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Konkvistador comments on Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012 - Less Wrong
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I'm reading Moldbug's Patchwork and considering it as a replacement for Democracy. I expected it to be dystopia, but it actually sounds like a neat place to live, it is however a scary Eutopia.
Has anyone else read this recently?
Every time I read Moldbug's stuff I am startled by the extent to which he tries to give an economic analysis and solution to a political problem.
The reason we have government isn't that we sat down once upon a time in the state of nature to design a political system. We have government because we live in a world where violence is a potentially effective tactic for achieving goals. Government exists to curb and control this tendency, to govern it.
Uncontrolled violence turns out to be destructive to both the subject of the violence and also the wielder -- it turns out that it's potentially more fun to be in a citizen-soldier in a democracy than a menial soldier in an tyranny, or a member of a warlord's entourage.
Politically, we don't do welfare spending and criminal justice purely for the fuzzies, or solely because they're ends in themselves. Every so often, we have organized and vigorous protests against the status quo. When this happens, those in power can either appease the protesters, use force to crush the protesters, or try to make them go away quietly without violence. If the protesters are determined enough, this last approach doesn't work. And the government can either use clubs, or buy off the protesters.
It turns out that power structures that become habitually brutal don't do too well. People who get in the habit of using force aren't good neighbors, aren't good police, and aren't trusty subordinates. Bystanders don't want to live in a society that uses tanks and poison gas on retired veterans or that kills protesting students; leaders who try to use those tactics tend to get voted out of power -- or else overthrown.
Moldbug talking about cryptographically controlled weapons is missing the point: we don't want to live in a society that uses too much overt violence on its members. And we tolerate a lot of inefficiencies to avoid this need.
Just because governments often employ violence just before they loose power does not mean that employing violence was the cause of their downfall. Many sick people take medication just before they die. Sure violence may do them no good, like an aspirin does no good for a brain tumour, but it is hard to therefore argue that aspirin is the cause of death. The assertion is particularly dubious since historically speaking governments have used a whole lot of violence and this actually seems to have often saved them. Even in modern times we have plenty examples of this.
This Robin Hanson post seems somewhat relevant:
The state can be thought of as a sedentary bandit, who instead of pillaging and burning a village of farmers extorted them and eventually started making sure no one else pillages or burns them since that interferes with the farmers paying him. The roving bandit has no incentive to assure the sustainability of a particular farming settlement he parasites. A stationary banding in a sense farms the settlement.
Government can expediently be defined, ultimately beneath all the full, as a territorial monopolist of violence. There is a trade off between government violence used to prevent anyone else from exercising violence and violence by other organized groups. How do we know we are at the optimal balance in a utilitarian sense?
Also Moldbug dosen't want to do away with government he wants to propose a different kind of government. And we have in the past had systems of government that where the result of people sitting down and then trying to design a political system. To take modern examples of this (though I could easily pull out several Greek city states), perhaps the Soviet Union was a bad design, but the United States of America literally took over the world. In any case this demonstrates that new forms of government (not necessarily very good government) can be designed and implemented.
Government violence s ideally more predictable than the violence it prevents (that's the whole reason we in the West think rule of law is a good idea). Sure the government has other tools to prevent violence than just violence of its own, but ultimately all law is violence. In the sense of the WHO definition:
You can easily make the violence painless by say sedating a would be rapist with the stun setting on your laser gun, and you can easily also eliminate the suffering of imprisoning him, by modifying his brain with advanced tools. But changing a persons mind without their consent or by giving them a choice between 6 years imprisonment and modifying their brain has surely just experienced violence according to the above definition.
The point of the the cryptographically controlled weapons is that you need a very small group of people who thinks being a citizen soldier is less fun than being paid handsomely by Blackwater to work.
I believe the main thrust of Moldbug's writings is that we should be (but aren't) solving an engineering problem rather than moralizing when we engage in politics (although, he seems to fall into this trap himself what with all his blaming of "leftists" for everything under the sun).
