A reminder unemployment and underemployment and labour displacement existed in Roman times, and could be inferred to have carried into post Roman serfdom and the age of kings. It might not be the best choice for a peasant normally but walking off the land did happen. There are court records seeking the return of successful townspeople provably off their lords domain, and similar documents around marriage and land inheritance.
Peasant revolts would be fights for retained rights, even if informal - not just new rights, if at all about new rights.
You’re right that "walking off the land did happen". Although the feudal system legally bound serfs to the land, there were ways for individuals to escape this bondage. For instance, a serf who lived in a town for a year and a day without being reclaimed by their lord could often gain their freedom. These people, known as 'villeins' in some records, were essentially free peasants who had successfully left their lord's domain.
How does this compare to employment bonds of today?
At least I know of likes of Infy, TCS etc doing this (in the home country) — making freshers sign bonds for 2-3 years and if you want to leave within that period the only way is to pay a good amount irrespective of whether you didn’t receive a salary raise or didn’t get the opportunities which were good good for you. If you don’t pay the bond — they won’t usually drag you to a court (they send legal notices for sure) but they will also not issue you an experience certificate.
A boon for the very thing you describe was the Black Death of the 14th century. The colossal depopulation of Europe increased the de facto bargaining power of peasants to the point where they could competitively seek out better labor wages and land concessions in places well outside their previous manor. Thus, many peasants did exactly this, to the point where the noble elites and monarchies of Europe tried to enforce tougher regulations and laws against free movement, wage increases and even conspicuous displays of prosperity by the increasingly wealthy peasant classes of society (many of who were also turning to mercantile ventures to further diversify their income.
As is usually the case with government social and economic dictates that attempt controls against the practical social and economic reality of the world around them, these laws slowly but inexorable failed, leading to the steady erosion of feudalism throughout Europe (though not everywhere at similar times, and in some places this repressive system lingered for centuries longer, ie: Russia, Sicily, etc)
If anything, for all its grim deadliness, the Black Death was oddly beneficial to the future social and economic flourishing of Europe, starting with the rise of the Renaissance, and leading from there to so many other things, for better or worse for the rest of the world.
Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives.
I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right.
No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in.
Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.
Land value tax would be a good addition to the Japanese model. Raise the tax high enough, land prices are zero, leaving behind only the value of the home. Homes, like cars, will naturally depreciate in value. No weird artificial depreciation of houses needed.
You can still have investment in real estate, but it will be a competitive market. You can't sit on land and let it appreciate without putting in the work, because appreciation of land means higher taxes.
Land value tax doesn't remove that, it mostly changes who benefits from that scarcity and more strongly incentivises using that scarce resource productively.
Japan has relatively cheaper real estate because of their lax zoning laws and frequent earthquakes drive the long term value of construction down. Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate.
It dosen't really have anything to do with what you are saying because the Nikkei underperformed relative to FTSE or S&P 500.
Land are worth something because it's undertaxed. If you tax land high enough, the price of land is zero. This means you don't have to take out a loan to buy the land, but maybe you need to do so for the building. Lands in cities are often high enough that they exceed the value of buildings. So, land price being zero save you money up-front, but you have to pay higher taxes on the land.
The improvements are naturally depreciating assets. Your house, much like your car, fall apart over time without maintenance. Ideally, you aren't taxed on improvements.
So, in a properly functioning market, you can buy property, but it's depreciating in price all the time, while you are left with a tax bill on the land. Each time, land value roses, you are left with a higher tax bill every year.
Japan also has less social mobility - it’s a great country but it’s no paradise.
Homes get torn down all the time because they aren’t worth anything - not exactly environmentally friendly.
Even in America today you have plenty of things worth investing in that don’t have to be homes if you can’t stomach the initial investment. Idk what you envision about replacing investment in homes with “research” though certainly curious to learn more about what you envision.
It would be vastly more advantageous to our actual standard of living if housing depreciates, people invested in business that provide something to scoring instead of land, and we could periodically tear down housing and rebuild it for cheap so that people can live in nicer residences
I think it's very difficult to compare policies in a meaningful way, and be curious to understand why you believe it would be vastly more advantageous to our actual standard of living if housing depreciated, and you could be right, but I don't think your claim that periodically tearing down housing and rebuilding it for cheap means nicer residences. On its face it seems that the opposite is true: cheaper materials means cheaper housing, but not necessarily nicer housing. One way that this claim is suspicious to me is that older houses in the United States are much nicer, if maintained, than newer builds, dollar for dollar and the quality of craftsmanship and materials isn't easy to replicate today. I have actual hardwood planks for flooring. Today if you want "hardwood flooring" it's typically a series of interlocking planks for easy/cheap install (and substantial markup) but not necessarily nice.
And the homes I've seen in Japan personally didn't seem to stand out to me as particularly nice but maybe you have some examples that you are thinking of or a different experience?
Japan is a really rigid country that values stability, hierarchy and following rules above all else. There is a reason why their economy has been stagnant since 1990.
And yeah, the houses might be cheap, but they are also tiny and most Japanese cities are ugly as sin. Not a great example IMHO.
Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "expert" in any given field to spread propaganda favourable to them.
The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.
One day society will collapse and in the chaos people will come together to create a new constitution. The people who find themselves in a position to write that constitution will not have time to read up on psychology and systemantics and cryptography and voting theory and AI, etc, etc. There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
Has anyone tried to write a constitution based on all this? Not with the expectation that it will actually be used, but as a way to teach these important theories and give a good example of how they can be applied to law?
Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.
> There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
I'm not certain.
Both the US Constitution and the first French Constitution, for instance, were the produce of one century of thinking ideas through. Each successive French Constitution has been redesigned to avoid the problems that led to the fall of the previous one.
And this is why I say that people are not and can not be equal, despite how uncomfortable it makes everyone.
Everybody has a "right to an opinion" but some people's opinions are fundamentally invalid because they are not constructed on facts and personal preferences but on an incomplete and incorrect understanding of the world and repeating other people's personal preferences.
The hard part is how to separate truth from lies, how to quantify uncertainty, how to tell apart objective and subjective, and how to make people introspect enough to realize when their preferences are not really theirs.
Intelligent and educated people have a much higher chance to get the objective part right. (To state the obvious, nothing is certain, people looking for absolutes or pretending I am talking in absolutes are either dumb or manipulative.) But they can also have different personal preferences from the unintelligent and uneducated. I still think weighting votes based on a test of knowledge and intelligence should be tries.
I also see very few reasons for massive nation states to exist beyond common defense. Perhaps laws should have much smaller jurisdictions, down to individual towns, so they can be experimented with and people can move not far if they are really unhappy. But that requires a much smaller and cleaner law system, so common people can understand the differences, otherwise it becomes a mess.
And we should teach people about manipulative techniques and abusive / anti-social personality traits from childhood, teach them to recognize them and even take tests depicting interactions between people where they have to detect use of manipulation.
Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.
Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
Yes, severely capping funding, or even banning all private funding and giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money, is probably one of the most important things you can do for the health of a democracy.
It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol
But essentially it’s very close. The result here was that private campaigning was rediced a lot. Debates are mostly state-organized. Big portion of posters are on state-designated special billboards. There’re still some ads on all sorts of media, but there’s less of them and they’re less intense. Private events are next to nonexistent. Compared to US, I’d say campaigning, when put on a spectrum, is closer to being banned than the other side.
> giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money
How do you allocate that? Surely you can't give anyone who asks the same amount. So you favour parties which are already entrenched. Of course that has quite a few upsides but it doesn't seem like an inherently democratic system.
In worst (of course not unavoidable) you also might end up with indirect equivalent of what your re trying to ban, e.g. private media companies with a lot of resources that are biased towards certain candidates influencing public opinion (without crossing the legal boundaries) or those already in power using the state media to do the same.
e.g. in Hungary most funding comes from the government. How did that work out for them?
I guess having parties funded entirely by small private donations or maybe a way to optionally allocate some share of the taxes you pay yourself and banning all direct funding from government and corporations could be the least bad option.
