caught me. I definitely mean to…I don’t know, steal your stuff and give it to other people?
I certainly couldn’t mean that the government should maybe make sure, for example, that there is a minimum wage which is actually liveable.
Now, to be more charitable than I think you’re being. I said “generally true” when I should have said “necessarily true”. Given that the vast majority of market interactions (especially various stock transactions) probably fit even my definition of voluntary.
So legislation isn’t imposition but wanting to live separately is imposition? Huh. Indeed, the difference might be irreconcilable.
[Edited: you’ve already answered that to John]
OK, we did a good talk. At least I hope you got some info on what others consider to be good, which is something you’re interested in. I wonder if you can roleplay a libertarian by now.
Okay. Given that the state has the power to tax, you have a finite range of options such as 1. Paying taxes 2. Not paying and going to jail 3. Leaving the country.
Conspicuously missing from that range of options is 0. No deal/mind your own business/nothing changes. When someone actively removes the zero option from the table, then the transaction ceases to be voluntary. That’s the big red line between both selling and panhandling on the one side, and robbery on the other. You know this, you’re just being an ass about it.
The market, almost always includes the zero option. The state, not so much.
that there is a minimum wage which is actually liveable.
Can you offer any definition o “liveabble” consistent with this defense of the minimum wage substantially different from “a wage which I would find tolerable to live at”? That’s the only candidate I can think of.
Possibly relevant data: The estimate of economic historians is that average real income in modern developed societies is twenty to thirty times higher than the average was for most of history. The median U.S. income for a full time wage or salary worker is about $900/week. One twentieth of that is $45/week. For someone working a 40 hour week, that’s a wage of a little over a dollar an hour, about a seventh the current minimum wage.
If you are proposing anything higher than that, or supporting that, or even supporting something half that, you have to claim that one cannot live on the income on which most of the people who ever existed did live.
Or recognize that “liveable wage” is dishonest rhetoric, designed to pretend that a value judgement is an objective fact, taking advantage of the ignorance of most of the population about how rich they are.
Can you offer any definition o “liveabble” consistent with this defense of the minimum wage substantially different from “a wage which I would find tolerable to live at”? That’s the only candidate I can think of.
What’s wrong with that definition? (Or, for some consensus level, rather than any particular individual)
I would like to live in a place where everybody has a roof over their head, access to adequate nutrition, education, a library, the internet, necessary health services, and so on.
I would also like for working people to enjoy material gains beyond this minimum level, both because taxation is necessary¹ to provide for those who can’t or won’t work (and probably defense and similar responsibilities) and taxpayers should be rewarded for their contribution, and also to provide an incentive for productivity over nonproductivity.
Now, I don’t think a minimum wage is the best way to achieve this, but in combination with Basic Jobs, it could be a plausible proposal.
Can one live in our society without breaking any laws or regulations while making only the sort of $1-5/day income that most people historically survived on? It seems to me there are a lot of regulations setting minimum standards, such as housing construction codes, that make it difficult, perhaps impossible.
@johan_larson
A lot of poor people in Southern Europe live in garages converted into small apartments. From the government’s viewpoint it’s illegal but if it starts enforcing it there will be a riot, so the government pretends not to notice.
The market, almost always includes the zero option. The state, not so much.
States and markets are compatible, e.g. states trade goods with eachother all the time.
But sure, within the boundaries of the of the state it doesn’t always act like a market (due to the law of the state). But the same is true for within the boundaries of private property (due to the authority of a property owner). Neither one presents a “zero option” for their inhabitants.
The dichotomy of the market and the state is as usual, a bad one, that only obscures the authority of property ownership.
If you are proposing anything higher than [the current minimum wage, given how much higher it is than the historic living wage], or supporting that, or even supporting something half that, you have to claim that one cannot live on the income on which most of the people who ever existed did live.
Or recognize that “liveable wage” is dishonest rhetoric, designed to pretend that a value judgement is an objective fact, taking advantage of the ignorance of most of the population about how rich they are.
Putting on my stickler hat, I can see another way, which is that certain people really meant a wage that permitted flourishing – living long enough to raise children at the same standard of living or better – and used the term “living wage” by mistake.
I have seen a few people express concern about this. The idea is that you could live at the historic wage in modern society, but you would be at a disadvantage among other people. This would impact your ability to “be fruitful and multiply”, and only because there exists this other culture that crowds you out. If not for them, you’d be fine, albeit poorer.
I don’t know the usual principled free market response to that argument. “Your culture isn’t owed the right to flourish” might be accurate, but more coldhearted than I’m used to. I’m more used to something like “well, you always have the option of expanding the frontier and settling new territory”, which still somewhat true even today, but I think growing less so, barring a breakthrough in space tech.
Can one live in our society without breaking any laws or regulations while making only the sort of $1-5/day income that most people historically survived on? It seems to me there are a lot of regulations setting minimum standards, such as housing construction codes, that make it difficult, perhaps impossible.
Pedantically, it’s probably not possible to live on $100-500/day without breaking any laws or regulations, so let’s take that to mean “laws and regulations that people actually care about in isolation, and would bother enforcing even if there wasn’t an anti-homelessness crackdown”.
Pretty sure it is still possible to do this if you’re up for tent-camping in a quasi-wilderness within walking distance of a town with a decent general store. Not sure how much land there is where you’d be allowed to step up from tent-camping to e.g. a log cabin.
Sleeping rough in a warm-ish city is probably also still possible, but much trickier due to the regulatory thicket. State or church-funded shelters would help quite a bit, if we don’t count their price against your $1-5/day.
I don’t think there’s much in the way of US cities or towns where building codes and zoning laws would allow the construction of apartments that could be viably rented in that price range, and those usually do get enforced.
Pedantically, it’s probably not possible to live on $100-500/day without breaking any laws or regulations, so let’s take that to mean “laws and regulations that people actually care about in isolation, and would bother enforcing even if there wasn’t an anti-homelessness crackdown”.
Pretty sure it is still possible to do this if you’re up for tent-camping in a quasi-wilderness within walking distance of a town with a decent general store. Not sure how much land there is where you’d be allowed to step up from tent-camping to e.g. a log cabin.
How much land is there where long-term camping is allowed that is also within walking distance of a town with a general store (we would probably also need to restrict this to climates that are reasonably temperate year-round, so i.e. holing up in a spot outside Boone, NC or anywhere in Wyoming might not be viable during the winter)?
There is also the question of whether that money affords you enough hygiene supplies that the townsfolk generally and the people running the store specifically continue to tolerate your presence (I think the answer there is yes, soap isn’t terribly expensive, but it can’t be totally ignored).
It also strikes me that the places where it might possibly be viable from a techical, legal standpoint are probably some of the places you would be most likely to run into something along the lines of:
“You better just git on down the road, y’hear?” *sound of shotgun cocking*
From one of your new “neighbors”, which is a social as opposed to legal limitation.
Putting on my stickler hat, I can see another way, which is that certain people really meant a wage that permitted flourishing – living long enough to raise children at the same standard of living or better – and used the term “living wage” by mistake.
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”
When millions of people, including presidential candidates, senators, professors, journalists, and commenters here, make the same false claim in support of their position, I don’t think “mistake” is a plausible explanation.
Some may be the victims of fraudulent claims by their allies.
However, I do still hope I find a response to the steelman. What’s the best way for free marketeers to address wages that might not give their earners much participation in modern society, even if it’s more than enough to live on?
Can you offer any definition o “liveabble” consistent with this defense of the minimum wage substantially different from “a wage which I would find tolerable to live at”? That’s the only candidate I can think of.
Possibly relevant data: The estimate of economic historians is that average real income in modern developed societies is twenty to thirty times higher than the average was for most of history. The median U.S. income for a full time wage or salary worker is about $900/week. One twentieth of that is $45/week. For someone working a 40 hour week, that’s a wage of a little over a dollar an hour, about a seventh the current minimum wage.
If you are proposing anything higher than that, or supporting that, or even supporting something half that, you have to claim that one cannot live on the income on which most of the people who ever existed did live.
Or recognize that “liveable wage” is dishonest rhetoric, designed to pretend that a value judgement is an objective fact, taking advantage of the ignorance of most of the population about how rich they are.
Except, I didn’t actually say that. I said:
I certainly couldn’t mean that the government should maybe make sure, for example, that there is a minimum wage which is actually liveable.
Which doesn’t actually say whether it should go up or down, but rather that it should be set by the government rather than the market, which was what we were discussing.
Now, since you’d like to discuss what a wage which was livable actually is, I think the MIT Living Wage calculator is a good place to start.
I’m not an economist, but I wonder how much of the estimates you’re providing depends on charity, state support, religious support, welfare (of the bread and circuses variety) or the ability to have access to property to camp/hunt/grow your own food?
Amusingly, for someone who lives where I do, in my condition, the living wage would actually be below the current minimum wage for my state.
Now, since you’d like to discuss what a wage which was livable actually is, I think the MIT Living Wage calculator is a good place to start.
This is great, as I’ve been looking for a source that calculates what is truly a minimum from a micro-economic stand-point. Federal poverty guidelines are very macro-economic based and so don’t match reality very well.
Except the link doesn’t actually give any numbers; it only talks (in vague terms) about a living wage calculator. Do you know where the actual numbers are?
Now, since you’d like to discuss what a wage which was livable actually is
Before discussion how much it is, I first want to discuss what the term means. Moderns take for granted a standard of living out of the reach of what most of the population of the world lived on.
In an old blog post, I offered as a possible definition a wage at which it was possible to live in a way that gave you an life expectancy at least half that of the average person. That avoids the binary life/death criterion–if “liveable” means “you don’t instantly drop dead,” then zero would be a liveable wage.
Feel free to tweak it as you like. For a starting point, do you know what the minimal cost of a full nutrition diet is?
The MIT calculator says it is calculangon for “a minimum tolerable standard of living.” That isn’t what “liveable” means.
My guess is that they would not consider a family of five living in one room to be a minimum tolerable standard of living, but it describes how quite a lot of people through history, including a recently as Moscow a few decades back, actually lived.
Do you also object to me saying “I make a living” as well?
After all, I’m clearly making more than the bare minimum needed to live. You can tell because I’ve got clothes (okay, you can’t see that, but trust me), and electricity and a computer, or phone capable of internet access.
How about ‘death tax’? There’s a false term. What’s being taxed isn’t death, but inheritance.
Look, if you want to be a quasi-prescriptivist, that’s fine, but it’s also not how politics, advertising, or people are likely to work, nor is it a convincing argument to anyone who doesn’t agree with your position.
I’ll also say, no, living wage does not mean a
wage at which it was possible to live in a way that gave you an life expectancy at least half that of the average person.
I’d call it a term of art intended to mean basically what the MIT folks say it is and which you’re pretty close to here:
Can you offer any definition o “liveabble” consistent with this defense of the minimum wage substantially different from “a wage which I would find tolerable to live at”?
I’d phrase that differently, a living wage is the minimum needed for the life a hard working person is entitled to. This will vary by region and there will be any number of disagreements about it. Fortunately, we have a political system to help us sort out those disagreements.
ETA: concluding thought. Also, your historical argument seems a fully universal argument against attempts at improvement. Also, I attempted to address it in my previous response:
I’m not an economist, but I wonder how much of the estimates you’re providing depends on charity, state support, religious support, welfare (of the bread and circuses variety) or the ability to have access to property to camp/hunt/grow your own food?
ETA: concluding thought. Also, your historical argument seems a fully universal argument against attempts at improvement.
Not at all. Only against demagogic exaggerations of the improvements being proposed.
I’m not arguing about whether a minimum wage is a good idea. I am arguing that your rhetoric in defending is either dishonest or the product of massive ignorance.
And you have come back to where I started. When you say “a liveable wage” what you mean is, roughly, a wage you wouldn’t too much mind living at.
Correct. Some left anarchists think that they can do without property and contract enforcement. I’m willing to let them live like they want but not willing to let them have my property.
Of course there’s a tension, for example what’s with some libertarians (Spooner) arguing for infinite copyright term and others (Kinsella) arguing for no copyright whatsoever. Land ownership is also frequently questioned.
But there are several order of magnitude difference between that and a state. Your argument sounds exorbitant, something like “There should be at least a rule against stealing therefore it’s totally permissible to steal everybody’s money and build a stadium because we really like football and stuff”.
You aren’t understanding how the state and property are tied together. Hypothetically, if there was a famine, and one guy had all the grain, then the state using violence to protect it from anyone trying to take it is presuming some kind of morality. It’s not a neutral position to use that violence.
I wish we had an upvote system so I could tell whether I was the only one to find that sentence/argument completely incoherent.
Literally the first person to use “the individual” in this minithread, and it’s the subject of your sentence.
You are substituting one definition of force for another’s, you argument based on this misdirection. Virtually no one discussing morality bins ‘rape’ and ‘defending oneself from rape’ as being the same thing. Yes they both can use one definition of force to be accomplished, but that is clearly not the definition being used above.
I’m not making any claim about the goodness of the state or even about the rightness of libertarianism. I’m just saying you clearly do want to enforce morality, contrary to what you said earlier.
Enforcing as in sending cops against everyone in the country who doesn’t obey my legislation and enforcing as in posting a guard in my shop are two very, very different meanings of “enforcement”.
And yet both of them use a moral claim to justify violence. I honestly don’t want to get in a whole argument about libertarianism. I just want you to stop claiming that you don’t want “to force anybody to follow my morality” because even if you were right about everything else, you’re quite clearly wrong about that.
My definition of “force” is very neutral: the initiation of violence against another human body.
You seem to think that it’s “force ” for the state to collect taxes, but not “force” to use an armed guard to prevent people from taking things from a store. But these are the same physical actions! The only difference is that you think the store is justified in initiating force, but the state is not.
It’s clear that what we’re really talking about is the question of *entitlement*, i.e. Who should be entitled to use force and when.
@Guy in TN > “…My definition of “force” is very neutral: the initiation of violence against another human body.
You seem to think that it’s “force ” for the state to collect taxes, but not “force” to use an armed guard to prevent people from taking things from a store. But these are the same physical actions! The only difference is that you think the store is justified in initiating force, but the state is not.
It’s clear that what we’re really talking about is the question of *entitlement*, i.e. Who should be entitled to use force and when”
+1
It baffles me that some feel Pinkertons hired by ol’ man Rockefeller will be less oppressive than police hired by a city council that you vote for (the history of the actual use of private police and private armies of the company towns in the 19th century seems to me to show otherwise!).
I have to think that the preference for “one dollar one vote” over one man one vote is from always imagining that one will have dollars, which isn’t a chance I’d risk!
@Guy
With sufficiently high bird’s view you could look at the American Revolutionary War and say: hey, two groups of people are doing the same physical action to each other! Clearly they’re fighting for who’s entitled to be the King.
Your definitions are tailor-made to miss the point, which you then accomplish. Libertarianism isn’t an alternative state any more than liberal democracy is an alternative dictator.
@Guy
In libertarianism collective rights normally do not exist, that is, a group of people may do no more than its members may do. “Normally” means that there are some nuances around dealing with criminals, but the ideal is that a large group of people can’t overpower just by numbers.
The state on the other hand is entirely built around various groups such as political parties overpowering each other by numbers, and most importantly, the state overpowering individuals. All this is extremely undesirable from a libertarian viewpoint.
If a guy may not put a gun to my head and take my money to buy a football ticket, then millions of people may not put a gun to my head and take my money to build a football stadium. Even if they’re waving a colorful piece of cloth. Even if they’re singing their gang’s theme song. Even if they have selected the gang boss by an election.
The state on the other hand is entirely built around various groups such as political parties overpowering each other by numbers,
Your objections applies only to a democratic states. In a non-democratic state, you wouldn’t have to worry about the majority overpowering the minority by sheer numbers. Instead, you can be assured the minority will overpower the majority (as they do when the enforce the libertarian concept of private property).
So this objection seems not to be against the state per se, but against democracies.
If a guy may not put a gun to my head and take my money to buy a football ticket, then millions of people may not put a gun to my head and take my money to build a football stadium.
But can you put a gun to a guy’s head to keep him from using money to buy a football ticket, if you think you are entitled to that money (e.g. you are the owner of the money)?
Again, I suspect your objection to the state turns entirely on the question of “who is entitled to what”, rendering the presence a gun a red herring.
@Guy I think you may be missing (or it hasn’t been sufficiently mentioned) the distinction between the use of force and the initiation of force. Under the (right-wing) libertarian model if I earned the money, I would be justified to use force to keep it. It’s not about not using force, but fundamentally concerned with not “drawing first blood.”
I don’t think it necessarily follows that property rights must be enforced by the state. I could personally enforce them, negotiate an arrangement with neighbors, make an agreement to defend the property rights of my neighbor if they’ll help protect mine, hire private security on mutually agreed terms or just broadly convince others that taking property isn’t something that will be productive long-term.
Indeed I have objected specifically to a democratic state, for the other kinds of states are little more than a bunch of bandits controlling a territory, so the objections to them should be obvious. Some states (the Ottoman Empire) were even openly started by a band of bandits.
Throughout the history folks who didn’t like the state found refuge among mountains. This means their terrain is shitty, their soil is infertile, and some of them purposefully grow only those crops that spoil fast to disincentivize robbers (such as taxmen). According to you (and ECD) those guys impose their morality on others and are a minority overpowering a majority. Seriously?
It might indeed happen that experiments with cryptocurrencies and related technology will render some industries untaxable, thus massively imposing libertarian morality on the larger society. If that happens, I’d say that the society deserved it 100%, and the reason I’d say so boils down to this bizarre idea that highlanders rob from the people of the plains by preventing themselves from being robbed.
If you believe that the right to have property and indeed the right to very life itself comes down to you from the State, then I submit to you that y’all Americans are still in an unlawful revolt against the English Crown and must bow to Her Majesty and offer her appropriate reparations. If you say that it was proper for Americans to rise against their King, then clearly rights come from below, that is, from an individual.
And is not the present-day US government pretty much the new King? The old King was quartering large bodies of armed troops among Americans; the new King militarizes the police, giving them toys that they shouldn’t have at all. The old King was protecting them [the troops], by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States; the new King protects the policemen with “qualified immunity”. The old King was cutting off US Trade with all parts of the world; the new King does that with China. The old King was imposing Taxes on US without Consent; and you’re telling me that I’m imposing something on society by not consenting to the taxes?
. According to you (and ECD) those guys impose their morality on others and are a minority overpowering a majority. Seriously?
If you want to hide in the mountains and never see anyone. And you succeed. I will agree that you have not imposed your morality on anyone. But, when the next refugee arrives at your mountain farm and you drive him off with your pitchfork, yes, you are imposing your morality on him.
You may well be right to do so (especially if you substitute bandit for refugee), but you are still doing so. Whether you are doing so and whether you are right to do so are two different questions.
Also, whether you are attempting to do so and whether you are succeeding at doing so are different questions (hence the minority imposing its will on the majority conundrum you have created).
If you believe that the right to have property and indeed the right to very life itself comes down to you from the State,
I can’t speak for Guy in TN, but I don’t believe this and I think it’s orthogonal to our entire conversation.
and you’re telling me that I’m imposing something on society by not consenting to the taxes?
Yes. Especially if you actually don’t pay them, as opposed to don’t consent to pay them. Again, you might be right to do so (in this case, i do not think so), but that’s different from whether you are imposing something on society by refusing to abide by its rules.
Let me give you a different example. If I lived in a society which required all members to get married and have children to support the community going forward, and I were gay and refused to do so, that would be an imposition on the society. I believe, for moral reasons, that this would be an imposition that it was right to make, but it would still be an imposition.
From my perspective, it really seems like you want to have it both ways, you say
Well, I have a problem with that. I don’t want to force anybody to follow my morality, I don’t want to be forced by anybody to follow their morality, I don’t want to play the tug-of-war or even care about it.
And then you make a whole series of moral arguments. There is a case that libertarianism is moral, which you obviously know because you’re making it. Pretending otherwise just confuses the issue.
I think you may be missing (or it hasn’t been sufficiently mentioned) the distinction between the use of force and the initiation of force. Under the (right-wing) libertarian model if I earned the money, I would be justified to use force to keep it.
Are you saying you would be justified in initiating force (“drawing first blood”) in order to keep it?
@eigenmoon
Indeed I have objected specifically to a democratic state, for the other kinds of states are little more than a bunch of bandits controlling a territory, so the objections to them should be obvious.
My position, since I haven’t spelled it out, is that libertarian property is essentially indistinguishable from a non-democratic state. So pointing out the difference between libertarian property and a democratic state isn’t very interesting to me, since we both already agree about the difference on this axis.
According to you (and ECD) those guys impose their morality on others and are a minority overpowering a majority. Seriously?
Yep, if he is enforcing property rights. If there is a fight between one property owner vs. two non-property owners, and the property owner wins, then this situation is quite literally a minority overpowering a majority.
I suspect you’ll disagree, but I think the taking itself would be initiation of force. I don’t consent to you taking my $item, you then apply force that overrides that consent. You may not believe in property, but taking something I built (or traded for using value I created) is no different from forcing me to build it for you.
@ECD
I see. According to your definition of imposing morality, if the society decides to sacrifice me to Baal but I escape, I’m imposing morality on the society. Under that definition, I do indeed want to impose. I just defined it differently, in this example it involved destroying statues of Baal.
@Guy
Again, seriously? The difference between libertarianism and monarchy is the presence of a King. There, spelled it out for you.
Although there’s also an anarcho-monarchist Hoppe who makes me go wtf.
I suspect you’ll disagree, but I think the taking itself would be initiation of force. I don’t consent to you taking my $item, you then apply force that overrides that consent.
Notice how the term has shifted. At first we were defining force, as you put it, as “drawing first blood”. But now you have expanded the term to include “applying force” to use of an object that overrides the consent of the person you think is entitled to it.
But this just loops us back to where we started. Because basically everyone is in agreement, libertarians, communists, monarchists, run-of-the-mill centrists, that if someone is entitled to a thing, then they should only be parted from that thing with their consent. We all just disagree on who is entitled to what.
And since its your theory of moral entitlement which is doing all the work of determining whether an action constitutes “initiation of force”, you can’t point to the lack of “initiation of force” as evidence of a superior economic system.
Let me flip it, so you can see why:
“Libertarianism is bad, because it relies on the initiation of force. This is because I think the state is entitled to the tax money. So when people, without the IRS’s consent, force the IRS not to be able to collect what is rightfully theirs, that’s initiation of force. I just wish people would respect the rights of property owners (the IRS)”
^This is the equivalent to what I hear when I talk to libertarians
There are some differences, like if you come to my house as a guest I can impose a smoking ban on you but can’t rifle through your wallet.
But I think this is not really the issue. There was an interesting society in early modern Poland that is basically ancap but only for nobles. Libertarianism is that but with everyone being noble. Monarchy is that but with only one noble.
@Guy I don’t think the term has shifted in terms of “drawing first blood.” I think the first non-voluntary interaction meets that standard.
There is an underlying reality in the sense that not all claims are equally legitimate. I don’t think that the state or it’s agents (appointed or elected, etc.) can claim to be acting defensively/voluntarily to take, $item that I myself built (or to consider me the aggressor in not surrendering). This is because that $item (or it’s equivalent value) wouldn’t exist, except for the part of my life used to create it.
From your perspective, me denying the use of my life by others might constitute the initiation of force, but I think there’s a strong case that I am acting in defense of my life (even if just a portion, I’m guessing that even a very temporary kidnapping would still be initiation of force by just about everyone’s standards).
This is because that $item (or it’s equivalent value) wouldn’t exist, except for the part of my life used to create it.
All material things consist of a natural component. Even the most technologically advanced items, for example a computer, rely on silicon and plastic. So all items you help create consist at least of labor+natural resources.
Because of this, when you claim property on an item, you necessarily claim property over an uncreated natural resource. And by doing so, you prevent other people from accessing that same natural resource, making them worse off.
From your perspective, me denying the use of my life by others might constitute the initiation of force, but I think there’s a strong case that I am acting in defense of my life
So while you may be tempted to think of a resource you used your labor to help create as “nature+your labor”, and therefore the item is essentially an extension of yourself, it is more accurately thought of as “people made worse off+ your labor”, since that includes what happens when you claim property over a piece of nature.
So should people who are made worse off, have in say in their change of condition? I would think so.
And apologies for piling on too hard, but the idea that labor+capital results in the laborer owning the capital isn’t how property works, even in libertarian theory.
If you hire me to plant crops in your field, I don’t become the owner of part of your field. But why not? The fact that you payed me should be of no relevance, because under this metaphysical framework my labor was added to the capital of the field, which now means that the field is literally an extension of myself.
The libertarian “homestead theory” attempts to solve this problem by saying that only the first laborer is the one who matters. But this makes no sense: if labor+capital means you become part of the capital, then any labor plus capital should mean the same thing. But this would result in mass collective ownership, which is not typically what people who deploy this line of thinking are going for.
@Guy I don’t think you’ve been disrespectful at all, and I hope I haven’t come off that way either.
However, I completely disagree with your premise in how you are thinking of a resource. That is, I don’t think a thing is a resource until human ingenuity finds a use for it: finding oil was once considered a nuisance in trying to dig wells for water, unrefined nuclear fuel would have once been called just “dirt” a hundred years ago. To clarify, you might think about the quantity of oil reserves up until the 18th century . Even now, the more oil we use up the more oil we seem to have:
Because we keep finding more uses for oil we keep redefining what counts as an oil resource through better technology.
This is more evident if you look at GDP per capita (the best proxy I can think of for human well-being over time – https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth), we keep “using up” more and more stuff, and human well-being keeps increasing. If the effects were so negative (if it was really the atoms and not the time/effort/talents), I would expect to see wealth decreasing as population increases.
If I buy a computer, I may deny the specific atoms of metal, plastic, and silicon to others, but I would argue that these don’t really have intrinsic value to begin with – they were worthless without the time, effort and talents that made them into a computer, which is what I am really purchasing through my own money (which is just a measurement of my own time, effort and talents). Even beyond this, I’ll use the computer to benefit others through entertainment and productivity, etc. (I wouldn’t make the purchase unless the value was greater to me than the money and I wouldn’t sell my time unless the money was worth more to me than my time).
Yes the Earth technically has a finite mass, but it is effectively an infinite resource as we keep finding more clever ways to use different parts of it. Of course, you may also have concerns beyond maximizing human well-being, but generally only harm to other human beings would count from a libertarian perspective.
You mention land use a few times and while it’s true that I would be preventing someone else from using the land, that land had to be made valuable somehow – even for fertile farm land there are still concerns of irrigation, maintenance, etc. and there’s plenty of land that is effectively worthless – at least at the moment. I would still argue that the exchange is primarily for of the time/effort/talent to create the value.
While it’s true that virtually everything was conquered at some point and there isn’t an infinite chain of voluntary exchange of values throughout all of human history. However, for the vast majority of value, this would still be true (GDP is many orders of magnitude greater than it used to be, so value creation would have to be much, much greater than mere value transfer). After N degrees of separation (and X generations) it wouldn’t be possible to provide just compensation to the victims of the initiation of force anyway (who receives and who pays for The Norman Conquest?).
If I buy a computer, I may deny the specific atoms of metal, plastic, and silicon to others, but I would argue that these don’t really have intrinsic value to begin with – they were worthless without the time, effort and talents that made them into a computer
The idea that value comes from a combination of both labor and nature should be pretty straightforward.
For example, it takes roughly the same physical amount of labor to dig up a piece of coal as it does a piece of gold. But why then, do people value the gold more? The obvious answer, I think, is that there are intrinsic properties of the gold that people deem valuable compared to the properties of the coal. While the labor necessary to acquire the gold is certainly factored in, that’s not the only source from where the value is derived.
we keep “using up” more and more stuff, and human well-being keeps increasing. If the effects were so negative (if it was really the atoms and not the time/effort/talents), I would expect to see wealth decreasing as population increases.
All this shows is that the creation of property can make people better off in aggregate, which is quite different from the question of it makes individuals worse off.
For example, if I steal money from a drug addict to fund a factory (transforming $1000 worth of value into $10,000,000), you could say that I made everyone better off as a collective. But I can’t make the argument to the drug addict that my action’s don’t have a negative effect on him.
You mention land use a few times and while it’s true that I would be preventing someone else from using the land, that land had to be made valuable somehow
If the arg is “yes, the creation of property makes some people worse off, but its worth it in the end because of how much better off it makes everyone on average”, you won’t get any disagreement from me.
But I would also then ask why that same logic isn’t extended to taxation and welfare by the state. Yes, it makes a few people worse off (the rich), but the utility gains by the poor vastly make up for it.
After N degrees of separation (and X generations) it wouldn’t be possible to provide just compensation to the victims of the initiation of force anyway (who receives and who pays for The Norman Conquest?).
I find this argument to be structurally interesting.
The importance of establishing a chain of voluntary transfers isn’t something that I actually care about. It’s irrelevant to my philosophy. The “chain of voluntary exchange” is a libertarian concern, primarily used to argue why the state’s power is supposedly illegitimate, while private property is legitimate.
So when a Leftist such as myself points to private property, and asks if it follows a chain of voluntariness, it’s not because we are secretly deeply concerned with voluntarism. That’s not an axis that we even judge the moral legitimacy of the ownership. I’m just seeing if the libertarian is willing to consistently apply their standards to other power structures besides the state.
So the next move, one I think that was popularized by Bryan Caplan, is what you argue for here. Something along the lines of “Meh, we can’t re-litigate the past, and a chain is voluntariness isn’t important anyway, so we shouldn’t worry about it”. Which is interesting, because I thought the lack of voluntary acquisition was the core argument against the sovereignty of the state to begin with.
Like, if the chain of voluntariness doesn’t matter, what’s the argument against the state’s territorial claims of sovereignty again?
@Guy We’ve come to an incredibly fundamental point of disagreement. I think it is entirely/almost entirely the ingenuity that provides the value, and not the atoms and that the evidence strongly supports this.
If the atoms were intrinsically valuable, then the amount of wealth should be relatively fixed, but it isn’t. Since total wealth has increased by orders of magnitude, I would have to conclude that at the very least, the vast majority (and increasing) share of the value in a thing is due to the ingenuity and not inherent. If the mix between ingenuity and atoms’ intrinsic contribution were relatively even in the creation of wealth, then I would expect GDP per capita to stay flat (as we grab more atoms), but it is exponentially increasing.
Gold mining and coal mining are completely different processes, so it’s not surprising they produce different amounts of value. There might be the incredibly rare situation that a person just trips over a nugget of hundreds of pounds, but I think this is rare enough (and constitutes such a small fraction of total wealth) to be negligible.
If the property owner is 99.99+% defending legitimately acquired wealth and <0.01% Bogarting the intrinsic wealth of atoms, I'm completely fine with updating my "don't initiate force" principle to "minimize the initiation of force," and saying the proper minimization is to protect property rights.
I can apply a similar logic to the case of conquest, if the initiation took place far enough back and only accounts for a tiny percentage of the total, then 99+% is voluntarily acquired and I'm okay with simply minimizing the initiation of force. Whereas if I take something in the present, a retaliatory/defensive response can get us closer to the voluntary ideal.
I know it's tangential to the initiation of force question, but I think that you'll still end up with less overall flourishing taking the property and redistributing it due to secondary, tertiary, etc. effects through perverse incentives, but that's not really our topic.
I am kind of curious here, Guy. You are technically correct that violence to defend one’s property is indeed not a zero option (as defined by John), unless one treats owning property as a kind of baseline. I think private property is treated as a baseline by John and by eigen, so that taking one’s personal property is kind of equivalent to attacking one’s body. I personally am pretty much on John’s and eigen’s side. I do think that attacking one’s body is worse than taking one’s property, but still they are somewhat equivalent. I don’t think you agree, since the existence of property seems to violate the zero principle in your mind.
So I am trying to understand your point of view. You apparently don’t consider taking one’s property in any way equivalent to protecting one’s body. Do you believe in private property at all? IS there some ownership principle where people have the right to protect “their” property? Say property that one has produced oneself, or property traded for with other property one has produced?
I can’t speak for Guy but it’s not about proving that private property is bad. It’s about showing how intertwined it is with the state. The real question here is how square your claim that attacking the body is worse than theft while also claiming they are somewhat equivalent. Libertarians can take private property as a “baseline”(smuggling in some complicated claims with that word), but that’s not based on some objective feature of the world. It’s your own normative belief that is not a priori better than what everyone else believes.
I think private property is treated as a baseline by John and by eigen, so that taking one’s personal property is kind of equivalent to attacking one’s body.
You are correct to note that much of this argument is really about what the “baselines” ought to be, i.e., who is entitled to what, not about “use of force”.
To help illustrate why, let me flip it around. Let’s say I defend taxation by saying
A: “Taxation is good, because it doesn’t rely on the use of force”. B: “But of course it relies on force, see all the government men with guns?”
A: “Ah, but you don’t call it ‘use of force’ when initiating violence to defend property you believe someone is entitled to, right? Well I think the state is entitled to the tax money”
So the first sentence, where I talk about “force”, isn’t actually doing any argumentative work here. If I want to defend taxation in a less tautological manner, I should instead do so on grounds that I think the state is morally entitled to the tax money, since that’s what the question is actually hinging on. And likewise, that’s the argument the libertarian needs to make as well.
So I am trying to understand your point of view. You apparently don’t consider taking one’s property in any way equivalent to protecting one’s body. Do you believe in private property at all?
I don’t support “private property” in the libertarian/ancap/liberal economic conception of it. I do support “private property” in the sense of the legal construct that exists in today’s modern economies, i.e. the state setting up a system where individuals are granted certain decision-making powers over resource use, with the state retaining the highest sovereignty, including the rights of taxation, regulation, and confiscation.
IS there some ownership principle where people have the right to protect “their” property? Say property that one has produced oneself, or property traded for with other property one has produced?
No I don’t think so, at least not in the “natural right” sense that you are probably using the term. I also don’t think there’s a “natural right” to protect a person’s body.
But for both cases it makes sense, from a practical perspective, to create a legal right for the protection of human bodies, and also the protection of property, in certain circumstances. But this isn’t based on any underlying axiomatic principles (is not based on “voluntary transactions”, “self ownership”, “homesteading”, ect) and could be revoked/changed depending on the context of the situation.
No I don’t think so, at least not in the “natural right” sense that you are probably using the term. I also don’t think there’s a “natural right” to protect a person’s body.
Well I don’t believe in “natural rights” myself, being a consequentialist, not a deontologist (sp?). But it very much makes sense to me that people will generally be happier and more prosperous when there is a presumption that each person’s body and one’s property (however that property is defined) is safe from attacks from others, and that defending such is not considered an offense. I would like to see such a presumption be both cultural and governmental. I do think that such presumptions do mostly exist in today’s Western society, so I bring this up for philosophical reasons, not because I am looking for change in the world on this matter. Also, I think property can be defined in quite different ways (such as intellectual property, land, inheritance). What is important in my schema is that however personal property is defined, people have the right to defend it.
I say the above to explain why I think John’s concept of zero option makes sense and is important. Individuals have the option of participating or not in any potential private market transactions. Individuals do not have the option not to participate in governmental transactions. To me the point is that government inherently is more confining and less free. IMO, government is necessary for some things. But I think the default should be voluntary transactions to satisfy needs.
But it very much makes sense to me that people will generally be happier and more prosperous when there is a presumption that each person’s body and one’s property (however that property is defined) is safe from attacks from others, and that defending such is not considered an offense.
I agree as a general principle. However, I think there should be certain caveats. For example, in order for “protection of property” to have meaning, there must be an exception to the protection of people’s bodies. Otherwise, you would have no recourse, no means of defending, any legal property that you owned from people who try to take it. All you could do to a thief is be like “Hey, don’t do that!”.
So, right off the bat, if we agree that people should be able to defend what they are entitled to, that necessarily implies that they should be able to initiate bodily violence against other people. And critically, by doing so, this precludes any system that protects property from being “voluntary” or based entirely on “free exchange”.
Which I am fine with. I support the creation of legal property, as well as the institutions of taxation and state regulation.
Also, I think property can be defined in quite different ways (such as intellectual property, land, inheritance). What is important in my schema is that however personal property is defined, people have the right to defend it.