So much of Moldbug's belief system, and even his constructed identity as an "enlightened reactionary", ride on his complete rejection of whiggish historical narratives; however, he takes this to such an extent that he ends up falling into the very trap that Whig Interpretation's original critic, Herbert Butterfield warned of in his seminal work on the subject:
Except, none of his prescriptions are sensible engineering. Crypto-controlled weapons as foundation for social order are more science-fiction than sensible design for controlling violence in society. it's much too easy for people to build or buy weapons, or else circumvent the protections. Pinning your whole society on perfect security seems pretty crazy from a design point of view.
Right, I don't think he succeeds either. I was merely trying to summarize his project as I think he sees it.
Abba Lerner, "The Economics and Politics of Consumer Sovereignty" (1972):
In raw utility the inefficiencies we tolerate to pay for this could easily be diverted to stop much more death and suffering elsewhere. Perhaps we are simply suffering from scope insensitivity, our minds wired for small tribes where the leader being violent towards a person means the leader being violent to a non-trival fraction of the population.
Also are you really that sure that people wouldn't want to live in a Neocameralist system? When you say efficiency I don't think you realize how emotionally appealing clean streets, good schools, low corruption and perfect safety from violent crime or theft is. What would be the price of real-estate there? It is not a confidence that he gives Singapore as an example, a society that uses more violence against its citizens than most Western democracies.
Further more consider this:
That sounds pretty draconian. But we also know Singapore is a pretty efficiently run government by most metrics. Is Singapore an unpleasant place to life? If so why do so many people want to live there? If you answer economic opportunities or standard of living or job opportunities, well then maybe Moldbug does have a point in his very economic approach to it.
I had assumed we were talking about government for [biased, irrational] humans, not for perfect utilitarians or some other mythical animal. I was saying that routine application of too much violence will upset humans, not that it should upset them.
I'm sure many people would live quite happily in Singapore. Clearly, it works for the Singaporians. But I don't think that model can be replicated elsewhere automatically, nor do I think Moldbug has a completely clear notion why it works.
Moldbug talks about splitting up the revenue generation (taxation) from the social-welfare spending. This seems like a recipe for absentee-landlord government. And historically that has worked terribly. The government of Singapore does have to live there, and that's a powerful restraint or feedback mechanism.
In the US (and I believe the rest of the world), the population would like to pay lower taxes, and pointing to the social welfare benefits is the thing that convinces them to pay and tolerate higher rates. I think once the separation between spending and taxation becomes too diffuse, you'll get tax revolts. Remember, we are designing a government for humans here -- short-sighted, biased, irrational, and greedy. So the benefits of unpleasant things have to be made as obvious as possible.
I'm open to being corrected on this, since I don't have a good source for Singaporean immigration statistics, but my prior is that people who choose to live in Singapore are coming there from other places that are much more corrupt while also still being rather draconian (China, Malaysia). I'm pretty sure well-educated Westerners could get a well-paying job in Singapore, and the reason few move there is not, in fact, about economics.
I've read through the pieces, and I'm struggling to come up with something to say that a reactionary absolutist like Moldbug would find interesting. For example, in the first piece linked, Moldbug says (Let's ignore that the last sentence is questionable as a matter of historical fact):
I don't disagree that it is a Schelling point. But is it stable? History strongly suggests that legitimacy is a real thing that is an important variable for predicting whether governments can stay in power and institutions can remain influential in a society. In other words, there's a reason why mature absolute monarchies (like Louis XIV) invented "divine right of kings." I assert that you can't throw that away (as Moldbug does) and assume that nothing changes about the setup.
My next point would be that there is no reason to expect a government to make a profit. But Moldbug's commitment to accepting the verdict of history means that he wouldn't find this very persuasive. if one believes that might makes right, then government probably does need to make a profit. In other words, when you acquire power by winning, there's every reason to expect that failing to continue winning will lead in short order to your replacement.