Here’s a narrow critique, you don’t understand that limiting campaigning privileges name recognition which is something only existing officials or celebrities will have.
In a representative system where you vote directly for candidates and not parties like in the US you need to know who is who and what they support.
Banning campaigning hurts challengers to the status quo.
I could keep picking your naive suggestion apart but this is I believe sufficient evidence that you haven’t done your homework.
Start with the fact that it's impossible and will only benefit the candidate that best bends the rule or is able to blatantly break it without repercussions.
And most party funding comes from the government which favours party which are already in power? Not that this is a horrible system but it does have rather obvious downsides.
e.g. that doesn't seem to be working that well in Hungary or Turkey and presumably quite a few other countries. Banning or severely limiting external funding or support makes it rather easy for politicians with authoritarian policies to keep their grip on power.
You win the election, you tweak the system to make it easier for you to win next time, you get more funding and your opponents less. Rinse and repeat and you can weaken the opposition to such an extent that you can stay in power more or less indefinitely. That's what Orban or Erdogan are doing.
Another option is you spend a lot of money, win, then change the rules to ban or limit external funding so that nobody else can do that to challenge you.
So far government does u-turn after each election so it looks like there’s enough safeguards to make sure formula stays sane. Maybe it would be a problem if private citizen funding was fully banned. But now that’s allowed with a cap to avoid fraud.
And in our case the alternative is Russian money making it into politics. Which is exactly what could lead to issues.
If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on the part of moneyed individuals.
Suppose we allow only short published stump speeches and nothing else.
What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote?
Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.
Well that doesn’t happen currently so it probably won’t happen in this scenario. Nor does it really happen in countries that have implemented bans on private campaign financing.
Propaganda is definitionally just strategic spread of information. You shouldn't expect people to turn their brains off just because you've said propaganda. Any political speech done with forethought and intent is propaganda.
Are stump speeches not propaganda? I don't see why the election system should privilege candidates whose political views are most compellingly expressed in quick little text blurbs.
I don’t think that’s true? There are exceptions, but Mike Johnson or Chuck Schumer aren’t successful because they’re getting really good zingers on social media.
I mean, that is exactly why people even know their names. You think people actually read schumers policy positions on his website? Maybe a single digit percentage do. Most everyone just blindly picks the party line option even on primaries usually the party endorsed candidate wins.
Or complete stagnation and entrenchment of current political class and their networks. Not that its necessarily not the case anyway but it would be very heard for anyone outside the system to break in.
Currently, they are only used for some positions like presidency, are usually 2 terms and don't apply to other positions.
IMO:
1) We should get rid of presidents and other single-person positions altogether and replace them with groups of at least 5. Power concentrated in the hands of one individual attracts the worst individuals.
2) Term limits should apply to many more positions.
3) I am undecided whether the limit counter should be shared among all positions (i.e. if 2 terms is the max, you can serve 2 years as president, 2 as senator, or 1 as president and 1 as senator - changing position would not reset it). This would mean there would be no career politicians but also the politicians would be less experienced. The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town) but only allowing one term in each position. That way people can judge them on their past performance.
Its tricky, though. There might be people who are doing a perfectly good job and kicking them arbitrarily might be suboptimal.
Then there is room for quite a lot of direct or indirect corruption. e.g. if you know you won't have a job in 4-8 years major corporations and other organizations offering you a cushy job if you do the "right things" might become quite a bit more appealing.
But yes, having a distinct class of career politicians has some significant downsides as well..
> The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town)
Might work fine or there might be a lot of gatekeeping if you just want to get on the first step since that will likely be controlled quite tightly by the established parties/cliques.
I think this would be pretty tricky to do. For example, I love the idea of limiting candidates to a little stump speech pamphlet that gets included in the voting materials.
But, what if instead of doing typical advertising, a candidate coordinates secretly with people outside your jurisdiction. Co-conspirators could spend months or years running stories about some issue—crime, homelessness, drugs, etc, that might even have some kernel of truth (but be wildly overblown). People in your society might jump in with their own stories related to the problem, legitimate stories of things that happened to them, but filtered up by “the algorithm.” Then, the malicious candidate can just reference the well-known (overblown) issues in their pamphlet. It’s perfect because they don’t even have to make or defend any specific claims, just gesture broadly at the fears that individuals have self-selected.
What do we ban? Getting your news from outside the jurisdiction? Discussing your experiences? Politicians meeting people outside jurisdiction? I don’t really see it…
I dunno. My gut feeling is that we just have to come to terms with the idea of democracy requiring some sort of media literacy. But then if people were good at identifying ads and ignoring them, they wouldn’t be used so widely.
Strongly disagree, in the age of teleprompters and speech writers this is a major part of campaigns (because of TV) but hardly matters at all for actual governing. Our excessive focus on it is not helping us select better leaders.
I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants are the cause of all our issues and the media will be full of crimes by illegal immigrants, etc.
If you're happy to accept almost literally everyone as Stalinist I suppose so. But if the word is going to mean anything then no, spending a lot on propaganda isn't Stalinist. It is routine governance. If you intend to organise people politically it is going to take a lot of propaganda.
Routine governance in Stalin’s time is what we now call Stalinism. “Just the way we do things” doesn’t tell you much about the quality. Unlimited campaign spending has a huge potential to consolidate power and allow more spe ding in a positive feedback loop.
The problem is that whatever system we come up with in theory, will have to be built in practice out of people, and there is never any shortage of people who will happily abuse the system and fellow people out of greed or delusion. That's why an AI overlord arising and taking over is not a threat, it's our only hope /s
We can at the very least tweak existing systems to be meaningfully better.
For example we could phase out all marketing and advertising. We could simplify and automate accounting and many other jobs. We could reduce the work week to 30 hours. We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job. Make moving down on a career ladder or switching careers entirely a common and non-humiliating occurrence, etc.
The most pertinent question to ask is - why haven't any of these already happened? What kinds of people prevent these changes from occurring and what should be done about it? Do you know any of these people - are some of them your family members. Are you one of them? Why does no one seem to ask these questions and seek answers? :)
> We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job.
Most of your comment I agree with but I take issue with this part.
Some time in recent history education became a means to an end: getting a decent job. This is not strictly speaking the point. Learning for the sake of learning still has tangible value that cannot be substituted by requisite training for entry level jobs.
I'm not really sure what caused this shift (but I definitely understand and respect it) but it's heavily misguided. If only we could all be so lucky as to be highly educated in a mundane job.
I don't want to live in a world where we only learn what we need to know in order to do our job. Do you?
> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics.
There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found useful, from a (leftist) video essay:
> See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...]
> Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of the things we do in our day-to-day lives can be justified by either one, we don't often notice the contradiction between them, and it's easy to imagine whichever one tends to be our default is everyone else's default as well. [...]
> Your conservative friend thinks you're naive for thinking the system even can be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation [...] Many conservatives assume liberals [...] know The Hierarchy is eternal, that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them. [...]
> > that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them.
They're right... when the other is someone like them.
And they have a blind spot for an other who is not like them.
Meanwhile, what is the blind spot of the people who are not like that (i.e., who believe in equality)?
Is their blind spot that they can't imagine so many people who are trying to gain advantage, and being deceitful about it?
This analysis is highly muddled. "making things equal" != democracy. Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies. The concepts of democracy and capitalism have a far greater reach than the current US political climate where both are malfunctioning. The US is a superpower attempting to become a third world country and corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.
There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should not have it comes to have it. This is what every system so far has succumbed to. We need a truly equal system where all concentration of power is avoided unless absolutely necessary for the functioning of society to avoid an eventual collapse of the system.
The basic mechanism you’re describing is essentially accurate, however:
> As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship.
This doesn’t logically follow. The existence of a power differential doesn’t necessitate the differential being exploited to increase the differential. If we assume individuals are maximally selfish, this might hold, but that isn’t the case; people do altruistic things all the time, and there’s good reason to think most people are hardwired for it. The problem of liberal democracy is how you design a system to address those who are hardwired towards malicious selfishness; it isn’t clear that you truly can.