While this is an admirable advocacy of respect for the rule of law, I cannot bring myself to be so agnostic on the question of how property is defined. I think the content of the property law has too strong of implication for human well-being to do so. For example, if I was living in a system where the rule was “the King owns everything”, I would think this system to be unjust, and fight against the King’s ability to defend his property.
I say the above to explain why I think John’s concept of zero option makes sense and is important. Individuals have the option of participating or not in any potential private market transactions. Individuals do not have the option not to participate in governmental transactions.
But you don’t have the “zero option” of choosing not to participate when you are within the boundaries of the authority of the property owner. And sure, you could just leave, but the same argument could be applies to the boundaries state.
The more underlying issue, is that John is working with a bad dichotomy here. The appropriate comparison to state authority isn’t market exchanges (since after all, states can participate in markets), but rather private authority. And likewise, the inverse of markets is simply non-markets, which occur under the authority of both states and private entities.
But with my government, ‘you can’t do this, it’s wrong,’ is an actual argument for why they should not do it (it’s probably not a winning argument, but I’d like it to be a relevant argument), whereas making that argument in the free market is…completely orthogonal to its purpose.
The market isn’t a person, you can’t make arguments, moral or otherwise, with it. Neither is the political market that determines what the government is doing.
All of the choice, and all the potential for moral or immoral actions, is with people–to whom you can make arguments. You can try to persuade voters, legislators, lobbyists, bureaucrats, judges, the people whose actions determine what the government does, of things, including moral things.
In exactly the same sense, you can try persuade consumers, workers, stockholders, … the people whose actions determine market outcomes, of things, including moral things. In that respect the situations are identical. You are being fooled by imagining the government as a person. It isn’t.
The difference comes in the ways in each system maps individual preferences into outcomes. In that respect the market is much preferable, for reasons I can go into if you are sufficiently curious.
I appreciate your position, but I think you’ve expanded the definition of market here to the point where everything is a market and given it is and remains my position that markets are amoral, I’m going to disagree with that position.
I also have to say, it’s hilarious to me that we’ve arrived at discussion of the political market in a discussion which began with Eigenmoon arguing why government, unlike cultural or the market, is not subject to the forces which cause those to be ‘superintelligences’ subject to the stresses and forces which mean, maybe, we should be careful about screwing with them…
I agree with everything but your last two paragraphs. I think that nationalism is fundamentally incompatible with liberal capitalist democracy, because globalism itself is a consequence of liberalism, capitalism, and democracy. Capitalism has resulted in rapid technological progress, largely in the fields of transportation and communication, making the world a smaller place. And liberal capitalism seeks to spread out and expand as much as possible, fostering trade between nations; indeed, the fundamental essence of liberalism (in the International Relations sense) is that trade is preferable to war, on the basis that absolute gains are better than relative gains. Furthermore, liberal democracy is inextricably tied to methodological individualism and equality of opportunity, which are anathema to nationalistic outlooks; when you make a point of viewing people and treating people as individuals first and foremost, rather than making pre-judgments about them on the basis of some group identity, then it becomes harder to simply reject people who happen to have a different skin color or a different set of genitalia or a different sexual orientation. This becomes doubly true when you have a global communication system that allows people from all over the world to communicate with each other in real time.
And I don’t find that Steve Sailer article you linked convincing at all. (In fact, I checked out that site’s weekly news roundup to get a sense of what it’s about, and I found it so utterly disgusting that I’m inclined to update my priors against anything posted there. But let’s put that aside for now.) The key problem is that Sailer doesn’t distinguish between liberal democracy and illiberal democracy. The oldest and purest form of illiberal democracy is, of course, mob rule – the peasants with torches and pitchforks that Sailer is describing, ready to drive out both the minorities below them and the elites above them. But while all democracies are built upon popular sovereignty, liberal democracies are also built upon civil rights and rule of law, which serve to protect minorities and individuals from the majority’s whims. Illiberal democracy may be incompatible with diversity, but liberal democracy is the best defender of diversity in existence, far better than the superficially cosmopolitan autocracies that Sailer mentions. It’s also telling that most of Sailer’s examples come from war-torn Middle Eastern countries that lack the sociopolitical stability to guarantee things like constitutional rights and equality under the law. It seems doubtful that anything similar would happen in stable developed nations with strong political institutions. Ultimately, the sort of right-populism you’re talking about is doomed to failure; its victories are, to use your terminology, contingent victories rather than fundamental ones.
In my opinion, as someone who’s extensively studied both Fukuyama and his critics, the only problem with his theory is the timeframe. And even then, it’s less of a problem with the theory itself and more of a problem with the assumptions that it led people to make. They assumed that the triumph of liberalism would happen overnight following the fall of the Berlin Wall, whereas it’s bound to be a much slower and messier process that faces a lot of pushback along the way.
Just had a small realization. There’s an old dynamic in my country’s history between population, nobility and king. The king was (almost) always the champion of the people, because he needed that to counterbalance the power of nobility and avoid becoming a figurehead.
My first guess of the current wave of populism is that it’s a reaction to a perceived “Establishment”. Which, and that’s the realization, is the very same age old dynamic of Nobility asserting its control, and the population finding a champion to fight them.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily make the champion a good guy, and there is a real potential for a Very Bad Guy. But it does mean that at least on this particular dimension the interests align – he’ll have to be anti-Establishment because that’s both his biggest problem and that being so is the source of his political power.
Just had a small realization. There’s an old dynamic in my country’s history between population, nobility and king. The king was (almost) always the champion of the people, because he needed that to counterbalance the power of nobility and avoid becoming a figurehead.
My first guess of the current wave of populism is that it’s a reaction to a perceived “Establishment”. Which, and that’s the realization, is the very same age old dynamic of Nobility asserting its control, and the population finding a champion to fight them.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily make the champion a good guy, and there is a real potential for a Very Bad Guy.
Isn’t Vlad Dracula a folk hero for doing things like having his castle built by the nobility’s forced labor?
He’s famous for a lot of things, and we really really miss him. There’s a story on how the country got so honest (mostly though impalement of robbers) that he had a gold cup placed by a fountain at a crossroads. Many drank from it, admired it, but none dared steal it.
@Radu Floricica: I don’t think so. Our country had just 4 kings. Charles I let the army repress brutally the peasant revolt in 1907, Ferdinand and Michael I were just figureheads, Charles II was a king-dictator and quite unpopular, especially at the end. The only one that resembles your description is Cuza, but he wasn’t a king, Romania wasn’t yet a kingdom (I think the title he used outside was “prince”).
As for the princes who ruled the former states that later united into Romania, Michael the Brave (Mihai Viteazu) made serfdom stronger, forbidding serfs to leave the land. Vlad Tepes punished extremely harshly both nobles and commoners (@Le Maistre Chat: I never heard about him using nobles to build a castle; he was seen as a hero for fighting against Turks).
(@Le Maistre Chat: I never heard about him using nobles to build a castle; he was seen as a hero for fighting against Turks).
He did a bunch of things, all popular with the commons (was my impression). Fighting the Turks was a big one, though he also converted to Roman Catholicism and got Papal support (the Wallachians were Eastern Orthodox). Cite for the Castle Dracula thing.
What if it’s the case that democratic success is really just a butterfly effect stemming from American geography and a few accidents of history?
1. Britain managed to secure the coast to half a continent with the best arable land, the best river networks and the best natural resources.
2. Britain had egalitarian values congruent to democracy, which flourished given the distance to the motherland and led to their logical conclusion: democracy.
3. The country that sat on and conquered the best parts of North America had the opportunity to enforce its ideology across the world and capitalised upon it.
In WW1, it was the Americans who bailed out the Allies, it was the flood of US troops that forced Germany to launch the Spring Offensives and those same troops who were crucial in defeating it.
In WW2, the US played a pretty substantial role. They beat Japan in the Pacific, they provided Allied manpower and industry for the Western Front. They spearheaded the air offensive that destroyed the Luftwaffe.
In the Cold War, the US managed to capitalize on the fact that it cheaply secured the industrious regions of Germany and Japan. The Soviets got the poor half of Germany and a completely destroyed Eastern Europe in exchange for 27 million lives. The end was never in doubt.
The US hasn’t faced a peer competitor in its own hemisphere. They have never lost tens of millions in a land invasion like the Russians. They had an immensely privileged position, dominating the entirety of a landmass around the same size as Europe and its only natural that their ideology would conquer the world.
In WW1, it was the Americans who bailed out the Allies, it was the flood of US troops that forced Germany to launch the Spring Offensives and those same troops who were crucial in defeating it.
I question the narrative that WWI was a victory for liberal democracy. Both Germany and Austria, while they were still nominally empires, had been on a decades-long path of liberalization and democratization, and overall they weren’t much more authoritarian than the third French Republic or than the Kingdom of Italy (and they were certainly less so than Russia — which was in the ally side!) Them winning WWI wouldn’t have changed that, and if anything it may have made the transition smoother and given less breeding-ground to fascism.
This is a silly question and contains spoilers for Deep Space Nine, Season 7.
So late in the season, there’s an episode where the new Ezri Dax discusses the Klingon Empire with Worf and points out that despite all their talk about being proud & honorable warriors, they’re actually a corrupt aristocracy which is barely functional and basically evil. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as886JnsjtQ
Now this goes back to at least TNG, but also most of DS9. Does anyone know if this was long laid plan, or late realization that what was being said and what was being done didn’t match up?
Also, just a comment on fiction, this scene actually made a LOT of earlier scenes/episodes better for me, because there wasn’t a show-tell contradiction, there was someone lying to themselves and others. I’m struggling to think of other examples of scenes which have that effect.
This is similar to the “hanging a lampshade on it” trope, where a character will point out an inconsistency or plot hole, even if not specifically addressed (Like, hypothetically, “Too bad we could fly into Mordor on Eagles, Mr Frodo.” “Ha, keep dreaming Sam”) You feel better knowing that the inconsistency is intentional and not just the author failing to communicate properly, though that’s a little different in a work with multiple writers and producers.
In this case, I think Picard was aghast at the Klingon political system and the Federations need to accomodate it back with Whorf was exiled early in the TNG run.
Hang on a Lampshade is almost it. That shows that the writer sees the problem, which makes things better in that I’m not trying to pretend it doesn’t exist. In this case, however, the fictional universe recognizes it as a problem and then goes on to attempt to fix it (I’m not sure how convinced I am that replacing the current corrupt leader with a single relatively non-corrupt leader will actually fix it, but the show ends before that question can be resolved).
I think so as well, but it’s hard to tell because no one was really willing to push the point with Worf at that juncture, for obvious reasons.
It wasn’t a long laid plan, but Ron Moore wrote sins of the farther (The TNG episode where Worf gets his discommendation), became known as the klingon guy, went on to either write or substantially contribute to virtually all of the worf/klingon episodes on TNG and DS9. So that arc, even if not planned out in advance, does really represent one writer’s vision of the empire with a fair bit of consistency.
Good to know, thanks!
I don’t think they needed anything to retroactively explain the contradiction. Despite being aliens, Klingon politics is so very human. You got the true believer(notably an outsider), the truly contemptible, and then most of them are somewhere in the middle. They talk about their ideals, and they really believe them, but they’ll often betray them to get ahead. And everyone is impulsive and quick to do something stupid but sometimes they stop bickering to unite against a common enemy. That kind of mess is politics 101.
Eh, I’m not sure. It’s been a while since I sat down and worked my way through them all (which I’ve been considering doing again, at least TNG and DS9 in prep for Picard), but my recollection was that there was quite a lot of acceptance of the Klingon definition of themselves.
That may be more a fandom/expanded universe thing though.
I remember a dissonance between A: the characters accepting the Klingon definition of themselves and B: all Klingons not named Worf or Kang so blatantly failing to meet that standard.
I bought it at the time.
My read was that Klingon society nominally valorized qualities like honor and, um, valor, but that it was difficult to ascend to leadership and simultaneously maintain those qualities.
Worf, who grew up outside the Empire, had a naive and uncomplicated view of those qualities, and the dissonance between his beliefs and Gowron’s corruption led to the Empire finally taking its place as a docile client-state to the Federation.
(Quark’s “root beer” speech might be the best thing about the series, although I have a sentimental attachment to “especially the lies.”)
@J Mann,
I haven’t been able to find the scene on YouTube, but IIRC Quark’s root beer and the Federation speech was lifted almost verbatim from the 1961 cold war Berlin comedy 1,2,3 with a Soviet agent speaking of Coca-Cola and Americans.
Great film directed by Billy Wilder and starring James Carney.
@Plumber – awesome, I’ll try to check it out!
I can accept that a Christian is sincere in his beliefs without being surprised when they lie or steal.
Remember that the Klingon situation was always delicate, so it’s not like Picard could go full lecture mode on them. And of course, Worf saw Klingon culture through a very different perspective.
Right, but if every Christian you observe save one, regularly lies or steals, would you accept the self-definition of Christianity as a culture of honesty?
Nearly every Christian lies, as do all people. So the question would be whether I think Christians have a culture of honesty. But I’m not sure exactly what counts as “culture of honesty” and what doesn’t. It does seem to be some kind of motivating force, but yeah, it’s clear many people can’t be bothered to care. When I watch a Martin Scorsese movie, his characters display this tension between sincere religiosity and their lifestyle with a stunning lack of self-awareness. But those characters are a reflection of reality. If no characters points out this absurdity, I don’t consider it a flaw with the movie. And “honor” is much more nebulous than something like honesty.
I would be interested in everyone’s comments on the following question/proposition:
When is separation of a region from a nation-state supportable?
Imagine the following idealized thought experiment, from which messy pratical
details have been removed, to allow us to focus on the pure case.
A the population of a certain region of a country, unanimously and as a matter of its
considered, settled, judgement, wants to separate and found a sovereign nation.
Doing so will pose no economic nor military/security threats. Problems of joint
property, liability for debts, pensions — all will be settled with serious inconvenience
to the country which is losing territory.
It seems to me that under such (idealized) conditions, the right to leave and form a
sovereign state is a fundamental democratic right. It’s a logical extension of the logic
of democracy. (Note that I’m speaking about the right, not the wisdom, of separation.)
Thoughts?
There’s also the question of preservation of the rights of former citizens of the larger country, in the newly separate bit. Now, accepting your premise that they are unanimous (and not in the ‘we asked all the voters, after we’d successfully restricted the vote to me and the other five people in this room’) a lot of this is resolved and I would tend to agree that it is the right of this region to withdraw, though there will be edge cases that need to be addressed in negotiation.
Always, assuming that the separation leaves both states as viable, independent entities. Why should any group of people have a right to force others into a single polity?
I don’t really know how to justify this, but my instinct is to say that, while your idealized case is not necessarily supportable, it’s not necessarily _not_ supportable either. Whether I’d support it would depend on the specifics which you’ve abstracted away. In my mind there’s a wide difference between (for example) “we want to secede because you conquered us recently/your legal system denies us rights” and “we want to secede because we are a distinct ethnic group and this gives us the right of self-determination.”
(Also, not really important, but do you mean “settled with serious inconvenience to the seceding region” or “settled withOUT serious inconvenience to the larger nation”? “Settled with serious inconvenience to the country which is losing territory” seems to bias the abstract case towards not allowing secession.)
Whoops! WithOUT serious inconvenience.
I do not believe in rights that are completely disconnected from being enforced by someone.
Suppose that some country in Europe has a region that wants to go, but the country said ¡no! to that. What should its neighbors do? Invade it?
I’d be totally for something like a tribunal in Hague for the said country but something tells me it won’t happen.
I think the actual question sounds like this: how do you win independence?
Be strong enough (in economic leverage, political leverage, and force of arms) to make it stick against efforts at economic sanctions and/or conquest by your neighbors/former state. And it’s worth noting that in practice, economic and political leverage tends to really mean “Make a third party with sufficient force of arms use force or the threat of force on your behalf”, so to reduce it even further:
Be strong enough to defeat (via insurgency or conventional war) attempts to conquer/reconquer you, or be able to convince someone else strong enough to defeat those people to act in your interests.
Comrade Lysenko has put it well. But let’s not go there, although of course as adults we all know that old Bismarck was right when he said that all serious questions facing mankind are finally settled not by parliamentary majorities, but by blood and iron.
Democracy isn’t a God-given thing with sacred powers. It’s just a system that seems to work, in its very various implementations. Also, it’s very much not about just voting, but about rules, institutions, culture and so on. Two wolves and a sheep voting what to have for dinner is valid majority voting, but I wouldn’t bet on the welfare of the sheep.
To translate this to your example – a region voting to secede may or may not be a good idea. For an obvious counter-example: the 90% richest parts of the country could always vote to secede from the poorest 10%. Repeat until you are left with just London.
There are also other considerations. For example, it may not be “just”, for various reasons.
The string of secession votes we’re seeing lately mostly (all?) happen in EU, where, to be perfectly honest, it’s mostly a matter of labeling. People, money and trade can still move freely regardless of the vote.
I think in every real world case, tribal identity will trump the sort of economic motivations you suggest. The economics may determine some swing votes in a referendum, but if there isn’t a large base who emotionally identify as a nation distinct from the larger existing state, as in Scotland or Catalonia, the movement will never get off the ground. And in every case where such a sense of national identity exists and there is evident widespread desire for independence, it is appropriate to determine the matter in some democratic way, probably most often a referendum.
Usually, that is the case. The Selfish Gene wants to be ruled by its near replicants. But … consider the Americans. Consider the Confederacy. Consider the South Koreans and the Taiwanese.
My own reading of news from America, and my experience on various on-line forums, is that the hatred that exists between Left and Right in America today is at least equal to Hutus vs Tutsis, or Sinhalese vsTamils, or Greeks vs Turks, or Sunni vs Shia. And if the two American cultures were geographically separated even more than they are now .. if there were a cluster of 90% Red states surrounded by a ring of 90% Blue ones… then perhaps separation would begin to move out of the realm of the ridiculous and unthinkable into the realm of a possible solution that would remove the two sides from each others’ detested embrace.
With Scotland, just speaking from experience, there is a large base who emotionally identify as a nation distinct from England. It’s more a difficult questions of whether the structure of the UK is enough to express than within the existing framework. Arguably economic motivations were the main detractor from the independence argument here, and that’s part of why we voted No. If they’d had a better counterargument on the currency and were realistic about economic prospects i know a lot more people would have felt comfortable going with their heart instead of their head.
Yes, I think that was Slovenia’s motive in getting quickly out of the Yugoslav republic — they didn’t want to keep paying for the Albanians’ welfare. Similarly, Northern Italy has a very haughty attitude towards the South of Italy. And when the Protestants of Northern Ireland looked like making trouble over the Good Friday agreement, I noted a very chilly attitude towards them at dinner parties in the South of England — not pro-IRA, but “Who needs these people anyway?”.
I would urge the two new states to have a total free trade and free movement agreement, but of course they would be sovereign states, few of which take my advice.
Just using your example above with London, it would be fantastic if London seceded!
Then the rest of the UK could charge them 500% tariffs on food imports and electricity and everything else that London seems to take in from the rest of the country, instead of hoping for some outward investment in return but never getting it. If London had it’s own currency then when people try to take their money out to move back to wherever they came from/send we could see a real exchange rate effect.
I’m hope you’re not serious, but London could just buy everything (including electricity, if really needed) from somewhere else.
Plus, I doubt they’re “taking” anything as much as “buying”. If London would become a glassy crater today, most of the areas around it would be bankrupt in a month for lack of a market to sell their products.
Always, given a sufficiently strong majority of the population of that region agrees, if we believe democratic principles have meaning.
That said, I would argue that this is an entirely separate question from matters of ownership of property, settlement of liability, etc.
And of course, if the reasons for the separation is particularly acrimonious, it seems entirely right to me for the nation-state to say “Yes, of course, Ambassarod, we recognize the Sovereign State of Regionia. Congratulations, Ambassador. By the way, as of noon today, a state of war exists between NationState-istan and Regionia.”
We already know what you are, we’re just haggling over the price. What constitutes a sufficiently strong majority?
This seems like one of those things that follows intellectual fashions, over generations. At one point, self-determination was not a thing – subjects belonged to whatever ruler had most recently conquered the place they lived, unless they picked up and left [successfully]. Rulers swapped territories with no more concern for the inhabitants than a couple of fashonable ladies trading hats. And nobody had a problem with this, conceptually.
They might find some particular ruler to be a “bad king”, and another to be a “good king”, and prefer to have a better ruler. They might rebel against the “bad king” – or flee to another ruler’s territory. But the only thing wrong with England owning half of France was that the French king also wanted that terrain. And even later on Alsace-Lorraine got traded/conquered back and forth like a prize for winning a military victory. What the inhabitants wanted only mattered to the extent that they might actively make trouble.
In the first part of the 20th century, regional self-determination was something that victors in wars used to break up empires – not something that applied to areas controlled by the victors before the war, or for that matter areas the victors decided to claim as spoils. Before that, part of the US fought a very bloody war to force the other part to remain “united” with it – in spite of traditions of democracy etc.
It seems to me that the main justification for some areas being political units and others being split among many larger units, or incorporated into some larger unit, is always a mix of naked power, and tradition. Currently liberal democracies occassionally allow seperatist referenda – but for every UK/Scotland there’s a Spain/Basque country. And precious few national divorces have come about as a result of these – usually countries split after and because of bloodshed.
Of course it’s also true that nothing is ever unanimous. Your thought experiment doesn’t happen in real life. But even if it did, I’d expect the containing country to insist on keeping the breakaway region, unless the breakaway region was also costing the country a lot more than it was producing – with production including such things as “national pride” in the containing country.
Would that be “right”? Frankly, I’d love to see people who consistently made decisions on grounds of what was right, rather than what was to their benefit, but I’m not expecting to see that often, or at the aggregate level of nations. Mostly they invent morals and ethics that support what they wanted already 🙁
Thanks for all the replies, of the high quality to which I have become accustomed here.
Now … move away from the pure case and appproach ugly reality: not everyone in the break-away wants to leave. Assuming you support the right of separation in the pure case, what percentage of the population should be able to excercise a veto on separation?
Assume all else remains the same: full rights for ‘remainers’, no negative security or economic issues.
My own rough rule of thumb is: 1/3. That is, for separation you need a 2/3 majority of those voting.
The reason I’m asking is I would like to get an idea of the thinking of the intelligentsia on this issue. I’m putting together a case for the future break-up of the United States, along political lines, and am interested in how people think about territorial integrity.
There is an apparently near-unanimous case; Norway’s vote to leave its union with Sweden. Though in that case the Swedes seemed to be more trying to push them away than keep them, and anyway for lizardman constant reasons I find reports of the vote tally hard to believe (I don’t know if any scholars have questioned them, or if anyone was suspicious at the time). And in any event I suppose someone could quibble that the Sweden/Norway union wasn’t really a nation state.
Yes … the Swedish/Norweigian split was always held up by Lenin and others as an example of where the Right of SD avoided national clashes, and allowed the workers to get down to class warfare. The real problem arises when you have two peoples who are geographically interpenetrated. Then, the question becomes, who gets what. And the ultima ratio regnum rules.
This seems obvious to me. Of course, I come from a country that venerates a separation substantially less popularly supported, where attacks on loyalists were somewhat of a byword, so of course I would.
Shhhhhh!!!!! We’re not supposed to talk about what happened to Loyalists, or to the property they left behind when they fled to Canada (I think the latter issue was raised once by people addressing the lost property of Cuban exiles now in the US, their argument being tu quoque.)
I am all for it as long as people have open borders to move between the new states.
If you don’t like the new state, you should be able to move out (I am ignoring here those costs), and if you like the new country, you should be able to move in.
Exasctly. I always thought that was part of the genius of federalism. Mississippi can make homosexuality illegal, California can make it compulsory, and if you don’t like it, move.
The problem in America since very early is that has never been acceptable to the strong horse.
When the slaveholders are in power, you get Dred Scott, when the abolitionists are in power, you get the Civil War.
So when liberals were weak on gay marriage, the federal government couldn’t stop Massachusetts, and now that they’re strong, the feds need to quash Alabama.
The right has the exact same set of principles on different issues.
Absolutely. It’s a case of whose Ox is Gored. I recall growing up in Texas in the 1950s, when it was liberals who defended free speech, the right of a Commie physics professor to teach physics, etc. and it was the Right who wanted loyality oaths, who did an Anti-Fa-raised-to-the-fifth-power when the CP tried to hold a concert at Peekskill. Although … Hubert Humphrey, the Bernie Sanders of his day, did author the Communist Control Act of 1953 which outlawed the CP.
@doug1943 >
I’m imoressed, Peekskill 1949, is pretty niche, the only reason I know about it is ’cause the former vice-president of my old union local was there.
Plumber: I’m an Ancient-of-Days, so have had more time to snap up unconsidered trifles than many others have. And I’m an ex-Marxist (Trotzkyite variant) so I know something about the history of the American Left. Peekskill ought to be
rubbed in the faces ofmade familiar to every free-speech-loving conservative, so that they (we) don’t get too self-righteous when condemning anti-Fa and campus snowflakes who attack Charles Murray etc. America recovered from that illness, but it didn’t give us immunity, and in fact the second time around looks like being fatal.@doug1943
Which is the exact reason I’m not a libertarian. Somebody’s morality is going to get legislated, so I’m going to make damn sure it’s mine.
I find it hard to think of reasons against it. I’d be interested to see if anyone here does oppose it (so far all the responses seem to agree).
One issue (that I think you should address per your comment below about motivations) would be migration rights across the border and how the seceding state handles the rights of people who were born in it but now live in the parent state (i.e. broader issues about citizenship). E.g. I’m British and have English and Scottish heritage – if Scotland were to secede (which is possible in the next 5 years), would I be able to obtain Scottish citizenship.
There’s also an issue regarding who gets to vote in a possible referendum. When Scotland voted against independence in 2014, English, EU and Commonwealth citizens resident in Scotland could vote, but Scottish people living in England could not. That seems a bit weird and complicates the idealised conditions you set out.
If I were advising the Council of Secession I would first advise them not to use that name, given its unfortunate connotations. And then I would advise them to bend over backwards to make every conceivable concession to ‘remainers’.
The only really tricky part would be immigration rights. Would the new state still be required to admit as citizens, everyone that the ‘mother state’ recognizes as citizens. I would argue yes, for the first five or ten years, but after that, mother-state would-be immigrants are treated like everyone else.
As a limiting case, I certainly don’t think that individual households should have the right to secede and from sovereign states. I mean, I don’t have a moral problem with it or anything, but as a practical matter I don’t think you can form much of a government if you allow it.
Yes, there has to be a practical limit. As the world economy changes, this limit might get smaller and smaller, as — hopefully — national boundaries become less and less significant. In the meantime, I would be pretty liberal in my calculations for who is ‘big enough’ to run their own state, i.e. to govern themselves.
I wonder if the PolySci people have ever taken up this question? If not, it might make an interesting topic for a Master’s thesis, maybe even a PhD.
In a sense, allowing self-determination is just running the film of nation-building in reverse, as many nation-states were consolidated out of previously-autonomous tribes, not without violence in many cases.
I haven’t raised this out of idle speculation. I think something like this might be key to avoiding some very nasty developments in the America that is coming.
Depends on what political units you take to be pertinent to the question.
Let’s assume that a majority of the population of the country as a whole does not want the region to secede. Then its secession is not the “democratic” outcome from the perspective of the nation as a whole. So you’re talking about a (super)-majority of a particular subset of the country.
But how is this subset selected? What is a legitimate delineation? What if I drew lines to enclose a particular highly gerrymandered district in which support for secession was high. Why should the nation accept this partition?
I look at it from a mathematical perspective. We are considering a two-dimensional surface on which we associate two numbers with every point (density of support for secession and remain), and we are considering partitions of this space such that the integral of the first density exceeds the second. We can partition it however we like — clearly there will be rather a lot of possible outcomes.
So we must restrict ourselves to only considering certain kinds of partitions as “legitimate”. What standards should we use? Obvious candidates are things like contiguity, compactness, historical boundaries, differences in culture or language, and so forth.
But if you want to argue from democracy, it seems to me that the only case in which a solid conclusion exists is that of mutual affirmation — the nation as a whole must support secession, and the region itself, preferably by a supermajority. The supermajority requirement can be seen as a practical way of guaranteeing that any reasonable partition of the region would also support secession (with high probability), which seems a desirable thing. Otherwise you would get situations where region X wants to secede, the people of country Y (X in Y) agree. But the people in town Z in region X *don’t* want to secede.
In the end democracy is not a cure all. You have to decide when the vote is held, who can vote, and so forth. Look at the bloody failure of popular sovereignty in settling the question of the western frontier in the run up to the American civil war (which itself featured secession, and was settled by force of arms — incidentally, the principle of self-determination in international affairs owes much to Wilson, himself a Southerner, probably not coincidentally).
A very interesting reply. In real life, the criteria you raise are usually decided by appealing to national identifies: that is, the secessionists will attract legitimacy to their cause by being of a different national identity from the people from whom they wish to secede. Then we can argue about just what difference is difference enough: Lenin had Stalin write a whole pamphlet on this, and the question of ‘what is a nation’ occupied Marxists for decades: the CPUSA applied it to American Blacks, and you can Google ‘the Black Belt’ and find a proposed Black Nation, which cnsisted of the Southern counties where Blacks were a majority. I don’t think this insane idea lasted more than a few years.
The argument that what is ‘democratic’ depends on how you draw the boundaries of the demos is, of course, the ‘tyranny of the majority’ question in disguise. The majority of French citizens considered Algeria an integral part of France. For a while, it might have been the case that the majority of inhabitants of North America — north of hte Rio Grande that is, considered that Canada should be added to the acquisitions of the USA.
I think it’s like the question of at what age should we be allowed to vote, or have sex with someone fifty years older than we are. It’s necessarily somewhat arbitrary.
At any rate, I do hope the future secessionists from the US draw boundaries as sensitively as possible, even allowing Kaliningrads for ‘remainers’. It’s the fate of the latter that really decide whether secession is peaceful or not — when leavers and remainers of different tribes (best word I can find to encompass ‘nations’, ‘religions’, ‘races’) and are geographically highly interpenetrated — then you have trouble.
Wise secessionists will make every possible accommodation to remainers, including things like (subsidized) house swaps with ‘leavers’ in the original homeland. Maybe, when/if this question appears on the historic agenda in the US, we can avoid bloodshed.
It’s not clear to me that the right of succession has any direct relation to democracy. If we take democracy to the the “will of the majority”, then the question of succession would need to also survey how people who lived outside that particular region would have voted. Because it’s possible that more people in total opposed succession, despite all of the people within a subset of that population supporting it. If that were the case, then succession would be an anti-democratic outcome.
So to answer your question: I am agnostic on the question of their succession until I get more information.
This is really interesting to me, because it seems non-intuitive.
Do you think it would be democratic for China to hold a referendum on whether Mongolia should be part of their country? Basically any majority would swamp the entire population of that country.
It would indeed be the democratic outcome. If you want to make an argument against it, you should point to something other than the will of the majority.
This ends with the result that no democratic outcome has ever really occurred, which is sort of odd to me. I mean, China didn’t vote on whether the South should leave the Union either, and their votes would’ve swamped both parties (and been hilarious).
Note: Not a serious argument, more of an interesting thought. I’m not fervently democratic at all.
While its true that no maximally democratic outcome has ever occurred (a world-wide vote), we can still compare whether a vote is more democratic than another, comparatively speaking.
E.g., we can say that the US became more democratic when African-Americans were allowed to vote, but an even more democratic process was theoretically possible (giving women the ability to vote).
@Guy in TN
This makes me kind of want to rank things by “democraticness” in silly ways. Brexit is more democratic than Scottish independence, but less democratic than if the EU had been allowed to vote on it.
Also, should you rank it by percentage of total populace or raw numbers? Brexit is more democratic than Switzerland has EVER BEEN!
Rank by raw numbers, definitely.
The issue at hand, is that people too often use “democratic” to mean things other than “will of the majority”. Like, I get what doug1943 was hinting at, that succession is comparable with certain liberal values such as “consent of the governed” or “individual sovereignty”.
Have you ever read an article that’s like “X country isn’t a democracy, because they don’t have free speech”. It’s the same thing: the term “democracy” being used in place of “liberal values”, resulting in confusion.
@Guy in TN
I agree, that seems right to me. And I am now going to mentally rank things on democraticness.
In general there is not one “the democratic outcome”, because the result of any particular vote varies according to a number of variables, including when the vote is held, who holds it, what people are allowed to vote, and other conditions.
As I noted above, the lead up to the American civil war well illustrates the limitations of democracy. This is apart from the secession crisis itself (incidentally, many states that did vote to secede had regions with strong (probably majority) unionist sentiment, and one state (Virginia) actually split over secession).
@Guy in TN:
As much as I’d like to make a meme of Maximally Democratic Man (he’s a Victorian African-American captioned “Where da women at?!”), I’m not sure this can logically hold.
It would be more democratic to give women the vote, but then it would be even more democratic to invade Canada and make its population American voters, even if they’re an equally-democratic separate population.
So a large nation in which only a privileged majority can vote is more “democratic” than a smaller nation with full democratic participation?
@Le Maistre Chat
The “invading Canada” part is unnecessary, if your goal is to allow Canadians to vote in US elections.
@Eponymous
But the smaller nation doesn’t have “full democratic participation”, because it’s excluding a very sizable chunk of people: those who are not citizens.
“Citizen” is equally as arbitrary an exclusion category as “white” or “female”.
This is facile. Women and non-whites living in the US are subject to US law. Canadians living in Canada are not.
There might be an actual argument somewhere for granting foreigners a vote, but equally arbitrary is puff and nonsense
“Subject ” to US law is doing a lot a heavy lifting, since they are certainly affected by US law.
Saying that people who are affected by a law, but not “subject” to it, cannot participate is indeed an arbitrary carve-out.
No that’s still facile, unless you’re also asserting that I am, in fact, “affected” by what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms and should get a say in what’s allowed
Oh, but you are in fact, “affected” by what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Their choice precludes you from partaking in a sex act that you might desire, and the State uses coercion to prevent you from doing so. “It’s coercion all-the-way-down,” so we need to finally start talking about what the optimal sex-distribution system is!
@Gobbobobble
“This doesn’t affect you” is an incorrect argument for any occasion.
If that’s the only thing keeping you from going full-on sexual authoritarian, I would first stop to consider if there are any other reasons why the state might not want to regulate that behavior.
It could be that sex simultaneously affects other people, and is also best not to regulate.
@ControlsFreak
I mean, you’re mocking me but I’m right.
Cleanse your mind of liberalism and you will understand.
Liberalism and anti-liberalism mean a lot of things to a lot of people. You’re going to have to help me out a little bit. Why does the fact that Person A having sex with Person B at Time T prevents me from also having sex with Person B at Time T (even though I might want to) mean that we should jettison laws against rape?
Yikes … How did we get from Self-Determination to Consenting Adults? Via the confusion, as someone pointed out, of ‘democratic’ with ‘liberal’ or ‘liberal democratic’. This has been a meme (?) on the Old Right for a long time … back in the early 60s, you would see (in Texas anyway) bumper stickers with the slogan, ‘This is a Republic, not a Democracy’, which was a John Birch Society campaign at the time. Tyranny of the majority, limited government, super–majorities to amend the Constitution — we’ve been here before.
My own take on when it would be ‘wrong’ for an external majority to deny the right to secession to a geographically-compact minority would be when that act would deeply negatively affect the welfare of the majority. Here we begin to speak of self-interest, and the eternal problem that A’s rights may clash with B’s self-interest, so B is motivated to define his self-interest in terms of rights also.
Isn’t this the argument of those who believe that they have the right to shut down meetings on campus where the speaker might say something that would upset them? They have a right not to hear arguments from conservatives or libertarians.
May I thank everyone who has contributed their opinions here. I don’t think I could find a smarter group of people to run these ideas by.
Coming soon: a proposal to end the bitter political conflict within the US, by allowing part of it to secede.
Bad faith. I’m out.