The idea is that it is possible to make the cake bigger by having efficient government. This is why he invokes Laffer curves as relevant concepts.
I find myself sympathetic to this. If you say give some amount of stocks to foundations that provide free healthcare to those who can't afford it or preserve natural habitat ect. that matches current GDP spending, but come up with a government that is more efficient at providing funds for all these endeavours you get more spent in an absolute sense on healthcare or environmentalism than otherwise.
If you want to do efficient charity, you don't work in a soup kitchen, you work hard where you have a comparative advantage to earn as much money as possible and then donate it to an efficient charity. Moldbug may not approve but I actually think his design with the right ownership structure, might be together with some properly designed foundations be a much better "goodness generating machine" than a democratic US or EU might ever be.
I also like the idea of being able to live in a society with laws that you can agree with, if you don't like it you just leave and go somewhere where you do agree with them.
The profit motive is transparent and it is something that is easy to track down than "doing good", which is as the general goal of government far less transparent. As a shareholder or employee in a prosperous society you could easily start lobbying among other share holders to spend their own money to set up new charity foundations or have existing ones re-evaluate their goals.
It also has the neat property of seemingly guaranteeing human survival in a Malthusian em future (check out Robin Hansons writing on this). As long as humans own stocks it wouldn't matter if they where made obsolete by technology they could still basically collect a simply vast amount of rent which would continue growing at a rapid rate for millennia or even millions of years. The real problem is how these humans don't get hacked into being consumption machines by various transhuman service providers but optimize for Eudaimonia.
He says robot armies and cryptographically locked weaponry eliminate the need to care about what your population thinks. The technology simply wasn't there in the time of Louis XIV. The governing structure has no need to mess with people's minds in various ways to convince them it is a just system.
And the thing is, while such technology as ubiquitous surveillance or automated soldiers in the hands of government sounds scary, there seems to be no relevant reason at all to think other government types won't have this technology anyway. Worse the technology to modify your mind in various ways will also be rapidly available (as if current brainwashing and propaganda technology wasn't scary enough).
In other words people living in such Patchwork instead of the futuristic US or the PRC would trade political freedoms for freedom of thought and association. The last two are not really guaranteed in any sense, but he gives several strong reasons why a sovereign corporation might have an interest in preserving them. Reasons that most other states as self-stabilizing systems don't seem to have.
He basically says that whether we like it or not might does make right. The USA defeated Nazi Germany not because it was nobler but because it was stronger. This is why Germany is a democracy today. The US defeated the Soviet Union not because it was nobler but because its economy could support more military spending and the Soviet Communist party couldn't or wouldn't use military means as efficiently as say the Chinese to stomp out dissenting citizens. This is why Russia is a democracy today. Democracies won because they where better at convincing people that they where legitimate, their economies where better and as a result of these two they where better at waging war than other forms of government.
He also seems very confident that if his proposed form of government was enacted somewhere it would drastically out-compete all existing ones.
Many government programs provide services to people who can't afford the the value of the service provided. Police and public education provided to inner-cities cannot be paid from the wealth of the beneficiaries. Moldbug complains about the inefficiency of the post office, but that problem is entirely caused by non-efficiency based commitments like delivering mail to middle-of-nowhere small towns. Without those constraints, USPS looks more like FedEx. That's not a Moldbuggian insght - everyone who's spent a reasonable amount of time thinking about the issue knows this trade-off.
And I simply don't believe this is a likely outcome. There will be times when a realm does not want to use its full arsenal of unobtanium weapons (i.e. to deal with jaywalking and speeding). Anyway, isn't it easier (and more efficient) to use social engineering to suppress populist sedition?
I mostly agree with your analysis, in that I think we've been lucky in some sense that the good guys won. But doesn't Moldbug have some totally different explanation for the Cold War, involving infighting between the US State Dept. and the Pentagon?
