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Hi,
I've been reading LW sequences sine a few months, and I find them very interesting, but I think you made a mistake in mixing politics (libertarianism, french/american revolutions, ...) into this post.
I won't go into explaining why I think economical libertarianism is deeply flawed and not similar at all to the process of Science (for once, I don't think it degrades well at all), but above that, by calling into very complicated and very debated concepts, you're just making following your core reasoning harder to follow.
I also think you make some factual errors : saying the "american revolution" is a success but the french one a collapse is a great mistake. Most of the progress of the French Revolution lasted for very long and still last. The whole concept of "Human Rights", both the "first generation" rights, like the freedom of speech, and the "second generation" rights like universal access to education, come mostly from the French Revolution (the Declaration of Humans and Citizen Rights, to my knowledge, predates the 1st Amemendement). Most countries of Europe and South America use a civil code derived from it. The abolition of slavery by the French Revolution in 1793 was temporarily undone afterwards by Napoleon, but it was a firm stone on which the abolitionist have built afterwards.
And some very fundamental measures of the French Revolution, that were totally opposite to economical libertarianism, like the "taxation du prix du pain" (state-fixed price of bread to block speculation on breads and flour (the "Accapareurs")) lasted for almost two centuries, protecting France from famine, and making the "french baguette" a world-renewed food (because, to the contrary of what economical libertarianism predicts, the fixed price of bread leaded to a massive development of the bread industry in France, making bread the fundamental food, and forcing the bakery to compete on quality since they couldn't compete on price). That's just a few examples among many. Wiping the jump forward in humanism that represented the French Revolution and its continuing consequences nowadays in a few words as you did is, in my opinion, just not true.
Anyway, thanks for those very interesting posts.
Interesting! Welcome to Less Wrong!
1) Welcome!
2) Libertarianism was being contrasted with Science, non-libertarianism was presented as analogous to it.
3) Policy debates should not appear one-sided
You claim to be critiquing "economical libertarianism", but in fact you are critiquing microeconomics. For instance, you critique the familiar critique of price-fixing by presenting a purported counterexample. But the idea that price-fixing has certain predictable perverse consequences comes, not from libertarians, but from standard microeconomics, since it's a simple deduction from basic theory of supply and demand.
Libertarians do, to be sure, make heavy use of microeconomic theory, but this does not warrant calling microeconomics "economical libertarianism", any more than the use of a bicycle by Mao to commute to work would warrant calling bicycles "transportational communism".
So, to reinterpret your post, taking you to be attacking microeconomics, you are saying that the science of microeconomics is not in fact a science, since it is immune to empirical refutation, such as by the purported success of price-fixing.
Well, I think my comment was misunderstood - I didn't want to start a full debate on economical libertarianism, economics or politics. To be done seriously, it would require much longer posts than a small comment on an article about science and rationality.
My point was mostly that the political issues about libertarianism and about the French and American Revolutions are highly debatable, and shouldn't be sorted out in a few bold sentences as Eliezer did on the post, and that by doing so, he's more making is core post about the differences between Science and Rationality harder to follow, because he's dragging into it a very heated and complicated debate.
For that, I pointed a few examples of things done by the French Revolution which were (in my opinion) very successful, but it was just an example to illustrate my core point which was : "don't drag politics in such a bold way in a post about rationality, you'll commit factual errors and antagonize people". A bit a variation over the "don't take QM as en example", that's all. Sorry for the noise ;)
The worst policy has good consequences, the best policy has bad ones.
The successes you cited would only be relevant if one understood Eliezer to be claiming that every consequence was bad or ephemeral from the French Revolution. While that is how politicians speak and how others speak much of the time, it's not charitable to interpret arguments as if they were from politicians.
In the French Revolution, they were really, really confident that things would be best if they could decide more or less ad hoc to kill tens of thousands for interfering with it. In the American Revolution, they didn't trust themselves so, they tolerated more anti-revolutionary behavior, and things turned out better. That's all.
Even if the French do make fantastic bread, the Reign of Terror was still not a good idea.
How did France manage to have subsidized and/or price controlled bread without degrading the quality?
In a free market, price, weight, and quality would all fluctuate, so the system would be flexible at those points. Legislating two of those variables to be fixed would seem to leave the third responsible for reflecting economic changes, despite diminishing returns on changing it when the other two haven't been adjusted at all.
Avoiding degrading quality wouldn't be hard, one would set the price higher than the free market would have borne, so bakers have to compete for what inelastic demand there is by improving quality alone. The cost to society is the absence of cheaper, lower quality bread, which would be a reasonable policy choice.