Not bad faith. I genuinely don’t see how you get from [private property means A can’t use B’s stuff] to [we should jettison private property] and also not [private sexuality means A can’t use B’s junk] to [we should jettison private sexuality]. Please please please help me figure it out. I’m actually quite good at coming up with plausibility arguments in many aspects (including my professional life, which requires vague plausibility arguments when reviewing academic proposals), but I can’t see this one without some help. That’s part of why I asked you to define what liberal/anti-liberal means to you. You’re giving me literally zero help, literally zero indication of how any of this is supposed to work, and then yelling bad faith when I ask, “PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE TELL ME HOW THIS IS SUPPOSED TO WORK! I DESPERATELY WANT TO KNOW!” (Worse, you’ve told me that I’m basically right in interpeting you so far, with, “you’re mocking me but I’m right,” leaving an atrocious mess of ambiguity for how we get from Point A to Point B.)
Next time, try not to prescribe a position to a person that they don’t support, particularly one that they’ve already denounced in the very thread.
How?! What are the principles? How do we determine whether it’s best to abolish private property? In other words:
You’ve gotta give me something. You’ve got to at least try.
A disjointed rant. I both love and hate my Industrial Engineers, but that’s only because I really hate everyone else.
Okay, so high level background, in two parts. You probably know all the stories about how crazy efficient Japanese firms are, how every employee has permission to stop everything on the line, how we all need to be Six Sigma and need to Kaizen and blah blah blah.
A lot of that is driven by your Industrial Engineers. The Wiki definition is:
Basically they try to make factories run better, not necessarily by designing machines, but by making processes run better. They are the kinds of guys that do time studies and try to figure out optimum placement of your arm in relation to the direction of the Moon and ask you to fill out a bunch Gannt/Ghant/Gennt/Gary charts about how your project is going.
They might try to patch machines, but their attitude is as follows (paraphrased from boss’ boss)
We have a lot of them. A lot of them. They are everywhere throughout the whole organization. I never encountered an Industrial Engineer prior to working at a factory, and heard nothing but bad things prior to starting: my friends and family engineers basically don’t consider them “real” engineers. They don’t do math, they don’t design electrical systems, they don’t really design machines: they aren’t engineers as you might understand them.
But my god do they understand how to improve a goddam factory. Or, rather, they are the only people that care to improve a goddam factory.
I’ll relay a story from a former coworker, who worked at a food processing company that made….let’s say pizzas. And let’s say you have a production line that fires up the dough, just enough to parcook it to get out some of the nasties, and then it goes under a big cannon that shoots the dough full of tomato sauce.
For some odd reason, the cannon would misfire on every fifth pizza, and shoot tomato sauce all over the floor.
For years, no one really noticed or cared about this problem. It wasn’t until the Industrial Engineer saw it, stopped the line, and did a 5Y (why is this broken? Why is that broken? Why is that broken? Ask “why” at least 5 times in the hopes it leads to a correctable behavior) that they actually identified the problem and fixed it.
Our plant, and other plants, are full of stupid losses like misfiring tomato sauce cannons. People at my factory still tell me stories of how some management trainee right out of college improved several lines that have been there for 15 years. You’d think the people with decades of experience would have got these pretty close to optimum. Nah. Clearly, the guy shotgunning beers a year ago is our best option.
Plus, our Industrial Engineers are far more data-driven than anyone else on our team. There’s real benefit, especially around budget season, to data, because now we have historical trending going back years, right up to the point where the IE folk started running things.
So, why do I like our IE folk? Because no one else knows how to problem solve and run a business. It’s all tribal knowledge, duct tape, and a lot of luck. That’s good enough to keep a business going for quite a while, but it’s hell when you start running into problems, because no one knows how to prioritize and fix problems. I’d consider everything IEs do “common sense,” but apparently it’s not common at all.
So, why do I dislike IE? Jesus H, there’s no need to complicate everything!
For instance, if you don’t hit your production, there’s no immediate reason to get a damned meeting of 6 people together. Just go out to the production line and see what’s broke. You might need a more in-depth meeting to figure out how to fix what’s broke, but initial problem-solving shouldn’t be that damn hard.
What’s particularly annoying are those damn fish-bone diagrams, where you try to find everything that can possibly be wrong. Here’s the thing about manufacturing, everything that can go wrong is at least a little wrong, unless you’re doing some real precision stuff where tolerances are low. It’s just not worth the time or money to fix everything. So if you try to diagnose everything wrong with the line, you’re going to find a lot of problems. And most of them, we’ve already decided aren’t worth the time to fix.
Really, you need some rough idea of what baseline operations are, and when you aren’t performing to rate, an idea of what your general failure points are. You also need a plan to improve your baseline when capital becomes available, so you don’t have to brainstorm every year. All of this stuff should be documented and saved (another thing that Industrial Engineering likes, that Production doesn’t: record retention).
Plus, there is an assumption that a magical “standard” will fix everything. Let’s go back to what my industrial engineering boss’ boss said:
That’s not how this works! That’s not how any of this works!
I’ll give an example. We have a production line with a couple different stations, with a central vacuum pulling dust from each station. Turns out, the vacuum pressure was too high, and actually damaging the product. We can’t actually turn down the vacuum, so we installed dampers to regulate the pressure.
Some Industrial Engineer had the bright idea to centerline each damper. Now, I am abusing the term “centerline,” but I am using it as the Engineer actually used it (and he didn’t use it the correct way AFAICT, but let’s ignore it). Basically, each damper had a line drawn it to show its exact position when we were having a world-class shift. So, theoretically, no more problems from the vacuum!
So what happens when one of the stations goes down?
Oops. Guess it wasn’t so simple to just set one uniform standard for every situation for all time.
Stuff like this irritates me. The solutions are one-size catch-all, and assumed to be permanent solutions. There’s also an obsession with standards, when standards need to be audited for them to really take. But there’s no concern about the effort it really takes to audit standards, so that all gets hand-waved away.
So ends my rant. We have a few weeks left to finish a budget, and our Industrial Engineers just finished updating all of our production estimate. Once we get a sales forecast (on Monday…hopefully….) we should be able to guess how many labor hours we need this year, which means we should also know how many labor dollars we need to spend. That clock is ticking, and it’s starting to sound like a bomb.
Also, go Bears.
Sympathies. Sounds not dissimilar to being at the customers trying to figure out why your product is malfunctioning, with both sides pointing fingers at each other.
Very interesting. I should tell my older son to consider studying IE – it may be his thing.
Also, Roll on you Bears!
I’d say give it a shot. We have a bunch of people with IE backgrounds in our company. You can rise pretty far with relatively modest education.
I can only emphasize that you will be graded on your GSD. You need to take on projects and you need to complete them on time, or else no one will take you seriously. These IE guys, particularly the ones that advance, are very project focused. They are basically mini project managers.
Is the profession of industrial engineering in decline? I seem to remember hearing something about programs being closed at some colleges. I don’t remember what the symptom was, perhaps a lack of quality applicants or graduates having trouble finding relevant employment.
I am currently in my last year of undergrad, and this is pretty much exactly what I am studying. However, it isn’t what you’ll see on my degree, since as you said, it doesn’t exist as a department at the school I attend (or any of the schools I applied to). I don’t know if the need for the profession is decreasing, but for whatever reason the masters of credentialism seem to think so. I had to put together a double major in order to learn everything I wanted to and have had no trouble at all looking for work even so.
Bureaucracy is structure without meaning. -me
There’s a certain amount of detail orientation and desire for structure needed to do a job like that, and its failure mode is for the structure to take over while the meaning drains out.
In software, that leads to waterfall design. So eventually, the improvisor personality types who have an instinctual sense for where meaning lies (and whose failure modes are to never unpack their suitcases because who knows, maybe they’ll take another trip someday, and frequent existential crises) come up with extreme programming, which over time morphs into slavish devotion to the latest agile buzzword. It’s the circle of life.
+1 on this, and fault trees for the win. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it is broke, start at the point where it is broke. What, immediately, is the cause for the break? The tomato-juice cannon is either being fired to command at the wrong time, or it is firing without being commanded. See if you can rule out one of those by, e.g., monitoring the command line to the tomato-juice cannon. Then go back one immediate step for each branch you haven’t pruned, adding a small number of sub-branches for possible immediate causes. Lather, rinse, repeat until you’ve got something you are willing to consider root cause.
Fishbones, listing everything that could possibly go wrong, er, is on the standardized list of things that often go wrong, and checking off each one without logic or common sense, are a recipe for wasted effort. Their one virtue is that they can be used by rote by people who aren’t experts in failure analysis, and guard against their carelessness missing something important. I’d think it would be a sign of professional incompetence for anyone calling themselves an “Industrial Engineer” to use such a thing.
And then there’s the abomination my old manager calls a “fishtree”, where someone makes a halfhearted attempt at a fault tree but insists on filling out all the branches before doing any pruning and uses their memory of a standard fishbone to lay out those branches.
In my experience, fishbone diagrams are a symptom of a classic failure mode, that being the “a smart person did a thing once, but we no longer have the smart person, so we are trying to get a bunch of stupid people to do the thing the smart person did by copying their methods”. Honestly, that’s not even a bad strategy, especially if you only have stupid people to work with. But it becomes a nightmare when a new smart person shows up, but can’t do the work their way because the organization is stuck in somebody else’s ways.
And then it gets hosed down the drain and becomes the problem of the process wastewater pretreatment plant operators.
FTFY
How else did you think they got by all that pizza?
Did you ever read Cheaper By the Dozen? It’s the story of one of the founders of this kind of analysis, as told by two of his kids, the family being large enough that he applied his professional expertise to making the family work.
You are invited to describe how to reform English spelling. Do not dwell on the actual reforms themselves. There are many reasonable proposals. Instead, describe how to bring them about, as an institutional, political, and cultural matter.
Local (small country) spelling changes went like this:
– highest scientific forum said “now spelling is X”
– schools started teaching X
– television said “spelling is now X”.
This may work for english as well, with the biggest caveat that any change that hopes to be successful needs to start simultaneously in at least 3 major english speaking countries (UK, US and one other).
The US federal government tried to move the country to metric back in the seventies. The effort was broadly unpopular, and failed. Americans can be an ornery bunch.
Wait, why does it need to start in 3 countries at the same time? The weird British obsession with the letter u persists to this day. Your best option is definitely to start in the US and hope it spreads via osmosis to the rest of the Anglosphere.
That’s why :)) Unless it gets enough momentum from the start…
On the plus side, in 20 years we’ll have enough specialized AI that we can all be using different spellings and have software auto-convert between them.
WIthout the letter u, what’s to separate colors from colons?
@Lambert
I suspect that’s a “there’s no u in colons” joke, for for the life of me I don’t get it.
The following assumes you’re already president of the US and your party has a complying majority in both chambers of congress and in the supreme court.
Step 1: propaganda – using, on all avalaible channels, a wide network of bipartisan media personalities sympathetic to the idea of a spelling reform, run many regular documentaries, inquirries, op-eds, etc on various negative aspect of English spelling: the many exceptions, the etymological nonsenses, the cost of teaching such a complicated system, the wasted opportunities of competent people with bad people turned away from jobs, etc – fit the angle to the audience, emphatize taxpayer costs for republicans and inequalities and outdated norms for democrats. Also show that English spelling and pronunciation have constantly evolved since the language first appeared in the middle age, but do not mention the idea of a spelling reform directly. Do this for at least 6 months.
Step 2: introduce the idea of a spelling reform. If step 1 worked, it should now have wide bipartisan support.
Step 3: have the new spelling voted as a constitutional amendment. The implementation needs to adress three critical points: publication, government usage and teaching.
For publication, put into the amendment that new publications in English will be refused a legal deposit if they do not comply with the new spelling.
For government, seemingly require that all English written communication by all branches and levels of government should conform to the new spelling only.
For education, require that any college entrance examination or college aptitude test require a small composition exercice in English, which must conform to the new spelling or get a failling grade (that is, the student must show they are aware of the new spelling, even if the composition ends up containing many mistakes).
Make sure cases of States defying this amendment are judged in priority by the supreme court.
Step 3 should all be done as fast as possible before the whole thing loses steam.
Edit: it is assumed other English speaking countries will follow, since nowadays America pretty much sets the norms for English.
I think your edited-in assumption is… bold. The British public would go ballistic if you tried to get them to change their spelling simply because America had. People would no doubt familiarise themselves with the new system, because there’s a lot of Amerenglish on the internet, but they wouldn’t start using it.
Assuming you’ve got all that, your priority is spelling reform?
Surely you can work on more than one project at once (especially since the spelling one requires at least 6 months where you’re just letting the propaganda roll out)/
Brazil reformed spelling some 10-ish years ago, as part of a treaty with other Portuguese speaking countries, to iron over differences before the languages drift apart to much.
I could be wrong, but AFAIK they just made it the only acceptable spelling in all government, including the highly sought exams for civil service and free college, and it’s mostly working, though taking a long- ish time.
Create a new technology that is convenient and desirable for young people to use to communicate. Severely restrict the method of input to that technology, such that it is easier to communicate with the reformed spelling than it is with the previous spelling. The changes should work themselves out in the long run.
imo, its not 2 long b4 ev1 uses it!!!
On a similar note, I’ve noticed a lot fewer misspellings ever since autocorrect has become standard. Changing the spellings there would probably be a quick way to get people to adopt new spelling.
*chuckle* I notice many more incorrect spellings, particularly things like random choices between its and it’s. Some auto-corrected messages approach verbal salad, but the components are all real words.
Galaxy-brain: it will be much easier to reform the English spelling system if we first replace the Latin script with another. Nothing too complicated, not an abugida or anything, but an alphabet with plenty enough letters to cover a good fraction of the sounds. Pick something that looks cool, too. Georgian would do, though we might want to repurpose some of its letters for non-English sounds as vowel letters, since, like English, it only has five vowel letters and we need some more. But once we’ve agreed on the new writing system, agreeing to spell everything phonetically in it shouldn’t be too difficult. თის კუდ ვირკ.
Suborn the people at Microsoft, Google, and Apple that standardise the word lists in their various spell-checkers to introduce your preferred spelling. Reform can be slow – small changes in your preferred direction, so long as you can keep those people on board. You may want to get the folks at Corel, IBM, and the keepers of /usr/dict/words on board, but they’re less necessary.
Kids these days. What do we think of how social media is affecting teen girls in particular? Haidt did an interview with rogan, highlights of which are that Haidt says girls and boys are equally aggressive, but boys are physically so while girls are relationally so. With smartphones and social media, he thinks the doubling to tripling of self-harm or depression rates among girls (depending on age group) is something that requires to a changing of norms to deal with.
Also hits upon callout culture, nanny state, and overall fragility
I don’t know any teenage girls, but if you’re interested in what seemed to me an astonishingly perceptive fictional take on the question, I cannot recommend the recent movie 8th Grade highly enough.
Your comment made me go watch the movie. Agreed it was very perceptive (and shockingly well acted). Concerning @DragonMilk’s question, the movie seemed kinda neutral. It largely avoided bullying and cyberbullying as topics, which made it more nuanced. But it easily could have gone that direction, and things would’ve gotten a lot darker fast, I’d suspect.
It was my understanding that suicide was a primarily male issue. Am I just totally off base or something wrong with your framing?
@Peffern,
I haven’t seen any new statistics in years, but IIRC more girls/women attempt suicide then boys/men do, most often by trying to poison or cut themselves, boys/men are much more likely to use a gun in their attempts and do kill themselves
Hospitalization for self harm (e.g., cutting) is higher. Actual suicide may well have boys succeed in the act more than girls in line with men shooting themselves vs. women trying to OD.
The charts show baseline rates for boys rising much less than girls.
From my very, very limited and restricted experience in EMS, almost all of the suicides or suicide attempts I’ve encountered have been men or boys. I think I’ve only encountered a single woman/girl.
Again, not sure about suicide specifically, but self-harm trends are well-established
Presenting: Slate Star Showdex.
-#-
Scott Alexander leans back in his chair. He brings a smooth, hot MealSquare to his lips.
Scott ‘Slate’ Alexander. He’s scholarly. Hard-working. Unflappable. A psychiatrist by day, he leads a double life as an investigator — and nothing escapes his notice.
“There’s only one thing I don’t understand,” Scott says.
He scowls at the the lizardman.
“Why are you here?”
-#-
This episode of Slate Star Showdex brought to you by:
MealSquare.
“The only rational choice.”
At MealSquare, we’ve maximized smoothness for your enjoyment. Nothing delivers flavor with more efficiency than MealSquare. Meet your needs with four MealSquares — or use a competitor’s product twice as often? You don’t need decision theory for that choice.
MealSquare will satisfy — so you should believe that MealSquare will satisfy. Don’t delay: “make it a MealSquare.”
Who eats MealSquares hot‽
They’re not actually very smooth at all; the texture is pretty chunky and dense. Not exactly in a bad way, but putting some smooth peanut butter on them makes them more palatable, so I usually do that in the morning. Having to reheat them would defeat the point of “easy to grab and consume”.
I have eaten over 500 mealsquares over the past 2 years and I usually eat them cold right out of the refrigerator. Sometimes they sit in my car and get hot which is fine, but the melting chocolate usualy leaves a mess.
I’ve warmed mine up before and yeah, the melting chocolate tends to get everywhere.
I’m surprised to learn that you’re the Mealsquares type, Nick.
I only ate them for about two months. I’m interested in trying them again sometime, but not unless the texture changes.
I usually put them in the microwave for 30 seconds. They’re mildly enjoyable when warm; when cold, they’re so dense and dry that eating them is a chore.
I agree that cold MealSquares end up dense and dry, but heating them introduced this strange acidic taste that lingered in my throat after eating. Had almost a hint of dairy in it, so I wondered if it might be the lactase enzyme they add to help with lactose intolerance.
I tend to take the remaining mild choreness of the texture as a benefit. With foods that go down too easily, it’s also easier to eat too much, especially with the delay on hunger signals. A beverage is also obligatory—currently black coffee for me, though I want to start putting a little cream(er) in it.
The other main alternative I’ve tried for “easy nutritious breakfast food” has been the Nabisco belVita packets, and that’s much cereal-ier, less complete. And it’s easy to be tempted to have two and then I feel kind of sick afterwards; I don’t know whether that’s because of an overdose of the B-vitamin enrichment in those or what.
That was fantastic, please continue.
Thank you, Incurian.
Incurian, I have posted Episode 2 in today’s open thread.
So many Prairie Home Companion memories, but is this corner meant to parallel Guy Noir, or English majors?
And are MealSquares the power milk biscuits, the ketchup, or the rhubarb?
(The Slate Star Companion?)
“Noir” was the general idea, though I am not a writer, but rather a plant.
The (apparently controversial) “smooth, hot MealSquare”, and the following advertisement, were inspired by cigarettes.
Here’s something I didn’t see mentioned on last OT’s discussion about virtue signalling (defined herein as doing something that looks virtuous even when you know it’s not): is it fair to use virtue signalling as a tactic in asymmetric negotiation?
I started thinking about it because of this tweet*. The negotiation to reduce GHG emissions is asymmetric because most emissions are produced by a small number of companies. Your attempts to e.g. recycle or install solar panels on your house will have close to zero or even negative effect on worldwide GHG reduction. Assuming you care about this issue, should you do those things anyway in order to credibly state to large companies, “I’ve done my part, now you do yours!”
*Full disclosure: on digging up that tweet for this post I came across other claims that Johnson misrepresented the cited study by not distinguishing direct and downstream emissions. I’m posting anyway because I think “do a small thing to guilt others into doing big things” is still a common dynamic falling under the umbrella of virtue signalling. If the example above is too distracting, feel free to substitute your own.
No, they’re produced by a large number of customers, customers who would suffer a huge amount if those companies stopped producing the fuels they’re burning. The quote is nonsense, implying that companies are making carbon for funsies, not because people want to hear their homes and drive their cars.
As I’ve said, my views on global warming are non-standard for a liberal, but I will point out that this is literally the first response and discussion which occurs below the tweet in question, at least on my screen. To which he replies:
I don’t necessarily buy that, but his position is more nuanced then you’re suggesting.
market demand isn’t nebulous, and exxon isn’t driving the problem. People who like driving cars are. Exxon is just serving their need, and the author falling back to “well I don’t think exxon is really to blame, but we have to blame someone and they’re an easy target” is a wierd sort of motte and bailey and deeply immoral to boot. And we absolutely do talk about the problem of smoking without targeting producers, cynical legal cash grabs by lawsuit aside.
Exxon in particular took the same strategy as tobacco companies and devoted a lot of money to obscuring the science around the effects of their business. While any company and industry might be expected to do this, it suggests a level of culpability beyond “satisfying consumer desire”.
They presumably also lobby for the various tax breaks and subsidies that artificially cheapen fossil fuels and are continuing to lock the economy into fossil fuels in the short to medium term.
The anti-smoking campaigns weren’t terribly gentle nudges of individual consumers.
I think there are a couple fundamental differences between tobacco and oil that break down that metaphor:
1. Society at large can continue to function without tobacco. Yes, the elimination of smoking is a noticeable change, but not one that would completely upturn modern civilization.
2. Tobacco contains a chemical that literally hacks your brain to make you want more of it. Gasoline doesn’t.
3. Cigarette companies pretty aggressively advertise their products to get people to try and get hooked on them (see point 2). Oil producers and gas stations barely need to at all–if you drive a car, you’re going to need to fill it up with gasoline. No persuasion required.
That’s stretching the definition of “produced” further than I’m willing to tolerate. Customers want heat and personal vehicles, they’re not paying the company to ship in those products from who knows where. Even if they were, “I was paid to do it” isn’t a great defence against criticism.
The problem with putting the onus on the customer to vote with their wallet is that multinational supply chains are pretty much (intentionally) illegible to outsiders more than one or two steps back, and put disproportionate pressure on the end mile distributor. That information imbalance is part of why I consider pollution an asymmetric problem.
If you look at the list of 100 corporations, it’s mostly fossil fuel companies and they’re counting the emissions from the product as well as incidental emissions. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the supply chain, gasoline or oil or natural gas are going to be responsible for roughly the same amount of fossil fuel emissions no matter where you get them. Electricity a little less so, but only a little; if you’re not literally an aluminum company you likely won’t go much wrong by assuming you’re using the mix of fuels in your grid region.
Criticism for what? Pumping oil out of the ground results in essentially zero GHG emissions, ditto pumping gasoline into a customer’s tank. There’s some overhead in the intermediate stages, but ExxonMobil’s part of the process could be made net carbon-neutral without too much trouble, if anyone cared. No one cares.
The part that releases GHG into the atmosphere, is the part where a retail consumer burns his gasoline in his car because he wants to drive somewhere and didn’t want to accept the limitations of a ZEV. And yet we’re arguing about whether the oil companies have a defense against criticism.
The part of smoking that kills is when the customer smokes the cigarette. Not when Philip Morris harvests tobacco or rolls the cigarette or lies about the health effects of smoking. Philip Morris is totally innocent here, right?
For making and selling cigarettes, yes, and even more so than the oil companies – it is at least possible to use cigarettes in a responsible manner that doesn’t endanger third parties. Tobacco companies have also been accused of other misdeeds (e.g. corrupting the relevant science) for which a different defense would be required and maybe no adequate defense is available.
And the same could be said of the oil companies, though I think it would be a bit more of a stretch in their case. But when so much of the criticism is simply for EvilBigCompanies having manufactured tobacco or gasoline, or guns or sugary soft drinks or whatnot, I’m pretty confident that I’m seeing people who want a sufficiently unpopular scapegoat, not a fair assessment of responsibility.
The frustrating bit from the tobacco company lawsuits is that the claim was that the tobacco companies lied and misrepresented the science to mislead customers into buying their cancer-causing product, leading to many deaths and illnesses. If we accept that claim, then those companies should have been wiped out, but no additional restrictions should have been placed on new companies that rose to take their places, which didn’t misrepresent science or mislead customers. (“Smoke Coffin Nails brand–it’ll have you walking around with an oxygen tank before you’re collecting Social Security!”). But the actual goal was to impose political and regulatory changes, not to do any kind of justice.
Confused by this. What’s “justice” here? Revenge? Isn’t making the world a place where less people smoke just?
Getting fewer people to smoke is a public health goal, but has nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of tobacco companies in slowing public knowledge/acceptance of the dangers of smoking. To do justice w.r.t. that bad behavior would not necessarily decrease the number of people smoking, it would just sue the offending companies into oblivion and give the proceeds to their victims.
One pretty big difference between the two cases is that when the truth finally came out about smoking, people started doing a lot less of it– while they still seem about as willing to burn fossil fuels now that The Science Is Settled as they did back when the oil companies had the science locked up in the secret vault next to the 300-mpg carburetor.
Smoking causes you, personally, to have a bunch of health problems. Driving an SUV may contribute in a very small way to your grandchildren someday having some climate-related remediation or adaptation to do.
What was the guarantee that the new companies would not do the same again?
You may reply “the threat of getting destroyed like the companies of yore”, but the new companies may try to bribe politicians and corrupt the system so it does not happen again. Whereas if the regulation is in place, they will have to corrupt the system to first remove the regulations, so that’s a step removed from doing the same again.
The companies that had done the harm weren’t sued into oblivion, they were sued for a lot of money and strong-armed into not opposing a change in regulation. This may well have been a good direction for our policies w.r.t. smoking to move, but it didn’t have much to do with justice.
There’s two separate things going on:
The negative effects of smoking and the ethical problem of misrepresenting the science.
Given that tobacco is so addictive, I don’t see a problem in banning advertising and imposing a sin tax. My liberalism is based on the fact that people generally do what’s best for themselves, and lots of smokers say they wish they could stop.
Saying misleading things about the health effects of your product is its own issue. The tobacco compaines are in the same bucket as VW was with the emissions scandal. The companies involved should be punished pour encourager les autres.
Do what? Lie to people and tell them that smoking tobacco is perfectly safe? I suppose there’s no guarantee that they wouldn’t do that, but since nobody with three functioning brain cells would now believe them, it would be both pointless and harmless so I’m not terribly worried.
R.J. Reynolds et al, at least fibbed and probably frauded when it still mattered.
Sounds like they’ll still have their thriving teenage market 😛
They would lie again to people and people would believe them again. Maybe not as many people as the first time, but they would be believed.
evidence: global warming deniers, flat earthers, all the constant studies funded by food companies promoting this or that diet, all kinds of cults, etc, etc, etc, etc.
If the future market for cigarettes is comparable in scale to e.g. flat-earthers and religious cultists, I’m going to declare the problem close enough to solved as makes no difference and not really care very much about whoever is serving that market. Your other examples are in no way settled science the way the tobacco/cancer link is, no matter how much you would like to believe otherwise.
You think that in the counterfactual world where tobacco companies got destroyed, salt was sown where they stood, and then no legislation was passed against tobacco would have _less_ smokers than this world?
re: global warming: Exxon helped fund studies and orgs denying global warming. Like tobacco companies did at some points.
If the previous companies have just been sued into bankruptcy for lying about the risks of smoking to their customers, then I’d expect the replacement companies to avoid doing that so they don’t follow their predecessors into bankruptcy.
I’m not talking about the best policy for decreasing smoking, but rather about seeing justice done. I also don’t think that the policy that most decreases smoking is automatically the best one. (Though it’s overall a good thing that fewer people are smoking.)
And I am really, really uneasy about the precedent that says that you can be sued into oblivion for financially supporting research that led to some bad social outcome, or for expressions of opinion/ideas that would normally be protected by the first amendment. I can imagine this precedent being used for really bad things. Indeed, every couple years someone proposes suing the oil or gun companies on the same theory. In both those cases, the way it looks to me is that the folks wanting to sue recognize that they can’t get their policy enacted via normal democratic processes, and hope to bypass those and get them enacted a different way. In some hypothetical future where Republicans have a dominant position in the courts, I expect this very idea to be applied to abortion clinics and pro-abortion organizations. At which point Republicans and Democrats will mostly swap positions about whether this is reasonable, because most people don’t have principles, just a side.
Setting a precedent where company owners can reasonably expect that if they lie to and harm their customers they will not lose commensurable money for doing so even when they’re discovered seems like a No Good Very Bad Thing. I would be pretty tempted to err on the side of financial over-punishing than under-punishing
Well the replacement companies may just not lie about it anyway; without legislation, why would they even need to? just buy more marketing than the general surgeon and now you can advertise to children anyway, to make up the difference in smokers who quit due to health concerns. To be fair, it’s not like in the current world they don’t try to sneakily advertise to kids anyway, but still.
That’s a fair concern, tho dunno if it should be extended to companies who have internal research that clearly says bad-social-outcome-will-happen and then fund research that says bad-social-outcome-won’t-happen, without the part in the middle of funding research that tries to avoid bad-social-outcome
That is probably frustrating because the plaintiffs never proved such a thing in court. Phillip Morris never lost a major class action to smokers, instead they lost various lawsuits to Medicaid on dubious legal theories that boil down to: We have these programs, and paid for additional medical care as a result of cigarettes. This theory is a perfect example of lawlessness, because we would never allow a private charity that takes care of DUI victims recover against Budweiser on such a theory.
So yeah, cigarette company comparisons are rarely good analogies. I’m basically here to inform you a significant part of this thread was based on a lie.
@Clutzy
I don’t think this is correct. The tobacco companies entered into a master settlement agreement with the states, which included dissolving two “research organizations” and release of documents (as well as big piles of money, see: https://www.naag.org/assets/redesign/files/msa-tobacco/MSA.pdf) and in the subsequent years preceded to lose a lot of cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_politics#Litigation and see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Morris_USA_Inc._v._Williams). Now it’s true, as far as I can tell that they never lost a major class action, but from my brief research, that has more to do with issues of class similarity and need to prove individual harm than any notion that there wasn’t fraud.
Ah, the companies extracting fossil fuels, I take it? If so, the solution is easy: just buy the companies and shut them down. Oh, you¹ don’t care that much to save the planet, you say? You would rather that somebody else’s money were used according to your wishes at no cost to yourself?
Virtue signaling. Plonk.
¹ In case it wasn’t clear, not any particular ‘you’.
I don’t think that’s how these things work.
Once you’ve checked behind the sofa and found $950,000,000,000 in loose change and bought out the entire petrochemical industry, somebody else is going to go and start mining coal somewhere else.
‘Blame’ is one of those things that creates more trouble than it’s worth.
It’s not terribly mysterious that fossil fules make very cheap sources of energy, especially for cars. There’s plenty of natural embedded incentive to extract and refine those resources for use.
‘Assymetric Burden’ feels like it’s missing the mark here. No matter what *specific policy* is adopted, the outcome would be roughly the same. INDIVIDUALS must be kept from using fossil fuels for energy and as a result, people who extract and refine those resources need to find something else to do. If a policy targets [blames] individual consumers, the businesses that supply those goods are affected, if a policy targets [blames] companies, the consumers are effected.
If you outlawed fossil fuel extraction completely [or taxed it to the point of doing the same] you drive an industry out of existence but in the short term and possibly the long term greatly increase the cost of electricity and transportation.
If you imposed punitive carbon taxes based on fuel type, assuming consumer behavior shifted sufficiently, this would also raise energy prices in the short term and encourage people to shift over to alternatives. This has the same effect on oil/coal companies.
Alternatively think of it in terms of consumer profit. If a ZGHG energy bill is double what you’re paying now, that’s the individual’s ‘profit’ from fossil fuels. Add that up across all consumers and you get a number that is in all likelihood much higher than the commodity profits of the oil industry. Also bear in mind that since all industrial processes use energy to some extent, the cheapness of energy is embedded into all consumer products not just personal electricity bills.
Reading In Coal Country, the Mines Shut Down, the Women Went to Work and the World Quietly Changed from gave me some tears, and since misery loves company for those who’d rather not click on the link, here’s some of it:
I can already imagine some responses:“”They should’ve moved and learned to code”, coal has to die to save polar bears’, “This empowers women”, , and it reads like a dying community of broken men, and working women that is increasingly supported by semi-nationalized health insurance.
For me the parallels with the Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco after so many shipyards jobs disappeared in the ’70’s are obvious. These folks weren’t raised their whole childhood that their chief goal in life is to fashion yourself to go away to a selective college and then again move for ambition, and they don’t have family tales of striving immigrant grandparents, instead much of their families have been their for centuries, and they have deep roots where they live.
If past is prologue, and their fate of these rural whites does follow the once majority black neighborhoods of the San Francisco bay area I don’t inagine much to be optimistic about, I suppose subsidies to move to places with more opportunities, but I’m not sure how many would want to move far from the graves of their ancestors anyway.
How many centuries are we talking here? San Francisco has only really existed since 1849, only 170 years ago and 1) how many of those shipyard workers are descended from ’49ers and 2) those ’49s weren’t exactly homebodies if we think wanderlust is heritable. The coal mining towns of West Virginia are even younger, dating from the 1880s or after. Those mine workers were by and large new-commers to the region (African-Americans from the deep south and new immigrants from Europe).
@brad,
I was thinking of parallels and differences, and I failed to communicate that
Folks who lived in the Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco (and similar near shipyard neighborhoods in Oakland, Marin City, and Richmond) in the ’70’s and ’80’s mostly came or their parents in the ’40’s and ’50’s, and San Francisco is filled with newcomers, the general impression I had of Kentucky and the rest of Appalachian ‘coal country’ was of folks who’s ancestors mostly arrived in the 17th century, and I thought that with those deep roots it would be even harder to move.
What you said about West Virginia surprised me, so thanks!
Appalachian history is pretty interesting. There are the famous (at least ’round here) boarders, but they were hardly the only wave. Before the big coal mine influx there were waves of German* and Irish immigration coming to the area almost continually from the early 19th century. And even after coal mining took off it still competed for quite a long time with logging and associated industries.
* and much of the country for that matter, the extent of German immigration is for various reasons not that well known in the US
Yeah, this is brutal. And there’s no obvious way to fix it, unfortunately. Telling people to move away is essentially telling them to gamble their communities and their family ties on the possibility of getting a better job somewhere, but where can an older person without a college degree get a job today in the US?
The worst part is, there’s no real chance of this fixing itself the way these people want it to. As long as natural gas remains cheap and mini-mills remain more efficient than conventional blast furnaces for steel production, coal will continue to die. Environmental regulation is only one (unfortunately necessary) element of what’s killing coal.
I live in a former coal-mining area where the government made the decision to close all the mines (which were all state-owned) in 1965 due to the discovery of natural gas fields which were a more economical source of energy. The last mine closed in 1976.
There was a period of high unemployment, but it is now not hugely above the national average, as the government worked to provide alternative employment (and the former state mining company transitioned into chemical processing while staying in the region).
There was an article in the Times over the weekend about a shortage of Border Patrol officers. Not sure about the education or age requirements.
https://www.borderpatroledu.org/become-border-patrol-agent/
This is not intended as a rebuke, I was just interested in what the listed requirements actually were. I’m surprised by the hard age limit, and find the Spanish requirement interesting.
About this requirement:
.
A Border Patrol agent is a variety of law-enforcement. There are many Federal/State/Local jobs of that type: police officer, game warden, State-University campus security officer, Federal Marshal, Postal Inspector, welfare-fraud investigators, Transportation inspectors, Border Patrol Agent, etc.
All of these jobs have a minimum physical fitness requirement, almost always with an age limit. It’s not that all people over age 39 are unfit for duty. It is that the bell-curve for physical endurance/stamina in that age range has a very small section for ‘can pass the physical part of training’.
People can remain in those jobs past the age of 39, by passing physical fitness tests (or being re-assigned/promoted to positions which have lower physical fitness requirements).
Insofar as they already do up-front and recurring physical fitness testing, I am skeptical that the 39-year requirement is based in the statistically superior fitness of youth. Rather, I believe it is about culture formation. Law enforcement cares very deeply about its institutional culture, moreso than almost any corporation (but less so than the military), believing that shared culture is necessary for mission success. Young people can usually be indoctrinated or assimilated into a new culture in a way that old people can’t.
That was the point of view expressed by the precinct chief in about their older new recruit played by Nathan Fillion in The Rookie.
As long as natural gas remains cheap and mini-mills remain more efficient than conventional blast furnaces for steel production, coal will continue to die.
and it would die much faster if we properly penalized it for all the lung cancer deaths it causes.