I think it likely that any system of government backed by unobtanium weapons would defeat any existing government system. It's not clear to me that a consent-of-the-governed system backed by the super weapons wouldn't beat Moldbug's absolutist system. And even if that isn't true, why should we want a return to absolutism. It's painfully obvious to me that my rejection of absolutism is the basis of most of my disagreement with Moldbug. I think government should provide "unprofitable" services, and he doesn't.
The good guys did win, because I'm not a National Socialist or a Communist or a Muslim or a Roman. But I don't think we where lucky. "The Gift We Give Tomorrow" should illustrate why I don't think you can say we where "lucky". By definition anyone that won would have made sure we viewed them as the more or less good guys.
That wasn't Moldbug's argument about the USSR, it was mine :)
Yes, if I recall right his model goes something like this: The State Department wanted to make the Soviet Union its client much like say Britain or or West Germany or Japan where, it viewed US society and Soviet society as on a converging path, with the Soviet Union's ruling class having its heart in the right place but sometimes going too far. Something they could never do with any truly right wing regime. This is why they often basically sabotaged the Pentagon's efforts and attempts at client making. The Cold War and the Third World in general would have never been as bloody if the State Department vs. the Pentagon civli war by proxy wouldn't have been going on.
Sure but I don't want to live in a society that takes this logic to its general conclusion. I want to be able to dislike the government I'm living under even if I can't do anything about it. Many people might not either, and we may be willing to tolerate living in a different less wealthy part of patch land or paying higher taxes for it.
What is that? Can we depack this concept?
I'm trying to figure out what you mean by this. Can't we have a "Deliver mail to far off corners foundation" and give it 0.5% of the stocks of Neo-Washington corp. when the thing takes off? Do you in principle object to government being for profit or is it just you think that nonprofits funded by shares of the government of equal GDP fractions as they have right now couldn't provide services of equally quality? What is the governments mission then? Which unprofitable services should it provide? All possible ones? Those that have the most eloquent rent-seekers? Those that are "good"? Can you define then the mission of government in words that are a bit more specific than universal benevolence? And if democratic government is so good at that why don't we have seed AI report to congress for approval of each self-modification? Don't worry the AI also gets one vote.
So, Moldbug's Cold War explanation is total nonsense? I thinks the Cold War follows after WWII even if the USA was ruled by King Truman I and the USSR was rule by King Stalin I. More formally, I think political realism is the empirically best description of international relations.
Anyway, you asked about patches and realms, and I said that governments do the unprofitable. If it were profitable, government wouldn't need to do it. Moldbug seems to say that we ought not to want government to do the unprofitable. That explains his move to a corporate form of government, but it doesn't justify the abandonment of the role that every government in history has decided it wanted to do.
You completely missed my point. Who gets to decide what is unprofitable? Who decides which unprofitable things are worth doing? The set of all possible unprofitable activities is vastly larger than the set of profitable ones.
You do realize we where talking about the USSR just a few seconds ago right? I guess Russia was a bad place to make cars so the government had to step in and do that.
Communism (and socialism in general) have inefficient (i.e. not wealth-maximizing) preferences for wealth distribution. So no, it doesn't surprise me that that massive government planning was required to try to implement the communist preference. If equal wealth distribution were wealth-maximizing, then the government wouldn't have needed to intervene to make it happen.
This isn't a groundbreaking point. It falls out straightforwardly from the economic definition of efficiency.
I repeat myself:
Unless you are arguing Communist preferences of wealth redistribution and the opportunity cost that entails where automatically representative of those of "the Russian people" because duh they had the October revolution and a civil war in which Communists won. In which case I will ask why they would not be in North Korea, and would also ask you if all regimes deciding things are representative of "the people" why do we even need this democracy thing? Obviously Ancient Egyptian peasants wanted to be involved in the unprofitable business of building Pyramids for Pharaoh.