I would say that over a long enough period of time it's unavoidable that a selfish person will use the power to gain more. Selfish people are more likely to seek positions of power, so even if most people are altruistic, the people that seek power are more likely to be selfish.
I’ve come to basically the same conclusion. Attempts to engineer perfect political systems that are immune to this sort of infiltration is like trying to build a structure that will never need to be repaired—you can expend a lot of resources and effort on it upfront, but on a long enough timeline there will be failure modes you didn’t foresee.
Then how do you explain that all attempts at communism ended in dictatorships, except (perhaps) Israel, whereas the list of capitalist republics that ended in dictatorship is pretty short?
Oh and how do you intend to solve that most "communists" leaders were fake and intended to become dictators from the very start. There's many cases of various dictators, from anarchist, to just self-interested people, fascists, religious lunatics, ... pretending to be communists to grab power. In many cases, communists supported these awful people with extremely bad results. Examples: Russia, Afghanistan, Iran, Poland, Venezuela, ... all are cases of communists supporting would-be dictators that had ZERO intention of ever making those societies equal or tolerant or democratic.
In fact there's plenty of people who got support by pretending to be communists, even going so far as committing terrorist attacks on behalf of communism, to turn around and become capitalist "leaders", like ... well, most of the members of the EU commission for example. Jose Manuel Barosso, for example, was part of communist protests that lynched people. He was also the EU commission president that pushed Greece into debt servitude.
Cancer can be also said to be fault of a system living longer than it needs to. In the end, what matters less is the specific instance of the system than ensuring the continuity of development is passed on.
But for states, they still feverishly cling to the idea of unity even as it brings increasing fragility and stagnation.
What if a true democracy is not a worthy goal? What if some people should have more or less say in something.
Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing?
Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair?
If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinces enough people that for very large values of 2, the answer is five, democracy says the answer is 5. How do you protect against this outcome in a pure democracy?
Education would probably be the answer. In a true democracy we would need to make sure everyone is well educated. Of course there are a lot of decisions that require very specialized knowledge that can't be taught to everyone, and in such cases it might be necessary to have limited participation or some kind of weighted voting.
> What if some people should have more or less say in something.
Yes, I certainly agree.
The problem (which IMHO outweighs all the benefits by quite a bit) is that when you allow drawing these artificial lines the ones in charge of them will inevitably design the system in such a way that benefits them (maybe even without ill intentions).
It's similar to geographical gerrymandering just openly based on social/education/etc. class.
Also... balancing interests of diverse social and economic groups is not exactly straightforward, its certainly not basic math.
That's how totalitarian regimes maintain their grip on power as well. At the end of the day someone needs to define what "civic virtue" is, if its done top down well that might not necessarily work out that well (of course it might be the opposite but it seems like a very dangerous method).
I don't, you don't either, quite a few people in North Korea might view it differently.
My point is what methods do you use to "instil civic virtue"? How do you define it? And most importantly how do you prevent people from diverging from them?
Historically totalitarian societies were often quite good at instilling any kind of "virtue" you wanted. Free and democratic societies generally tend to struggle with the "instilling" part. (Of course to be fair there a few success stories (to an extent) like France)
Education, and the fostering of independent civil society, which is something you don't see in authoritarian societies. The virtues you want to instill in a democratic society, contrasted with authoritarian ones, are truth vs. propaganda, accountability vs. loyalty, and courage vs. obedience.
I think you are leaning too hard into moral relativism. The differences between free- and authoritarian societies are plain to see.
Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not equating the values themselves, as you said they are the polar opposite. And to be honest I'm certainly not a fan of moral relativism in the direct sense.
The methods seem more concerning. First you have to give someone the right to define what these virtues mean in practice. Then you need to somehow impose them on the wider population. This is a rather dangerous tool and I think actual examples of such a top down approach working in democratic societies are quite rare.
It works if the consensus already exists in the society. Clearly these days that's not the case in quite a few places.
What do you then? Force children of people who have a radically different understanding of what these civil virtues are to attend schools which teach them against their will? Take them away if the parents refuse? Well that's what totalitarian states do...
> First you have to give someone the right to define what these virtues mean in practice. Then you need to somehow impose them on the wider population. This is a rather dangerous tool and I think actual examples of such a top down approach working in democratic societies are quite rare.
Once you have a democracy, you are not supposed to dictate from the top but distribute political power, and decision-making. The US has seen the executive's usurpation of power from the other branches of government since the turn of the century. Such an unbalanced government is by definition inimical to democracy.
Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal". In a democracy, the people have the power to decide and anyone has the power to elect, be elected and to voice his opinion freely.
> Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal".
His point is that democratic systems are subverted if absolute equality is not enforced. It’s a crude argument but basically correct. The only way you prevent usurpation is by making sure one individual doesn’t have any obvious means of scaling his influence to the point that he can challenge the democratic militia.
What you call influence is simply trust that others impart to an individual. There is very little a single individual can physically do by themselves. So if there is someone with the influence to challenge a militia then it's better to say a proportionate number of people are also challenging the militia with the person as their proxy.
This is the argument populists make regarding Caesar, and there might be some truth to it, but it falls apart when you look at a Venezuela or North Korea; it’s easy to say that a nation gets the government it deserves when you aren’t the one having your life threatened.
Then again, outsized influence is a problem in democracies as well; this is what creates the conditions for a Caesar figure to emerge in the first place.
>There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible.
Only if by that you mean equal opportunities for everyone.
But if you mean equal outcomes, then you're guaranteed to get USSR/Cuba/Venezuela poverty, famines and shortages, and even there that didn't fix the issue of the elites being super wealthy, it just made everyone else equally poor.
People will never end up equal no matter how many thumbs the government puts on the scale, that actually makes it so much worse.
Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes. Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.
All the countries you mention had a lot of power centralization, which I'm arguing is the reason all systems fail. If we avoid centralized power, we avoid the corruption and theft that inevitably comes with it.
I don't have details. It'd need to be based on direct democracy, but for now we don't have any way to make good decisions efficiently with it. I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.
>Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes.
And how is 'equal outcomes for everyone' as the end goal, different than communism?
Even if you think it's not communism, the results will still be the same: poverty and famine for everyone but the elites since, news flash for you, people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures just like our ape ancestors, and if you force equality of outcome upon them, you take away their opportunity to try to better themselves in respect to their peers, so then society spirals downward into everyone refusing to work or at most doing the bare minimum since there's no incentive do work harder if you'll end up equal to Bob the uneducated alcoholic.
>Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.
Yes the lottery of birth in life is unfair, welcome to the real world. Some people are born rich some are born poor, some are born tall some are bone short, some are born pretty some are born ugly, some are born smart some are born stupid, some are diligent and hard working, some are lazy and procrastinative.
You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels. The only thing you can do is tax inherited wealth better, and try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.
>I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.
Yeah, no. It's gonna be the exact opposite of that: more surveillance, more targeted propaganda, and less democracy. See Palantir.
Please don't do this. Criticizing and thinking about the outlines of new solutions is a necessary first step. Details can be figured out after people agree on what the problems with the current systems are. Obviously I'm aware of the problems of previously attempted systems and don't wish to repeat them. If we can't figure out better details than those tried before, then of course I would prefer the current system.
> people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures
Sure, humans have many kinds of needs and wants, and climbing the social hierarchy is just one of them. Why should we base our governance and our economic system on that need instead of something less destructive? There can still be hierarchies, just not the kind of hierarchies that give people power over others. An olympic gold medalist is at the top of a hierarchy, but doesn't have much power to control other people. Hierarchies like that could still remain to satisfy the people who have a strong need for such a thing.
Also, as I've said in other comments, I do believe there might be a need for some level of differences in rewards, as not all jobs are such that enough people would want to do them purely from intrinsic motivation. In such cases there should first be attempts to find rewards that don't provide control over other people, and if that is not enough, then we should figure out if the job is absolutely necessary and increase the rewards little by little until we have enough people doing it. Not all power differential can or should be avoided, but creating them should be the last resort and they should be as small as possible.