Total job openings for construction are just off their 20 year high, probably an all time high but the graph only goes back 20 years, as are total retail openings, and job openings in manufacturing and trade/transportation/utilities.
The issue does not appear to be ‘where can a person with no college degree get a job’ but a combination of ‘where can you earn near 6 figures with no degree’ and ‘why won’t these unemployed people move to where jobs are’.
There’s definitely a boom. You can hardly get construction contractors right now, everybody’s so busy. However, it’s not a huge mass of people with a “strong back and a weak mind” anymore. While there are some laborers, even much of that work is done with mechanization which requires skills, and even the fewer laborers will add more value if they don’t need to be closely supervised to get anything done.
Steel prices are through the roof, so we’ll see if that has a slowing effect; it’s negatively impacted a couple of contracts I’ve tried to let, but it’s hard to disentangle the more expensive steel from the more expensive contractor profit to get them out to your site given that it’s a seller’s market.
Miners fit the bill. You don’t thrive… well, you don’t even survive in the mines with a weak mind. They should convert relatively easy to construction.
I had a conversation with someone in the local 911 dispatcher business. Apparently, they are unable to hire/retain employees, despite typically paying around $25/h. No credentials required, though some background in public safety is preferred. They are hiring/training dozens at a time and only a few accept job offers afterwards. Obviously this is not a huge sink for unskilled workers. But I was surprised at how much trouble they are having staffing/retaining these positions given the pay.
Possibly it’s the stress of listening to 911 calls all day every day (with a non-trivial chance that you are listening to someone die). Certainly the person I know elsewhere online who worked as a 911 call dispatcher found the job extremely difficult for that reason.
Interesting. Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be any reason 911 dispatchers couldn’t be outsourced to e.g. Appalachia, whereas there are reasons (linguistic and cultural fluency, politics) why one might not want to outsource it to India. This isn’t going to be a cure-all for what ails the coal towns, but it might offer a little bit of help.
I think that some level of local knowledge is desirable for a 911 dispatcher (callers may not know exactly where they are, a dispatcher might be able to help locate them).
British company call centres are often in the North-East of England, which is a former mining area. Part of the reason for this is the high unemployment in the area after the loss of both mining and a lot of the other major industries (like shipbuilding), and part of it is that British people associate the local accent with friendliness and trustworthiness.
Nah, I’m going to say something else. This looks a lot like a return to normality, after a very non-normal period where men could make enough money to sustain a one-income family. Same thing that happened to everybody 50 years ago.
I’m not being cynical here, that’s, I think, a critical observation if you want to fix things. Mind tends to go to different kinds of solutions in the specific vs general scenarios.
What do you think of projects to retrain former miners from Jiu Valley?
It’s a good thing, obviously. But well, I’m not going to have very warm feelings towards former miners in Jiu Valley. Also, they’re the poster child for high incomes: both while working, and with legendary lay off bonuses (which I understand were quickly wasted).
Also the major layoffs were already decades ago. Problem is mostly solved, those retrained now probably started their career when the mines were already shrinking.
My response isn’t ‘they should learn how to code’, but it is ‘why are some of these men so inflexible? Ok, I get the 55 year old who has spent 30 years as a coal miner being lost when the jobs dry up, but the article talks about a 25 year old woman who had two different out of work coal miner boyfriends and a 38 year old married women. Unless these people are dating/marrying much older men you have guys with 10-20 years in the mines basically giving up on any other work.
It seems pretty obvious to me.
One half of it is sticky wages, where most people are unwilling to take a nominal (never mind real) pay cut. The other half is the existential despair of going from a miner who can support his family to a grocery bagger who can maybe keep his family off welfare if his wife works too.
I’d like to see how some of the glibber posters here would react if they woke up and found out that the only paying work they could get is scrubbing toilets for minimum wage. I don’t think that any of us are more “flexible,” we just have much more marketable skills which allow us to avoid demeaning work.
The latter jobs are a gross exaggeration contradicted by the piece. The wives/girlfriends of these people are taking zero job history and going back to school and are making more than minimum wage.
I made significant money playing online poker years ago until federal regulations killed it, after that I worked part time as an entry level tech in a biology lab for less than $15 an hour, and when grant money dried up and jobs were scarce during the great recession I eventually shifted to midnight to 8am shifts at a bakery that started at $10 an hour. I have also literally scrubbed toilets (summer job in high school) worked basically every job in restaurants including high volume/low pay dish washing, and moved 500 miles away from my parents, 5 siblings and 9 (and counting) nieces and nephews (only 2 at the time of the move) to get married because my wife kept her income during the GR and I lost mine.
Men can be nurses too. I don’t think it’s immediately obvious that I would rather be strung out on opioids than a nurse.
I imagine it’s somewhat harder to retrain as a nurse than as a grocery bagger. It might even be harder than retraining as a coder, depending on talents, personality, and what sorts of coder are in demand at the moment.
No work is demeaning. Toilets need to be scrubbed and the scrubbing of them is honorable and necessary and contributes to society. If it is judged demeaning this tells us something about the judger, not the work.
My wife and I are retired and live on less than we would take home with minimum wage jobs like you describe. If social security disappeared and we had to go to work scrubbing toilets we would both gladly do so and experience no diminution of quality of life nor would we find the change stressful in any way.
+1
You’re talking about people taking a huge loss of income and prestige. You can expect people to do that to survive, but they’re never going to like it!
I recommend the following substitution:
“Learn to code” –> “Learn to play NBA-level basketball”
or
“Learn to code” –> “Learn to do publishable work in theoretical physics”
Say, if someone tells me that the way I can get back to a respectable middle-class income level is to become a professional athlete/theoretical physicist, it turns out that’s just another way of saying I can’t get back to a respectable middle-class income.
baconbits9 already said that their reaction isn’t “learn to code.” It was literally their first sentence. Their reaction is similar to mine, though, which is if there are these job openings that all of these women with little to no job history/training are taking (which are not coding, either), men could be taking those same jobs.
This might be the single most point anyone has made on this subject that I’ve ever read. Specifically, this cuts right to the core of why I’ve found it so difficult to really understand the closing-the-coal-mines/opioid-epidemic/middle-america-unemployment cultural force:
The concept of people having fundamental “roots”/deep ties to the land they live on and their way of life is fundamentally alien and confusing to me. It’s hard for me to explain just how strange this concept is to someone who was brought up in an environment of “family tales of striving immigrant grandparents” (I’m fourth-generation not third- but the point stands. I knew my great-grandmother long enough to hear it from her).
Part of the reason this is so hard for me to wrap my head around is that I cannot see myself or my family (either my ancestors or my hypothetical descendants) arriving in this kind of situation. I basically don’t understand how these “roots” come about from a place where they don’t already exist. I think it’s in some way tied to nationalism – I’ve always seen through the lens of “I live in this country” not “I am this country” and I can imagine how someone with deeper ties to the land might think in terms of the second.
This does explain why arguments about retraining for new industries, or impetus from environmental protection, or invocations of the dangers of lung cancer and other safety hazards seem to fall on deaf ears.
I don’t have a point, I just felt like I suddenly had an epiphany upon reading your comment and wanted to let you know.
Also, I’ve deliberately avoided stating my specific ethnic background for this comment since I want to avoid assumptions, but I’m wondering if it’s pretty obvious.
I think the concept of ethnicity has a built-in tension between “We are this land. The food it grows becomes the cells of our body. We are literally it.” and “In other lands, everyone whose language I can understand is more kin to me than the rest of humanity.”
Can you imagine having a large social network that gives you a lot of value, but you cannot coordinate them to move with you?
I’ll bet the tendency toward feeling a strong connection with the land/town of your birth/etc. varies a great deal by individuals, and also to some extent across cultures and may be partly genetic.
The US, especially the West, was settled by a lot of people who pulled up stakes and moved somewhere more promising a few times. Whatever of that is genetically driven, plus whatever of that is cultural and has been passed on, is presumably still with us.
The number of people I know who really should move out of the Bay Area to have a decent quality of life, but don’t, makes this very easy to imagine.
Even though enough of those social networks have moved to Portland and Seattle to count as coordination.
Bignum*Dunbar’s Number of atomic individuals moving from the Bay Area to the Pacific Northwest, does not necessary constitute the movement of even a single social network. Those individuals may have each decided to abandon their Bay Area social network in the expectation of joining a new social network drawn from the same general culture.
Not having lived in either the Bay Area or the Pacific Northwest, have you seen examples of actual social networks, as opposed to individuals, migrating as a unit?
@John Schilling – the only time I’ve seen full social networks migrate is the annual migration to Gerlach, Nevada, and from the Bay Area to Irwindale (RenFaire). But they come back.
@Peffern >
I have a guess based entirely on projection and my memories of one of my great-grandmothers.
FWLIW, so you don’t have to guess, my great-grandparents were:
One born in the U.S.A., family name Irish or Scottish (Mc….)
One from Ireland, family name unknown.
One from Ireland, family name Irish (O’…)
One from Germany, family name German.
One from Austro-Hungarian Empire, family name unknown.
One born in U.S.A., family name English, allegedly descended from 17th century immigrant to Massachusetts.
One unknown to me, gave birth in Kansas.
One unknown to me, gave birth in Massachusetts.
Grandparents are:
One from Massachusetts, family name Irish or Scottish.
One from either New Jersey or Ireland (I’ve heard both stories, both of her parents were Irish in either version), family name Irish.
One from Kansas, family name English.
One from California, family name German.
My parents were from California and New Jersey.
I’m born in California and both work and live within 20 miles of my birthplace, and my wife wasn’t, her mother is still alive and foreign born, so my son’s are the fourth generation born in California, have ancestors that have been on this continent for even more generations than that, and also have still living immigrant ancestors, and since they’re both mixed race it’s likely that they won’t just get called “one of the Irish guys” at work as I have been, but maybe they will just based on the name?
Hard to tell what will be in decades to be, last and previous years had plenty in the San Francisco Saint Patrick’s Day parade that visibly have at leassome non-Irish ancestors, cause that’s how just we roll!
This is fun, so I’ll do mine too.
Greatgreatgrandparents:
Two from the Great Lakes region, German surnames
Five from Virginia, English surnames (these go back to Jamestown)
Two from Pennsylvania, English surnames (these go back to Plymouth)
Two from the Great Lakes region, Norwegian surnames
Seven from Iowa, Irish surnames.
All born in the United States, although at the fifth generation back (great-great-greats) the Norwegians and Germans are immigrants (they were born here and married in their own communities). The Irish are tougher to tell, but they were probably immigrants in that same generation because that’s when the first wave of Irish showed up (1830s-50s)
@EchoChaos,
That’s impressive, it looks like you know all the branches of your family from way back!
@Plumber
Genealogy is something I really enjoy. The English lines I can trace to the 1600s or earlier, including my descent from this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rich,_1st_Baron_Rich
Note: He was a very bad person.
The German and Norwegian lines I can trace back to point of immigration, but I haven’t gone foreign language to go further than that.
The Irish are always tough to tell as they’re bad at record-keeping in America, let alone in Ireland and they generally arrived before detailed immigration records were kept, but I am pretty sure the prior generation were the immigrants. It’s also possible they were Scots-Irish (Borderers) who went to Iowa to blend into the Irish immigration there, but no records either way to prove it.
@EchoChaos:
Was he a bad person as a child?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richie_Rich_(comics)
I hate this man!!!
@Nick
I told you!
He’s a villain in a lot of stuff for a good reason.
I’m from one of the migrating families that Plumber finds odd; in three generations, one person has settled down and raised kids in the same state where he or she grew up.
Paternal grandparents born in California and Iowa, grew up in Iowa, settled in Massachusetts (he was a lawyer.) Both were of long-term American ancestry, English and Scottish surnames.
Maternal grandparents born in New York and Connecticut, settled in NY (he was an engineer). At least some of his family had been in Connecticut since the founding of the New Haven colony, her grandparents included one German, one daughter of German immigrants, and two mixed Scottish/Irish/long-term American.
Parents settled in Ohio; the four of us are now in California, Colorado, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire. All of this was following jobs.
I’ve moved several times, and rebuilt a network through things like finding a church, the local Society for Creative Anachronism group, other music or dance groups, depending on what I could find.
And my husband has four immigrant grandparents, his father born here and his mother came over with her family as a toddler.
Plumber is right that we grew up expecting to go to college and then go where the jobs were, though once we got there most of us settled down–I’ve moved more than any of the others have, and I have still been where I now am for 25 years.
You have some of the deepest attachment to place of anyone I’ve even heard of and not especially long-standing generational ties. It makes me think that the two aren’t as connected as you are saying but is instead more of an individual personality trait.
@brad,
Sure, outliers exist, but I strongly guess that collegiate class folks being raised to expect to move makes it more likely that they will.
I agree that class probably has something to do with it, but my point is that probably once you have grandparents, parents, and your generation all growing up in the same place additional generations don’t contribute much to the chances that someone is going to be extremely place oriented.
@plumber
sounds a lot like what happened when industry and shipbuilding left the west coast of scotland, with local men turning to heroin and alcohol instead in areas like Greenock and Glasgow.
This same scene is playing across the north of england, scotland, wales, and ireland, and also in the north of Queensland in Australia where I am now. Sad and difficult problem that seems impossible to fix.
I’m not sure why it has to be impossible to fix. The answer is probably to let the 55-year-olds whose jobs have just plain disappeared to retire early, (funded if necessary,) tell the 35-year-olds whose jobs have just plain disappeared to find other work and offer assistance with retraining. The 15-year-olds who grew up expecting to follow their fathers into jobs that have just plain disappeared don’t need anything; they should already have gotten the message that the world has changed.
So we just crowd everyone into a few major cities except for farmers and their support? I’m not saying we should fund people who prefer living in rural areas instead of cities, but surely we can manage society in such a way that not everyone has to live in their countries megacity?
Or should london comprise roughly 65 million further down the line?
If that’s the way it works out, sure why not?
On the other hand I don’t see why that needs to be the equilibrium. It looks to me like smallish countries with their capital co-located with their commercial center get one mega metro area e.g. Ireland, Austria, SK, and Japan. But plenty of other countries don’t–like Germany, US, France, and China.
> This same scene is playing across the north of england
They can always retrain as male strippers.
I think it’s a cyclical thing. Some bit of Glasgow or Brum or London is nasty and run-down. Then either investment comes in top-down or it builds a reputation from the bottom up. Then it gentrifies. Then whatever sustained it moves away or it just decays over time back into a bit of a dump.
General post-industrialism is a broader problem, but places like Manchester and Leeds seem to be on the up right now.
the cities are on the up, places like Blackpool or the Highlands and Islands are slowly bleeding out. Is the ultimate goal to have everyone in the country commuting into the city for their service job, with a lucky few who want to work with their hands able to make the few things that are not cost-efficient to automate?
This article reminds me of something else.
In Michigan, there are many areas that used to be mining boom towns.
I became familiar with the story of one of the mining regions while I studied at Michigan Tech University (formerly Michigan College of Mining and Technology) in the city of Houghton. In the 1840s, surveyors discovered copper deposits in the region. By 1880, the area around Houghton was a major population center in Michigan, and millions of dollars of copper were mined and shipped annually. Peak production was during World War I, though production remained high until the time of the Great Depression, and recovered somewhat during World War II.
Population of the region also peaked in the boom years between 1910 and 1930. Since then, most towns are half their peak size, or less. Many towns have a few nice-looking buildings that are relics of the opulent years a century ago.
Local business is now almost all support for tourism, or support for the lumber business, or support for institutions like Michigan Tech. Though apparently some mines have re-opened in limited ways since I was in the area.
During the decline, many people shifted to whatever local business they could find…or moved to the growing industrial areas elsewhere. Alcohol was the drug-of-choice for people who hit hard times and didn’t/couldn’t move. The Prohibition came and went during part of this time, but I can’t tell if it had any impact at all on the choices of people who were hard up.
I had no family or historical connection to that area. I was a student, one of a large population that comes in, stays for a few years, and moves elsewhere. Yet learning that history gave me a little perspective–and empathy–for the stories about declining towns in the Rust Belt, or in Coal Country, or other areas that have seen business dry up.
Is anyone else here a fan of Pewdiepie? I’m not looking for a flame war, but would like to hear if/how watching him as affected you personally.
The only Youtuber I watch regularly is CarlSagan42, who streams mostly Mario Maker. He hits the sweet spot of entertaining, competent, and sincere, but that’s because streaming isn’t his day job. (Every so often I also watch a bunch of GDQ footage in a row.)
Everyone else, the algorithm rat race has either made their content not appealing enough to follow regularly, or not worth it to produce content frequently.
Part of this, though, is because I’m into Japanese idols, so that fandom emotionally fulfills a large part of why people get into any particular internet celebrities.
Well now I want to ask about your interest in Japanese idols. Do you just watch lots of music videos? Do they make other content? Do you follow them like celebrities?
Consider the people at Rooster Teeth. They put out stuff as “artists,” i.e. as actors for sketches and cartoons and films. They also put out a lot of unscripted stuff, for talk shows and podcasts/vlogs and interviews and documentaries and candid self-filming.
Idols are basically that. They put out MVs and do concerts and lives, and also talk shows and act in TV/film, and do fashion photoshoots, and also radio shows, and documentaries and candid self-filming. Some of them are also doing Let’s Play streams now, even.
With regular celebrities, they have some sort of primary day job (actor, music artist), and the adulation by the fans of them as a person is a side effect. They might take advantage of that (promoting themselves on social media and in interviews), but that part isn’t the main thing.
With the idol model, promoting themselves is the main thing. Taking an acting or singing gig is the mechanism to get fans interested in the person.
The “Golden Age of Cinema,” in the heyday of the studio system, was running off of the idol model. You went to see A Judy Garland or A Cary Grant film.
Cool, sounds like a fun model. Thanks for explaining.
I wish this were the case, but it really isn’t. just see the cheerleading that hugo chavez got a few years ago for promoting collectivization and state planning. the word communism is discredited, but not the underlying ideas.
Those polices were celebrated as they were being implemented, the anti-democratic nature of the regime excused. They were only condemned after their inevitable failure became obvious, and even then there is not a small amount of excuse making about oil prices, US sanctions, etc.
It does in the sense that the neoliberalish policies actually work and chavismo doesn’t, but the appeal of chavismo seems to remain undimmed no matter how many times its failure is demonstrated in practice.
I think Atlas covered that with his distinction between contingent victories and fundamental victories. The rise of Chavismo seems like a near-perfect example of a contingent victory.
the word communism is discredited, but not the underlying ideas.
If anything, I feel like the opposite is true. People keep throwing around the terms “socialism” and “communism,” with less and less idea of what they actually mean. Something like Chavismo isn’t really based in Marxist or even Leninist principles, it’s just typical populist strongman rule with some half-baked leftist fiscal policies thrown in for good measure. And the “socialism” that modern American leftists support is even less socialist than that; as far as I can tell, the majority of them are really just confused welfare capitalist social democrats who only think they’re socialists because they internalized the conservative idea that socialism just means high taxes and welfare programs.
I disagree with this very strongly. If anything, it’s a lot of self consciously and explicitly left wing policies with some strongman rule thrown in. Chavez actively cultivated the far left, buddied up with castro for no reason other than ideology, and was largely celebrated for it by the international left.
If they think that, why did they applaud Chavez so consistently and loudly? And frankly, we’re not talking about just a welfare state, we’re talking about effective nationalization/price fixing huge swathes of the economy. Healthcare, education, finance, tech. the lust for the commanding heights hasn’t abated, it’s just switched targets.
@cassander >
Lets go down your list;
Healthcare: How well do the Brits do with their system?
Education: The parochial schools seem to do better for most students than the majority of locally controlled public schools and maybe a fully nationalized public school system would be better, but I doubt it.
Finance:For much of the 20th century U.S. post offices also were banks, I haven’t really read that they did badly but I presume there must have been some reason that was stopped?
Tech: Oh Hell yes!
Not because I think it would be done well, but because I hope it will go badly!
The Soviet Union was notorious for allocating products badly, but in the last twenty years it’s become increasingly difficult to source replacement parts and damn near everything, with merchants and vendors telling me “Oh that’s obsolete, you can’t get that anymore, you have to buy this whole new thing” (and by the time I get familiar with the new thing, it’s obsolete), so what is there to lose!
To Hell with that!
The Soviets kept making a copy of a 1937 German motorcycle into the 1990’s!
That is AWESOME!
Stop all this ****ing change cold and let a man have time to get used to how things are!
Maybe still allow a tiny little bit of progress for the kids (like my son) who are into new stuff, but for me slowing Tech advances way the Hell down sounds like a winner!
Plus maybe the Tech workers will stop moving here and bidding up housing!
Kill that golden egg laying goose dead, dead, and DEAD!
All in on this central plan!
It’ll be great!
EDIT: I just had the thought that foreigners would still be doing innovation dagnabbit! While there’s still the side benefit of stopping Tech in this nation keeping housing from being bid way the Hell up, for the progress slowdown to work trade with other nations has to be curtailed, and since most things often require materials and parts if not the whole item coming from overseas now we’d have to deliberately keep innovations from coming across our borders, and that requires competence to do instead of just trusting that attempts at progress would be bungled by a now nationalized Tech.
Foiled, damn it!
Lets go down your list;
the NHS employs 1.5 million people just in england, with a population of 55 million. That means the US NHS would employ a minimum of 9 million people in theory, and in practice considerably more than that. However the UK does with their system, it’s not something that can be replicated in the US
Education: The parochial schools seem to do better for most students than the majority of locally controlled public schools and maybe a fully nationalized public school system would be better, but I doubt it.
It was deemed unnecessary given the spread of retail banking, and probably lost a lot of money.
I believe we’ve discussed before how I don’t consider your desire to make the bay area more conducive to your lifestyle to be a sound basis for public policy.
Not if you wanted a modern motorcycle it wasn’t. Or modern cancer treatments, or a house that didn’t leak, or the million other things the soviet union was deficient in because of it’s low productivity.
“If a Neo-Nazi walked up to you while you were waiting for the bus and asked you to skim/read a 5-page essay on why they believe Hitler was right, what would you do?”
Could this question be used to determine whether someone is extremely open-minded? For example, if they say they would read it, then they are very open-minded, if they scoff at the idea then they are too close-minded to see past their initial views of an idea, and if they say no because it’s boring then neither?
This is something I have not fleshed out, just an interesting thought. I think it would be interesting if you could come up with one question that could weed out very open minded people from somewhat open-minded or close-minded people.
One obvious confounder is if the person being asked is generally very busy. If they are the sort who studies flashcards or reads books at bus-stops, then they might prefer those activities to reading about why Hitler was right.
Another confounder is the person being approached at the bus stop could already be a neo-Nazi.
Are they handing me a leaflet to read in my own time like the people who sell charity “newspapers” like the Big Issue, or are they hovering around demanding my thoughts on it?
The former
Ok, well I would definitely read it then. I already have some strong expectations about what would be in the leaflet, but any kind of political extremism is fascinating to me (kind of in the same way as a train anorak), and I would be low key excited to find it in my area even if I would be upset and worried to see it become popular on a national level. I have enough white privilege (and I mean this seriously, not mockingly) to be amused and entertained by silly Nazi men as long as they remain a weird minority.
Not really, too many confounders. E.G., I would blow them off (politely if possible, about the same way I respond to unsolicited religious tracts, please-sign-this-petition political activists, and the like), but not because I’m not willing to consider the merits of Hitler’s theories of race, politics, and world order. Precisely because I have read a fair amount on the subject of National Socialism, World War Two, and various Anti-Semitic theories of history that my prior for a random dude at a bus stop having an argument I haven’t heard before is very, VERY low.
They would have to be -extremely- convincing with their verbal pitch to make me think there’s something completely novel in their five page essay.
I’m kind of in the same boat as you, but there’s also a (very big) part of me that would want to pull a Daryl Davis. Later he’d have to tell his buddies “Hey, I walked up to this Jewish-looking guy with the essay, and he was totally cool about it. He read the essay, didn’t get offended or dismiss any of the points out of hand, and even said he could understand one or two of the conclusions in it. Then we talked for a while until the bus came. He was friendly and interested in what I had to say. We even swapped email addresses so we could talk more.” That’s a guy who isn’t going to stay a neo-Nazi for long.
Openess is one of the big five personality traits. Presumably there’s some kind of standard instrument to measure it, no?
True, I was looking for one question that could be used to quickly gauge someone’s open-mindedness, while the Big Five is a battery of questions. But perhaps I could find a question in there that itself is a good enough indicator openness.
This hypothetical Neo-Nazi reminds me of two minor characters in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Universe from a very, very religious country, named Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets and Smite-the-Unbeliever-with-Cunning-Arguments.
Wow I thought you were making those up, that’s surprisingly relevant
I would definitely read it. I am sure of it. I think I can lend 10 minutes of my time to see how someone justifies something I believe to be utter nonsense.
I’d at least skim it, but with a low threshold for dismissing it. I’m not going to go out of my way to parse poorly-worded sentences, bad spelling, whatever. Likewise for substantially unsupported claims.
But I’d skim it at least to see if there was anything I hadn’t heard before. And then later on research any claims which seemed to be even passably correct to stick in my head.
P(guy handing me a Nazi tract is a crackpot) ~= 1
I think this was discussed somewhere on LessWrong. Exposing yourself to a biased but skilled persuator is not “information”, in the sense of improving your view of reality. Depending on specific conditions, this may still be so even if you’re aware of it and trying to compensate – but that’s a lot less likely.
I’d read it while being aware it’s propaganda. The small risk of becoming biased pro-hitler is more than compensated by a general tendency to be open to counter-arguments to your current views. And one document is well within reasonable limits. Hell, sometime I’ll have to find the time and finish Mein Kampf – I got bored well before I got to the saucy bits.
As an aside, I find Christchurch manifesto prison-enforced ban to be morally repugnant. No strong opinions on the voluntary media ban.
Isn’t that how courts work – exposing the judge/jury to biased but skilled persuators from each side? Does anyone have a better idea for how to obtain justice? And why should political discussions be different from criminal justice in this regard?
The courts work in a context that’s carefully tuned to balance the two sides. But OP’s question was about a singular event. Note that my final decision is to read it – more variety of persuators means better view of reality overall. Key word here being “variety”, not sheer number.
Do you know of the LessWrong post? I’d love to read it. The only two relevant ones I can think of are SSC but are the epistemic learned helplessness one and hardball questions about the superintelligent AI changing your view.
No, sorry… LW is huge and it was a long time ago.
That’s fair, no worries.
But along your point of a biased but skilled persuader, how do you function during meetings or 1:1 debates if someone is advocating for a certain point and is not backing down? In the end you have to make a decision, but you also know that you may become biased towards their view (just like becoming slightly biased pro-hitler) if you only hear their side of the argument.
@zeno1
It’s perfectly ok to get a bit biased towards hitler after that conversation, it would be odd if you weren’t. It would mean he was very shitty persuader. Fortunately it’s just one interaction among many, so long term it evens out to a (hopefully) accurate image.
I remember this post and was able to find it by searching for the metaphor it used: The Bottom Line, by Yudkowsky. It’s part of the original sequences. IIRC there’s a few later, related posts, but this is the core post on how to update on evidence present by a source you know to be both biased and highly persuasive.
I’d not read some person on the street’s pamphlet, even if it wasn’t about Hitler.
The Public Transport system is not a place for conversation.
I think it’s gonna be polluted by context.
if a sterotypical Neo-Nazi (intimidating skinhead) walked up to me while I were waiting for the bus… that’d probably be a tad intimidating and my interest would be in getting the hell away rather than their leaflet.
In a personally safe format like online I know my response:
“skim through it and if it’s totally batshit dismiss the person as mentally unwell, if it’s sort of coherent pick out the factual inaccuracies and respond pointing them out”
Unless it’s the same old copy-pasta in which case you know the person is just parroting and it’s boring to respond to the same thing over and over.
Do you have time for everyone who approaches you to hear the good news about _(whoever)_, let alone a neonazi?
I mean a bunch of them are scammers, or they are trying to sell you some product, which may or may not be a scam in itself independent of what the person approaching you believes/knows about it.
Telling the well intentioned true believers, it’s hard, but a good rule of thumb is “ignore them all”. Which would include the neonazi guy in my case.
People have abused the social etiquette of approaching another random person for help to sell stuff, and it is a shame.
I think it’d depend on the guy. If he seemed a little off-kilter, I’d probably decline and remember that I forgot something at home. Interacting with crazy people is always a risky endeavor. If he otherwise seemed normal, I’d probably go for it. Bus rides tend to be rather boring and it might even lead to an interesting conversation.
I’m likely to treat it as a personal threat, since Hitler would have had me killed.
ETA: Also, you’ll want a non-political one, otherwise the political skew would probably swamp your results. At least (this is not an accusation) unless the goal of the study is to produce a study with the headline: Neo-Nazis Most Openminded Group!
Sounds like he mistakes >500 year processes and cycles for eternal trends.
One could have said in the year 100 that Imperium has made astonishing strides since the Punic Wars.
That any defeats by barbarians are mere contingent events. etc.
I never said liberal democracy would be rendered damnatio memoriae, nor that it would never have any effects after more history happens.
See: me using the word ‘like’, whose roots are very much non-Roman.
No, but the Roman Empire both as a state and as its institutions and form of government definetely collapsed and were replaced by different states with different institutions, mostly feudal monarchy (with some instances of oligarchic republics more similar to the ancient Greek poleis than to SPQR).
So would a first century Franciscus Fukuyamus declare that Imperial burocracy was clearly the “End of History”? According to this logic, he should have.
In fact, there were Romans who claimed exactly that. The Greco-Roman scholar Polybius once said that the only task left to future historians would be to explain how the Roman Republic accomplished so many great victories and triumphs. (Compare and contrast Karl Rove’s quote that “we’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”)
So what separates Fukuyama from Polybius? For starters, Fukuyama never claimed the U.S. or any other existing nation would dominate the world forever – although some of his readers, like the aforementioned Mr. Rove, may have interpreted him that way. Nor did Fukuyama claim that specific systems of government or societal structures or modes of production would remain in place indefinitely; the governments and societies of the future may look very different than the governments and societies of today. His claim was merely that future sociopolitical systems will be built upon the foundation of liberal democracy, rather than on opposing systems like fascism, communism, or monarchism.
Polybius seems to have been right for longer than Fukuyama, at least.
I wouldn’t go so far as to propose cycles, let alone periodic cycles – but I basically agree.
There is a difference between “who’s in power” and “has the Overton window moved (far enough to exclude the old ways)” – I actually thought that was what the OP meant by “contingent” vs “decisive”. Reading e.g. a defense of the “divine right of kings”, or for that matter one *against* it, feels like walking into delerium to a modern person. (I.e. it’s well outside the window). And yet – I actually see a resurgence of ideas tending in that direction over the past 60 or so years with similar cultural spaces being explored in fiction, rather than merely attributed to “benighted” or “barbaric” ancestors.
Ideas and ways of seeing the universe come back. Sometimes they become dominant again, though often with new names and other important differences.
I think Francis Fukuyama would agree with a version of this argument-he recently appeared on bloggingheads.tv with Bob Wright and argued his vision of “history” meant an end state. He did not think anything other than liberal democracy would be the final stage and in the discussion with Wright he talks he was more worried about the rise of right wing populism in established states than the rise of China as disproving his theory. The reason for his concern more with right wing populism is Fukuyama was talking about the triumph of “Western liberal democracy” in his essay and he talks about “illiberal democracy” as a threat in the discussion with Wright. That is not quite the same thing as diversity but he sees, say, Modhi’s actions in Kashmir or Erdogan’s rise in the Turkey as threats to his thesis, not because they will abolish democracy or capitalism but because they are degrading constitutionalism and separation of powers ect the “liberal” components in “liberal democracy”. If you say the end of history triumph of “nationalistic illiberal democracy as the end state of history” his thesis changes.
Still…I can’t help feel the comparison to Japan and Taiwan may be the wrong goalpost. As you point out, China’s per capita income is basically second world level or 25% of America’s. But it was third world level in the early 90s (equivalent to India) and more importantly China’s GDP now is about 70% of America. That is closer than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever came (lazy googling gives me Soviet GDP of less than 50% of America in 1977 for example-.7 trillion vs. 2 trillion vs China’s 12 trillion vs America 19 trillion in 2017.)
You can say thats a function of capitalism and you may be correct but its decidedly a non-Western style of capitalism. China also seems to be growing more authoritarian as it gets richer (see Xi becoming leader for life) not less.
In some ways America and European geopolitical planners better desperately hope China never hits S. Korea or Japanese GDP per capita income/first world status-if it comes to pass that 1.3 billion Chinese have gdp per capita of over 50% of America’s 300 million then you aren’t talking about a Chinese economy that is narrowly surpassing America’s. You are talking about a Chinese state that has a GDP what, 3x-4x America’s? Such a state would be clearly dominant over the nearest Western rival (although maybe an India that also somehow achieved first world gdp per capita could give it a run for its money.) Maybe a mishmash of all these predictions will happen and 2050 will feature a faceoff between a newly (illiberal) democratic and fiercely nationalistic China and a democratic India suffused with Hindu nationalism and led by a right wing populist that is not overly concerned with diversity. That world wouldn’t be completely foreign to an observer in 1991 but it also wouldn’t resemble a world dominated by “Western liberal democracy.”
I think something to bring into this is that we won’t see an end of history if you believe that superintelligent general AI is coming soon (mid this century/early next century), since that will completely disrupt the current battles between competing systems without us being able to see them come to their fundamental conclusion.
Sure. Fukuyama’s predictions likewise won’t come to pass if another Chicxulub-sized asteroid strikes the Earth, or if the Zeta Reticulans take over the world and force us all into slavery, or if the Evangelical Protestants were right all along and the Rapture suddenly occurs. But it would be rather exhausting for social scientists to preface every new theory with “assuming some unforeseen, unprecedented, and incredibly unlikely event doesn’t wipe out or irreparably alter human civilization first…”
That said, Fukuyama has addressed the subject of transhumanism and the dangers it could potentially pose to liberal democracy.
Yeah, but very smart people working in the relevant field consider it likely within the stated time period, whereas I don’t give the Zeta Reticulan apocalypse theorists much credibility.
Sadly can’t read this due to the pay wall, but I’m glad he’s addressed it, because to me the weird thing would be if it wasn’t relevant.
Yeah, but very smart people working in the relevant field consider it likely within the stated time period, whereas I don’t give the Zeta Reticulan apocalypse theorists much credibility.
While I do think there are plenty of ways for advanced AI to cause massive economic and infrastructural problems, largely just due to systemic overreliance on it, the Skynet scenario seems incredibly unlikely to me, especially within the next few decades. An actual AI cataclysm is much more likely to be along the lines of “we have this one AI controlling the world’s air traffic systems and it suddenly broke down,” which could still be devastating but wouldn’t end humanity and probably wouldn’t end modern civilization.
@LadyJane
I made quite a substantive response to this but it keeps being eaten, so apologies. I’m trying to find what banned word is doing it. Hopefully multiple versions don’t appear at once.
EDIT: Found out why it was being deleted. F4k3 n3wz is a banned term. I understand why though I was using it indirectly.
@LadyJane
That’s not my go to either. I would like to think we’re not so dumb to put AI in charge of whether nuclear weapons would be fired, but who knows what game theoretical nightmares are in store.
That’s just one system. Technology fundamentally changes everything. I don’t know about “destroy humanity”, but you don’t need to do that to disrupt human centred politics like liberal democracy and its populist antagonist. I was only born in 1987 and things have radically changed in my lifetime in such a way that liberal democracy is more in peril, not less, and many of the reasons may have a lot to do with modern communication technology. At least many esteemed media outlets put a lot of weight on f4ke news being behind the right populist push, and the nature of social media allowing powerful interests to manipulate the outcome in a way that is assumed to be predictable enough to be worth putting resources into. Trump then adopted it and all sides now throw the charge at each other. You add deep f4kes to that and produce something like deep f4ke news, and the ability to have faith in information is harmed, and since information is very important for the democratic process the implications aren’t minor.