If we are not sure the ancient Egyptian Monarchies captured people's preferences for unprofitable activities that should be done according to the values of those indirectly funding them, if the same cannot be said of Rome, if the same cannot be said of Communism ... why do you think it can be said of say the US government? Why do you think this is more efficient than having government be a money making machine that gives its citizens free money because they own stock and lets them spend it on whatever charity (which also by definition do unprofitable things) or indulgence (which often are also unprofitable - whenever I go stop to smell the flowers or go watch a movie I don't do this to maximize my profit in currency, but to hopefully maximize my utility) they want? Or if it interferes with the operation of the state why not have the stockholders spend it in some other part of Patchland that specializes in being a great place to spend your money for good causes or fun?
And if you don't think people's preferences even matter when deciding what unprofitable stuff to spend resources on ... well whose preferences should then?
I want unprofitable stuff that I like done too. Like helping people not having to die if they don't want to. All else being equal I don't however much care who does them. BTW I'm not too sure about Moldbug's government type either, I wouldn't volunteer to live there just based on his arguments, but I do think he does a good job of dealing with regular arguments in favour of democracy. I do think a city or patch of desert somewhere to test the form of government might be a good idea.
For Moldbug, the answer is . . . not you. Unless the CEO of the realm put your charity on the cleared list. But I suspect that most of the things I would want to do with my dividends would be prohibited as security risks. Political control without thought control has never happened, and I don't think that super weapons could make it happen.
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This is why choosing the state as the actor that must bear unprofitable activities, regardless of on who's behalf, seems to my sentiments less an aesthetic choice or one that should be based on historic preference but an economic question that deserves some investigation. The losses of utility over such a trivial preference seem potentially large.
I suppose it depends on what you see as "charity". For example, free childhood vaccinations can be seen as charity -- after all, why shouldn't people just buy their own vaccines on the free market ? -- but having a vaccinated population with herd immunity is, nonetheless, a massive public good. The same can be said of public education, or, yes, canes for blind people.
Let's do some [Edit: more abstract] analysis for a moment. [Edit: I suggest that] government is the entity that has been allocated the exclusive right to legitimate violence. And the biggest use of this threat of violence is compulsory taxation. Why do people put up with this threat of violence? As Thomas Hobbes says, to get out of the state of nature and into civil society. (As Moldbug says, land governed by the rule of law is more valuable than ungoverned land).
What does the government do with the money it receives. At core, it provides services to people who don't want them. The quote mentioned letting prisoners choose their jailors. It probably would increase prisoner utility to offer the choice. It might even save money (for example, some prison systems mandate completing a GED if the prisoner lacks a high school degree). But that's not what society wants to do to criminals. If the government uses compulsory power to fund prisons, I assert a requirement that the spending vaguely correspond to taxpayer desires for the use of the funds. (Moldbug seems to disagree).
Consider another example, the DMV. At root, the government threatens violence if you drive on the road without the required government license, on the belief that the quality of driving improves when skill requirements are imposed and the requirements will not (or cannot) be imposed without the threat of violence. It is common knowledge that going to the DMV to get the license is a miserable experience because the lines are long and the workers are not responsive to customer concerns. By contrast, the MacDonald's next door is filled with helpful people who quickly provide you with the service desired as efficiently as possible. Why the difference? In part, it is the compulsory nature of the license and in part, it is that benefits of improved service at the DMV do not accrue to anyone working for or supervising the DMV. See James Wilson's insightful discussion (pages 113-115 & 134-136) (There's also an interesting discussion of the post office on pp. 122-25). I assert that much "inefficiency" in government is simply the deadweight loss inherent in compulsory taxation, which is one part of government Moldbug doesn't want to abolish.
And there's less justification for calling an entity with compulsory tax powers a profit making entity. In what way has Moldbug's Calgood acted in a competitive marketplace? Voting with your feet is just as possible in the United States or Western Europe today as it would be in the patch & realm system.
Max Weber was a libertarian?
Hmm. It's embarrassing to admit I'm not as well read as I'd like. I'd only ever heard the concept in libertarian discussions. Thanks.