> You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels.
Maybe not entirely, but we could do much much better than what is happening now. It's important that we have a system where people are encouraged to use their abilities to improve society, but the huge differences in the resources people get is surely not the only way to achieve that. A lot of scientists do science not because the pay is great, but because they're interested in the topic and there's fame and knowledge to be had. Also the rewards that people expect are relative. In a society where someone gets paid 300 times more than others the most skilled people won't want to do the work for less than that, but in a society where the highest reward is 5 times more than others the most skilled people would still gravitate towards that work. Maybe personal interests would have a larger part in deciding what a person chooses to work on, but I don't think that would be a bad thing.
> try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.
But this will eventually lead to the winners taking more and more, we end up with a system similar to what the soviet union was and we will crash. The direction we are heading in is plainly visible. The capitalist system is better than the soviet one, as it's slower to centralize power, but eventually the power differentials and resulting corruption will be large enough that the system no longer functions, and we are very close to it I think.
We can continue this way and crash and reset every few hundred years, or we can acknowledge that it is the centralization of power that causes these issues and try to build a system that avoids it as much as possible.
This is nonsense. Most/all democracies have laws that only certified doctors can practice medicine. This makes doctors unequal from other people. Is this incompatible with democracy?
Democracy is about equality of rights, not equality. People are not equal in every aspect, but they should be equal in front of the law, for example.
Freedom is not absolute because your freedom stops where somebodys freedom beginns.
Hence, if you practice medicine without qualifications there is a high chance you will hurt somebody. It is not undemocratic to protect against hurting others. Hurting others is not a right.
Yes. This is why every society of note limited the franchise prior to the 1900s. You can only have debates among equals among people who are equal. The sort of equality communists imagine requires that you either radically re-engineer the human pysche or implement Harrison-Bergeron-style handicaps on exceptional people.
Depends on what the doctor can do with that inequality. If it means the doctor gets paid 20 times more than others then yes that is incompatible with democracy, as over time that wealth difference will be used to increase the inequality. But if the power is limited to only decisions about health, which is necessary for healthcare to function, then it should be acceptable. You'd still have to make sure that even that level of power is not used to gain more power, though.
One can argue whether 20 times more is too much or too little but I would say that it is correct that a doctor gets paid quite a bit more than unskilled labor. Some people who become doctors might still go through with it if it were not but most (sane) people would not go through the lengthy and very demanding path that is medical school and residency if it was not a better paid than a job that very many people could do. I can tell you here and now that I don't think I personally would have had the stamina to become a medical doctor.
Sure, I can agree with that. There does need to be some kind of incentive to do jobs that enough people don't naturally want to do. But the differences in rewards should be kept as small as possible and created only as a last resort. As I said, power concentration should only be allowed if absolutely necessary. If no one wants to become a doctor, then I'd consider it absolutely necessary to increase the incentives of doing so bit by bit until we have enough doctors while keeping in mind the risk that comes with the power differentials created. At some point an extra doctor might not be worth the extra risk of power concentration.
> Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies.
No, Capitalism can only reinforce hierarchies. Its core tenet is accumulation of capital, and thus power.
> corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.
Corruption is what happens when the capitalist class gets powerful enough to bend the rules. Incompetence is what happens when they figure out they can put a puppet in place and order him to bend the rules faster for them.
>that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them
That's true even in the most leftist and forcefully egalitarian regimes like communism. There are a few taking the ultimate decisions and there are some that benefit.
Our current regime lies through their teeth daily. Like obvious, completely made up lies. Every. Day. It's not a misunderstanding. One side is pushing for authoritarianism, one is not. One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence. I'm so fuckin tired of pretending there is just some kind of misunderstanding between both "sides".
No, the video makes the point that it's not really a misunderstanding, there are fundamentally different values in tension. If you believe in and value hierarchy then authoritarianism is natural and desirable, the lies are just for assuaging your less committed or more sensitive allies and befuddling your enemies.
But people do not value hierarchy for its own sake. They value hierarchy when they're on top of it, or at least in the top half. There are not actually fundamentally different values, but different interests.
I don't think we can. I think video game worlds (especially MMOs) have somewhat similar structures appear, where there's a portion of people that seem to become rich.
>I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
That would work in MMO games,not in reality. If the system is not naturally evolving, it will produce tragedies. Look at communism. It was supposed to produce "a better" society but resulted in tens of millions of deaths, loss of freedom and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
The continue the bonsai metaphor: would its inevitable demise tell us about how hierarchies can be uprooted? Or conversely, that existing hierarchies that are well tended to rarely meet their end?
And that's why I say power must always come from the bottom.
Many people have anti-social traits which manifest by seeking power and then using it to extract value from other people at their expense.
Meanwhile the people doing real work are almost always pro-social but are too busy to play these power games, unless the power imbalance gets too large.
Even YC is designed that way, they fund people that can get into MIT or stanford or harvard maybe? Others with great records are rarely accepted, this is a known fact
this is easily shown to not be true? from 2025 numbers I think:
University of California, Berkeley - 26 founders
Stanford University - 21
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 17
Cornell University - 10
Georgia Institute of Technology - 7
Carnegie Mellon University - 7
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 7
Harvard University - 6
University of Oxford - 6
University of Cambridge - 6
University of Pennsylvania - 5
University of Washington - 5
Columbia University - 5
Johns Hopkins - 4
Yale - 4
Caltech - 4
UCLA - 4
YC is, last I heard, largely an in-person thing. And it makes sense for CA schools to be highly represented because of that.
Doesn't that list consist entirely of the top of the top world universities, with small-ish admittance numbers and sky-high tuition price per year? I think you are kind of proving the point of the top commenter :)
There is in one sense the king and the pawn are similar. Pawns are many, kings are few. If one pawn sacrifices itself to sacrifice the king, then kings ought to fear pawns and not take undue advantage.
The power (access to tools, system, and opportunity) to sacrifice an individual by another individual has become immensely disproportionate of late among individuals of different social and economic strata.
If you look at history, that's really not how elites react to violence (or its threat) from the 99%. Regicide is a Crime against God - meaning the social order which puts the elites on top. Vs. peasants are expendable at scale if the elites feel that they need to violently defend their elite status.
And this ain't chess, where Pawn x King is just another move. Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle and 4X scope by mail order, then get a job in a convenient book depository. If an assassin manages to kill a king, then 100:1 that it's an inside job - the perp is either another one of the elite, or acting his behalf.
This is an odd thing to say given the events of the past few days and even last couple years:
“Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle and 4X scope by mail order, then get a job in a convenient book depository”
Your broader argument still holds that those in power often don’t tend to view isolated threats from the public as truly existential threats (until they do, like we just saw in Nepal).
But it’s a bit hard to agree that even in America things are truly that much different.
Can we please move to a more intelligent discourse on this than “rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down”? The social hierarchy shows self sustaining intent on small scales, but by and large it has been clearly shown to be emergent and ever-evolving. Believing that someone is keeping you from moving up the hierarchy is a story you tell yourself.
Nobody said it's a conspiracy. It's simple specialization. Some people are good at productive positive-sum work, others are good at office politics, manipulation and scams. The latter are good at accumulating power to extract value from the former.
Imagine a world where workers decided how much to pay their assistant ("manager") according to how much tangential effort and overhead he saves them so they can focus on their core competency.
The way labor availability doesn't actually help most peasant families if they don't have land to use it on. And when land is locked up by Big Men or temples or aristocrats, the system traps excess labor in a way that looks inefficient, but is actually great for those doing the extracting
People make mistake assuming that system is the same inefficient and exploitive for everyone. The owners and rule makers have everything in abundance, service providers from construction to healthcare queue at their doorstep. You might hear the owners and rule makers complaining about the reality and economy but it's something completely different from what you think.
This blog series by Bret Devraux keeps bringing me back to the black death, and how that reformed labor relations.