There’s definitely something to historical materialism (though I think technology broadly is the factor, and “the means of production” is a bit too narrow). The industrial revolution provided the material base for liberal democracy AND populism, and it may be that the information and intelligence revolution provides the basis for something else entirely. We’re still reeling from the impact of the internet, and now smart systems are entering the scene. Even if their capability tops out at a human level that’s going to radically change everything, because suddenly you have access to rapidly reproducible and near perfectly loyal slave armies.
This paper shows how non-violent democracy movements can succeed with very small numbers behind them. Unless the liberal democratic countries have the power to conquer and forcibly convert all of the autocratic countries, this will be the main mechanism by which the slow convergence towards the liberal democratic end of history occurs. Even human level automation radically disrupts this mechanism, by allowing the military to shrink towards the command level.
From the paper:
The ability for the above mechanisms to affect autocratic regimes is diminished if technologies arise that
A: Make the opinions of the masses easier to centrally coordinate
B: Make the masses redundant
We’re arguably in the early stages of A due to social media, and in the future automation is going to fulfil B in the economic and military field. Strikes won’t work because there will be very few workers, and the government can simply lower your s0cial credit score, lowering your privileges and government stipends. If people do try to organize and go Ghandi, the backfire effect will be quenched when the government needs fewer loyal subjects to enforce order, and relies on a much much smaller group of well paid techs, rather than masses of lower paid grunts whose sympathies lie among the populace.
There will still be the international dimension to consider, and it’s possible that liberal democratic countries could go to war to free other peoples, but ultimately I think the jig will basically be up for democracy once A and B are even halfway fulfilled. You start talking about superintelligent AI and then maybe the jig is up for everyone, and perhaps not due to a lurid Terminator scenario, but simply because we slip into comfy irrelevance as a species.
It’s possible liberalism in the sense of a permissive legal system may still persist, but this would effectively have to be granted at the behest of the real power, as the material basis for bottom up “people power” would have been undermined.
Was nationalism an issue in the Arab Spring? Wasn’t it Arabs rebelling against other Arabs?
Mostly that is correct. But in some places, like Syria and Bahrain, it was Sunnis rebelling against Shiites or the reverse – an ethnic identity basis, not far from nationalism.
Sorry if I’m misreading, but I think you can clearly have nationalism even if the rebelling and rebelled against are both members of the same ethnic group.
Pretty much this. The American Revolution was a nationalist revolution of British v. British.
The American Revolution is an interesting example because the revolutionaries invented a new nationality; the old one was too closely identified with the Crown and government.
Going back to my point, I didn’t mean that the Arabs aren’t nationalist. I meant that nationalism didn’t make sense as a reason for Arabs to fight other Arabs.
I think it does. You can have nationalism which is not ethnic nationalism. Now, whether this is the case for the Arab spring is a question I don’t have an answer for.
Arabs are tribal.
Generally speaking, the largest groups they recognize an allegiance to are tribes or tribal confederations with sizes ranging from ten thousand to one million people. Membership to tribes is defined by patrilinear ancestry: a man can never join another tribe, a woman can only join another tribe through marriage, but this is discouraged too, most marriages are endogamic. This pattern of social organization is replicated in a fractal-like fashion down to the level of individual family units. In fact marriages between first cousins, double cousins or uncles and nieces are common. Within a tribe, there isn’t a clear cut difference between relatives and strangers, trust and allegiance smoothly decrease with ancestral distance: “I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger”.
There used to be a pan-Arab nationalist movement between the 19th and early 20th century, mostly appealing to intellectuals and politicians, but it is now mostly dead. The Salafi movement and its attempted implementations such as al-Qaeda and ISIS sought to establish a Sunni Muslim theocracy, but these were never broadly popular with the general Arab population, or even with the Sunni Arabs, and are now mostly defeated.
Most of the conflict in the Arab world can be attributed to them being stuck into post-colonial nation-states ultimately resulting from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, which map poorly to the existing tribal divisions. Thus in each state you have an emir or strongman president supported by a single tribe or small alliances of tribes and propped up by foreign interests, ruling with an iron fist on mostly unwilling subjects who don’t recognize his legitimacy. When the power balance shifts, as in the Arab Spring, conflict ensues, and finding new stable equilibria has proved to be very hard.
Arabs are diverse. Libya and Syria are tribal. Tunisia and Egypt are not. Don’t trust me, consult Lee Kuan Yew. That fact yields a pretty good prediction of the divergent paths of the Arab Spring.
Well, the Arab Spring in Egypt, while nowhere approaching the mess of Libya and Syria, didn’t really improve over the status quo. el-Sisi is as much of a dictator as Mubarak, if not more. Heck, Trump recently called him “his favorite dictator” to his face.
Tunisia seems to be the only country where the Arab Spring really succeed. But it’s a small country at the margin of the Arab world, both geographically and culturally, hence I would consider it a non-central example.
They marry their nieces? The Koran has a clear list of which relatives a man isn’t allowed to sleep with, and nieces are on the list. (Cousins aren’t.)
You’re right, I was misremembering.
Get back to me when the liberal capitalist social democracies have had stable debt-to-GDP ratios, and TFRs of ~2.1 excluding immigration, for a few generations. Until then, the supposed “end state of history” is sustaining itself by consuming non-renewable resources at a non-trivial rate. Any actual end state of history will be, A: some non-trivial development of liberal capitalist social democracy or B: Mad Max and its sequels(*) or C: whatever outmoded forgotten systems cling to life on the ash heap of history until LCSD is too weak to stop them from taking charge.
* Possibly including optimistic far-future sequels that I could imagine if I felt like it.
Why is immigration from high-fertility countries a non-renewable resource?
I don’t understand why this is an issue either. The obsession that people on the right have with reproduction and birth rates is downright baffling to me. The chances of human civilization breaking down simply because we don’t reproduce enough seem negligible.
Because old age retirement programs exist and are, essentially immortal in a traditional neoliberal political sense. In other words, they will only be reformed/dismantled in a revolution or in the wake of a breakup.
Just in America we have Social Security and Medicare, which have payout projections that mirror or eclipse total government revenues in the near future, even with tax rate increases.
@Clutzy
Except Social Security and Medicare are reformed all the time, see the giant list of bills reforming them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States)#History
I’m going to ask for a source for this, as what I’m able to find indicates:
“The annual cost of Social Security benefits represented 4.0% of GDP in 2000 and 5.0% GDP in 2015. This is projected to increase gradually to 6.4% of GDP in 2035 and then decline to about 6.1% of GDP by 2055 and remain at about that level through 2086.” Wikipedia, referencing the Social Security Trustee’s report from 2012 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_debate_in_the_United_States)
While federal receipts as a percentage of GDP sit at about 16%. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S. Again, I’m not an economist, or particularly economically literate, so perhaps I’m misunderstanding, or misreading.
Because some people do not wish that their ethnic group disappear or be dispossessed from low birth rates.
@jermo sapiens
That doesn’t help clarify the issue particularly because that doesn’t seem a plausible outcome to many people. The confusing thing is why that seems like it needs to be combated.
@NostalgiaForInfinity
Why would it be implausible? White Americans will no longer be the majority in our own country within my expected lifetime. That seems pretty plausible to me.
It is an issue if you don´t want immigrants in your country.
Well the people for whom this outcome doesnt seem to be plausible are not the ones obsessing over birth rates, obviously. And the people for whom it does seem plausible have an interest in publicizing the issue as much as possible.
The underlying facts however, are not really in dispute, and are even celebrated by some.
@EchoChaos
“No longer a majority” is far from “disappear or be dispossessed”. There will still be 180 million or so white Americans. That’s not disappearing (although it is fewer than there are now), and dispossession seems unlikely.
@jermo sapiens
A charitable interpretation would be that people weren’t mourning the decline in the disproportionate influence of a certain group of people. It’s insensitive but is hardly an endorsement of the disappearance or dispossession of white people.
As I said above, it is likely that the US will become a majority non-white country soon, but I don’t see why it should be interpreted as an existential crisis for white America.
@NostalgiaForInfinity
I’ll politely disagree and leave it at that.
@EchoChaos
Fair enough. I would like to understand the position though. I struggled to articulate a response to jermo sapiens that wouldn’t seem obviously ridiculous to someone for whom this was a concern (not sure I managed it).
@NostalgiaForInfinity
If Scott wants a “discuss the roots and mentality of WN” thread he’s welcome to allow it, but like certain other buzzwords on his policy page, we steer clear of that here.
I dont fear the disappearance of white people, nor am I a WN (to also answer EchoChaos’s last comment). But disappearance could occur as a result of very low birth rates, which is why I mentioned it initially.
Much more likely is dispossession, by which I mean “losing their majority status”, the sense that they will lose their influence over the affairs of their country, as you note yourself in the above quote.
So, what is the charitable interpretation of an intentional reduction in an ethnic group’s influence within their society? Is there anyway to view that policy as anything but aggression against that group? Are there other ethnic groups for which it is OK to dispossess of their influence in society?
I know this is dangerous territory, but I have difficulty listening to Paul Krugman in that clip I linked above and thinking this would be ok to say about anyone else. I’m genuinely curious as to what is going on here. If I were asked by a WN to defend what Krugman is saying, I’m not sure I could do a good job.
One non-WN reason to be unhappy about low birth rates is that it suggests that things aren’t working out very well for a lot of people–they’re not able to get set up in a stable marriage and have kids, which is one of the best ways we know for people to have worthwhile and satisfying lives. To the extent that the low birth rate reflects people feeling too pressed by their circumstances to be able to afford kids, or unable to find a satisfactory partner to have them with, this seems like a bad thing we should care about. To the extent it’s just people deciding that life with no kids and more money is a better deal for them, I’m not sure it’s much of a problem. (Other than the potential for population collapse or big changes in population makeup that might be unhealthy for other reasons.).
I’ve seen the argument (I think from Interfluidity) that you can say the same thing about unwed births. The idea is that women at the bottom of the social/income/intelligence distribution tend not to have a lot of great choices available for husband material, and so face a choice of no husband + a kid or no husband + no kid, and opt for at least having a kid. This reflects, not just some kind of bad cultural values or something, but a lousy situation in which lots of left-tail-of-the-bell-curve men have few prospects and jailhouse tattoos, and so the approximately matching women don’t marry at all rather than marrying as poorly as they’d have to. (Mass incarceration also has a huge impact here!)
To the extent that the Republicans get most of their voters from whites, it’s probably also pretty easy to see why Republicans who are worried about the future of their party might not be thrilled to see a declining fraction of the population be white–they’re worried they’re going to start losing elections. (This is also part of why one thread in the party involves outreach, particularly to hispanics. The Bushes are closely linked to this, but it’s not so popular with a lot of the base.). And similarly, it’s not hard to see why both ethnic activists and Democrats might view more hispanics in the US with enthusiasm–it will make their jobs easier.
Low TFR and falling population isn’t a problem necessarily, even from the perspective of a “For ourselves and our posterity” (foaop for short).
It does tend to put strain on old age/retirement programs.
It *is* a problem from the foaop perspective if it’s combined with replacement migration. Since replacement migration means that the countervailing pressures of rising wages and falling property values don’t kick in and automatically subsidize family formation.
Also replacement migration doesn’t even necessarily solve the retirement issue if the replacements aren’t life-time net taxpayers. People often migrate at peak working [taxpaying] age so the short-run tax outlook is rosier than it appears.
Ultimate “foaop” anxieties are about the answers to these questions:
1. how long the sub replacement TFR will continue
2. given #1, how small a % of the population the “op” in “foaop” will remain.
3. Without being too explicit, will the anti-racism of the future be an inclusive, understanding, and morally consistent type, or a cynical, triumphalist, and opportunistic variety.
You know the whole thing about the meaning of life? A lot on the right think they’ve got it figured out. The traditional find it in religion, and most surviving religions are pretty big on the whole “be fruitful and multiply” thing. The less religious seem to be even MORE traditional, holding that propagation of their line (and of allied lines) is itself the point of life.
Your point is well taken. But I find it unfortunate that you need to qualify this reason as being non-WN. Shouldnt we be concerned about birthrates being lower than replacement for basically any living thing (maybe not the cane toad in Australia, but any non-invasive species)? I just want to express my dismay that concern for lower than replacement birth rates is coded as WN such that you felt the need to formulate your opinion with an anti-WN disclaimer.
If the green spotted newt of central california was exhibiting lower than replacement fertility, it would be normal to express concern, global warming would be blamed, and legislators would be petitioned to act now to save the green spotted newt from extinction.
Similarly, I can express concern for the low birth rates in Japan and nobody will accuse me of being a japanese nationalist. It should be entirely natural to express concern for lower than replacement birthrates of anybody or anything.
jermo:
It’s a reason for being concerned with low birthrates that doesn’t turn on any form of white nationalism. This seems relevant, in a discussion in which it seems like some people think that only white nationalists are concerned with the issue.
Yes, I understand. That is what I find to be deplorable.
Not if that living thing has increased its population by orders of magnitude in recent history, and you’re coming at it from a strictly ecological perspective?
From some environmentalist perspectives, at any rate, there’s a great deal in common between the cane toad and humanity.
Well, at least that’s honest. In the context that we are discussing this however, replace environmentalist with progressive, and humanity with white americans.
Consider the counterfactual. What if Europeans/whites had a TFR of 6 and Africa (or wherever else has a high TFR) had a TFR of 1.3, tens of millions of whites were emigrating to Africa each year, Africa would soon be majority white and was trending more and more white over time, etc. Would anyone be concerned about that at all, and would that concern seem in any way justified?
How do you feel about Hawaii? Native Hawaiians are now about the same population as pre-contact. Do you think they should have been at all concerned about immigration or reproduction?
Enkidum:
Wouldn’t that concern apply a lot more to trying to slow down places with extremely fast population growth, rather than to opposing efforts to get TFR back up to replacement levels?
Also, it really does seem like a life well-lived, for most people, involves marrying and raising some kids. People not doing that seems like a bad outcome.
@LadyJane > “…The obsession that people on the right have with reproduction and birth rates is downright baffling to me…”
On this and that among “the Right’s” wishlist I think they should get their way, or I just wouldn’t be much bothered if they did, but on most of the stuff that most motivates me to vote I’m still “on the Left” so I really can’t speak for “The Right”, but I do worry about birthrates, not because (as I’ve heard some “on the Right” say) of a fear of cultural changes, in many ways newer immigrants and their children seem to me to be more interested in preserving aspects of American culture than those who were born here of parents born here are, plus I have a strong belief in the “founder effect” – otherwise (judging by the plurality of where Americans ancestors are from) we’d be speaking German instead of English.
Instead what worries me about low birthrates is what they seem to be symptoms of: historically people tend to have more children when they’re optimistic about future prosperity – i.e. low in the ’30’s during the Great Depression, and high in the ’50’s during the post war boom.
Birthrates dropped in 2009 in the wake of the Great Recession but, despite an improving economy since 2011, birthrates haven’t come back, that plus the lower life expectancy of Americans after 2014 (largely due to alcohol, drugs, and suicide) indicates lingering despair – and that worries me.
@albatross11
Depends on how worried you are about the change in population over the entire globe, in which case you want to decrease population overall (which, honestly, I think I do).
But that’s a very different topic, probably.
@TheNybbler: Even from that perspective, I don’t really get it. White Europeans are not being overtaken by some alien species; their “replacement” does not have to entail the end of any White European’s individual bloodline. If I reproduce, and my children and their children reproduce, then I’ve succeeded at passing on my genes. And if some of my descendants end up mating with Blacks, or Asians, or Latinos, or non-European Caucasians, that doesn’t erase my genetic contribution to the species. Some of my descendants might not look like me, but that’s a shallow concern, and it wouldn’t be true for all of them anyway, since some mixed people look mostly or entirely White. It’s only a cause for concern if you believe that non-European races are genetically inferior (or at least genetically distinct in ways that go far beyond appearance and climate tolerance), or if you adhere to some modern version of the one drop rule. Needless to say, I reject those notions.
And if you’re coming from a religious rather than Darwinian perspective, it makes even less sense. If your goal is to ensure the survival of your faith, then surely American Christians should be thrilled about the fact that there are so many devout Christians immigrating here from the southern border. (Granted, Latino immigrants are almost exclusively Catholic, while most conservative Christians in the U.S. are Evangelical Protestantism, but I don’t think that’s the central issue here.)
@jermo sapiens:
Humanity as a whole is not in danger of going extinct, and comparing a human ethnic group to an entire species or even sub-species is a false equivalence. There are “races” (i.e. phenotype groups) of gray wolves that are endangered, and even a few that have recently gone extinct, but they seem to be very low on the priority list for most conservationists.
Now, would I be sad if calico cats stopped existing? Sure, and I don’t want to see a world where humans with pale skin or blonde hair or blue eyes or Caucasian facial features stop existing either. But I don’t think that’s what “White extinction,” as the ethno-nationalists describe it, would entail. Not only are human races not real species or sub-species, they don’t even correspond to actual human phenotype groups that well. In terms of genetics, claiming there’s a “White race” makes as much sense as saying that all white-furred dogs, from pomeranians to great danes, comprise a “White breed.”
The genetic difference between “Pygmy” and “Non-Pgymy Sub-Saharan African” is much greater than the genetic difference between “Non-Pgymy Sub-Saharan African” and “European,” and I’d say Pygmies are far closer to extinction than Europeans are, yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone claiming we need to take drastic efforts to preserve their genetic heritage. 200 years ago, most people didn’t consider Irish and Italian people to be truly White. 100 years ago, most people didn’t consider Jewish or Slavic people to be truly White. Today, people don’t consider Middle Easterners or Indians to be White, even though many ethnic groups from the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent are fair-skinned and nearly all of them have Caucasian facial features. One of the most Aryan-looking people I know, a pale woman with blonde hair and blue hair and sharp features, is actually Persian.
So really, I see no more reason to mourn the eventual disappearance of the poorly-defined ethno-cultural grouping known as The White Race than I do the mourn the disappearance of the Scythians. This “extinction” won’t involve the mass extermination of individuals, or the end of specific bloodlines, or the disappearance of genetic or phenotypal traits; it will merely be the end of a specific categorization, one that wasn’t even internally consistent and didn’t particularly match the actual reality of the world.
Clearly you don’t spend a lot of time in progressive groups! There are a lot of immigration enthusiasts who use the Japanese birth rate crisis as a perfect example of why we need immigration, and harshly criticize the Japanese government and Japanese culture for being so strongly opposed to it. Among leftists and progressives with a focus on immigration rights, Japan is basically the ultimate example of what we should strive to not be like.
For instance, this was recently posted to a pro-immigration Facebook page I follow:
@LadyJane:
I would surmise that’s not what most anti-immigration Europeans are concerned about. Even the right-wing democratic leaders of Hungary told the EU “Give us Christian immigrants. Those are the only ones we’ll accept.” White men worrying about the extinction of their haplogroup has got to be a very non-central thing.
Japan is going to have a harder time perpetuating its culture with immigrants than, e.g, Hungary, because where are you going to get high TFR Mahayana Buddhists who will also practice Shinto?
On Latinos: the IQ-100 objection to an open border with Mexico is “Speak English!”, IME.
@Le Maistre Chat: That explains why conservative Christians in both the U.S. and Europe would oppose immigration by Muslims, but not why they’d oppose Latino immigrants (most of whom are devoutly Catholic), or Christian immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, or Christians refugees from Muslim countries. Or why their British equivalents would be so opposed to Polish immigrants, who are both White (at least by the current American definition of the term) and largely Christian.
My point is that I don’t think the demographics issue is really about religion, except to the limited extent that religion serves as a proxy for race and/or culture. I’m not sure if the primary motivator here is race (either in the strict genetic sense, or in a looser tribal sense) or culture, but I think both of those are more central to the debate than faith is.
@LadyJane: I mean, do Americans oppose Christian refugees and English-speaking African Christians? I grew up Midwestern Red and have zero experience of that. Complaining that Latinos won’t learn English, yes, but that’s all.
Working-class Britons being mad that Poles took their jobs processes as “Sounds weird but OK, seems to be a true truth claim.”
@Le Maistre Chat: That was actually a recent source of conflict between the religious right and the nationalist right. A lot of the Evangelical Protestants pleaded that Trump’s ban on immigration from Muslim countries should include exceptions for Christian refugees, whereas the more secular branches of the social/cultural right (especially the alt-right ethno-nationalist types) wanted blanket bans for everyone in those countries. In the end, the latter group won, although largely due to outside intervention in the form of the explicitly religious ban being declared unconstitutional by the federal courts.
LadyJane:
I think you’re pushing on the wrong lever there.
There are some physical differences across racial groups. They’re usually not very important except in a social sense, but occasionally they are. Forensic anthropologists and DNA tests can both distinguish racial groups pretty well from dead bodies/DNA. There are real differences that go down to genes and basic functioning of the body, though the most striking of these tend to be for smaller groups than a whole race. (Sherpas have a ton of high-altitude adaptations, for example.) Doctors do and should sometimes provide different medical advice to members of different racial groups, and some medicines are known to work differently in different racial groups.
Whether race is a useful category for analysis depends on what you’re doing–this isn’t some moral question, just a practical one. For medical research, for example, it’s a better world when the people researching drug side effects and dosing and such check it out for members of multiple races. In at least that context, race is a valid and worthwhile scientific category. Similarly for using DNA to unravel prehistoric populations and migrations. And probably dozens of other things.
But what I think you’re trying to argue for is that race isn’t a useful or meaningful moral category. That is, what you seem to be arguing for is that nobody should be especially concerned if they see (say) all the Australian Aboriginees disappearing from the Earth via some kind of voluntary action like not having kids. Or that if it turned out that the black population in the US were collapsing, but not because of anything bad, just because of heavy takeup of birth control and abortion, that this would be a silly thing to be upset about. We’re all human, after all.
I don’t think you can ever get from that is-statement about whether race is a useful scientific category or has any meaning to an ought statement about whether or not anyone should care if one racial group is going away or being supplanted by another. This is purely a matter of values and priorities and tastes. Perhaps Alice is upset that whites are becoming less common in the world, Bob is upset that Catholics are becoming less common, and Carol is upset that Yiddish speakers are becoming less common in the world. I don’t think there’s an obvious way to decide which of these peoples’ concerns are more or less reasonable. (Except by pointing out actual numbers showing that their groups aren’t disappearing–which I think works out fine for Alice, is a little worrying for Bob, and isn’t going to make Carol feel any better at all.)
Now, just to be clear, whites aren’t remotely going away–shifting to no longer being the majority in the US is a change, but not an extinction. And I think much of that phenomenon turns on considering hispanics nonwhite in much the way that a previous generation wasn’t quite ready to label Italians as white. And some of the change also has to do with mixed-race children, which isn’t any kind of extinction, it’s just people marrying/having kids with people of other races.
Now you’re talking about white nationalists, not worries on the right about different issues. The white nationalists are easier to understand, but hard to find common ground with if you reject their ideas of racial purity.
I’m fairly sure Christian sects are not fungible.
OTOH, I think the Catholic Church has generally been pretty comfortable with mostly-Catholic immigrants from Latin America….
@albatross11 says: “OTOH, I think the Catholic Church has generally been pretty comfortable with mostly-Catholic immigrants from Latin America….”
The Spanish language Mass at the Catholic church near my house,has far more attendees than the English language Mass a few hours earlier, and most of the parishoners at the Protestant churches nearby have either grey hair or Asian faces (by far most with American accents so at least second generation, or came while young), the historically black church in my old neighborhood is still going strong even though the neighborhood hasn’t been majority black since the late ’90’s, but with less parishioners than before.
As a guess, non-whites (if you include Latinos in that category) are at least half the practicing Christians within 10 miles of my house, and by far the most who are under 50 years old.
Young whites (not including Hispanics) just don’t go to chuch much in my area, and to me it looks like without the immigrants that have come here in the last 30 years there would hardly be any practicing Christians here at all.
@Plumber, @albatross11
And growing up in America, most of those young people won’t be Christians either, and in a generation or two none of them will be. Americans are better off materially, but their kids will be immensely worse off spiritually. Given what’s at stake (the soul), that’s not a happy outcome.
@albatross11:
As I said before, race is not phenotype, and only corresponds to phenotype in a very loose way. At best, racial groups are a very rough approximation of phenotype groups.
An American doctor may be inclined to assume that a Black patient has sickle-cell anemia, since that disease predominantly affects Black people. But it’s not really “Black people” who are prone to sickle-cell disease, it’s a handful of West and Central African ethnic groups; people from Ethiopia or South Africa aren’t any more likely to be born with it than Europeans or Asians. It’s just more convenient for American doctors to think about “Black people” because that’s a category they’re much more familiar with, and most of them wouldn’t be able to visually discern between a West African and an East African. The same goes for recommendations on medicine: pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t put out an ad warning “this medicine may have harmful effects on people of Yoruba and Igbo descent,” since most Black people in the U.S. aren’t even aware of their ethnic heritage.
As for Sherpas, they’re an extremely small and isolated ethnic group, much like the African Pygmies I mentioned earlier. I’d agree that they are an actual race, in a real physical sense, but as with the Pygmies, they’re an exception that proves the rule. If someone generalized from the Sherpas and claimed that “East Asians have a greater tolerance for high altitudes than other humans,” then they’re clearly making a major categorical error. (The statement might technically be true in a statistical sense, since the Sherpa people may bring up the overall average for high-altitude tolerance enough to put East Asians as a whole slightly above other races. But even then, it’s highly misleading, since the majority of East Asian ethnic groups and the vast majority of East Asian individuals don’t have greater high-altitude tolerance.) Speaking of “the White race” and “the Black race” and “the Oriental race” is mistaking a particularly old and faded map for the territory.
Yes, that was largely my point.
@TheNybbler: I agree that Christian sects aren’t fungible, but at the same time, with the sole exception of Jack Chick’s comic strips, I’ve never seen anyone oppose Latino immigration on the grounds that it would result in Catholics displacing Protestants. Anti-Catholic rhetoric like that hasn’t been a part of the anti-immigration movement – and definitely not a central part – since it was Irish and Italian immigrants that Nativists were complaining about.
@Nick: I’m not really sure what your point is. Are you saying that Catholics should oppose Latino immigration to the U.S. because it would be bad for Latinos, in the sense that they’d stop being religious? That’s certainly not an argument I’ve heard before.
No, you understood.
@Nick,
Exactly why religious beliefs have dropped so much recently in the U.S A. is curious, my understanding is that Britain and Europe have been less religious than the U.S.A. for decades earlier and the U.S.A. was the exception to a general loss of faith among NATO countries, but that’s less true now.
African-Americans are still notably more religious than other Americans, for a long time white Evangelical Christians were actually increasing, but now there’s less of them as well, Mormonism held steady for a long time, but their numbers have started to drop lately as well, I haven’t read any reports on this, but well the decline of “mainline” Protestant churches in the U.S.A. has been long noted in my area the parishioners are increasingly second generation Asian-Americans who’s parents came from majority non-Christian nations, I suppose that Asian Christians were just more likely to emmigrate?
I’ve seen some reports Thad this is partially because of political partisanship, as the Republican Party became more identified with Christianity more Democrats became atheists, again the exceptions being new Hispanic immigrants, and African-Americans, with American blacks being just about the only subgroup that increased church attendance correlates with voting Democratic Party (atheism doesn’t correlate among American blacks with voting Republican though, it correlates with not voting at all), among most every other demographic frequent church-going correlates with voting Republican. First generation immigrants tend to be both Democrats and religious, third and up generation Americans tend to be Democrats or religious, with American blacks and to a lesser extent Jews the exceptions.
Exactly why this is the case I invite suggestions.
@Plumber:
Vietnam has a 7% Catholic minority (higher before the Communist victory: they were converted by French missionaries, and South Vietnam had a Catholic dictator for a time) who were heavily over-represented among Vietnamese refugees to the US. There may be other examples among Asian peoples.
Because eventually those nations will no longer be high fertility. They will eventually go through the demographic transition.
More broadly, if the US sustains itself via brain drain from LDCs, what happens when LDCs catch up? This is probably more relevant for certain industries. For instance, many Western medical systems sustain themselves by poaching intelligent young doctors from South Asia. Once this talent pool is no longer available, are Western medical systems sustainable? If they aren’t sustainable, the political consensus underpinning the Western government isn’t sustainable either.
The “end state of history” hypothesis include the notion that liberal capitalist social democracies will eventually spread to most of the world. If that is the case, then where will the immigrants come from?
Of course you could weaken the claim and make the “end state of history” mean just the “end state of Western history”, assuming that large regions of the world will forever remain sh*tholes endlessly supplying the West with cheap immigrant labor. But this hardly seems like a stable equilibrium either.
This strikes me as a really great problem to have. I look forward to learning about the solutions my great-great-great grandchildren come up with to it.
Because, as others have noted, Fukuyama’s thesis at least strongly implies that all those high-fertility countries are going to convert into low-fertility liberal capitalist social democracies. They’ll produce some finite number of excess babies before that happens, after which “they” are “us” and we collectively are going to need a new source of babies.
More generally, it is highly unlikely that the effective TFR (i.e. after emigration) of the non-LCSD nations will exactly match that of the liberal capitalist social democracies ins the long run. Maybe the non-LCSD nations will maintain a higher net TFR in the long run and yet somehow avoid Malthusian catastrophe. If so, their population will grow so vast that the LCSD nations will be a tiny footnote in the history of humanity. Maybe the non-LCSD nations will maintain a higher net TFR for a time until they do undergo collapse. If so, that collapse and its aftermath going to look an awful lot like history continuing to happen. Also, after one multitudinous generation of refugees, the future supply of immigrants will be greatly diminished. Or maybe the non-LCDS nations will see their net TFR decline (probably by emigration or conversion to LCDS “universal culture”), in which case again the non-LCDS world will diminish to the point where it can no longer meet our demand for immigrants.
@LadyJane:
What, in the hypothetical where the future of humanity is the democratic west writ large and forever, is the alternative? Liberal capitalist democratic socialists as we know them, reproduce at less than replacement rates. Absent immigration, each generation will be smaller than the last. Eventually, there won’t be enough people to maintain the machinery of civilization, and civilization will collapse in a most historic faction. After which there won’t be any factories to make birth-control pills, and the TFR will climb again.
Or maybe, as noted, LCDS civilization will be forever a minor part of humanity, surviving and even thriving on the basis of defectors from the larger non-LCDS world. Could happen, but probably those non-LCDS types are going to keep perpetrating history. Or maybe LCDS civilization as we know it will transform itself into something whose population reproduces at replacement rates. Could happen, but that’s not a trivial change and probably implies at least one more big and unforseeable bit of history.
I’m guessing it will be a mix of all three, but what all three have in common is more inbound history and if there is a stable end state it isn’t the eternal dominion of LCDS Universal Culture as we know understand it. What else have you got?
If we knew why low TFRs were happening, it would be much easier to predict the future.
I suspect that the insatiable human drive for safety and comfort, combined with enough prosperity to achieve high levels of both has led to cultural changes in the way we live our lives and raise children. Those children have grown up to be so immature and risk averse that they shy away from risky and scary things like teenage sex, marriage. These kids are so neurotic that the “Kingdom of Fear” that Hunter Thompson wrote about in the early 2000s has entered a feedback loop, and the younger generations are convinced that the civilization will collapse by the end of the century.
And maybe they are right. There does seem to be something ‘off,’ economically, which gives a sense of foreboding about how jobs and careers and housing markets are really going to work in 30 years.
Then there is also the dropping sperm count, which as far as I’m aware has no obvious cause either.
The topic would make a good effort post for Scott, I think.
Something worth noting for TFR is that Western countries have sub-populations (not all of them ethnic in nature) that have above replacement fertility rates; the highly religious for example.
I do not believe TFR remain low indefinitely, but if whichever groups remains will be one that is largely immunized against LCDS incentive structures (urban, family planning, get a college education, etc.) — which may be a good or a bad thing depending on your POV.
@LESHAPABLAP
Well we can infer at least these two proximate causes
1. Abortions, in the sense that Some portion of pregnancies that would have produced children do not do so anymore
2. Delayed Marriage / Delayed Childbearing — Either people delay marriage for college or they delay marriage due to economic insecurity [often both]
What remains of the TFR would be all the factors that on average encourage people of the same age to consciously have fewer total children than they did in the past (i.e. controls for age of marriage). That’s where the real uncertainty lies in my opinion.
@John Schilling: I think we’ll figure something out eventually. I tend to worry more about the actual problems of the present and the immediate future than about various potential problems that are centuries away. As Enkidum said above, that seems like a really great problem to have!
I think we’ll figure something out eventually as well. But for Fukuyama’s thesis to be correct, this unknown thing we will eventually figure out has to A: not be of historic significance and B: not fundamentally alter LCDS culture. And most of the obvious candidates would do at least one of those. Hence, my request that Fukuyama’s defenders come back when they’ve actually figured out a specific thing and shown than it works.
Dropping sperm count, dropping testosterone level and increasing BMI.
Therefore men have reduced baseline libido due to reduced testosterone, and both them and their potential partners are more likely to be fat, making them both even less sexually attractive, thus reducing the chance of mating, and when they do mate the chance of pregnancy per intercourse is lower due to reduced sperm count, even without taking birth control into account.
What causes this is not clearly known, but my money is on “gay frog” environmental xenoestrogen pollution.
Anyway, whatever the cause, below-replacement TFR is maladaptive, which means that evolution will eventually take care of it (*). Even in the lowest fertility countries there are individuals who reproduce above replacement, whether they are less risk averse, or more resistant to xenoestrogens, or whatever, as long as the traits that give them higher fertility are heritable, they will prevail. Low TFR is on the wrong side of biology.
(* or drive us extinct, but there are too many of us for this to be a serious risk for now)
Or maybe the human population is above equilibrium, so evolution is propagating below-replacement rates to push the population to numbers better suited to thriving in the existing environment?
Isn’t that one of the cases where homosexuality occurs in the animal world?
This is a group selection argument. In general, group selection is very weak compared to individual selection, and arguably not existent for modern humans as a species since we don’t really compete with anything comparable to us.
Not that I’m aware of.
I understood it as immigration being a consumption of a non-renewable resource.
Suppose that one of the reasons why your country sucks less than some other country is genetic. Certain gene is more frequent in your population than in other populations. Maybe there is a loop where the genes cause certain policy, and the policy in turn gives advantage to people with the gene.
Now, if you import too many people, you are diluting the gene in your population.
The same argument could be made even if you assume that the thing that makes your country suck less is actually cultural. If the speed of immigration is greater than the speed of the immigrants acquiring your culture, you are diluting the culture.
Generally, if there is anything about people that makes the country great, immigration reduces it, unless immigrants are chosen for having the same traits.
(Arguments like “it’s not people, it’s the laws” won’t work in long term. In democracy, people will change the laws. Even before that, they can stop obeying them, or stop enforcing them. Or maybe the laws only work in combination with certain behavior, and without that behavior they do more harm than good.)
The dictatorships (China etc.) also have subreplacement fertility.
The debt ratios have never caused significant harm as far as I’m aware.
China does by design (one-child policy), other dictatorships have super-replacement fertility.
Countries with high debt/GDP like Japan or the PIGS are still considered first-world, but they do have severe economic issues primarily affecting the younger generations. Unsurprisingly, these are also the large countries with some of the lowest TFRs. PIGS countries also have the highest rates of youth unemployment among first-world countries, while the Japanese youth are usually counted as employed but many of them are financially dependent on their parents.
I don’t know which one of these phenomena causes the others, or whether they are in a self-sustaining vicious cycle, but clearly this doesn’t look like a sustainable equilibrium.
Russia and Iran also have very low fertility rates.
According to the Wikipedia article I linked, according to the 2019 UN data, they both have higher fertility rates than the EU average and the US, and in fact Iran has almost replacement TFR.
@viVI_IViv
Below replacement is still a low TFR. Espacially since Iran does not have the imigration rates as the EU and the US.
But comparing the data from 2017 to 2019, the TFR of Russia and Iran is growing while the TFR of Europe and the US is declining.
I wouldn’t be surprised if in a decade or so Russia and Iran are both comfortably above replacement, while I don’t expect this to happen for Europe or the US.
@viVI_IViv
Russia and Iran are both substantially poorer than EU, and fertility generally gets lower as a country gets richer. So the fact that they have comparable fertility rates with the EU (as that wiki article you helpfully linked shows) means that they are sort of underperforming on this metric.