If the legislated price were too low, bakers would compete on low manufacturing costs, and quality should spiral downward.
It seems controllable whether the cost of regulation is quality or affordability.
I hope someone shows up with knowledge of the actual history.
I'm assuming it wasn't a price floor-- that would make bread less affordable. I believe that subsidy to manufacturers + price controls leads to decline in quality because the incentives become doing just enough to meet the regulations and competing to get permissions and subsidies from the government.
It's possible that France exists to annoy libertarians. Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour (a book I've heard an interview about but not read) tells the story of Louis XIV making France into a world center of style. He picked winners, or created them. He promoted companies which continued to make high quality goods for centuries.
By libertarian standards, this should be just about impossible. Or maybe it's like winning the lottery-- you might succeed, but the odds are so low that it's a very bad strategy.... and, of course, the French aristocracy's spendthrift ways and insulation did lead to the French Revolution, and a utilitarian might say that any amount of delightful food and fashion just isn't worth it.
Still, picking winners on that scale is amazing. Does it take the unlikely combination of really smart person at the top chasing their own fascinations without those fascinations being too crazy rather than trying to guess what other people want?
How much could one pick winners by simply throwing the force of your big monarchy behind them and then just relying on inertia? If a sufficiently powerful organization is set up as being culturally considered best at something that gives them a possible long-term advantage even if there's no objective standard by which theirs is better.
Good question. One way of testing it would be to see whether other monarchies have tried anything like it, and if so, whether they succeeded.
Googling turns up some sources, so if you're really interested this sounds like the type of project to hone (y)our scholarship skills on, rather than passively wait for someone knowledgeable. The book linked to suggests that the rise in quality coincident with price controls (I don't know about subsidies but I can confirm the price controls) is a recent phenomenon, so data should be readily available.
This is a great "applied rationality" question IMO - you've noticed a clash between some doctrine that you hold and some external evidence. Suggestion: make a Discussion top-level post, making a little more precise where the clash lies, to coordinate the finding and reporting of relevant evidence.
It's telling that the Quatorze winner-picking you single out are in "high fashion, fine food, chic cafes, style, sophistication, and glamour." It's notoriously difficult to find objective measures of quality in those sectors.
17th century England was far more "libertarian" than 17th century France. And more prosperous too, right?
You agree that the effect of a high floor would be higher quality, but doubt such a law wold be enacted because of the unpopularity of raising food proces?
If a higher than free market price floor raises quality, and subsidies per unit lower it, and a high price floor is politically unpopular as it would raise food prices, a subsidy lowering the free market price and a floor above that new price would still raise quality, depending on the variables.
Much better to be able to change what other people want. Guessing is so hard!
No, I'm not sure what the effect of a price floor would be on quality (it seems to me it could be positive, negative, or neutral), but I don't have to care because I don't think a price floor would be politically possible under the circumstances.
I'm not convinced it's possible to reliably change what people want.
If you think subsidies politically possible, and subsidies would lower food prices, wouldn't subsidies and a price floor be politically possible together? Then, if the floor raised quality more than subsidies lowered it, couldn't there be a net increase in quality?
The point of not having a price floor is that the political pressure is to keep bread affordable.
I've ordered the book about the history of French bread, though I don't have tremendous faith that there will be enough about politics and economics to answer the question of how a controlled market maintained high quality.
I'm fantasizing that there were panels of bakers doing blind tests of the flour, but really I'm guessing.
Meanwhile, something to contemplate from a fine essay about samovars:
I believe competence happens when there's enough pressure for accomplishment, but not too much.
An analogy:
The point of having a minimum wage is to help low wage earners. Would it be politically difficult to lower the minimum wage by 15 cents? I assume so, and resistance would be motivated by direct concern for the poor.
Would it be politically difficult to simultaneously, in a single bill, lower the minimum wage by 15 cents, slightly raise all taxes, and provide a transfer of hundreds of dollars per month to every person in your country? Also yes, but for different reasons entirely, having nothing proximately to do with direct concern for the poor. Combining the measures would eliminate the previous political objections, like a strong wave swamping weak one.
In practice, some laws have establish fixed prices. A fixed price law is the same as a bill with two laws establishing a floor and a ceiling. Such laws have not been politically impossible in history, and a compromise bill needn't satisfy various constituencies by containing laws of parallel structure (i.e. limits to a price range).
I don't think one can say a measure (especially one strongly supported by a minority) would not be politically feasible alone and consequently conclude it would not be the outcome of a compromise political process.