I have heard about that a few times now. But this series really emphasizes how much surplus labor the rich could extract. And hence shows how much social impact it had when that labor reduced, and could suddenly negotiate.
I wonder if the black death, and subsequent social change, might have been the best thing to happen to the peasant class.
I wonder what would happen given today’s demographic if mass migration was shut down. There may be similar change. But ruling class is hard at work to avoid that.
The black death killed a lot of people, but mostly the old and infirm. Europe was left an extremely young and dynamic place.
Today's demographic situation also involves a shrinking population, but it's for lack of young people. The world is getting a lot older really quickly, and that means less energetic and dynamic, and it means a lot of resources flowing to older unproductive people.
Still less work hands would mean change of balance between the capital and the labour. The changes in real estate pricing, which is one of the main expenses for labour, would be massive.
It doesn't really mean that because there isn't a forever fixed amount of labor being bidded on by the workforce. That side of the market is also dynamic. As population ages and then shrinks, labor demand will also shrink. If supply and demand shrink in tandem, wages don't increase.
Real estate bubble won't pop with a shrinking population, because shrinking populations retreat to city centers. Spain, Italy, Japan, and Korea are full of $10,000 houses and all of them are overpriced. Meanwhile, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo, and Seoul are, without hyperbole, more expensive than they've ever been.
Japan or Korea are not shrinking that much, but they’re getting older. Give it a couple decades when last bigger generations start vanishing entirely en masse.
Japan is already shrinking a million people per year, and Korea about 100k, but both are accelerating. It won't be long before Korea is also shrinking a million people per year.
My personal guess about this is that wealthy people tend to lock wealth away in unproductive but safe ventures instead of value production. When there is a large labor population decrease and labor can demand more of the wealth of a society, they tend to use that wealth in a more productive way for the average person and that leads to social flourishing. Hence, I am not at all worried about the decrease in population - that will increase the power of labor and unlock a lot of horded wealth towards actually productive ends, not whatever dumb or safe shit rich people think is smart.
The modern UK leasehold system is, in many ways, rooted in the feudal landholding arrangements. In the UK, when buying a house, the buyer sometimes leases the land rather than owning it outright, and must pay ground rent to the landlord. A lease is usually bought for 80 years or more, but occasionally properties are sold with only a few years remaining. If the lease is not renewed, the homeowner risks losing the property to the landlord. The right to renew is not a given and comes with premium costs. Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to restrict or abolish this system but it continues to persist.
Vast majority of houses are not leasehold. It’s 125 years at lease, and aside from a couple of decades the ground rent was always a peppercorn (actual ground rents started in the 90s and have now finished)
You're right, but the proportion of leasehold is still somewhat high (about 7% of houses in the UK). Kinda weird that it's still a thing. There's also a good scam going where leaseholders will try and persuade you to buy out of the lease for X thousand £, because people want the piece of mind rather than paying the ground rent.
In UK and most of the rich EU, one doesn't even have to get indebted to be in precarious position. The land owning and tenancy alone make it, any person at any time is one letter away from being homeless or from at least months long legal battle.
When you get to the end, remember that's how many to most black people lived until very recently until they were expelled from the land with nothing, due to the rise of more efficient farming techniques. The very few who owned their own land were more slowly pushed out when they were denied farm loans. Black people owned about 15 million acres of land in 1910, now they own about 1 million.
how much have land ownership shrunk per person, for all americans, since 1910? i wouldn't be surprised if it was similar. which isn't to, in any way, discount the especially terrible treatment people of color have had in american history.
The idea that "efficiency" alone caused it glosses over how policy and power structures actively shaped who got to benefit from modern agriculture and who got left out (or pushed out).
I can recommend reading ACOUP to any technically minded person even if it's about history.
I haven't had the time to read this series yet but I can recommend for example his articles about the industrial revolution, making of iron and steel or sieges in the Lord of the Rings compares to read world tactics.
He has a knack for analyzing society from a systems level perspective and going into the right amount of depth for somebody who wants to understand the principles without having any background in history.
Yeah, and imagine how much more time could the medieval peasants have spent working if only they had electricity, machines and computers at their disposal.
I think the origin of the trope is that the peasants sat around doing nothing during winter, when there was nothing to plant or harvest.
It's probably true that there was less work in the winter (although you still had all your maintenance tasks, e.g. repairs and preparing firewood), but this was compensated by much more intense labor in the spring and summer.
Overall, though, it makes no sense to say medieval peasants worked less than people do now, it's likely very comparable, and the variations would depend on the quality of your soil/irrigation and how much you were going to get taxed.
It is really great that Snopes was around in medieval times and can confirm or deny! /S
The thing is, no one knows what medieval peasants were doing, cos we weren't there. We have this or that piece of evidence, but evidence can be misinterpreted.
The majority of people today don't work as hard as the farmers of today. It is completely implausible that they work harder than the farmers of the middle ages, who almost certainly had to work harder than modern farmers (thanks to no mechanization).
That’s not really a fair comparison when vastly more of the population worked as farmers. The article has a good bit of evidence though that the amount of food needed to feed laborers didn’t lower meaningfully during the period cited as having short work hours, while the economic record that statistic is based on is very spotty. They probably worked way more hours.
If you enjoy even a smidge of this, please look at other articles/series on their blog, ACOUP is absolutely phenomenal and I've not seen many writers (here also historian and tenured professor) both be so accessible and graspable while having a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation AND providing ample sources.
10/10 couldn't recommend more.
I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoyed the one on iron.
I found the one for Sparta too emotionally charged for my interest. But I really really endorse most of the other ones especially ones touching in economics and logistics of ancient world.
(Btw he's not a tenured professor, much to his chagrin, he's an adjunct professor. This is exactly why he wrote A LOT about broken academia system too.)
It's just funny since his blog is the entire reason I learned about the difference of adjunct and tenured professor, and why a big problem in academia is that they tenure less and less and rely on lots of adjunct professors instead.
There is a vast gap in how academia treats adjunct vs tenure track professors, a difference the author of this blog has spent a decent amount of words explaining and complaining about.
My impression is that it is correct enough the look good on surface. Like learning Freud, you see his points, it makes sense, but the details are wrong and so you spend most of your time learning why he wasn't exactly right.
It's been awhile since I've read it, but it does offer a similar approach in the sense that it's an easy read. Bret does a good job of making the various topics fun and interesting, even in areas I normally wouldn't be interested in.
As a side note, I've read some interesting critiques on Diamond's theories. But I did find the whole book to be an interesting perspective, even just thinking about things North America lacked such as animal husbandry that may have drastically changed the way it developed.
_his_ blog. It’s all written by one man. But I agree that it’s a remarkable blog, so fascinating and freely given.
While I’m in grumpy-old-man-shakes-fist-at-newfangled-grammar mode, I can _almost_ accept that people writing in the “historical present” is unavoidable these days since TV historians have made it so trendy, but it’s especially jarring when he changes tense in the middle of a sentence (emphasis mine):
> These settlers _were_ remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings _are_ trying to do is…
I'd normally be frustrated with all of the grammar mistakes, as it indicates to me that the author can't be bothered to proof read their own work before they expect others to read it.
However, now I see the mistakes as an indicator that it hasn't been written with an LLM which then makes me more inclined to want to read it.
"chatgpt, a guy on hacker news just said spelling mistakes are a sign llms haven't been used - write <thing> with a reasonable amount of convincing spelling mistakes so that it appears to be written by a human."..
A reminder unemployment and underemployment and labour displacement existed in Roman times, and could be inferred to have carried into post Roman serfdom and the age of kings. It might not be the best choice for a peasant normally but walking off the land did happen. There are court records seeking the return of successful townspeople provably off their lords domain, and similar documents around marriage and land inheritance.
Peasant revolts would be fights for retained rights, even if informal - not just new rights, if at all about new rights.
Labour mobility predates the modern era.