Btw. I do not think that year by year comparisons tell us anything useful on fertility. For any conclusions we would need longer term data.
@AlesZiegler
What cruel nasty things does Iran try and do to improve fertility rates? I naturally assumed that being a theocracy they have effectively tried to make females into brood mares, but if even that isn’t increasing birthrates, then what will?
What is it about even the barest taste of modernity that makes so many people not want to breed?
A scientific theory should be able not just provide a nice sounding explanation for the things one already knows, but also to predict the things one does not. What did Fukuyama predict that actually came true?
Since 1992 (the year “The end of history” was written) no major country abandoned autocracy in favor of democracy, while several countries (notably Russia) went into the opposite direction. Several democratic countries have been successfully invaded and lost territory to their autocratic neighbors with little more than a token protest from the major democracies. If that’s what’s happening when the West still has material advantage, how will the global politics look like when China’s economy gets significantly ahead of the US?
Picking 1992 strikes me as a bit of cherry picking here, given it’s just after the fall of communism. But you do have countries becoming more classically liberal, like mexico. And if you look at freedom house you’ll see a big shift in the 90s to early 2000s.
Perhaps, but it was Fukuyama who picked those cherries, and Fukuyama whose thesis was chosen by the OP as his “hot take”.
Fukayama was writing in the context of post-soviet states transitioning to becoming democracies. He predicted that they’d succeed, and most of them have. You can’t leave then out, they’re a big part of his thinking.
Most of them have not. Those that had are all EU members now, meaning that no “post-soviet state transitioned to becoming democracy” without ongoing external material incentives. As trust me, as a person living in one, that it’s the only thing keeping us from reverting to autocracy right now.
The reason for this is obvious. Liberals misunderstood and overplayed their hand. The liberal democracy of Fukuyama’s time was no longer the social democracy of a few decades before. Faced with grim realities of now-ruling neoliberalism, and unable to revert back, post-soviet societies took refuge in strong authoritarian states and personalities who could at least rein and counterweight the liberals’ excesses.
Maybe it’s unfair for Fukuyama personally to have become a poster child for liberal hubris, but someone had to.
> Those that had are all EU members now
Ukraine and Georgia are reasonably democratic and not EU members.
Also, they achieved this (admitted flawed) level of democracy despite massive influence from Russia working *against* democracy.
I’m not convinced that Georgia or Ukraine are reasonably democratic, and to the extent that they are, it requires plenty of popular unrest (which is not treated kindly by those in power). I’m also pretty sure Russia’s aggression actually “helps” here – it makes them look away from Russia’s example. And the very fact that they look westward for allies against Russia may be distorting the perspective, making them appear more alike western democracies than they actually are. Either way, both are hardly success stories at this point.
But I believe I have missed one particular former soviet satellite state that from my faraway vantage point appears to be a functioning democracy – Mongolia.
@Hoopdawg
I am now really curious how Mongolia is actually doing in a transition. It’s in a tough place caught between two authoritarian powers. Does anyone here have knowledge on that?
Mongolia ahas a ‘Third Neighbour’ policy of actively cultivating ties with countries other than Russia and China.
I also don’t think it’s necessarily true.
Indonesia in 1992 was ruled by Suharto, a dictator who had come to power in a military coup in the 1960s. I’m not sure how well it currently functions as a democracy, but it holds what at least appear to be free elections and has a 2/7 rating from Freedom House for political rights (where 1 is the best). In their words,
Nigeria also came out of a period of military rule in the late 1990s. While the former dictator Olusegun Obasanjo won the first two elections after the official resumption of democracy (which were widely condemned as unfair), more recent elections have been considered free and fair by international observers. In 2015, for the first time the incumbent President lost the election and peacefully handed over power.
I wish I could be more certain. Lately I’ve been envying the kinds of people who can dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as a bigot and believe it. This is bad for the overall health of the discourse, but probably much better for the mental health of the participants to not have to agonize over the details and nuances or worry that the wrong person got cancelled. Overall, moral clarity is a good thing to have…except when it led us to trick ourselves into invading Libya…there, see what I mean?
I find myself arguing most fervently for positions that I have the most doubts about, because I’m trying to convince myself more than anyone else.
Can anyone even relate to this, or am I just a freak?
Certainty is a hell of a drug, one I’d occasionally like to sample, indeed.
@ECD,
Well, how I induce this in myself is to work unscheduled overtime, be very tired, drink a lot of coffee or tea to be alert enough to drive, be unable to sleep, hear something on the radio or read online, and then fly into glorious umbrage at someone else’s opinion.
Not quite the same as joy, but I find it chases the blues away for a bit.
Recommended.
I’ve not yet had the “infuriated by something on the radio” experience yet, but I’m starting to get sick of the overtime. We’re in the middle of an emergency at work, and I finally got an 8-hour day yesterday and slept for 12 hours. Today was, thankfully, 8 hours as well.
@Plumber
Tempting, but I’ve been wrong so often I find it hard to get sufficiently heated up.
@ECD,
Ah yes, unfortunately when you have a calm state of mind and your full facilities and empathy ones ability to do some good ranting is hindered.
It really is burdensome.
A little alcohol unfortunately increases my seeing the common humanity in others, but I imagine a lot combined with enough coffee could have the opposite effect, but then enough manual dexterity may be lost that being a keyboard warrior becomes difficult, so some trial and error is necessary for the right mix.
Nothing could go wrong with using speech recognition software to record your drunken rants!
@bullseye,
So true!
And it’s’s a totally beneficial and worthy use for new technology!
I’ve been going the other direction.
I used to try to believe that people we mostly generally decent.
But there’s a … particular group that I shall not name… where I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the claims of bigotry surrounding them are actually well founded and largely true for a significant majority of their group.
I’m intentionally not naming the group…
But imagine it was Alabamans. (it’s not)
It wouldn’t have affected me like that if I’d been searching out racists to argue with. I could argue with KKK members all day without it meaning anything much about the average resident of Alabama. But if I walked up to different random Alabaman’s in different places at different times regularly to talk about their views…. and they kept starting to talk about how great the KKK is…. I’d start to worry about the average Alabaman.
Topics come up where this group and their position comes up and when I look at their supporters and their post history and… 75-80% of the time it’s a string of posts about how disgusting muslims are, how asylum seekers are all criminal scum, how gay marriage is “wrong” and gays are sinful, [nation name] for the [native ethnicity] and rants about how whites are gonna be genocided if we don’t strike first.
At what point does pretending that this group **isn’t** massively bigoted and racist simply self delusion?
And the worst of it is that it’s often the same people complaining about being called biggots.
3 post ago in their post history they’re ranting about how we need to keep blacks out and how Obama is “disgusting”…. then they’re posting about how it’s totally unfair that they get dismissed as bigots.
Keep in mind that rather a lot of these “people” are almost certainly bots – this is true of all of the issues I can think of which your general description might apply to.
At any rate, I think while this might give you a decent way of predicting how a given conversation is going to go, it’s usually not a very useful way of actually governing your interactions with any given person, even according to your (let’s face it, kind of made up) statistics, 1/5-1/4 of them show no overt signs of the behaviours you’re objecting to.
I wish it was made up, I started keeping track in a notebook ticking off when one did start ranting about Muslims or similar and when they didn’t.
It’s why it’s extra depressing from a starting position of trying to believe that people are mostly decent.
If they’re bots then someone has gotten good at writing bots that can pass the Turing test.
How much of a group have to be decent to mean you have to pretend they’re decent by default?
Continuing the KKK/Alabamans comparison, I be surprised if there’s not at least one member of the KKK out there who’s actually a really nice person and doesn’t actually believe any of the stuff about non-whites.
Does that mean I should pretend they’re all non-bigoted, good and decent?
What’s the threshold? 1 in 100? 1 in 10?
When the majority of a group are actually garbage humans… there’s a point where pretending otherwise is just delusion and the sane thing to do is just model the group as a group of bigots who’s motives are highly linked to that bigotry.
Fair. I guess as EchoChaos suggests, remember that Facebook/Twitter/whatever is not necessarily representative of meatspace. But some groups are just pretty toxic, and I mean if I see someone being very vocal about their support for them, my opinion about that person will be adjusted downwards. Just the way life works.
One thing that might be good is to update your model of bigots (or anyone) from “garbage humans” to “regular humans who have this one major flaw”.
It will make you feel less bad.
How sure are you that you’re getting a representative sample of the group? Like, maybe you think you’re talking to random Alabamans, but really you’ve unknowingly been talking exclusively to Alabaman Klansmen?
sampling is an issue, but then how much does validity apply it to people you encounter through the same sampling method?
If I sought out KKK message boards it would definitely be sampling bias if I wanted to take what I got from there and draw conclusions about a much larger group. But it seems valid to draw conclusions about KKK members from those same discussions.
If I sample by talking to a groups evangelists and the people who argue for them on online forums, sure it’s hard to say that grandma who is part of the same group but who never uses the internet is the same…..but can I eventually reasonably draw conclusions about their evangelists and people who argue for them on online forums?
When I’ve asked dozens of their evangelists encountered by method X about their beliefs and most have come back with bigotry.. at what point is the sane thing to assume that the next one you encounter by method X is probably pretty similar.
Well yes, it’s certainly valid to predict the results of your next sample based on the previous results of sampling the same way. I think that puts us in violent agreement – but your other comments seem to suggest you’re considering judging a broad group that you know you aren’t sampling based on the comments of the “evangelists” you are sampling.
True, you are right. I shouldn’t judge the whole group as harshly, but it does still move my priors for them somewhat.
Good rule of thumb for dealing with the internet:
1. Only say something if you have something to add to the discussion which hasn’t been said, or is unlikely to be said by someone else. Most people only talk for the sake of talking.
2. Don’t throw pearls to swine. If you aren’t going to change any minds or share understanding, don’t bother. Even Jesus didn’t waste his time with some sinners, because his time on Earth was limited. So is ours.
Both precepts are about wasting time. Don’t waste the time of others, but also don’t waste your own time. Time is better spent on other things. Like doing your laundry.
If you are constantly confronted with people who believe X and you aren’t changing their minds, then you should start ignoring them.
Well, I’d suggest to accept the prior that this group of people are… however you find them to be. If you find they statistically they’re so, then believing so it’s just a better fit to reality. (Another example that’s useful for perspective is that black people are more likely to be criminals.)
Then try to avoid thinking a lot in terms of category. Sounds like it’s a good idea, but it’s usually not.
And thirdly, remember that even the paranoid have enemies. Them being however they are doesn’t necessarily make each and every one of their opinions wrong.
The important question is how much do you need to interact with this group and why?
I have a very similar issue with some real life people I know, and my conclusion is that Facebook brings out the worst in people because of its feedback loops and non-interactive conversation.
If you don’t need to deal with them, just ignore them.
Am I to understand that “this group” and “their supporters” are two distinct collections of people? I can think of a few different ways in which judging the one by the words of the other could go wrong.
In this context
supporters = people who evangelize their belief system.
The people who go on message boards to explain/defend their beliefs and try to convert others or the people they put on stands handing out leaflets or going door to door.
“this group” is the wider group of those who have converted and throw their support behind the group.
The silent ones could all be terribly nice… but they seem to then be totally ignoring a lot of the stuff coming out of the mouths of their associated evangelists without disapproval or enough disapproval for it to put them off in any way.
The most vocal members of a group are also often the most extreme. It would be nice if people spent more time pushing back on the more fringey views of their fellow travelers, but politics, particularly online politics, being what they are, this problem is common for basically every position.
And how general is the group you are judging? The broader it is, the worst your heuristic might be. E.g. if it’s a specific policy, and the only arguments you hear in favor really are bigoted, maybe that does say something about all the “silent” supporters. But if it’s a broad coalition (e.g. Democrats or Republicans), it’s less fair to judge the whole by the sample of loud online supporters.
What would people think of you if you were judged by the most extreme proponents of the positions you hold? How much of your time online do you spend decrying the less savory ends of your own coalitions?
This is a rhetorical foul; you’re claiming a set of facts which you are careful to make unverifiable, and you’re winking in the direction of calling a certain set of people bigots while being able to deny you meant them if push comes to shove.
I was assuming he was calling a non-standard group of bigots, because if he wanted to call out Southerners (he specifically said it wasn’t us) or right-wingers he could’ve just said it.
How would you talk about it in the abstract? Because it is a general problem.
what do you do when a group appears to *actually* be mostly witch?
ignore the black hats, the gingerbread houses and way they keep cackling and flying around on broomsticks because it’s impolite to call people witches?
The goal isn’t to start a fight on the specific issue or I’d just name them.
It’s hard to avoid that some people will know what groups I argue with.
So I’m trying to make it general enough that a member of a Mormon 1978 anti-black schism group reading the comment or members of a certain Voat community would also feel attacked and think I’m talking about them.
Try to avoid a sin that is perceived to belong only to one side of the culture war. I think there are as many or more lefty bigots, but that’s an idiosyncratic view.
If you just said “witches” from the start you’d get a less negative reaction, I think.
I agree with EchoChaos (or at least what I think he’s suggesting). If your goal is to remain in the abstract, use literal black-hat-wearing broomstick-flying witches. People will still wonder what group you are actually referring to, but they won’t be as distracted.[1]
But depending on your goals, I wonder if you might be better leading with the witches, and then revealing the actual group at the end. Sometimes the specificity will allow a more accurate response, possibly from someone from the inside who can explain why you are reaching an incorrect conclusion from the evidence you are seeing.
[1] Although this being the internet, it’s possible that there is a large enough population of black-hat-wearing broomstick-flying non-witches that you might get specific pushback.
So you dislike those people because they make generalizations about groups – and then you are tempted yourself to generalize about the group they belong to.
The devil is in the details.
Telling you whether your conclusions are correct based on what you described is like convicting someone without seeing the evidence or letting them respond to it. It’s impossible to list all the reasons why your principles might not apply to every single case, and it’s certainly impossible for anyone familiar with the details to explain why your perceptions are just inaccurate if you haven’t told anyone any details.
treat it as a thought experiment.
Assume a reality where what I claim myself seeing is something I’ve actually seen.
you can assume I’m actually delusional in the real world, but if you found yourself in the universe where my claims were true, what would the sane reaction be? Pretend everyone is nice and non-biggoted or other?
You can’t get an “ought” from an “is”.
If you have indeed interpreted what you’ve seen correctly, you will be able to predict how the people in question will act given a specific set of circumstances with a decent degree of accuracy.*
What you choose to do with that knowledge is up to you.
* If you can’t make such predictions accurately, it means your model is wrong.
I’d think this answer is quite simple and easy to come by:
After you’ve engaged with their best non-strawmen arguments and determined they lack credibility.
This is, it’s not the argument I’m talking about, rather the people.
There does appear to be a small subset of people who have normal, non-racist reasons for their position, they’re a minority but they’re there.
And a subset of them have fairly reasonable arguments, they’re not arguments that personally move me, but I can recognize that they’re reasonable and fairly solid if you share their precepts.
It’s the people, the motivation of a seemingly sizable majority of the group that’s my issue.
It’s relevant because while that problem-majority mostly parrot the more socially acceptable reasons they simply flit between them as arguments-as-soldiers because they don’t actually care about those.
As such any argument/policy/sollution that addresses those publicly stated arguments is ignored because what they actually want, what they really really want is to just get rid of the muslims and everything else is just noise.
Have you read this post by our host, and its comments? Might have some useful discussion.
If there exists a subset of people who, in your words, “who have normal, non-racist reasons for their position,” that means that the position is not necessarily wrong. What you should then ASSUME (and I know its hard) is that all other people holding that position are simply intuiting that same position, but do no possess the rhetoric to say it in the same way.
This is simply the foil of a pretty standard argument made by “anti-racists” who oppose the normalization of IQ gaps and the like. Most anti racists do not possess the skill rhetorically or logically to persuade a child that “all humans are created equal”, there is a top 1-2% that make such arguments in a way that isn’t terribly embarrassing (children inherently perceive who in their peer group is better/worse at things). But the same is true of the “anti-anti-racists” who compose a group of people that generally have noticed that it is much safer to invite 70 year old ladies into your house than it is to let in 16 year old boys.
That sounds like a pretty normal, healthy way to approach things. I think especially if you can tune into the kind of self-awareness necessary to produce this post while you’re engaging in these arguments, recognize in the heat of the moment that you’re less sure than you might come across as, and adjust your wording accordingly. But that is a difficult skill to master.
Edited to add: I don’t think unkindness and not considering the consequences of your actions for other people should be thought of as “better for your mental health”. It’s just being a sociopath.
Now I’m wondering if most of humanity since the dawn of time has been sociopathic in this sense. If so maybe it’s the non-sociopaths who are freaks.
I would think it lies in the middle. Everyone has a point where others become other enough that they stop caring about the consequences for. For some it might extend only to themselves, or their immediate family. For others, it might be the entire country. Probably the mean is around tribe-level.
I’m much less certain about things than I used to be (‘things’ meaning politics and politics-relevant issues). I’ve become much more aware of my ignorance / lack of expertise.
Coincidentally I also argue about politics much less, although that may be because I now have a job and have less free time to argue on the internet.
I agree that it sounds comfortable to have a feeling of moral superiority, and to ignore all consequences and collateral damage.
But do you really want to be that kind of person?
I think it’s best to want to believe that which is true, and want to disbelieve that which is false.
Truth is a social construct. If people around me are saying “Flint still doesn’t have clean water” I don’t want to be the guy who says “well, actually, they’ve managed to bring lead levels down substantially since the scandal broke.” Nobody likes a mansplainer.
I do!
And to use your specific example, Kevin Drum still seems to be popular enough; and he’s not just pointed out “down substantially since the scandal broke”, but also that lead levels are down enormously since a generation ago and were even at the peak of the scandal, which is even more contrary to the outrage narrative.
There’s definitely a thing that is a social construct, that you will suffer social penalties if you deny. Flint having unclean water so long as any one of (Flint mayor, MI governor, POTUS) is a Republican, is a part of that thing. But I very strongly object to using the word “truth” to describe that socially-constructed thing. Indeed, I am tempted to assert that using the word “truth” to describe that socially-constructed thing will literally result in the apocalypse.
“Pravda” will do for now, but we could probably use a better word for this thing. Any ideas?
“Truthiness” has served us well and earned its place in the memeworld.
BBA:
That works great, as long as you’re not using that “truth” to make any actual decisions. But as soon as you start using your socially-defined but not factually-correct truth to make decisions, you find yourself invading Middle-Eastern dictatorships in search of nonexistent WMDs, locking teenagers up for life + infinity convinced that they’re (nonexistent) superpredators, having outbreaks of measles caused by parents avoiding the (nonexistent) risk of MMR making their kids autistic, etc.
I mean, if we’re all just having a bull session with nobody making any decisions based on it, feel free to go to town with whatever the popular socially-defined truth is–young-Earth creationism, the Lizardmen secretly controlling the world, the oil companies suppressing the 100 MPG carburetor, the Fed having finally solved the business cycle so we’ll have only prosperity from now on, AIDS being caused by unhealthy lifestyle instead of HIV, etc.
The problem is, it’s natural to decide what’s true using social mechanisms that are very susceptible to “social truth” that isn’t actually literally true. This is a mostly harmless tribe-building exercise for many beliefs, but then we all get together in markets and elections and make decisions, and those decisions are largely informed by those socially-true-but-not-really-true beliefs. And the result is that we make really bad collective decisions. And also, decisionmakers in our society are mostly not all that much smarter than average people and are probably mostly not as smart as the average SSCer[1]. So they make direct decisions about court cases and government policies and employment and such, based on the socially-true-but-not-true-true knowledge in their heads.
[1] I’m thinking people like city managers/mayors, police chiefs, local prosecutors and judges, executives of large corporatioons, Congressmen, governors, military officers, high-level civil servants, school board members, etc. These folks are on average smarter than the average bear, and know their area of expertise well, but probably get their broad understanding of the world from the same place as most everyone else–vaguely remembered stuff from college, what’s been in the newspapers, maybe a popular book or two, what’s on TV every night.
@John Schilling:
+101 truth-seeking Dalmatians.
No, over time I’ve gotten good at not arguing or even really identifying positions I don’t feel strongly for. (I think my posting history backs this up, but will update if corrected)
But on the other hand, I’ve realized my writing comes across as weak with filled with qualifiers. Say what you think, and count on people to know that if you are stating something, it’s obviously your opinion, and doesn’t have to be qualified as such unless you are really tentative. I’m trying to cut down on little fillers like “I mean” “like” or “well…” (except when used as a proper noun, of course), without sacrificing precision too much.
As far as personal presence goes, I’m not one usually brimming with confidence, but it is useful to be able to come across as self-assured if you have an interview or even just meeting people socially for the first time.
I need new business cards because of various contact info changes. I am a patent attorney. Anyone have any designs for cards that they found to be actually effective instead of the typical 95% chance of it going directly into a wastebasket after the person leaves?
Semi-transparent plastic ones had a lot of success in my case, at least design-wise. They might also feel a bit too expensive to throw away.
Is it weird I immediately thought people were using your cards to snort cocaine?
Yes 🙂
Not in my cultural context they didn’t, but judging by your reaction… your clients might. Still a win for you.
I’ve received cards from this one company that were made of metal. Those really did seem too expensive to throw away (although ultimately I did).
Ugh. Every once in a while I get plastic spam, rather than paper spam. I resent this extra pollution. But I’m not motivated enough to remember the specific spammers and boycott them, so I suppose this is not a negative from their point of view.
I did some designs for business cards, with faux metal and marble:
https://www.zazzle.com/collections/modern_metallic_business_cards-119656669743264920?rf=238833924154899198&tc=SSC
Speaking of marble, it might be cool to do the marbling technique with oil-based pigments floating on water.
Like you see on the endpapers of old books.
Use pastel colours to marble the paper before having the cards printed.
I like some of those. Thanks for the inspiration!
Continued from this.
ECD:
DavidFriedman:
ECD:
Oh, you want to argue for the morality of the government’s treatment of migrants, the government’s feeding the poor, the government’s housing the poor with libertarians, who see taxation to be as moral as robbery to begin with (unless maybe pure consequentialism, but you’ve just rejected it). Wow.
I’ll start small and ask this: why do you assume that averaging people’s preferences by the market will produce an immoral result, but averaging people’s preferences by democracy will produce a moral result? Wouldn’t both systems, if they worked infinitely well, produce the same outcome? In the prophetic words of HL Mencken:
Democracy can compensate for many Nash equilibria in a way that individual self interest cannot.
Could you provide an example?
I think the classic example is overfishing a lake. Using pure market mechanisms, everybody has individual incentive to take more than is sustainable and all the fishers lose. Using any method of shared decision making to make rules not to exceed the sustainable catch and punish anybody who does such that the individual incentives now support sustainable fishing. You could object that such rules could be made and enforced by non-democratic means, which is true, but it doesn’t contradict Eric’s claim that democracy can compensate for market failures such as this.
I’ll pre-empt the ‘make the lake private property’ counterargument by pointing out that while one person can own a whole lake, you can’t do the same for the atmosphere, ocean or airwaves.
OK, so government is useful to prevent polluting air or ocean by imposing taxes or prohibitions. Got it.
So what needs to be done when the government is doing the exact opposite?
Take air travel, for example. The Left becomes increasingly noisy about how unethical it is because carbon yadda yadda. But I’ve just checked – I can fly all across EU from London to Sofia for just 50€! How that’s even possible? Well, massive subsidies by governments of course, that’s how.
Perhaps the democracy will fix this particular case. But the natural behavior of governments is to subsidize polluting the lake to protect the country’s market share. Only when the lake is small enough to fit into one country will the government behave correctly, but then you should just make the lake private.
That is a problem neither markets nor governments have figured out how to solve yet. The free market is resisting paying for externalities such as carbon and other pollutants every step of the way. I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim such a thing as an advantage of markets over democracy.
There isn’t really anything resembling democracy operating at the global scale yet. Those rules we currently have which bind multiple nations are cobbled together out of bilateral and multilateral agreements, but democracy doesn’t have a huge amount of say in how they go. I think it’s even plausible one could argue that markets have a bigger influence on them as is, given how often industry groups get their way in such deals – although I’ll caveat that by saying that RCEP and EU trade deals are now looking like they might not include ISDS, so things might be changing right now on that score.
Perhaps there are good reasons we don’t have global democracy, perhaps it will never work, but nation states operating individually in their own interests does not a democracy make. I don’t think you can attribute the failings of that system to democracy.
I assume you mean inefficient Nash equilibria. Eliminating the Nash equilibrium that keeps everyone driving on the same side of the road does not strike me as a good idea.
The problem is that democracy also replaces many efficient equilibria with inefficient ones. See the public choice explanation of why, more than two centuries after the discovery of the Principle of Comparative Advantage, two centuries during each of which one of the world’s most successful economies (U.K. then Hong Kong) practiced free trade, almost all countries still have tariffs.
The reason is not that the politicians who support them are stupid.
I think calling the market (or democracy, for that matter) “averaging people’s preferences” is missing something important. I personally make decisions very differently if I’m making them collectively as opposed to individually.
I’m not sure I follow but would you say that politics brings out the best in you?
I’m not sure I follow either. I wouldn’t say politics brings out the best in me but I also don’t think shopping brings out the best in me. Perhaps it would help if you said what you don’t follow in my comment.
How is your decision making different in the collective and the individual mode? Do you optimize for well-being of your country in the collective mode and for your family only in the individual mode? Or do you arrive to a smarter decision by discussing it with everybody? Or do you do some shady individual stuff that you don’t want to show to the collective?
@eigenmoon
No, none of those. Even if I’m acting only in my own self-interest, with the opportunity to consult wise people for advice, and where my actions are open for all to see, I would make different decisions if I was part of a collective decision-making process compared to an individual.
Consider a boycott. I don’t boycott things individually because it doesn’t make a difference and I quite like the things I’m proposing to boycott. But if a large collective unit that I was a part of held a vote on whether to collectively boycott Big Bad Company then I might vote in favour.
Consider a strike. If the workers continue the strike they will lose pay in the short run but may win improved pay or conditions in the long run, but for an individual worker it might be more comfortable to scab and keep getting paid. A worker who makes a decision as part of a collective will go on strike; one who makes a decision as an individual will scab. (Probably the real reason why individualism gained so much ground as an ideology. The powerful realised, somewhat counter-intuitively, that people who think for themselves as individuals are less of a threat than people who work together and see themselves as part of something bigger than themselves… but I shouldn’t go off on that tangent right now…)
On a more local scale, a new supermarket opened in my town a few years ago. Where it was positioned was certain to mean much worse traffic getting in to my nearest city and I was opposed (silently) to its construction. Once it was built, it was cheap and convenient and I shopped there. Had I been given a say in a collective manner I would have spoken against it; instead I was only able to vote with my currency and I voted for it.
Or a smaller and more trivial example still. Suppose you and your friends are hanging out and planning to order a carryout. You want pizza and you make the case for pizza, but most people want Indian. When they order Indian you go along with them because it means it’ll all arrive at the same time and probably have cheaper delivery costs. The collective decision you would have made was pizza, but the individual decision was Indian.
I think this is almost always true. Your incentives are different as part of a collective compared to as an individual.
OK, now I see. But in terms of democracy, all that examples seem to be about having one party of like-minded people (or at least sufficiently like-minded that minor details like pizza can be swept under the rug). Now the averaging that I talked about starts when you discover another party in your neighborhood and start a race against them.
@eigenmoon
Again I’m not quite sure I follow where you’re going with that question. If two groups exist close to each other, and they’re very similar within the groups and very different between the groups, then there’s likely to be some conflict between the groups.
A given individual in group A will still have individual-mode decisions that differ from their collective-mode decisions. Perhaps their collective-mode decisions will encourage them to fight group B on behalf of group A even if it risks their well-being (or at least uses up their free time), whereas their individual-mode decisions would encourage them to avoid the fighting to preserve their own comfort even if it means group B is more likely to beat group A at whatever they may be competing over.
To be clear, I do understand that there is something a bit like averaging going on both in democracy and in the market, but it works in a very different way. I think in democracy people make collective-mode decisions — they vote for whomever they think will make better decisions. But in the market people make individual-mode decisions, making spending choices based on what will make the biggest marginal improvement to their lives. So even if we do decide to call a democracy and a market “averaging” mechanisms, they’re averaging different things.
I don’t quite see your two modes of thinking as being completely separate, as market does not in principle forbid collective action. Vegans are engaged in sending both market and political signals. Your pizza example is basically a consumer cooperative, a completely valid market move. There are many things for which a government pretty much acts like a big Kickstarter.
But there are indeed goals for which the market is very unhelpful, such as prohibiting an item or threatening another country. I guess that answers my original question as to why governments and markets arrive to different results.
Averaging people’s preferences through democracy could mean that the white…oh, wait, non-CW number, right? Er, the majority consisting of the elves vote in laws that prohibit providing certain services to dwarfs.
Averaging preferences through market mechanisms means that individual elves may choose to not provide service to dwarfs, but dwarfs will still be able to obtain the service from other dwarfs or non-complying elves.
So that’s a potential difference.
This is a CW enabled thread. It’s only whole-number threads that aren’t.
And note this is strongly correct. In the segregationist South, businesses were built to serve exclusively blacks that became very successful.
And there was a business finding jobs for blacks in parts of the South that treated blacks reasonably well for blacks in parts that didn’t. It was eliminated by state regulation which the Supreme Court, to its shame, upheld.
Exactly. Another difference would be a law enacted by a democratically-elected government limiting pollution, vs individuals polluting as much as they want and hoping other individuals stop.
I’m not planning to get into the “Boo, Libertarianism; Boo, stateism” discussion right now; just criticising the use of the word “averaging” to imply correspondences that I don’t think are present.
How is this working out for this dwarf?
Alex Jones is pretty much the perfect example of this, just like the segregationist South.
He has a market and can create his own platforms because there is a large group that wants to hear him that will bail if they’re excluded from regular social media.
The people who are seriously hurt are the regular Joe who gets fired from his grocery store job because he made a badthink tweet, not the big figures like Jones.
I’m not sure how well Jones is doing compared to before he was banned from all the big platforms, but even if we grant your point about Jones, the issue remains for the regular Joe fired from the grocery store.
@viVI_IViv
I think that’s probably the case. Just like in the South the black business owners were partially hurt (restricted from doing business with whites), partially helped (captive and supportive black audience), but the regular working class black Joes really got it in the shorts.
The market is weighted by the personal wealth of the individuals.
If Bill has 50% of the wealth he controls 50% of the “vote”, the system considers him and his whims more important than the vital needs of every other market participant.
If Bob has no money at all he controls ~0% of the “vote” and the system effectively assigns even his life to have approximately zero value.
Democracy, everyone gets a single vote. It can be manipulated but for that you need to manipulate the voters and get them to agree to support you.
It’s effectively like saying “how is a system where 10000 members of the nobility control everything worse?”
It’s worse because all choices end up being made to benefit the nobility such that one of them with a broken nail is considered more important than a peasant kid bleeding to death.
Demoracy is awful but it’s better than the available alternatives.
Just want to note that this happens without the nobility being evil. It’s just the market that prioritizes the broken nail.
But there’s an interesting counterintuitive phenomenon here. In practice free market tends to pay a lot of attention to the common people. In a free market a company looks at the 10000 members of the nobility and realizes their needs are pretty much fully met – it’s not particularly easy to sell them yet another nail protector. But the poor(er) people have quite a lot of unmet needs, and in aggregate they’re quite wealthy. Bill Gates may “have” 100 billion, but his actual yearly expenses are probably 3-4 orders of magnitude lower. A poor(er) guy may earn $15k a year, but he’ll spend 100% of it. So the aggregate poor people market is actually quite a lot better for a prospective seller/producer.
Keep in mind: our system where few poor people actually starve to death is quite a recent thing.
For much of the poor population the fact that they have even 10-15 K worth of “market power” is almost entirely a product of intervention by a democratic government to divert cash to them.
Poor people with zero money still have zero value in the market no matter how cheap what’s being sold or how much utility they gain from it.
zero times a trillion is still zero.
Eflornithine was a particularly depressing example of such. Pills that cost a few cent… but because the people who needed them didn’t have those few cent they didn’t even keep the factories open with millions of lives on the line.
My take is the causation is in the other direction. For most of history power was political, instead of monetary/free market. People starved because they couldn’t trade stuff for food (like, for example work).
Once more or less free market become a reality people could work for food, then for shelter, then for education, then for color TVs and so on. The more they had the more tempting buyers they became and more power was accorded to them by the free market. Virtuous cycle.
Which is why I really fear an overprotective government. It’ll say “you need employment for your own protection!” and then force drivers to chose between being employed by Uber or Lyft. This puts money in government’s pockets and in Uber’s pockets, but takes even more money from drivers and clients, not to mention quite a lot of freedom. Multiply this by 1000.
Markets don’t tend to remain terribly well functioning or free without some higher body enforcing it.
For much of history there’s been an excess of available labor such that it’s value often dipped below the cost of staying alive.
A huge fraction of modern government intervention is attempting to make sure the average citizen has *something* they can trade on the market like giving every citizen 14 or more years worth of education or just simply transferring some cash to the ones who still can’t cope.
There’s no law of the universe that says that labor has to have a high enough value to keep you and your kids alive.
For much of history the solution to this was to simply let people starve to death until the supply of labor dropped enough for the price to rise.
If this an undesirable outcome then just trusting to the free market is less appealing.
For most of history, most people were subsitance farmers.
Minimal wage labour and minimal trade.
You grew what you ate and ate what you grew.
If you starved, it was because your crops failed, not because you had nothing to trade for food.
If someone had anything they could trade for food they traded it to avoid starvation.
Assuming that there was available land for you to claim or work on. Something that wasn’t always the case.
@Murphy I’m not an anarcho-libertarian, or however those people are called. I’m all in favor of having institutions and property rights enforced from above. Hernando de Soto among others made the case quite well that pure chaos isn’t profitable – you need to be able to make contracts and have them enforced.
I’m less sure about the gov doing things like education and health care, in that I’m aware that there’s a commons problem and there are plenty of cases where it would be profitable for society to do X, but not for any individual actor to do X, so the state fulfills this role. I think however that the state should limit its involvement to strictly commons issues, and stop trying to solve everything, because it’s historically bad at it.
I am very much opposed to the state thinking it always knows best and directing everything, from every detail of our children’s education to how and where we can build, to how exactly businesses should be conducted. That’s just plain wrong, on many levels, from morality to efficiency.
I think we have to be clear about what you mean re: “profitable”
If something is good/desirable/high-utility for lots of poor people who have nothing to trade except low value labor, no land etc … and it’s worthless to the landed gentry….
is it “profitable”?
Keeping poor/sick/disabled people without money alive likely isn’t terribly profitable.
But is it desirable vs the alternative?
A democracy which weights the opinions of the poor people equally to rich people is likely to say yes, poor peoples lives matter a great deal too.
A market system that weights the opinions based on spending on the other hand….
Is the end goal to maximize GDP or something else?
In a a hypothetical libertopia where the land has long been claimed and there’s no undiscovered country in which to claim a farmstead… where’s the line between “state”, lords, kings, nobility and the small collection of local major landowners or the company that owns the company town.
is it somehow “better” if the company that owns the company town says no to you building a competing general store rather than the democratically elected town council of an identical town down the road?
It doesn’t really make sense to compare the market to democracy like this I don’t think. If Bill Gates prefers chunky peanut butter, it doesn’t mean I can’t have smooth peanut butter. So in that sense him being rich doesn’t mean he gets more of a say in what goods are produced, at least not in any way that matters to me.
You’d really have to get down to specifics and argue about whether a certain good or service is better provided by democracy or a free market. It is not too controversial that peanut butter is better provided by a market, and a nuclear deterrent is better provided by a democracy, for example.
If we buy Piketty’s assumption that the rich don’t spend anything, everyone gets to vote except the 10,000 members of the nobility.
Right. This seems the obvious flaw. The market is controlled by the most spending, not the most wealth. While the wealthy are also probably big spenders, contra Piketty, they’re not market dominant to the degree that the rest don’t matter.
That is not Piketty´s assumption.
