Comment on Improving long-run civilisational robustness

Wed, 11 May 2016 23:34:30 GMT

any first-year economics textbook

You didn't say "the first-order effect of abolishing labor laws would almost certainly be some increase in economic output", you said "abolishing all labor law would vastly increase the size of the economy". There are two differences here.

First-order effect according to Economics 101 versus overall effect in the complicated real world.

Some unspecified, perhaps small, increase versus "vastly increase".

Either would suffice to make your proposal to settle the issue by consulting "any first-year economics textbook" worthless. Would you like to make a more serious response?

I[f] a constraint on the process that generates the list is that it must be 100% de-politicized, then I wouldn't put much faith in the list.

Noted. Personally it wouldn't bother me at all, unless the list purported to be a complete list of everything that could or should be done. If completeness is the goal, then I agree that even politically incendiary proposals might belong in the list -- but they should be flagged as such, to avoid unnecessary political firefights.

Just because taxes pay for some item on it doesn't make it free

So far as I can tell, no one has said or implied anything even slightly resembling "these items are free because they are paid for by taxes". You need to stop rounding everything off to the nearest thing there's a libertarian talking point about.

(Lest I be misunderstood, I should add that I hope I would say the same thing if there were someone doing the same thing from the other side and rounding everything off to the nearest thing there's, say, a Marxist talking point about. It happens that no one here is doing that.)

greater regulation, and hence greater fragility

[citation needed], again. It seems obvious to me that some regulation has the intention of reducing fragility, and I don't see any grounds for assuming that it never succeeds. (Building codes make earthquakes etc. less disastrous. Labour laws make violent revolution less likely. Environmental legislation makes "natural" disasters less likely. Regulation of hazardous materials makes it less likely that we all get made stupid by lead poisoning -- you may recall that that's been blamed for the collapse of the Roman empire too. Do all these actually work? I dunno. Do you know that they don't?)

Two EMP devices, or two large enough asteroids

One large enough asteroid could put an end to life on earth, so I can't disagree there. But if you really think two EMP devices could bring down the world's civilization then I think you're out of your mind.

the orthodox explanation in my economic history class

Noted. The picture I get from the bit of reading I've just done doesn't quite match yours. It suggests that a more fundamental problem was that late Roman taxation was dominated by a land-tax which hit peasant farmers hardest, and which incentivized them to abandon land, so that productivity plummeted. That doesn't seem like overregulation exactly; it seems like a damagingly regressive and ill-designed tax system. (The total tax burden even in the late empire seems to have been somewhat less as a fraction of gross product than in, say, the present-day US.)

Also apparently commonly blamed for late Roman economic problems: concentration of wealth in the hands of the wealthiest of the senatorial class, and large transfers of wealth to the Christian church.

Nothing I've read -- admittedly, this is just wandering through what I can find online -- says anything about overregulation being the (or even a) source of the late empire's problems. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but I'm finding it hard to believe that it's "the orthodox explanation" in any context much wider than your economic history class :-).

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