You’re right that "walking off the land did happen". Although the feudal system legally bound serfs to the land, there were ways for individuals to escape this bondage. For instance, a serf who lived in a town for a year and a day without being reclaimed by their lord could often gain their freedom. These people, known as 'villeins' in some records, were essentially free peasants who had successfully left their lord's domain.
How does this compare to employment bonds of today?
At least I know of likes of Infy, TCS etc doing this (in the home country) — making freshers sign bonds for 2-3 years and if you want to leave within that period the only way is to pay a good amount irrespective of whether you didn’t receive a salary raise or didn’t get the opportunities which were good good for you. If you don’t pay the bond — they won’t usually drag you to a court (they send legal notices for sure) but they will also not issue you an experience certificate.
A boon for the very thing you describe was the Black Death of the 14th century. The colossal depopulation of Europe increased the de facto bargaining power of peasants to the point where they could competitively seek out better labor wages and land concessions in places well outside their previous manor. Thus, many peasants did exactly this, to the point where the noble elites and monarchies of Europe tried to enforce tougher regulations and laws against free movement, wage increases and even conspicuous displays of prosperity by the increasingly wealthy peasant classes of society (many of who were also turning to mercantile ventures to further diversify their income.
As is usually the case with government social and economic dictates that attempt controls against the practical social and economic reality of the world around them, these laws slowly but inexorable failed, leading to the steady erosion of feudalism throughout Europe (though not everywhere at similar times, and in some places this repressive system lingered for centuries longer, ie: Russia, Sicily, etc)
If anything, for all its grim deadliness, the Black Death was oddly beneficial to the future social and economic flourishing of Europe, starting with the rise of the Renaissance, and leading from there to so many other things, for better or worse for the rest of the world.
This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.
Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives.
I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right.
No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in.
Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.
Land value tax would be a good addition to the Japanese model. Raise the tax high enough, land prices are zero, leaving behind only the value of the home. Homes, like cars, will naturally depreciate in value. No weird artificial depreciation of houses needed.
You can still have investment in real estate, but it will be a competitive market. You can't sit on land and let it appreciate without putting in the work, because appreciation of land means higher taxes.
Land is a scarce resource. I don’t know that crating a system to wash that reality away is desirable.
Land value tax doesn't remove that, it mostly changes who benefits from that scarcity and more strongly incentivises using that scarce resource productively.
Japan has relatively cheaper real estate because of their lax zoning laws and frequent earthquakes drive the long term value of construction down. Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate.
It dosen't really have anything to do with what you are saying because the Nikkei underperformed relative to FTSE or S&P 500.
Better laws/incentives could still pull people out of the housing market.
>Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate.
Isn't this because most of Asia has just copied the western capitalist housing asset monetisation scheme with Japan being the only exception?
What do you mean by monenization scheme?
Land are worth something because it's undertaxed. If you tax land high enough, the price of land is zero. This means you don't have to take out a loan to buy the land, but maybe you need to do so for the building. Lands in cities are often high enough that they exceed the value of buildings. So, land price being zero save you money up-front, but you have to pay higher taxes on the land.
The improvements are naturally depreciating assets. Your house, much like your car, fall apart over time without maintenance. Ideally, you aren't taxed on improvements.
So, in a properly functioning market, you can buy property, but it's depreciating in price all the time, while you are left with a tax bill on the land. Each time, land value roses, you are left with a higher tax bill every year.
Japan also has less social mobility - it’s a great country but it’s no paradise.
Homes get torn down all the time because they aren’t worth anything - not exactly environmentally friendly.
Even in America today you have plenty of things worth investing in that don’t have to be homes if you can’t stomach the initial investment. Idk what you envision about replacing investment in homes with “research” though certainly curious to learn more about what you envision.
It would be vastly more advantageous to our actual standard of living if housing depreciates, people invested in business that provide something to scoring instead of land, and we could periodically tear down housing and rebuild it for cheap so that people can live in nicer residences
I think it's very difficult to compare policies in a meaningful way, and be curious to understand why you believe it would be vastly more advantageous to our actual standard of living if housing depreciated, and you could be right, but I don't think your claim that periodically tearing down housing and rebuilding it for cheap means nicer residences. On its face it seems that the opposite is true: cheaper materials means cheaper housing, but not necessarily nicer housing. One way that this claim is suspicious to me is that older houses in the United States are much nicer, if maintained, than newer builds, dollar for dollar and the quality of craftsmanship and materials isn't easy to replicate today. I have actual hardwood planks for flooring. Today if you want "hardwood flooring" it's typically a series of interlocking planks for easy/cheap install (and substantial markup) but not necessarily nice.
And the homes I've seen in Japan personally didn't seem to stand out to me as particularly nice but maybe you have some examples that you are thinking of or a different experience?
Japan is a really rigid country that values stability, hierarchy and following rules above all else. There is a reason why their economy has been stagnant since 1990.
And yeah, the houses might be cheap, but they are also tiny and most Japanese cities are ugly as sin. Not a great example IMHO.
> There is a reason why their economy has been stagnant since 1990.
There are many many reasons that go into explaining an economic outcome.
Reducing everything to a perceived cultural difference is wrong and intellectually uncurious.
I think if freedom is a desired trait then your system cannot (will not) be entirely dictated by any design.
If the pre-freedom systems are so locked in that post-freedom systems can't emerge, are you free?
Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "expert" in any given field to spread propaganda favourable to them.
The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.
One day society will collapse and in the chaos people will come together to create a new constitution. The people who find themselves in a position to write that constitution will not have time to read up on psychology and systemantics and cryptography and voting theory and AI, etc, etc. There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
Has anyone tried to write a constitution based on all this? Not with the expectation that it will actually be used, but as a way to teach these important theories and give a good example of how they can be applied to law?
Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.
> There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
I'm not certain.
Both the US Constitution and the first French Constitution, for instance, were the produce of one century of thinking ideas through. Each successive French Constitution has been redesigned to avoid the problems that led to the fall of the previous one.
I'm less familiar with other examples.
> Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book.
Link?
> We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.
Open up a git for the book and let the people do PRs and bug reports. One file per article.
And this is why I say that people are not and can not be equal, despite how uncomfortable it makes everyone.
Everybody has a "right to an opinion" but some people's opinions are fundamentally invalid because they are not constructed on facts and personal preferences but on an incomplete and incorrect understanding of the world and repeating other people's personal preferences.
The hard part is how to separate truth from lies, how to quantify uncertainty, how to tell apart objective and subjective, and how to make people introspect enough to realize when their preferences are not really theirs.
Intelligent and educated people have a much higher chance to get the objective part right. (To state the obvious, nothing is certain, people looking for absolutes or pretending I am talking in absolutes are either dumb or manipulative.) But they can also have different personal preferences from the unintelligent and uneducated. I still think weighting votes based on a test of knowledge and intelligence should be tries.
I also see very few reasons for massive nation states to exist beyond common defense. Perhaps laws should have much smaller jurisdictions, down to individual towns, so they can be experimented with and people can move not far if they are really unhappy. But that requires a much smaller and cleaner law system, so common people can understand the differences, otherwise it becomes a mess.
And we should teach people about manipulative techniques and abusive / anti-social personality traits from childhood, teach them to recognize them and even take tests depicting interactions between people where they have to detect use of manipulation.
[dead]
Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.
File this under Lies Engineers Believe About Political Science.
Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
Yes, severely capping funding, or even banning all private funding and giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money, is probably one of the most important things you can do for the health of a democracy.
It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol
But essentially it’s very close. The result here was that private campaigning was rediced a lot. Debates are mostly state-organized. Big portion of posters are on state-designated special billboards. There’re still some ads on all sorts of media, but there’s less of them and they’re less intense. Private events are next to nonexistent. Compared to US, I’d say campaigning, when put on a spectrum, is closer to being banned than the other side.
> giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money
How do you allocate that? Surely you can't give anyone who asks the same amount. So you favour parties which are already entrenched. Of course that has quite a few upsides but it doesn't seem like an inherently democratic system.
