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Lumifer comments on Stupid Questions September 2015 - Less Wrong
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I don't know -- do you think the rate of blowing up your competitors in, say, XIX century USA was much different from the rate of poisoning your enemies in e.g. XVII century Persia?
Yep, and there were incentive structures to deal with that in the pre-capitalist societies as well. Polities where everyone is free to poison anyone don't last long...
Without restricting the method of murder to poisoning, yes, quite significantly.
Polities where everyone is at least plotting to murder everyone else (in the aristocracy) were largely the norm throughout most of history.
Do you have data?
I have some data on the enemies-murdered column in 17th century Persia. A particularly nasty case is the shah Abbas I having all three of his surviving sons executed, blinded (a custom which translates more or less to disinheritance), or left to die in prison. The heirs in question were only three of a series of executions of potential rivals that would have made Ivan the Terrible feel like a bit of an underachiever; it began with a mass-execution after a rebellion by two puppet rulers installed by the shah in question, although we can't count their numbers, since they weren't, for our purposes, political enemies. Then there was Shah Safi's reign, who made Abbas I look pleasant by comparison.
How many people murdered business rivals in the 1800's in the US? Hell, the US didn't even execute confederate generals and politicians.
The comparison isn't to murder -- you only need to drive the competitors out of business. How many people set fire to a competing business? Hire gangs to intimidate competitor's employees? Arrange some industrial "accidents"?
We're not debating moral equivalency, we're talking about whether sociopaths under capitalism are significantly more law-abiding ("bind themselves by the rules of the game") than under non-capitalist systems. The only reason that I can come up for that is that under capitalism, generally speaking, the rule of law is stronger, often much stronger, and so it's harder to go against it. I'm not sure it's sufficient for the conclusion we're talking about, though -- the risks are higher, but there's less competition for the rewards :-/
One can probably make an interesting argument that modern societies are more totalitarian in that avoiding "the system" is much harder than in the Middle Ages, for example, but I don't know if that can be laid at the feet of capitalism...
Alright. So... how many times did this happen? And if you're not sure, would you expect this to happen frequently, given the dangers of retaliation? (Your rival losing his factory is a slight gain for you, as you don't gain all of his market share. His retaliatory strike burning -your- factory down is a -major- loss for you.)
The long and short of it is this: In capitalism, "Cooperate" has a higher average long-term rate of return. In other economic systems, "Defect" has a higher average long-term rate of return.
Quibbling about law and "the rules of the game": At this point, the economic system in the US isn't capitalism, but a capitalism-like metagame (crony capitalism) revolving around redefining the law (the rules of the game) to advantage yourself, all the while pretending the rule changes have some noble purpose, such as helping the poor.
I don't know, but I expect that some data exists -- there were enough books and studies of the robber-baron capitalism and such.
The dangers of retaliation are the same in every era.
I am quite unconvinced of that. Note that Adam Smith's invisible hand is NOT cooperation. And take, say, socialism of the USSR and Mao's China variety -- do you think it encourages to cooperate or defect? Or how about the Roman Empire?
That's a different topic, but it seems to me to be mostly about the definition of "capitalism". I don't think "pure" capitalism ever existed anywhere.
Dead enemies don't retaliate.
For the limited purposes I am discussing, yes it is. Just because the payoff matrix favors cooperation doesn't make it not-cooperation.
The USSR encouraged defection; just look at how, whenever food production was particularly problematic, the USSR would briefly swap over to a semi-capitalist system for a few years, and miraculously food production would increase. The farmers routinely defected under the soviet economic system, hiding whatever they could to sell on the black market, and meeting the bare minimum for the quotas, where they didn't get the quotas reduced for hardships which were always somehow worse when they didn't own the product of their labors.
Same thing with Mao's China.
Can't say much regarding the Roman Empire, as I haven't studied its economic system to any degree.
I am heading off a common line of debate before it happens, because I've had this particular argument many, many times before, albeit never in quite these terms.
At which point I no longer understand what do you mean by "cooperation".
Huh? That, um, never happened except for once in the 1920s. I have no idea what are you talking about.
I don't think that was as routine as you seem to think. If your farmers collective grows wheat, who do you sell it to? It's not like there were any millers to whom one could come with a sack of grain...
"Not defecting." I imagine defection is a clearer distinction in your mind?
It happened multiple times. The 1920 were the initial collectivization period, which led to a famine. The mid 1930's had the first semi-capitalistic change, allowing privately-held sections of farmland. The Soviet government largely ignored the fact that most effort was concentrated on the privately-held sections initially, but gradually cracked down, causing harvests to decline again. In the 1950's, some of the privately-held sections were collectivized in a renewed collectivization effort (which also combined many of the farms), and immediately harvests started falling, so the Soviet government switched from "national" ownership of the farmers' products to a system in which the government paid the farmers for the harvests. Harvests went up again. The government, however, gradually reduced payments, which again, caused harvests to plummet. In the late 60's the privately held sections of farmland were expanded, and harvests increased again. In the 70's, a new system which was supposed to guarantee farmers a higher share of the profits for their work was instituted.
Yeah, this happened constantly. Every new Party Leader wanted to make communism work, and would roll out a new communistic farming approach. This approach would fail, and they'd put some kind of capitalism back in place, and farming output would increase again.
What makes you think there weren't? The black market in the Soviet States was all-encompassing. The millers you came to were millers for the state, even, who didn't mind getting a little bit of money on the side. Corruption, in the Soviet, was not merely a way of life, it was often necessary to survive.