It’s close enough to Piketty’s assumption that he thought he could get away with using “r>g” in place of “r(1-c)>g”.
Are there detailed criticisms of Piketty which include the c term (I’m assuming c = spending of the ultra-rich?)?
@Paul Zrimsek
Well, yes, but in your original comment you converted reasonable if debatable assumption into obviously silly one.
@Paul Zrimsek
Why? How is “certain entyties have bigger profits than others” equal to the claim “certain entyties don’t spend anything”?
Piketty’s ciaim isn’t just “bigger profits”, but rather “certain entities have profits so vastly greater than their spending that we can reasonably leave the latter out of the math”. Note the lack of a spending term in Piketty’s math.
And “certain entities have profits so vastly greater than their spending that we can reasonably leave the latter out of the math” is equal to “certain entities don’t spend anything”, in the same way that zero is equal to epsilon. Technically incorrect in the literal mathematical sense, but practically correct in any context where it is reasonable to simplify the math that way.
If the worst that can be said of Paul Z’s post is that he abstracted Piketty to “the rich don’t spend anything” instead of the more pedantically correct “the rich don’t spend enough to matter”, meh, I’m going to call that praising with faint damns and move on as the rest of you imagine you are destroying Zrimsek with your literalism.
That explicitly is Piketty’s assumption. Wealth grows at the rate r so if r>g, wealth will concentrate endlessly (because no wealth is consumed). Of course this is trivially false, but nevertheless it is his assumption. If there were consumption then wealth would not grow at the rate of r. And of course empirically it does not.
@John Schilling
Okay, sorry for beeing imprecise. Replace “profit” with “net income”.
How does entity A has an yearly average net income of 5% and entity B has an yearly average net income of 1,5% mean, that entity A does not spend anything?
I see that I am stuck on this website with singular mandate to defend Piketty from endless attempts at strawmanization by resident libertarian cohorts. Alright.
My problem with Paul Zrimsek´s comment is that he makes Piketty´s book sound like something obviously dumb.
Piketty claims that that when r>g, income inequality usually increases, and backs that up with some empirical data, whose validity certainly could be disputed. Yes, that means that according to him, consumption by wealtholders is not so high that it would compensate for the difference between r and g. Perhaps he is wrong, but that is not an obviously dumb claim.
That’s all true, and I still say free market is better than democracy.
I’ll stick to the topics highlighted by ECD: immigrants, feeding the poor, housing the poor.
The rich are in general in favor of migration: more migrants means more labor supply. It is middle class that hates migration, believing that migrants will take their jobs or will sip welfare (some manage to believe both at the same time). Thus weighting the votes towards the rich helps the poor migrants.
When somebody feeds and houses the poor, it’s not rich that object to this – it’s middle class “concerned citizens” (I’ve linked some examples in the post). The rich probably live on their own islands and don’t really care. Again, here the poor have to suffer because the middle class can outvote them.
The problem with democracy is that preference strength doesn’t count. A middle-class man who doesn’t want to meet a poor person on the street gets one vote and a poor person who doesn’t want his only abode to be demolished gets one vote.
Surely it is best to have tension between markets and democracy so that there are protections from the extreme failure modes of each?
benwave: +1
In general, I think it’s healthy to have multiple power centers and decisionmaking processes in the society, so they all don’t end up getting captured and swallowed up by the same movement/person/party/whatever.
I agree, and this argument can be frequently heard from agorists. Governments overregulate everything, do increasingly crazy things with money supply, and are hell-bent on destroying all alternatives even up to private mail companies. This is exactly why a black market is necessary: to protect and preserve vitally needed alternative systems.
Most of my issues have been addressed by others, but I do want to flag a minor point:
I was mostly pulling those because of the discussion we were having below on virtue signalling where you said:
(which I misremembered as including housing for the poor) and
They would not be my models for moral government behavior. Historic refugee policy can be pretty good (and is still good in some places), as can some foreign aid, as can a lot (though not all) environmental regulation.
Democracy works this way with everyone getting assigned a number of votes to use, but in a market Bill only gets 50% of the vote AFTER the rest of the market decides to give him 50% of the vote. Starting from this point is like saying that the electoral collage gives a handful of people the power to pick the president.
I don’t know if that’s a reasonable objection. In elections, the assigned votes go back to being equal per person every four years, whereas in markets that never happens. There is not a single time when I’ve been alive where the responsiveness of the market to my desires is the same as its responsiveness to everybody else’s.
You don’t want to reset equality every few years because that takes savings out of the picture. If every day you have an option of a Coke or a Pepsi or nothing that is a very different scenario from a Coke, or a Pepsi, or keeping your dollar and having two dollars to vote with tomorrow. The second scenario makes markets way more responsive, and the ability to save votes is one of the main reasons calling voting ‘revealed preference’ is bogus (for the economic definition of revealed preferences).
Well I don’t particularly object to that, but doesn’t that show that democracy is Not like markets in that way? That was what I wanted to point out above
Voting in the market is quite a lot like voting in party politics.
Unless you’re rich, connected or talented enough to start your own party, or, market-wise, start your own company or pay extra for a bespoke service, you’re limited to voting for the choices others decide to give you. And what they offer you is contingent on both what others are offering, and what the majority in a demographic wants. Even niche non-bespoke offerings don’t go too niche.
That’s a misleading way of putting it, because market spending isn’t a vote. If I get 51% of the vote, my candidate is elected and yours isn’t. If I spend 51% of the money on the grain market, I get 51% of the grain and other people get 49%.
Further, in the market context, the usual reason I get 51% of the income is that I am producing and selling 51% of the society’s output (rough approximation–I’m blurring lots of economic details). Hence my existence does not reduce the amount the other people get.
There is no equivalent relation in the democratic context, which is one of the reasons some people oppose immigration.
@DavidFriedman >
I’m not following that train of thought, can you elaborate a bit more?
DavidFriedman:
Plumber:
In extremis, if all you need to get 100% of the resources is 51% of the votes, then it makes rational sense to devote your existing resources to just getting those votes. This is also true if it gives you anywhere from 52% to 99% of the resources (although the less you get, the less attractive certain strategies become, and the more likely they are to leave the table). This is especially the case since (as Friedman says in his book) money runs out, but votes never do.
If 51% of the votes only gets you 51% of the resources, then getting votes is only about as attractive as getting those resources via other means, but you still have that problem of votes never running out, as long as you can get people to keep pulling that lever. That’s why a lot of people oppose any strategy that enables that, uh, leverage.
@Paul Brinkley,
Ah!
“Skin in the game” then.
Thanks!
Why would I have to be a pure consequentialist? If you have any consequentialist in your moral makeup at all, you should be able to evaluate consequences.
Anyhow, the idea that we can’t morally judge what the market does at all is an exceedingly odd one, and I doubt the continued-OP really meant to argue it.
At risk of making a low effort post;
The market represents what an individual does
It doesn’t represent what an individual thinks he ‘ought’ to do
More importantly it doesn’t represent what that individual thinks other people should do.
_____________
High effort post
Sometimes this is a good thing, because people’s opinions about matters that don’t directly involve them often involve decision making with zero skin in the game. There’s seldom if ever a feedback mechanism between -> votes representative -> experiences policy.
Any kind of collective action problem where the benefits are diffused and only occur when a large number of people do something, but the costs are immediate tends to require a direct or indirect state solution. One example would be pollution. Though there are more or less market-oriented solutions to this. The law can assign a price to pollution [or a carbon tax in the case of CO2] and people opt for different strategies to manage this new cost. A less market oriented solution would be to control the quantity of energy use directly.
_____________
What remotely justifies one person applying their ‘ought’ onto another person with force? How is this anything other than bullying with extra steps?
Tragedies of the commons.
Democracy creates a new commons for there to be a tragedy of.
@baconbits9
Instinctively I love this statement. I will definitely have to ruminate on it.
@baconbits9
Didn’t tribal democracy come first though? So wouldn’t it be better to say that other forms of government narrowed the commons?
This sounds very pithy and cool but I’m going to confess I don’t know what it means.
At any rate, viVI_IViv gives the longer version of what I was gesturing at below. Dealing with free-riders who benefit from solutions to tragedies of the commons without themselves helping (one form of what Garrett is objecting to) is a very important part of the sustainability of societies.
I think he want’s to hint at the abuse of social services/security.
The government itself acts as a commons, it is un-owned but is highly valuable to control. It is easiest to see in kleptocracies where the graft is often explicit but in democracies it still happens (at the basic level its called rent seeking behavior).
Thanks, that makes sense, and I think I agree. But I wouldn’t say that’s all it does (and I don’t think you were implying it was).
Everyone does that. It’s called morality.
(I’m not intentionally trying to be patronizing in my response)
Nothing justifies anything except subjectively. You condition it on some subjective criteria and then everything else follows from said criteria.
Then as long as the ‘rules’ get followed [or not in practice] some set of consequences results — consequences of rules are not subjective even if you subjectively like or dislike them.
So for example if you condition that anything is justified as long as it is the result of voluntary transactions. (Ignoring the thorniness of deciding whether voluntary means informed consent and some other things.) Then most all government actions are unjustified.
Taxation is theft in the same way abortion is murder, or if you’re a vegetarian, meat is murder. Most non-libertarians don’t accept this premise as an absolute, and they’re not necessarily going to be convinced by pointing out that state action is coercive for the same reason most people aren’t convinced to become vegans when you point out that meat is murder.
___________
But my OP was more narrow; if the market represents what individuals do, why doesn’t it represent what is moral [from the perspective of the individual]
I’m just conditioning on whatever morality is defined as for the individual. Pollution’s an example of something an individual might want fixed for ethical reasons but market action doesn’t necessarily facilitate it since it’s a commons or collective action problem.
Also note that ‘market vs democracy’ =/= ‘market vs state’ at least as i imagine it– a lot of people want collectively imposed solutions to problems that voters generally won’t agree to anyway. (climate change ranks very low for voter priorities) But it’s easy to imagine that voters will vote for a higher amount of government aid to the poor on average than the same voters would contribute themselves privately [because of the skin in the game issue i mentioned]
I agree that government might be useful to limit pollution, especially in the carbon tax variant. But note that all this fits entirely within consequentialist framework: let’s set a goal, compare how effective different institutions would be at achieving this goal, and then – only then – assign some moral weight to implementing the best institution. I was wondering what’s with ECD’s “Government is Moral!” button that lets them dodge all this and bring out morality from the start.
The market doesn’t average people’s preferences, at least not to the same extent that democracy does. The market can fall into tragedy of the commons situations (essentially many-players prisoner’s dilemmas) where it will select an outcome that is not preferred by anyone.
This is relevant to the examples you are discussing here, since treatment of migrants, feeding the poor, and the housing the poor are all scenarios where there is a tradeoff between a common good and individual self-interest. E.g., I might want to use part of my disposable income to feed the poor, but if I donate to charity and my competitors don’t, they might outcompete me and drive me out of business. If instead everybody is forced to give X% of their income to feed the poor though taxation, then nobody is specifically put at disadvantage as long as X is not too large.
In general the purpose of the government is to solve hard coordination problems that can’t be easily solved by direct private negotiation or social praise and shaming.
Many instances of “we need the government to solve this hard coordination problem” can be better addressed by instituting appropriate market mechanisms.
E.G.: Government regulation isn’t necessary to solve the tragedy of the commons, property rights will usually do the trick just fine.
I’d be delighted to know how a system of property rights for the immaterial communal good of having the poor being feed would work.
Lack of clarity: I was addressing the portion of your comment regarding markets falling into a tragedy of the commons.
Feeding the poor is not a tragedy of the commons.
There is no market mechanism that I’m aware of that operates to feed those that are poor and unable to work.
There is, of course, a massive market mechanism that operates to feed the working poor.
if I donate to charity and my competitors don’t, they might outcompete me and drive me out of business.
By this logic nobody would ever be giving to charity, with or without taxes. But people did, and still do. I remember reading that people gave much more before the advent of the welfare state but I can’t find the link now.
If your business is in an unsaturated market and you can expand it, then doing so isn’t an evil act. You create new jobs and hire people that would be receiving charity instead. Unless you’re in a luxury business, you create useful things for people, including poor people, and everybody’s better off.
But if government gives someone a job, it’s only because it destroys a job somewhere else with taxation – where else is the money coming from? If the government gives welfare to a poor person, about half the job is destroyed. And the people on welfare don’t produce anything and are disincentivized from working: by the welfare itself, by the tax on working, by occupational licensing.
So any help that the government brings happens at a great cost. California just now enacted rent control which will make sure that no cheap housing will be built, and it also ordered Kanye to destroy the homes he built for the poor. That is how the government really helps the poor. At what point is the cost of having a government too much?
In general the purpose of the government is to solve hard coordination problems that can’t be easily solved by direct private negotiation or social praise and shaming.
I think that more than 50% of government-coordinated problems could and should be solved on kickstarter, and the rest would be solvable once US society stops nonsense such as shaming billionaires for helping.
I think you’re being too absolutist on this @eigenmoon.
Sure, North Korea with it’s heavy handed government doesn’t much thrive, but neither does Somalia with no central government.
Singapore and Sweden both do thrive, and neither of them (in different ways) would I call Laissez faire.
If instead you’re arguing with full Marxists, there just aren’t that many among frequent commenters here to engage with, overwhelmingly by far Americans “on the Left” point to Canada, not Cuba, as their goal.
They’re just plain not much more who want to re-animate Stalin than there are who want to re-animate King James 2, more than 9/10th want both private industry and government.
From my perspective of having both worked in private industry and as a government employee, the Rights criticisms of government are true as are the Lefts criticism of unregulated private industry, and for me to convinced that a strong movement towards either libertarianism or full socialism (not just a Sanderist dilute form) I want a thriving contemporary society pointed out, and so far to me right over the border in Canada looks like it, so God Save the Queen!
(we do have better cuisine and music here in the U.S.A. thanks to the southern states though, and I wouldn’t want to lose that).
+1
Somalia might not be Sweden, but it’s still better off as it is now; see “Better off stateless: Somalia before and after government collapse” (PDF). Of course that might be because Somalian government was horrible to begin with. Also Somalian society is pretty weird so it’s not exactly a shining beacon of ancap.
US is already taking about as much government revenue as Switzerland (27.1% for US, 28.5% for Switzerland but US borrows a lot on top of that). So… why aren’t you Switzerland? As in: US got enough tax money already to have its social care on Swiss level, so…?
But you say the Left wants to be Canada. Canada gets a bit more tax revenue: 32.7%. Surely you can raise the taxes accordingly, but wouldn’t the Left then say that the new target is Sweden or Denmark? I thought that’s what they say already.
Sweden takes 44% GDP as tax revenue, Denmark does 46%. That’s about the same as Italy (42.4) and France (46.2). So can we be sure that raising the taxes will make you Sweden/Denmark and not France/Italy?
If someone told me they would rather live in Somalia than Tanzania or Kenya, I wouldn’t believe them. People have a much higher preference for not getting blown up than they do for better telecommunications.
@eigenmoon > “.wouldn’t the Left then say that the new target is Sweden or Denmark?..”
I was using “The Left” for”median Democratic Party voter”, but your quite right, historically “The Left” has meant “folks who want the full Cuba”, but if we slip in-between using “Left” as one half of the Nation that votes, and “Right” as the other half into certain select political positions held by a small minority of people it gets confusing, to give one example fully “socialized” medicine is a position of some in the Democratic Party, two of the top four polling Democratic polling Presidential candidates support it (and another sometimes does, sometimes doesn’t, depending on when you ask her), but a majority a registered Democrats say they don’t want private insurance eliminated (nor does the front runner candidate), so if you go by the “divide the Nation into a more Left half of voter and a more Right half of voters” model than fully socialized medicine isn’t the position of the whole “Left”, if instead you define “Left” as “people who believe on an ideology that I pick that word to mean”, then sure, it can be anything, this is why I like reading Gallup and Pew – to get a better idea of what most actually support.
“…So can we be sure that raising the taxes will make you Sweden/Denmark and not France/Italy?”
You hardly can in any way.
We discussed this in the last Open Thread, Democrats rule both California and Massachusetts, Republicans both Mississippi and Utah, California and Mississippi both have higher rates of poverty than Massachusetts and Utah, just as being ruled by Social Democratic Parties didn’t turn Germany into Greece, or Greece into Germany, what the ruling policies are aren’t the only factor.
Massachusetts and Utah were both founded people descended from English Puritans, so maybe that’s a factor?
California and Mississippi’s southern borders are both further south than Massachusetts and Utah, so maybe that’s a factor?
Another example is Cuba and North Korea are both ruled by Marxist regimes, and I think best will agree that North Korea is the by far worse of the two.
So if political policies aren’t the only factor why am I so confident that a social democratic capitalist welfare state is the right choice?
Because most thriving places do follow that model, and (without any other practical tools) political policies might help, and what I would think would help more, going door-to-door and convincing folks to have higher empathy/solidarity/trust in their neighbors regardless of what governments do and doesn’t do, just isn’t practical.
@Plumber
I have an alternative theory. Look at the freedom ratings for countries and US states ( and economic). I wish there was fiscal rating of countries, too.
You’ll see that France is #71 and Italy is #80 on the economic list (below Kyrgyzstan), while Sweden is #19, US is #12 and Canada is #8. Also Mississippi’s fiscal freedom is even below California. It fails under Republican rule precisely because they govern it like it’s New York.
To thrive, society needs economic freedom, which is basically the absence of government. You can in principle stick high tax on top like the Nordic countries do, but then all other kinds of economic freedom must be top-notch, otherwise you’ll have Italy. My problem with the Left (however you define it) is that they don’t seem to value economic freedom that much, but no society is thriving without it.
@eigenmoon.> “…To thrive, society needs economic freedom, which is basically the absence of government. You can in principle stick high tax on top like the Nordic countries do, but then all other kinds of economic freedom must be top-notch, otherwise you’ll have Italy…”
I see merit in that argument, one or two threads ago there was a discussion of the 1950’s, U.S.A., and back then there were higher top marginal income tax rates, a larger amount of direct Federal government employees relative to the total population (especially when you include the larger standing army of then and you don’t include the huge number of “government by proxy” contractors, and subsidized NGO’s of today), immigration was more restricted, plus Truman sometimes had industries nationalized, but in very many other ways the mid 20th century U.S.A. waa less regulated than now, and had an economic growth rate not equalled since.
People donate trivial amounts compared to the taxes they are willing to pay. And yes, I said willing to pay, because it is an average preference revealed by their voting behaviors, regardless of what taxes-are-theft libertarians say.
I seriously doubt that before the welfare state people were giving to charity any amount comparable to what they now give to the welfare state through taxation.
And without welfare people who have no employable skills or inclination either starve or turn to crime. I suppose that for some people this is an acceptable outcome, but for people who value the chronically unemployed being feed, the market offers no viable solution.
And without housing regulations California would probably contain more slums than Kenya.
As Lincoln is said to have noted, calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it so. And saying people are individually “willing to pay” taxes (as opposed to coerced into doing so) because of what their democratically elected representatives may have voted for isn’t “revealed preference”.
(because SSC loves spelling pedantry) Sure there is, haven’t you heard of Soylent Green?
But of course there’s a market solution for people who value the poor to be fed, namely: if you value a poor guy having an apple more than having an apple yourself, you’re going to give it to him. Now we have a paradox: people are not willing to give enough (at least according to you) but they’re willing to vote for being forced to pay up. And the resolution is, I believe, obvious: people vote for high taxes because they hope that somebody richer than them will foot the bill. And about that they’re mistaken, since few take into account that tax burden is distributed throughout the market by prices.
And without housing regulations California would probably contain more slums than Kenya.
And that would be an improvement over sleeping in cars.
@Gobbobobble
It’s also environmentally friendly. Looks like Sweden has the solution to all problems.
And the political system starts in a tragedy of the commons situation and never leaves it.
Your implicit assumption is that the democratic process results in the government acting like a wise and benevolent tyrant. But the government isn’t a person, it’s the outcome of a political market, one which lacks the features that make the market, at least to first approximation, actually act like a wise and benevolent tyrant.
Bizarre. Neither the market nor the government average people’s preferences.
Yeah, people don’t even have coherent preferences within themselves.
I have an idea. Instead of voting on policy democratically, we will use a free market in “Decision Tokens”, where people place bids on policy using these tokens. The policy with the highest amount of bids wins.
The initial starting point for decision tokens will be 100 a person, with the following modifiers:
+5000 for socialists
+10000 for incomes less than $40,000 a year
-All tokens removed for incomes of more than $80,000
-50 for libertarians.
These Decision Tokens will operate in a pure free market, where anyone can use them to buy or sell any sort of policy they want, and they can even be exchanged.
As many commentators have noted, this method is superior to democracy, in that we can gauge the magnitude of preference, rather than a simple binary.
As supporters of markets, I assume you all won’t have objections to my free market proposal.
How does buying and selling policies work?
Say there’s a question of what to do with an area that is currently a vacant lot. A bid is placed on the question “what to do with the vacant lot” and the winner of the bid (the person who spends the most Decision Tokens) gets to be the decision maker. That person can later transfer that power to someone else in exchange for Decision Tokens, or anything really.
It’s just a normal free market, with the starting position being that Leftists and poor people have all the power, and wealthy people and libertarians (and maybe just a list of people I don’t like) having none.
It’s a pure free market with only voluntary transactions. Every exchange is mutually beneficial between the parties. Can’t think of any reason why people would object to this.
As long as the decision tokens are non-renewable, it would end up with an equilibrium essentially similar to free markets today.
Fools and their money would soon be parted, and we would end up with a capitalist system more intense than our current one.
If you get that many tokens every year, then there would quickly be a monetary revaluation to reduce all incomes by at least an order of magnitude, everyone would declare themselves a “socialist” and we’d move on as before.
So the winner pays tokens to who?
The decision tokens is just another currency and after some initial period it will have a quasi-stable price (like Bitcoin). At this point it this system should be basically ancap. Is this what you mean?
My employer doesn’t reduce my salary when he finds out I received an inheritance. I don’t think supply/demand works like that.
It would be based on past internet-posting history.
@Guy in TN
Yeah, but the people in charge of the money supply are the ones losing power here. One short sharp deflation later, and they miraculously make under $40k new American dollars, each of which is a lot more valuable than before.
This real effect has happened before, incidentally. In the 1950s with sky-high marginal tax rates CEOs were making wages not much more than their employees, but got lots of benefits like company purchased cars, houses, even airplanes.
In the strangest coincidence, my LinkedIn with my real name now spreads the good word of socialism!
They pay the tokens to the groups who are currently holders of the decision-making titles.
The issue at hand, is that government currently has certain “properties”, e.g. the power of taxation, environmental regulation, state-owned industry. And these powers are currently controlled democratically, which doesn’t measure the magnitude of how people value them well.
The typical ancap proposal is that these government powers/properties should be divested to people who are willing to pay for them in dollars.
I propose, that instead of accepting dollars, the government should accept Decision Tokens, which will be issued to groups of people that I personally like.
This is no more arbitrary than the government choosing to issue and divest using dollars. After all, dollars aren’t distributed equally either.
@Guy in TN & @EchoChaos,
You two are cracking me up with this!
Please consider my vote/dollars/decision tokens all in!
There’s an important feature of ancap missing, which is that the bid must be proportional to the territory you wish to cover. Otherwise the “decision-making group” would propose a law to kill me and I would be forced to give it all my tokens to repeal this law.
Once you get ancap right, except with decision tokens, I’ll take it. Very soon socialists will lose the ability to tax me. Your distribution of tokens simply means that Ancapistan would be quite small. But it’s still better than the current territory of Ancapistan (zero).
This part is bad enough. In particular, who gets to determine when there is a question which must be decided? Can I just pose, “There’s a question concerning whether or not Controls Freak should get all of Guy in TN’s money/possessions. Who’s going to give up Decision Tokens to decide this?”
This makes it worse. Rather than having a bidding process for each question, you’re putting a bidding process on a title (basically “representative for deciding Class X”). That means that answer to the previous question is probably, “There is a question-making Czar title, too.” But it’s still not clear how the exchange system works. I’m sure you want to say that all of the exchanges are voluntary, right? That means that if someone wants to become the new question-making Czar, they have to not only outbid everyone else, but they also have to get the current question-making Czar to voluntarily give up the title in exchange for the top offer of Decision Tokens.
It’s pretty obvious that not only is this simply a spoils system masquerading as a representative government masquerading as a market, but also whoever gets to become the first question-making Czar can trivially become dictator and never voluntarily give up his position in any exchange.
Quite aside from the reasons that this can’t be described as a market, it gives further reason to what I said in one of our previous conversations. The question is not whether there is going to be some coercion through government versus no coercion in government (sorry, DF). The question is one of political legitimacy and whether/how far that coercion is going to extend beyond, “You can’t steal people’s stuff.” This proposed spoils system fails miserably in political legitimacy.
Are you using the tokens to pay for the policies you want? If not then it isn’t a market.
Yes, you use the tokens to pay for the policies.
A slight change, the modifier on incomes less $40,000 should be +100,000.
Does selling tokens constitute income?
The issuing of Decision Tokens is a one-time thing, so that shouldn’t matter.
Prediction: In a few years, your skewed initial distribution of tokens will be washed out, and the wealthiest people will own enough of the tokens to do more-or-less what they like, if they agree on it. Elections will be a matter of getting the wealthy token-holders on the same page. Perhaps a few non-corporate organizations (unions, churches, interest groups) will also collect some tokens, but when the choice is give your token to your church or sell it to ExxonComcastPalintirNabisco for $1000, well, it’s easy to see what most people will choose.
And when everyone votes for a pony for everyone why are the sellers of ponies taking these tokens as payment?
It seem unlikely there will be any extreme wealth disparity once the poor have bought (on the free market) policies from the government such setting the taxation rate.
[You seem like a decent person albatross11, so I’ll let you in on a secret: I don’t actually support any of this policy I’ve proposed. It’s bad. But the reason my policy is bad, is the same reason that every else’s proposals to switch from democracy to a non-democracy are also bad. Namely: “Markets” are exchanges of non-market authority (property), which is inherently determined politically. So saying “let the rich people decide” is as arbitrary as saying “let people I agree with decide”. Commentator’s emphasis on the “free market”, as usual, just serves to obscure what’s really going on here.]
The poor, collectively, won’t be buying any actual decisions, because each poor person individually will be selling all of his decision tokens for cash money to the highest-bidding oligarch in their neighborhood.
That’s not a market. Simply having an object that is transferred is not sufficient to constitute a market. It’s not exactly on point for this discussion, but this was a really good Econ Talk podcast where they discuss some of the factors that are needed. There’s not 100% agreement on every detail, but this proposal clearly misses the cut.
In general, I would recommend following Econ Talk. There are many other episodes that get into these necessary background assumptions, which cut through a lot of the silly fake market talk. He also regularly brings on folks who he disagrees with, and the conversations are generally pleasant and educational.
Okay, well, that will teach me to go to work instead of staying home (and to start at the bottom in the few comments I had time to make before work today.
Fortunately, the vast majority of the points I would make have already been ably made by other people (thanks folks)
One point however:
Not particularly. Part of being moral is the potential for immorality. If you are amoral (as, I contend the free market is) then morality is irrelevant and your immorality by external standards is equally irrelevant. It’s only if you’re playing in a moral dimension that immorality is relevant/possible.
I accept that other people have differing views on what is moral and that, in a democracy (which I contend is preferable to even ECDistan, for reasons of humility and understanding that I would not hold absolute power for long barring supernatural action) the morals of other people will sometimes win out. I don’t like to lose, but it’s inherent in democracy. But with my government, ‘you can’t do this, it’s wrong,’ is an actual argument for why they should not do it (it’s probably not a winning argument, but I’d like it to be a relevant argument), whereas making that argument in the free market is…completely orthogonal to its purpose.
Now, maybe I can make the ‘this will revolt our customers and lose us money argument,’ but those aren’t actually the same thing.
The rest of your comment has been ably addressed by others, but I’ll also say, besides the point made that averaging isn’t what’s being done in either case that my answer to this:
Is that they’re trying to do different things. The market is trying to make money (with various caveats) the government is, or should be, trying to govern justly and morally. It should be no surprise that things with different goals end up in different places.
Now, it may well be that the government will end up being schizophrenically immoral due to the differences in moral judgments and preferences of its people, but that’s a different problem [link is to youtube and Yes Minister] and without very strong evidence of it (which cannot, alas simply be evidence of governments doing things I think are immoral for the reasons discussed above), I prefer to still be able to make moral arguments for my preferred policies.
The market isn’t there to make money. It’s there to maximize everybody’s utility. If you have voluntarily traded an apple for an orange, that means your utility has increased, otherwise you wouldn’t agree to it, and so did the utility of the other party. So every trade increases the sum total of utility. You can express the utility using money but that’s not essential.
There’s no reason why this utility shouldn’t include moral considerations, nor there is any reason why voting is about morality rather than about self-interest. If you want to build a home for a homeless person on your land, it’s a free market decision, reflecting your values. Although as Kanye’s example shows, then concerned neighbors come up and vote for those homes to be demolished.
You say that you like to make moral arguments, but you can do that without fighting for the access to the government, can’t you? What you really mean, it seems, is that you’d like to force other people to follow your morality, and you recognize that this is a tug of war, and sometimes other people will force you to follow their morality instead, but it’s OK, you prefer it that way.
Well, I have a problem with that. I don’t want to force anybody to follow my morality, I don’t want to be forced by anybody to follow their morality, I don’t want to play the tug-of-war or even care about it. The Left wants to murder their babies? Fine. I don’t approve but I can’t figure out any punishment more severe than the action itself, so whatever.
The entire morality tug-of-war fan club starts with a premise that taxation is moral, which I already disagree with. viVI_IViv here tells me that if not for the tax, the poor would remain hungry. With that I also disagree; but if not for the tax, the children of Yemen bombed by US for unclear reasons would not go hungry in the first place.
It looks like the most prudent course of action is to ensure that nobody is able to govern me ever again, especially not those who want to govern justly and morally, for it is precisely that kind of people who would ignore the strength of my own preferences.
You don’t want to impose your morality on others, just ensure that nobody is ever able to govern you ever again and bar all taxes.
Okay. I’ll think this is a contradictory position, but that’s fine.
Except, you’ve smuggled in an assumption there, “voluntarily” which isn’t generally true in market interactions. All the other options are worse is not the same as ‘voluntarily.’ And I strongly disagree that the market is there to maximize everyone’s utility, it’s there (optimally and ignoring market failures/monopolies/etc.) to allow optimal allocation of resources where ‘optimal’ means most profitable available (allowing for the presence of other actors).
And I probably could make moral argument in market interactions, people do, hence the existence of various funds which invest in ‘good/moral’ companies. However, I don’t actually think the market is either good at this, or the right tool for this. It is, when properly regulated, good at what it does. Trying to make it into something else seems risky and unlikely to succeed.
If your view is taxation is theft and legislation is imposition, then yes. But I don’t actually agree with those points and so I’m not going to agree with this restatement of my position, uncharitably phrased or not.
I’m going to mostly ignore the digression into abortion politics, but in the interest of not doing what I’ve claimed is done here and ignore a potentially important point, I disagree that the “Left wants to murder their babies”.
Anyway, at this point I think we’ve hit the point of irreconcilable disagreement. Interesting conversation.
ETA: Removed irrelevant aside, which made no sense after I changed course mid-sentence.
There is a finite range of options available, none of which are ideal. Alice chose what, to her, seemed the best option in that range. All other options were, by her standards, worse. How is this not the essence of a voluntary transaction by Alice? What meaning does the word “voluntary” have, if this isn’t it?
If “voluntary” for Alice means that we have to coerce Bob into offering her a better option than would exist for her absent such coercion, then that’s a sort of “voluntary” that is I think skewed into meaninglessness. Also, I’m pretty sure you intend for me to play the role of Bob far more often that that of Alice in your preferred system, and so I consider myself justified in coercing the hell out of you in regards to not establishing that system.
Okay. Given that the state has the power to tax, you have a finite range of options such as 1. Paying taxes 2. Not paying and going to jail 3. Leaving the country.
You choose the best option in this range, to pay taxes to the IRS. Is this a voluntary transaction?
Hey, as long as we all agree that it’s coercion all-the-way-down, then we can finally start talking about what the optimal economic system is, given that everyone here relies on coercion to achieve their ends. (i.e., thus rendering a “free market system” an ideological impossibility).
@John Schilling
Yep. you’ve caught me. I definitely mean to…I don’t know, steal your stuff and give it to other people?
I certainly couldn’t mean that the government should maybe make sure, for example, that there is a minimum wage which is actually liveable.
Now, to be more charitable than I think you’re being. I said “generally true” when I should have said “necessarily true”. Given that the vast majority of market interactions (especially various stock transactions) probably fit even my definition of voluntary.
ETA: Grammar correction.
So legislation isn’t imposition but wanting to live separately is imposition? Huh. Indeed, the difference might be irreconcilable.
[Edited: you’ve already answered that to John]
OK, we did a good talk. At least I hope you got some info on what others consider to be good, which is something you’re interested in. I wonder if you can roleplay a libertarian by now.
Conspicuously missing from that range of options is 0. No deal/mind your own business/nothing changes. When someone actively removes the zero option from the table, then the transaction ceases to be voluntary. That’s the big red line between both selling and panhandling on the one side, and robbery on the other. You know this, you’re just being an ass about it.
The market, almost always includes the zero option. The state, not so much.
So from your standpoint, there are no voluntary actions–with perhaps the tiny exception of choosing between two entirely equivalent alternatives?
Can you offer any definition o “liveabble” consistent with this defense of the minimum wage substantially different from “a wage which I would find tolerable to live at”? That’s the only candidate I can think of.
Possibly relevant data: The estimate of economic historians is that average real income in modern developed societies is twenty to thirty times higher than the average was for most of history. The median U.S. income for a full time wage or salary worker is about $900/week. One twentieth of that is $45/week. For someone working a 40 hour week, that’s a wage of a little over a dollar an hour, about a seventh the current minimum wage.
If you are proposing anything higher than that, or supporting that, or even supporting something half that, you have to claim that one cannot live on the income on which most of the people who ever existed did live.
Or recognize that “liveable wage” is dishonest rhetoric, designed to pretend that a value judgement is an objective fact, taking advantage of the ignorance of most of the population about how rich they are.
What’s wrong with that definition? (Or, for some consensus level, rather than any particular individual)
I would like to live in a place where everybody has a roof over their head, access to adequate nutrition, education, a library, the internet, necessary health services, and so on.
I would also like for working people to enjoy material gains beyond this minimum level, both because taxation is necessary¹ to provide for those who can’t or won’t work (and probably defense and similar responsibilities) and taxpayers should be rewarded for their contribution, and also to provide an incentive for productivity over nonproductivity.
Now, I don’t think a minimum wage is the best way to achieve this, but in combination with Basic Jobs, it could be a plausible proposal.
¹ Isn’t it?
Can one live in our society without breaking any laws or regulations while making only the sort of $1-5/day income that most people historically survived on? It seems to me there are a lot of regulations setting minimum standards, such as housing construction codes, that make it difficult, perhaps impossible.
@johan_larson
A lot of poor people in Southern Europe live in garages converted into small apartments. From the government’s viewpoint it’s illegal but if it starts enforcing it there will be a riot, so the government pretends not to notice.
@JohnSchilling
States and markets are compatible, e.g. states trade goods with eachother all the time.
But sure, within the boundaries of the of the state it doesn’t always act like a market (due to the law of the state). But the same is true for within the boundaries of private property (due to the authority of a property owner). Neither one presents a “zero option” for their inhabitants.
The dichotomy of the market and the state is as usual, a bad one, that only obscures the authority of property ownership.
Putting on my stickler hat, I can see another way, which is that certain people really meant a wage that permitted flourishing – living long enough to raise children at the same standard of living or better – and used the term “living wage” by mistake.
I have seen a few people express concern about this. The idea is that you could live at the historic wage in modern society, but you would be at a disadvantage among other people. This would impact your ability to “be fruitful and multiply”, and only because there exists this other culture that crowds you out. If not for them, you’d be fine, albeit poorer.
