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asr comments on Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012 - Less Wrong
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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.