The Führerprinzip.
Committees will always produce crap.
It is entirely unsurprising that prerevolutionary France should be the leading market for high style, fashion, and luxury goods, and entirely unsurprising that it should be the leading producer. I am inclined to doubt that Louis XIV created winners, though doubtless he picked them, the latter being much less surprising.
It comes from two different main reasons to me.
The first one is asymmetry of information in economics : the information on price in much easier to have, and with more confidence, than the information on quality. So customer have a more complete information about pricing (when we speak of bread at least, it may not be the case with complex debt schemes) than on quality, which makes competing on the price more efficient (in term of dragging customer) than competing on the quality.
The second one is in economies of scale : by fixing the price of bread to a value low enough for people to afford it, but high enough for bakers to not go bankrupt, it'll increase the demand for bread, decreasing the production cost of each single bread. Economies of scale can often counterbalance the law of supply and demand (or more exactly, they violate the hypothesis on which the law of supply and demand is built, making it inapplicable), and are badly underestimated in the usual formulations of economical liberalism.
My understanding is that France at one point (Paris in charge) fixed the price of bread artificially low, to benefit Paris at the expense of the peasantry, with utterly disastrous consequences (famine, urban riots, and terror against the peasantry), and much later, after the Paris commune was overthrown and the leadership of the rural militias was in charge, fixed the price of bread artificially high, to benefit the farmers at the expense of the city folk.
I conjecture that it is this latter regime that produced competition on quality.
When the maximum was first applied, the price of bread was controlled down, there were food riots, so it would seem that they did degrade the quality.
However, when the price of bread was controlled up, rather than controlled down, that did not affect the quality, and arguably improved it.
With all due respect, your account of the French Revolution is just cartoonishly biased. The "progress of the French Revolution" included, among other things:
The introduction of total war fought with mass conscript armies, for which all the resources of the nation are requisitioned, in place of the 18th century limited and professional warfare regulated by strict codes and financed mostly from monarchs' private purses.
This invention leading to two decades of Europe-wide mass slaughter and destruction that left an unknown number of millions of people dead. It also left the recurring idea of spreading the national glory and ideology (as opposed to mere interests of rulers, which may be vicious but are at least limited and sane) by war and conquest.
Overall, the nationalist ideology born in the Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars, both in France and elsewhere as a reaction to it, had subsequent historical consequences for which "cataclysmic" would be an understatement. Subsequent European revolutions inspired by the French one, even if initially non-violent, would usually lead straight to bloody ethnic conflicts.
These "rights" introduced by the Revolution included the "right" to the imposition of a rigid centralized government and elimination of all local historical customs and institutions in the name of national homogenization. Those who resisted were dealt with by methods that Europe wouldn't see again until the Nazis. This is analogous to the bloody total wars between nations engendered by the nationalist ideology, only in this case the violence is directed towards those elements within the nation who refuse to fall in line.
The legacy and inspiration of all these innovations around the world has indeed lasted until the present day, but I don't think it's something to be happy and proud about -- certainly not a "jump forward in humanism" by any stretch of imagination.
As for the events specific to the Revolution itself, the picture is perhaps even more gruesome -- from mobs dismembering their victims and parading their heads on pikes (which revolutionary propagandists proudly bragged about) to the mechanized mass executions with the guillotines.
Even the abolition of slavery was done in a way that caused a race war of enormous brutality in Haiti (the main center of French slaveholding), which was concluded by an all-out extermination of the losing side down to the last man, woman, and child. And in any case, the effective abolition of worldwide slave trade (and subsequently slavery) was due to the ideological and political developments in Britain and America, and their subsequent political and military actions. The French Revolution had little or nothing to do with it.
If you think legal documents are important, this is backwards. Both were written in August 1789 and probably had little influence on each other. But both were largely based on George Mason's 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights. Mason went on to write the US list, after refusing to sign the Constitution in 1787 and demanding a national list. In particular, his 1776 document gave freedom of press. I don't know how they expanded from press to speech; maybe one of the 1789 documents copied the other in this expansion, but Milton bundled the two in the 1644 Areopagitica as did many later people. As to the Enlightenment concept of human rights, it is pretty clear in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. But it owes a lot to pre-Enlightenment English documents, particularly the Petition of Right of 1628.
But why should we trace these concepts to their endorsement by governments? The documents did not create the ideas, but adopted them from a long train of authors, particularly the French Enlightenment. The documents are important as signposts in the triumph of the Enlightenment, but they are very crude measures because talk is cheap.