In worst (of course not unavoidable) you also might end up with indirect equivalent of what your re trying to ban, e.g. private media companies with a lot of resources that are biased towards certain candidates influencing public opinion (without crossing the legal boundaries) or those already in power using the state media to do the same.
e.g. in Hungary most funding comes from the government. How did that work out for them?
By allowing uncapped funding, you’re just giving a lot of power to big money. Which is not exactly democratical either.
I guess having parties funded entirely by small private donations or maybe a way to optionally allocate some share of the taxes you pay yourself and banning all direct funding from government and corporations could be the least bad option.
That’s what is going on here
- parties repeatedly getting 2% over 4 years get gov donations
- parties can take capped membership fees
- private citizen can forward a minuscule part of incomes tax towards a specific party, fully anonymously
- during campaigning, private people can donate to parties, capped to a small percentage of donator official incomes.
Fun thing is, this was put in place after an attempt to install a local equivalent of Orban. Bankrolled by a businessman with close ties to Russia.
My criticism is of banning campaigning, it's a an engineers solution to a complex web of problems they don't understand.
Well that isn’t a very compelling argument unless you get a lot more specific.
Here’s a narrow critique, you don’t understand that limiting campaigning privileges name recognition which is something only existing officials or celebrities will have.
In a representative system where you vote directly for candidates and not parties like in the US you need to know who is who and what they support.
Banning campaigning hurts challengers to the status quo.
I could keep picking your naive suggestion apart but this is I believe sufficient evidence that you haven’t done your homework.
Start with the fact that it's impossible and will only benefit the candidate that best bends the rule or is able to blatantly break it without repercussions.
And most party funding comes from the government which favours party which are already in power? Not that this is a horrible system but it does have rather obvious downsides.
e.g. that doesn't seem to be working that well in Hungary or Turkey and presumably quite a few other countries. Banning or severely limiting external funding or support makes it rather easy for politicians with authoritarian policies to keep their grip on power.
You win the election, you tweak the system to make it easier for you to win next time, you get more funding and your opponents less. Rinse and repeat and you can weaken the opposition to such an extent that you can stay in power more or less indefinitely. That's what Orban or Erdogan are doing.
Another option is you spend a lot of money, win, then change the rules to ban or limit external funding so that nobody else can do that to challenge you.
So far government does u-turn after each election so it looks like there’s enough safeguards to make sure formula stays sane. Maybe it would be a problem if private citizen funding was fully banned. But now that’s allowed with a cap to avoid fraud.
And in our case the alternative is Russian money making it into politics. Which is exactly what could lead to issues.
If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on the part of moneyed individuals.
Suppose we allow only short published stump speeches and nothing else.
What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote?
Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.
Well that doesn’t happen currently so it probably won’t happen in this scenario. Nor does it really happen in countries that have implemented bans on private campaign financing.
Propaganda is definitionally just strategic spread of information. You shouldn't expect people to turn their brains off just because you've said propaganda. Any political speech done with forethought and intent is propaganda.
Are stump speeches not propaganda? I don't see why the election system should privilege candidates whose political views are most compellingly expressed in quick little text blurbs.
That is how the system already works. Tv and social media soundbites are king, rather than substance.
I don’t think that’s true? There are exceptions, but Mike Johnson or Chuck Schumer aren’t successful because they’re getting really good zingers on social media.
I mean, that is exactly why people even know their names. You think people actually read schumers policy positions on his website? Maybe a single digit percentage do. Most everyone just blindly picks the party line option even on primaries usually the party endorsed candidate wins.
Or complete stagnation and entrenchment of current political class and their networks. Not that its necessarily not the case anyway but it would be very heard for anyone outside the system to break in.
That's why term limits exist.
Currently, they are only used for some positions like presidency, are usually 2 terms and don't apply to other positions.
IMO:
1) We should get rid of presidents and other single-person positions altogether and replace them with groups of at least 5. Power concentrated in the hands of one individual attracts the worst individuals.
2) Term limits should apply to many more positions.
3) I am undecided whether the limit counter should be shared among all positions (i.e. if 2 terms is the max, you can serve 2 years as president, 2 as senator, or 1 as president and 1 as senator - changing position would not reset it). This would mean there would be no career politicians but also the politicians would be less experienced. The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town) but only allowing one term in each position. That way people can judge them on their past performance.
Its tricky, though. There might be people who are doing a perfectly good job and kicking them arbitrarily might be suboptimal.
Then there is room for quite a lot of direct or indirect corruption. e.g. if you know you won't have a job in 4-8 years major corporations and other organizations offering you a cushy job if you do the "right things" might become quite a bit more appealing.
But yes, having a distinct class of career politicians has some significant downsides as well..
> The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town)
Might work fine or there might be a lot of gatekeeping if you just want to get on the first step since that will likely be controlled quite tightly by the established parties/cliques.
I think this would be pretty tricky to do. For example, I love the idea of limiting candidates to a little stump speech pamphlet that gets included in the voting materials.
But, what if instead of doing typical advertising, a candidate coordinates secretly with people outside your jurisdiction. Co-conspirators could spend months or years running stories about some issue—crime, homelessness, drugs, etc, that might even have some kernel of truth (but be wildly overblown). People in your society might jump in with their own stories related to the problem, legitimate stories of things that happened to them, but filtered up by “the algorithm.” Then, the malicious candidate can just reference the well-known (overblown) issues in their pamphlet. It’s perfect because they don’t even have to make or defend any specific claims, just gesture broadly at the fears that individuals have self-selected.
What do we ban? Getting your news from outside the jurisdiction? Discussing your experiences? Politicians meeting people outside jurisdiction? I don’t really see it…
I dunno. My gut feeling is that we just have to come to terms with the idea of democracy requiring some sort of media literacy. But then if people were good at identifying ads and ignoring them, they wouldn’t be used so widely.
Being able to give a good speech is merit when the goal is to select a leader.
Strongly disagree, in the age of teleprompters and speech writers this is a major part of campaigns (because of TV) but hardly matters at all for actual governing. Our excessive focus on it is not helping us select better leaders.
I used to think that, before 2016. Apparently, incoherent rambling is also a successful strategy.
Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist (2004) https://vimeo.com/90583017
Initial debates usually feature all serious candidates anyhow. Advertisement aka propaganda draws a line for me.
I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants are the cause of all our issues and the media will be full of crimes by illegal immigrants, etc.
> Banning campaigning would go a long way.
With tongue in cheek, that qualifies you as the "people like Stalin" category. Not a good idea.
And allowing for infinite money to pay for propaganda is somehow not Stalinist?
If you're happy to accept almost literally everyone as Stalinist I suppose so. But if the word is going to mean anything then no, spending a lot on propaganda isn't Stalinist. It is routine governance. If you intend to organise people politically it is going to take a lot of propaganda.
Routine governance in Stalin’s time is what we now call Stalinism. “Just the way we do things” doesn’t tell you much about the quality. Unlimited campaign spending has a huge potential to consolidate power and allow more spe ding in a positive feedback loop.
The problem is that whatever system we come up with in theory, will have to be built in practice out of people, and there is never any shortage of people who will happily abuse the system and fellow people out of greed or delusion. That's why an AI overlord arising and taking over is not a threat, it's our only hope /s
> optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
You are confusing narrative, a positive spin with actual rules of the system. In political system they are never the same.
Freedom, equal opportunity etc are not objectives of our political system, they are just the narrative.
I don't think those at the top of the social hierarchy would condone the 'better system'.
We can at the very least tweak existing systems to be meaningfully better.
For example we could phase out all marketing and advertising. We could simplify and automate accounting and many other jobs. We could reduce the work week to 30 hours. We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job. Make moving down on a career ladder or switching careers entirely a common and non-humiliating occurrence, etc.
The most pertinent question to ask is - why haven't any of these already happened? What kinds of people prevent these changes from occurring and what should be done about it? Do you know any of these people - are some of them your family members. Are you one of them? Why does no one seem to ask these questions and seek answers? :)
> We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job.
Most of your comment I agree with but I take issue with this part.