I don’t know the usual principled free market response to that argument. “Your culture isn’t owed the right to flourish” might be accurate, but more coldhearted than I’m used to. I’m more used to something like “well, you always have the option of expanding the frontier and settling new territory”, which still somewhat true even today, but I think growing less so, barring a breakthrough in space tech.
Meanwhile, ditto johan_larson’s question.
Pedantically, it’s probably not possible to live on $100-500/day without breaking any laws or regulations, so let’s take that to mean “laws and regulations that people actually care about in isolation, and would bother enforcing even if there wasn’t an anti-homelessness crackdown”.
Pretty sure it is still possible to do this if you’re up for tent-camping in a quasi-wilderness within walking distance of a town with a decent general store. Not sure how much land there is where you’d be allowed to step up from tent-camping to e.g. a log cabin.
Sleeping rough in a warm-ish city is probably also still possible, but much trickier due to the regulatory thicket. State or church-funded shelters would help quite a bit, if we don’t count their price against your $1-5/day.
I don’t think there’s much in the way of US cities or towns where building codes and zoning laws would allow the construction of apartments that could be viably rented in that price range, and those usually do get enforced.
@John Schilling
How much land is there where long-term camping is allowed that is also within walking distance of a town with a general store (we would probably also need to restrict this to climates that are reasonably temperate year-round, so i.e. holing up in a spot outside Boone, NC or anywhere in Wyoming might not be viable during the winter)?
There is also the question of whether that money affords you enough hygiene supplies that the townsfolk generally and the people running the store specifically continue to tolerate your presence (I think the answer there is yes, soap isn’t terribly expensive, but it can’t be totally ignored).
It also strikes me that the places where it might possibly be viable from a techical, legal standpoint are probably some of the places you would be most likely to run into something along the lines of:
“You better just git on down the road, y’hear?” *sound of shotgun cocking*
From one of your new “neighbors”, which is a social as opposed to legal limitation.
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”
When millions of people, including presidential candidates, senators, professors, journalists, and commenters here, make the same false claim in support of their position, I don’t think “mistake” is a plausible explanation.
Some may be the victims of fraudulent claims by their allies.
Ha! That’s fair.
However, I do still hope I find a response to the steelman. What’s the best way for free marketeers to address wages that might not give their earners much participation in modern society, even if it’s more than enough to live on?
@David Friedman
Except, I didn’t actually say that. I said:
Which doesn’t actually say whether it should go up or down, but rather that it should be set by the government rather than the market, which was what we were discussing.
Now, since you’d like to discuss what a wage which was livable actually is, I think the MIT Living Wage calculator is a good place to start.
I’m not an economist, but I wonder how much of the estimates you’re providing depends on charity, state support, religious support, welfare (of the bread and circuses variety) or the ability to have access to property to camp/hunt/grow your own food?
Amusingly, for someone who lives where I do, in my condition, the living wage would actually be below the current minimum wage for my state.
@ECD
This is great, as I’ve been looking for a source that calculates what is truly a minimum from a micro-economic stand-point. Federal poverty guidelines are very macro-economic based and so don’t match reality very well.
Except the link doesn’t actually give any numbers; it only talks (in vague terms) about a living wage calculator. Do you know where the actual numbers are?
Whoops, sorry, linked to the description, not the calculator: https://livingwage.mit.edu/
Duplicate comment deleted–not sure how I created it…
Before discussion how much it is, I first want to discuss what the term means. Moderns take for granted a standard of living out of the reach of what most of the population of the world lived on.
In an old blog post, I offered as a possible definition a wage at which it was possible to live in a way that gave you an life expectancy at least half that of the average person. That avoids the binary life/death criterion–if “liveable” means “you don’t instantly drop dead,” then zero would be a liveable wage.
Feel free to tweak it as you like. For a starting point, do you know what the minimal cost of a full nutrition diet is?
The MIT calculator says it is calculangon for “a minimum tolerable standard of living.” That isn’t what “liveable” means.
My guess is that they would not consider a family of five living in one room to be a minimum tolerable standard of living, but it describes how quite a lot of people through history, including a recently as Moscow a few decades back, actually lived.
@David Friedman
Do you also object to me saying “I make a living” as well?
After all, I’m clearly making more than the bare minimum needed to live. You can tell because I’ve got clothes (okay, you can’t see that, but trust me), and electricity and a computer, or phone capable of internet access.
How about ‘death tax’? There’s a false term. What’s being taxed isn’t death, but inheritance.
Look, if you want to be a quasi-prescriptivist, that’s fine, but it’s also not how politics, advertising, or people are likely to work, nor is it a convincing argument to anyone who doesn’t agree with your position.
I’ll also say, no, living wage does not mean a
I’d call it a term of art intended to mean basically what the MIT folks say it is and which you’re pretty close to here:
I’d phrase that differently, a living wage is the minimum needed for the life a hard working person is entitled to. This will vary by region and there will be any number of disagreements about it. Fortunately, we have a political system to help us sort out those disagreements.
ETA: concluding thought. Also, your historical argument seems a fully universal argument against attempts at improvement. Also, I attempted to address it in my previous response:
Not at all. Only against demagogic exaggerations of the improvements being proposed.
I’m not arguing about whether a minimum wage is a good idea. I am arguing that your rhetoric in defending is either dishonest or the product of massive ignorance.
And you have come back to where I started. When you say “a liveable wage” what you mean is, roughly, a wage you wouldn’t too much mind living at.
@eigenmoon
Enforcement of property tho.
Correct. Some left anarchists think that they can do without property and contract enforcement. I’m willing to let them live like they want but not willing to let them have my property.
Well, there you go: already making demands upon others about how they should act.
Do you not see any tension in “I just want to let people do what they want” and “Don’t violate my property”?
It’s the same tension if I said: “Hey, I don’t want to force anybody to do anything. Just so long as they don’t violate the law of the state.”
Morality presumes the individual, rendering this point moot.
I wish we had an upvote system so I could tell whether I was the only one to find that sentence/argument completely incoherent.
Literally the first person to use “the individual” in this minithread, and it’s the subject of your sentence.
Of course there’s a tension, for example what’s with some libertarians (Spooner) arguing for infinite copyright term and others (Kinsella) arguing for no copyright whatsoever. Land ownership is also frequently questioned.
But there are several order of magnitude difference between that and a state. Your argument sounds exorbitant, something like “There should be at least a rule against stealing therefore it’s totally permissible to steal everybody’s money and build a stadium because we really like football and stuff”.
@eigenmoon
You aren’t understanding how the state and property are tied together. Hypothetically, if there was a famine, and one guy had all the grain, then the state using violence to protect it from anyone trying to take it is presuming some kind of morality. It’s not a neutral position to use that violence.
I think Guy in TN and Wrong Species are right here. Property rights are not pre-moral.
@Wrong Species
Presuming some kind of morality… of the state? You mean the country where cops steal more than burglars?
You are substituting one definition of force for another’s, you argument based on this misdirection. Virtually no one discussing morality bins ‘rape’ and ‘defending oneself from rape’ as being the same thing. Yes they both can use one definition of force to be accomplished, but that is clearly not the definition being used above.
@eigenmoon
I’m not making any claim about the goodness of the state or even about the rightness of libertarianism. I’m just saying you clearly do want to enforce morality, contrary to what you said earlier.
@Wrong Species
Basically baconbits9 nailed it.
Enforcing as in sending cops against everyone in the country who doesn’t obey my legislation and enforcing as in posting a guard in my shop are two very, very different meanings of “enforcement”.
And yet both of them use a moral claim to justify violence. I honestly don’t want to get in a whole argument about libertarianism. I just want you to stop claiming that you don’t want “to force anybody to follow my morality” because even if you were right about everything else, you’re quite clearly wrong about that.
@baconbits
@eigenmoon
My definition of “force” is very neutral: the initiation of violence against another human body.
You seem to think that it’s “force ” for the state to collect taxes, but not “force” to use an armed guard to prevent people from taking things from a store. But these are the same physical actions! The only difference is that you think the store is justified in initiating force, but the state is not.
It’s clear that what we’re really talking about is the question of *entitlement*, i.e. Who should be entitled to use force and when.
@Guy in TN > “…My definition of “force” is very neutral: the initiation of violence against another human body.
You seem to think that it’s “force ” for the state to collect taxes, but not “force” to use an armed guard to prevent people from taking things from a store. But these are the same physical actions! The only difference is that you think the store is justified in initiating force, but the state is not.
It’s clear that what we’re really talking about is the question of *entitlement*, i.e. Who should be entitled to use force and when”
+1
It baffles me that some feel Pinkertons hired by ol’ man Rockefeller will be less oppressive than police hired by a city council that you vote for (the history of the actual use of private police and private armies of the company towns in the 19th century seems to me to show otherwise!).
I have to think that the preference for “one dollar one vote” over one man one vote is from always imagining that one will have dollars, which isn’t a chance I’d risk!
@Guy
With sufficiently high bird’s view you could look at the American Revolutionary War and say: hey, two groups of people are doing the same physical action to each other! Clearly they’re fighting for who’s entitled to be the King.
Your definitions are tailor-made to miss the point, which you then accomplish. Libertarianism isn’t an alternative state any more than liberal democracy is an alternative dictator.
Could you spell out what you think the difference is between libertarian property ownership and the state for me?
If they are clearly apples and oranges, surely there is at least one difference that is easily articulated.
@Guy
In libertarianism collective rights normally do not exist, that is, a group of people may do no more than its members may do. “Normally” means that there are some nuances around dealing with criminals, but the ideal is that a large group of people can’t overpower just by numbers.
The state on the other hand is entirely built around various groups such as political parties overpowering each other by numbers, and most importantly, the state overpowering individuals. All this is extremely undesirable from a libertarian viewpoint.
If a guy may not put a gun to my head and take my money to buy a football ticket, then millions of people may not put a gun to my head and take my money to build a football stadium. Even if they’re waving a colorful piece of cloth. Even if they’re singing their gang’s theme song. Even if they have selected the gang boss by an election.
Your objections applies only to a democratic states. In a non-democratic state, you wouldn’t have to worry about the majority overpowering the minority by sheer numbers. Instead, you can be assured the minority will overpower the majority (as they do when the enforce the libertarian concept of private property).
So this objection seems not to be against the state per se, but against democracies.
But can you put a gun to a guy’s head to keep him from using money to buy a football ticket, if you think you are entitled to that money (e.g. you are the owner of the money)?
Again, I suspect your objection to the state turns entirely on the question of “who is entitled to what”, rendering the presence a gun a red herring.
@Guy I think you may be missing (or it hasn’t been sufficiently mentioned) the distinction between the use of force and the initiation of force. Under the (right-wing) libertarian model if I earned the money, I would be justified to use force to keep it. It’s not about not using force, but fundamentally concerned with not “drawing first blood.”
I don’t think it necessarily follows that property rights must be enforced by the state. I could personally enforce them, negotiate an arrangement with neighbors, make an agreement to defend the property rights of my neighbor if they’ll help protect mine, hire private security on mutually agreed terms or just broadly convince others that taking property isn’t something that will be productive long-term.
Indeed I have objected specifically to a democratic state, for the other kinds of states are little more than a bunch of bandits controlling a territory, so the objections to them should be obvious. Some states (the Ottoman Empire) were even openly started by a band of bandits.
Throughout the history folks who didn’t like the state found refuge among mountains. This means their terrain is shitty, their soil is infertile, and some of them purposefully grow only those crops that spoil fast to disincentivize robbers (such as taxmen). According to you (and ECD) those guys impose their morality on others and are a minority overpowering a majority. Seriously?
It might indeed happen that experiments with cryptocurrencies and related technology will render some industries untaxable, thus massively imposing libertarian morality on the larger society. If that happens, I’d say that the society deserved it 100%, and the reason I’d say so boils down to this bizarre idea that highlanders rob from the people of the plains by preventing themselves from being robbed.
If you believe that the right to have property and indeed the right to very life itself comes down to you from the State, then I submit to you that y’all Americans are still in an unlawful revolt against the English Crown and must bow to Her Majesty and offer her appropriate reparations. If you say that it was proper for Americans to rise against their King, then clearly rights come from below, that is, from an individual.
And is not the present-day US government pretty much the new King? The old King was quartering large bodies of armed troops among Americans; the new King militarizes the police, giving them toys that they shouldn’t have at all. The old King was protecting them [the troops], by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States; the new King protects the policemen with “qualified immunity”. The old King was cutting off US Trade with all parts of the world; the new King does that with China. The old King was imposing Taxes on US without Consent; and you’re telling me that I’m imposing something on society by not consenting to the taxes?
If you want to hide in the mountains and never see anyone. And you succeed. I will agree that you have not imposed your morality on anyone. But, when the next refugee arrives at your mountain farm and you drive him off with your pitchfork, yes, you are imposing your morality on him.
You may well be right to do so (especially if you substitute bandit for refugee), but you are still doing so. Whether you are doing so and whether you are right to do so are two different questions.
Also, whether you are attempting to do so and whether you are succeeding at doing so are different questions (hence the minority imposing its will on the majority conundrum you have created).
I can’t speak for Guy in TN, but I don’t believe this and I think it’s orthogonal to our entire conversation.
Yes. Especially if you actually don’t pay them, as opposed to don’t consent to pay them. Again, you might be right to do so (in this case, i do not think so), but that’s different from whether you are imposing something on society by refusing to abide by its rules.
Let me give you a different example. If I lived in a society which required all members to get married and have children to support the community going forward, and I were gay and refused to do so, that would be an imposition on the society. I believe, for moral reasons, that this would be an imposition that it was right to make, but it would still be an imposition.
From my perspective, it really seems like you want to have it both ways, you say
And then you make a whole series of moral arguments. There is a case that libertarianism is moral, which you obviously know because you’re making it. Pretending otherwise just confuses the issue.
Or at least confuses me.
@Compbiocheminfo
Are you saying you would be justified in initiating force (“drawing first blood”) in order to keep it?
@eigenmoon
My position, since I haven’t spelled it out, is that libertarian property is essentially indistinguishable from a non-democratic state. So pointing out the difference between libertarian property and a democratic state isn’t very interesting to me, since we both already agree about the difference on this axis.
Yep, if he is enforcing property rights. If there is a fight between one property owner vs. two non-property owners, and the property owner wins, then this situation is quite literally a minority overpowering a majority.
@Guy
I suspect you’ll disagree, but I think the taking itself would be initiation of force. I don’t consent to you taking my $item, you then apply force that overrides that consent. You may not believe in property, but taking something I built (or traded for using value I created) is no different from forcing me to build it for you.
@ECD
I see. According to your definition of imposing morality, if the society decides to sacrifice me to Baal but I escape, I’m imposing morality on the society. Under that definition, I do indeed want to impose. I just defined it differently, in this example it involved destroying statues of Baal.
@Guy
Again, seriously? The difference between libertarianism and monarchy is the presence of a King. There, spelled it out for you.
Although there’s also an anarcho-monarchist Hoppe who makes me go wtf.
@Compbiocheminfo
Notice how the term has shifted. At first we were defining force, as you put it, as “drawing first blood”. But now you have expanded the term to include “applying force” to use of an object that overrides the consent of the person you think is entitled to it.
But this just loops us back to where we started. Because basically everyone is in agreement, libertarians, communists, monarchists, run-of-the-mill centrists, that if someone is entitled to a thing, then they should only be parted from that thing with their consent. We all just disagree on who is entitled to what.
And since its your theory of moral entitlement which is doing all the work of determining whether an action constitutes “initiation of force”, you can’t point to the lack of “initiation of force” as evidence of a superior economic system.
Let me flip it, so you can see why:
“Libertarianism is bad, because it relies on the initiation of force. This is because I think the state is entitled to the tax money. So when people, without the IRS’s consent, force the IRS not to be able to collect what is rightfully theirs, that’s initiation of force. I just wish people would respect the rights of property owners (the IRS)”
^This is the equivalent to what I hear when I talk to libertarians
@eigenmoon
What powers does a king have over his dominion, that a libertarian property owner doesn’t have over his property?
There are some differences, like if you come to my house as a guest I can impose a smoking ban on you but can’t rifle through your wallet.
But I think this is not really the issue. There was an interesting society in early modern Poland that is basically ancap but only for nobles. Libertarianism is that but with everyone being noble. Monarchy is that but with only one noble.
@Guy I don’t think the term has shifted in terms of “drawing first blood.” I think the first non-voluntary interaction meets that standard.
There is an underlying reality in the sense that not all claims are equally legitimate. I don’t think that the state or it’s agents (appointed or elected, etc.) can claim to be acting defensively/voluntarily to take, $item that I myself built (or to consider me the aggressor in not surrendering). This is because that $item (or it’s equivalent value) wouldn’t exist, except for the part of my life used to create it.
From your perspective, me denying the use of my life by others might constitute the initiation of force, but I think there’s a strong case that I am acting in defense of my life (even if just a portion, I’m guessing that even a very temporary kidnapping would still be initiation of force by just about everyone’s standards).
@Compbiocheminfo
All material things consist of a natural component. Even the most technologically advanced items, for example a computer, rely on silicon and plastic. So all items you help create consist at least of labor+natural resources.
Because of this, when you claim property on an item, you necessarily claim property over an uncreated natural resource. And by doing so, you prevent other people from accessing that same natural resource, making them worse off.
So while you may be tempted to think of a resource you used your labor to help create as “nature+your labor”, and therefore the item is essentially an extension of yourself, it is more accurately thought of as “people made worse off+ your labor”, since that includes what happens when you claim property over a piece of nature.
So should people who are made worse off, have in say in their change of condition? I would think so.
And apologies for piling on too hard, but the idea that labor+capital results in the laborer owning the capital isn’t how property works, even in libertarian theory.
If you hire me to plant crops in your field, I don’t become the owner of part of your field. But why not? The fact that you payed me should be of no relevance, because under this metaphysical framework my labor was added to the capital of the field, which now means that the field is literally an extension of myself.
The libertarian “homestead theory” attempts to solve this problem by saying that only the first laborer is the one who matters. But this makes no sense: if labor+capital means you become part of the capital, then any labor plus capital should mean the same thing. But this would result in mass collective ownership, which is not typically what people who deploy this line of thinking are going for.
@Guy I don’t think you’ve been disrespectful at all, and I hope I haven’t come off that way either.
However, I completely disagree with your premise in how you are thinking of a resource. That is, I don’t think a thing is a resource until human ingenuity finds a use for it: finding oil was once considered a nuisance in trying to dig wells for water, unrefined nuclear fuel would have once been called just “dirt” a hundred years ago. To clarify, you might think about the quantity of oil reserves up until the 18th century . Even now, the more oil we use up the more oil we seem to have:
https://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?product=oil&graph=reserves
Because we keep finding more uses for oil we keep redefining what counts as an oil resource through better technology.
This is more evident if you look at GDP per capita (the best proxy I can think of for human well-being over time – https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth), we keep “using up” more and more stuff, and human well-being keeps increasing. If the effects were so negative (if it was really the atoms and not the time/effort/talents), I would expect to see wealth decreasing as population increases.
If I buy a computer, I may deny the specific atoms of metal, plastic, and silicon to others, but I would argue that these don’t really have intrinsic value to begin with – they were worthless without the time, effort and talents that made them into a computer, which is what I am really purchasing through my own money (which is just a measurement of my own time, effort and talents). Even beyond this, I’ll use the computer to benefit others through entertainment and productivity, etc. (I wouldn’t make the purchase unless the value was greater to me than the money and I wouldn’t sell my time unless the money was worth more to me than my time).
Yes the Earth technically has a finite mass, but it is effectively an infinite resource as we keep finding more clever ways to use different parts of it. Of course, you may also have concerns beyond maximizing human well-being, but generally only harm to other human beings would count from a libertarian perspective.
You mention land use a few times and while it’s true that I would be preventing someone else from using the land, that land had to be made valuable somehow – even for fertile farm land there are still concerns of irrigation, maintenance, etc. and there’s plenty of land that is effectively worthless – at least at the moment. I would still argue that the exchange is primarily for of the time/effort/talent to create the value.
While it’s true that virtually everything was conquered at some point and there isn’t an infinite chain of voluntary exchange of values throughout all of human history. However, for the vast majority of value, this would still be true (GDP is many orders of magnitude greater than it used to be, so value creation would have to be much, much greater than mere value transfer). After N degrees of separation (and X generations) it wouldn’t be possible to provide just compensation to the victims of the initiation of force anyway (who receives and who pays for The Norman Conquest?).
The idea that value comes from a combination of both labor and nature should be pretty straightforward.
For example, it takes roughly the same physical amount of labor to dig up a piece of coal as it does a piece of gold. But why then, do people value the gold more? The obvious answer, I think, is that there are intrinsic properties of the gold that people deem valuable compared to the properties of the coal. While the labor necessary to acquire the gold is certainly factored in, that’s not the only source from where the value is derived.
All this shows is that the creation of property can make people better off in aggregate, which is quite different from the question of it makes individuals worse off.
For example, if I steal money from a drug addict to fund a factory (transforming $1000 worth of value into $10,000,000), you could say that I made everyone better off as a collective. But I can’t make the argument to the drug addict that my action’s don’t have a negative effect on him.
If the arg is “yes, the creation of property makes some people worse off, but its worth it in the end because of how much better off it makes everyone on average”, you won’t get any disagreement from me.
But I would also then ask why that same logic isn’t extended to taxation and welfare by the state. Yes, it makes a few people worse off (the rich), but the utility gains by the poor vastly make up for it.
I find this argument to be structurally interesting.
The importance of establishing a chain of voluntary transfers isn’t something that I actually care about. It’s irrelevant to my philosophy. The “chain of voluntary exchange” is a libertarian concern, primarily used to argue why the state’s power is supposedly illegitimate, while private property is legitimate.
So when a Leftist such as myself points to private property, and asks if it follows a chain of voluntariness, it’s not because we are secretly deeply concerned with voluntarism. That’s not an axis that we even judge the moral legitimacy of the ownership. I’m just seeing if the libertarian is willing to consistently apply their standards to other power structures besides the state.
So the next move, one I think that was popularized by Bryan Caplan, is what you argue for here. Something along the lines of “Meh, we can’t re-litigate the past, and a chain is voluntariness isn’t important anyway, so we shouldn’t worry about it”. Which is interesting, because I thought the lack of voluntary acquisition was the core argument against the sovereignty of the state to begin with.
Like, if the chain of voluntariness doesn’t matter, what’s the argument against the state’s territorial claims of sovereignty again?
@Guy We’ve come to an incredibly fundamental point of disagreement. I think it is entirely/almost entirely the ingenuity that provides the value, and not the atoms and that the evidence strongly supports this.
If the atoms were intrinsically valuable, then the amount of wealth should be relatively fixed, but it isn’t. Since total wealth has increased by orders of magnitude, I would have to conclude that at the very least, the vast majority (and increasing) share of the value in a thing is due to the ingenuity and not inherent. If the mix between ingenuity and atoms’ intrinsic contribution were relatively even in the creation of wealth, then I would expect GDP per capita to stay flat (as we grab more atoms), but it is exponentially increasing.
Gold mining and coal mining are completely different processes, so it’s not surprising they produce different amounts of value. There might be the incredibly rare situation that a person just trips over a nugget of hundreds of pounds, but I think this is rare enough (and constitutes such a small fraction of total wealth) to be negligible.
If the property owner is 99.99+% defending legitimately acquired wealth and <0.01% Bogarting the intrinsic wealth of atoms, I'm completely fine with updating my "don't initiate force" principle to "minimize the initiation of force," and saying the proper minimization is to protect property rights.
I can apply a similar logic to the case of conquest, if the initiation took place far enough back and only accounts for a tiny percentage of the total, then 99+% is voluntarily acquired and I'm okay with simply minimizing the initiation of force. Whereas if I take something in the present, a retaliatory/defensive response can get us closer to the voluntary ideal.
I know it's tangential to the initiation of force question, but I think that you'll still end up with less overall flourishing taking the property and redistributing it due to secondary, tertiary, etc. effects through perverse incentives, but that's not really our topic.
Markets necessarily rely on the existence of property, which does not include the “zero option” any more than the law of the state does
Evidence of which, is what happens if I violated your property. It’s an exact parallel to if I violated the law of the state
I am kind of curious here, Guy. You are technically correct that violence to defend one’s property is indeed not a zero option (as defined by John), unless one treats owning property as a kind of baseline. I think private property is treated as a baseline by John and by eigen, so that taking one’s personal property is kind of equivalent to attacking one’s body. I personally am pretty much on John’s and eigen’s side. I do think that attacking one’s body is worse than taking one’s property, but still they are somewhat equivalent. I don’t think you agree, since the existence of property seems to violate the zero principle in your mind.
So I am trying to understand your point of view. You apparently don’t consider taking one’s property in any way equivalent to protecting one’s body. Do you believe in private property at all? IS there some ownership principle where people have the right to protect “their” property? Say property that one has produced oneself, or property traded for with other property one has produced?
I can’t speak for Guy but it’s not about proving that private property is bad. It’s about showing how intertwined it is with the state. The real question here is how square your claim that attacking the body is worse than theft while also claiming they are somewhat equivalent. Libertarians can take private property as a “baseline”(smuggling in some complicated claims with that word), but that’s not based on some objective feature of the world. It’s your own normative belief that is not a priori better than what everyone else believes.
You are correct to note that much of this argument is really about what the “baselines” ought to be, i.e., who is entitled to what, not about “use of force”.
To help illustrate why, let me flip it around. Let’s say I defend taxation by saying
A: “Taxation is good, because it doesn’t rely on the use of force”. B: “But of course it relies on force, see all the government men with guns?”
A: “Ah, but you don’t call it ‘use of force’ when initiating violence to defend property you believe someone is entitled to, right? Well I think the state is entitled to the tax money”
So the first sentence, where I talk about “force”, isn’t actually doing any argumentative work here. If I want to defend taxation in a less tautological manner, I should instead do so on grounds that I think the state is morally entitled to the tax money, since that’s what the question is actually hinging on. And likewise, that’s the argument the libertarian needs to make as well.
I don’t support “private property” in the libertarian/ancap/liberal economic conception of it. I do support “private property” in the sense of the legal construct that exists in today’s modern economies, i.e. the state setting up a system where individuals are granted certain decision-making powers over resource use, with the state retaining the highest sovereignty, including the rights of taxation, regulation, and confiscation.
No I don’t think so, at least not in the “natural right” sense that you are probably using the term. I also don’t think there’s a “natural right” to protect a person’s body.
But for both cases it makes sense, from a practical perspective, to create a legal right for the protection of human bodies, and also the protection of property, in certain circumstances. But this isn’t based on any underlying axiomatic principles (is not based on “voluntary transactions”, “self ownership”, “homesteading”, ect) and could be revoked/changed depending on the context of the situation.
@Guy
Well I don’t believe in “natural rights” myself, being a consequentialist, not a deontologist (sp?). But it very much makes sense to me that people will generally be happier and more prosperous when there is a presumption that each person’s body and one’s property (however that property is defined) is safe from attacks from others, and that defending such is not considered an offense. I would like to see such a presumption be both cultural and governmental. I do think that such presumptions do mostly exist in today’s Western society, so I bring this up for philosophical reasons, not because I am looking for change in the world on this matter. Also, I think property can be defined in quite different ways (such as intellectual property, land, inheritance). What is important in my schema is that however personal property is defined, people have the right to defend it.
I say the above to explain why I think John’s concept of zero option makes sense and is important. Individuals have the option of participating or not in any potential private market transactions. Individuals do not have the option not to participate in governmental transactions. To me the point is that government inherently is more confining and less free. IMO, government is necessary for some things. But I think the default should be voluntary transactions to satisfy needs.
@Mark
I agree as a general principle. However, I think there should be certain caveats. For example, in order for “protection of property” to have meaning, there must be an exception to the protection of people’s bodies. Otherwise, you would have no recourse, no means of defending, any legal property that you owned from people who try to take it. All you could do to a thief is be like “Hey, don’t do that!”.
So, right off the bat, if we agree that people should be able to defend what they are entitled to, that necessarily implies that they should be able to initiate bodily violence against other people. And critically, by doing so, this precludes any system that protects property from being “voluntary” or based entirely on “free exchange”.
Which I am fine with. I support the creation of legal property, as well as the institutions of taxation and state regulation.
While this is an admirable advocacy of respect for the rule of law, I cannot bring myself to be so agnostic on the question of how property is defined. I think the content of the property law has too strong of implication for human well-being to do so. For example, if I was living in a system where the rule was “the King owns everything”, I would think this system to be unjust, and fight against the King’s ability to defend his property.
But you don’t have the “zero option” of choosing not to participate when you are within the boundaries of the authority of the property owner. And sure, you could just leave, but the same argument could be applies to the boundaries state.
The more underlying issue, is that John is working with a bad dichotomy here. The appropriate comparison to state authority isn’t market exchanges (since after all, states can participate in markets), but rather private authority. And likewise, the inverse of markets is simply non-markets, which occur under the authority of both states and private entities.
The market isn’t a person, you can’t make arguments, moral or otherwise, with it. Neither is the political market that determines what the government is doing.
All of the choice, and all the potential for moral or immoral actions, is with people–to whom you can make arguments. You can try to persuade voters, legislators, lobbyists, bureaucrats, judges, the people whose actions determine what the government does, of things, including moral things.
In exactly the same sense, you can try persuade consumers, workers, stockholders, … the people whose actions determine market outcomes, of things, including moral things. In that respect the situations are identical. You are being fooled by imagining the government as a person. It isn’t.
The difference comes in the ways in each system maps individual preferences into outcomes. In that respect the market is much preferable, for reasons I can go into if you are sufficiently curious.
I appreciate your position, but I think you’ve expanded the definition of market here to the point where everything is a market and given it is and remains my position that markets are amoral, I’m going to disagree with that position.
I also have to say, it’s hilarious to me that we’ve arrived at discussion of the political market in a discussion which began with Eigenmoon arguing why government, unlike cultural or the market, is not subject to the forces which cause those to be ‘superintelligences’ subject to the stresses and forces which mean, maybe, we should be careful about screwing with them…
I agree with everything but your last two paragraphs. I think that nationalism is fundamentally incompatible with liberal capitalist democracy, because globalism itself is a consequence of liberalism, capitalism, and democracy. Capitalism has resulted in rapid technological progress, largely in the fields of transportation and communication, making the world a smaller place. And liberal capitalism seeks to spread out and expand as much as possible, fostering trade between nations; indeed, the fundamental essence of liberalism (in the International Relations sense) is that trade is preferable to war, on the basis that absolute gains are better than relative gains. Furthermore, liberal democracy is inextricably tied to methodological individualism and equality of opportunity, which are anathema to nationalistic outlooks; when you make a point of viewing people and treating people as individuals first and foremost, rather than making pre-judgments about them on the basis of some group identity, then it becomes harder to simply reject people who happen to have a different skin color or a different set of genitalia or a different sexual orientation. This becomes doubly true when you have a global communication system that allows people from all over the world to communicate with each other in real time.
And I don’t find that Steve Sailer article you linked convincing at all. (In fact, I checked out that site’s weekly news roundup to get a sense of what it’s about, and I found it so utterly disgusting that I’m inclined to update my priors against anything posted there. But let’s put that aside for now.) The key problem is that Sailer doesn’t distinguish between liberal democracy and illiberal democracy. The oldest and purest form of illiberal democracy is, of course, mob rule – the peasants with torches and pitchforks that Sailer is describing, ready to drive out both the minorities below them and the elites above them. But while all democracies are built upon popular sovereignty, liberal democracies are also built upon civil rights and rule of law, which serve to protect minorities and individuals from the majority’s whims. Illiberal democracy may be incompatible with diversity, but liberal democracy is the best defender of diversity in existence, far better than the superficially cosmopolitan autocracies that Sailer mentions. It’s also telling that most of Sailer’s examples come from war-torn Middle Eastern countries that lack the sociopolitical stability to guarantee things like constitutional rights and equality under the law. It seems doubtful that anything similar would happen in stable developed nations with strong political institutions. Ultimately, the sort of right-populism you’re talking about is doomed to failure; its victories are, to use your terminology, contingent victories rather than fundamental ones.
In my opinion, as someone who’s extensively studied both Fukuyama and his critics, the only problem with his theory is the timeframe. And even then, it’s less of a problem with the theory itself and more of a problem with the assumptions that it led people to make. They assumed that the triumph of liberalism would happen overnight following the fall of the Berlin Wall, whereas it’s bound to be a much slower and messier process that faces a lot of pushback along the way.
Posted because it’s something that shouldn’t be good but weirdly works: Caramelldansen for banjo.
Love it 😀
Thumbs up! (c:
Just had a small realization. There’s an old dynamic in my country’s history between population, nobility and king. The king was (almost) always the champion of the people, because he needed that to counterbalance the power of nobility and avoid becoming a figurehead.
My first guess of the current wave of populism is that it’s a reaction to a perceived “Establishment”. Which, and that’s the realization, is the very same age old dynamic of Nobility asserting its control, and the population finding a champion to fight them.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily make the champion a good guy, and there is a real potential for a Very Bad Guy. But it does mean that at least on this particular dimension the interests align – he’ll have to be anti-Establishment because that’s both his biggest problem and that being so is the source of his political power.
Isn’t Vlad Dracula a folk hero for doing things like having his castle built by the nobility’s forced labor?
He’s famous for a lot of things, and we really really miss him. There’s a story on how the country got so honest (mostly though impalement of robbers) that he had a gold cup placed by a fountain at a crossroads. Many drank from it, admired it, but none dared steal it.
Did I mention we miss him?
Thanks. I think you did!
@Radu Floricica: I don’t think so. Our country had just 4 kings. Charles I let the army repress brutally the peasant revolt in 1907, Ferdinand and Michael I were just figureheads, Charles II was a king-dictator and quite unpopular, especially at the end. The only one that resembles your description is Cuza, but he wasn’t a king, Romania wasn’t yet a kingdom (I think the title he used outside was “prince”).
As for the princes who ruled the former states that later united into Romania, Michael the Brave (Mihai Viteazu) made serfdom stronger, forbidding serfs to leave the land. Vlad Tepes punished extremely harshly both nobles and commoners (@Le Maistre Chat: I never heard about him using nobles to build a castle; he was seen as a hero for fighting against Turks).
I’m apparently very unpopular for saying so, but I never really got how they’re “our” kings. I definitely didn’t mean them.
He did a bunch of things, all popular with the commons (was my impression). Fighting the Turks was a big one, though he also converted to Roman Catholicism and got Papal support (the Wallachians were Eastern Orthodox).
Cite for the Castle Dracula thing.
What if it’s the case that democratic success is really just a butterfly effect stemming from American geography and a few accidents of history?
1. Britain managed to secure the coast to half a continent with the best arable land, the best river networks and the best natural resources.
2. Britain had egalitarian values congruent to democracy, which flourished given the distance to the motherland and led to their logical conclusion: democracy.
3. The country that sat on and conquered the best parts of North America had the opportunity to enforce its ideology across the world and capitalised upon it.
In WW1, it was the Americans who bailed out the Allies, it was the flood of US troops that forced Germany to launch the Spring Offensives and those same troops who were crucial in defeating it.
In WW2, the US played a pretty substantial role. They beat Japan in the Pacific, they provided Allied manpower and industry for the Western Front. They spearheaded the air offensive that destroyed the Luftwaffe.
In the Cold War, the US managed to capitalize on the fact that it cheaply secured the industrious regions of Germany and Japan. The Soviets got the poor half of Germany and a completely destroyed Eastern Europe in exchange for 27 million lives. The end was never in doubt.
The US hasn’t faced a peer competitor in its own hemisphere. They have never lost tens of millions in a land invasion like the Russians. They had an immensely privileged position, dominating the entirety of a landmass around the same size as Europe and its only natural that their ideology would conquer the world.
I question the narrative that WWI was a victory for liberal democracy. Both Germany and Austria, while they were still nominally empires, had been on a decades-long path of liberalization and democratization, and overall they weren’t much more authoritarian than the third French Republic or than the Kingdom of Italy (and they were certainly less so than Russia — which was in the ally side!) Them winning WWI wouldn’t have changed that, and if anything it may have made the transition smoother and given less breeding-ground to fascism.