Some time in recent history education became a means to an end: getting a decent job. This is not strictly speaking the point. Learning for the sake of learning still has tangible value that cannot be substituted by requisite training for entry level jobs.
I'm not really sure what caused this shift (but I definitely understand and respect it) but it's heavily misguided. If only we could all be so lucky as to be highly educated in a mundane job.
I don't want to live in a world where we only learn what we need to know in order to do our job. Do you?
The kinds of jobs I imagine would leave people with far more energy and time to do whatever they want - including learning, or not learning :)
> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics.
There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found useful, from a (leftist) video essay:
> See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...]
> Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of the things we do in our day-to-day lives can be justified by either one, we don't often notice the contradiction between them, and it's easy to imagine whichever one tends to be our default is everyone else's default as well. [...]
> Your conservative friend thinks you're naive for thinking the system even can be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation [...] Many conservatives assume liberals [...] know The Hierarchy is eternal, that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them. [...]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs
> > that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them.
They're right... when the other is someone like them.
And they have a blind spot for an other who is not like them.
Meanwhile, what is the blind spot of the people who are not like that (i.e., who believe in equality)?
Is their blind spot that they can't imagine so many people who are trying to gain advantage, and being deceitful about it?
There used to be a name for this. "Everyone is different." How people have forgotten this basic fact is beyond me.
This analysis is highly muddled. "making things equal" != democracy. Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies. The concepts of democracy and capitalism have a far greater reach than the current US political climate where both are malfunctioning. The US is a superpower attempting to become a third world country and corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.
There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should not have it comes to have it. This is what every system so far has succumbed to. We need a truly equal system where all concentration of power is avoided unless absolutely necessary for the functioning of society to avoid an eventual collapse of the system.
The basic mechanism you’re describing is essentially accurate, however:
> As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship.
This doesn’t logically follow. The existence of a power differential doesn’t necessitate the differential being exploited to increase the differential. If we assume individuals are maximally selfish, this might hold, but that isn’t the case; people do altruistic things all the time, and there’s good reason to think most people are hardwired for it. The problem of liberal democracy is how you design a system to address those who are hardwired towards malicious selfishness; it isn’t clear that you truly can.
I would say that over a long enough period of time it's unavoidable that a selfish person will use the power to gain more. Selfish people are more likely to seek positions of power, so even if most people are altruistic, the people that seek power are more likely to be selfish.
I’ve come to basically the same conclusion. Attempts to engineer perfect political systems that are immune to this sort of infiltration is like trying to build a structure that will never need to be repaired—you can expend a lot of resources and effort on it upfront, but on a long enough timeline there will be failure modes you didn’t foresee.
Then how do you explain that all attempts at communism ended in dictatorships, except (perhaps) Israel, whereas the list of capitalist republics that ended in dictatorship is pretty short?
Oh and how do you intend to solve that most "communists" leaders were fake and intended to become dictators from the very start. There's many cases of various dictators, from anarchist, to just self-interested people, fascists, religious lunatics, ... pretending to be communists to grab power. In many cases, communists supported these awful people with extremely bad results. Examples: Russia, Afghanistan, Iran, Poland, Venezuela, ... all are cases of communists supporting would-be dictators that had ZERO intention of ever making those societies equal or tolerant or democratic.
In fact there's plenty of people who got support by pretending to be communists, even going so far as committing terrorist attacks on behalf of communism, to turn around and become capitalist "leaders", like ... well, most of the members of the EU commission for example. Jose Manuel Barosso, for example, was part of communist protests that lynched people. He was also the EU commission president that pushed Greece into debt servitude.
In other words, cancer always spreads.
Not necessarily the first cancer, but eventually one will.
Cancer is when a component of a system acts to replicate or enrich itself instead of acting to perpetuate the system.
Cancer can be also said to be fault of a system living longer than it needs to. In the end, what matters less is the specific instance of the system than ensuring the continuity of development is passed on.
But for states, they still feverishly cling to the idea of unity even as it brings increasing fragility and stagnation.
What if a true democracy is not a worthy goal? What if some people should have more or less say in something.
Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing?
Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair?
If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinces enough people that for very large values of 2, the answer is five, democracy says the answer is 5. How do you protect against this outcome in a pure democracy?
Education would probably be the answer. In a true democracy we would need to make sure everyone is well educated. Of course there are a lot of decisions that require very specialized knowledge that can't be taught to everyone, and in such cases it might be necessary to have limited participation or some kind of weighted voting.
Unfortunately that seems to be highly subjective and different people have a very different understanding of what "well educated" means.
> What if some people should have more or less say in something.
Yes, I certainly agree.
The problem (which IMHO outweighs all the benefits by quite a bit) is that when you allow drawing these artificial lines the ones in charge of them will inevitably design the system in such a way that benefits them (maybe even without ill intentions).
It's similar to geographical gerrymandering just openly based on social/education/etc. class.
Also... balancing interests of diverse social and economic groups is not exactly straightforward, its certainly not basic math.
You instill civic virtue from a young age.
That's how totalitarian regimes maintain their grip on power as well. At the end of the day someone needs to define what "civic virtue" is, if its done top down well that might not necessarily work out that well (of course it might be the opposite but it seems like a very dangerous method).
I don't know what you're talking about. What kind of civic participation do you see in North Korea?
I don't, you don't either, quite a few people in North Korea might view it differently.
My point is what methods do you use to "instil civic virtue"? How do you define it? And most importantly how do you prevent people from diverging from them?
Historically totalitarian societies were often quite good at instilling any kind of "virtue" you wanted. Free and democratic societies generally tend to struggle with the "instilling" part. (Of course to be fair there a few success stories (to an extent) like France)
Education, and the fostering of independent civil society, which is something you don't see in authoritarian societies. The virtues you want to instill in a democratic society, contrasted with authoritarian ones, are truth vs. propaganda, accountability vs. loyalty, and courage vs. obedience.
I think you are leaning too hard into moral relativism. The differences between free- and authoritarian societies are plain to see.
Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not equating the values themselves, as you said they are the polar opposite. And to be honest I'm certainly not a fan of moral relativism in the direct sense.
The methods seem more concerning. First you have to give someone the right to define what these virtues mean in practice. Then you need to somehow impose them on the wider population. This is a rather dangerous tool and I think actual examples of such a top down approach working in democratic societies are quite rare.
It works if the consensus already exists in the society. Clearly these days that's not the case in quite a few places.
What do you then? Force children of people who have a radically different understanding of what these civil virtues are to attend schools which teach them against their will? Take them away if the parents refuse? Well that's what totalitarian states do...
> First you have to give someone the right to define what these virtues mean in practice. Then you need to somehow impose them on the wider population. This is a rather dangerous tool and I think actual examples of such a top down approach working in democratic societies are quite rare.
Once you have a democracy, you are not supposed to dictate from the top but distribute political power, and decision-making. The US has seen the executive's usurpation of power from the other branches of government since the turn of the century. Such an unbalanced government is by definition inimical to democracy.
Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal". In a democracy, the people have the power to decide and anyone has the power to elect, be elected and to voice his opinion freely.
> Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal".
His point is that democratic systems are subverted if absolute equality is not enforced. It’s a crude argument but basically correct. The only way you prevent usurpation is by making sure one individual doesn’t have any obvious means of scaling his influence to the point that he can challenge the democratic militia.
What you call influence is simply trust that others impart to an individual. There is very little a single individual can physically do by themselves. So if there is someone with the influence to challenge a militia then it's better to say a proportionate number of people are also challenging the militia with the person as their proxy.
This is the argument populists make regarding Caesar, and there might be some truth to it, but it falls apart when you look at a Venezuela or North Korea; it’s easy to say that a nation gets the government it deserves when you aren’t the one having your life threatened.
Then again, outsized influence is a problem in democracies as well; this is what creates the conditions for a Caesar figure to emerge in the first place.
If things are not equal, then the voice of some people is louder than the voice of others, and that is no longer a true democracy.
Nothing has been as effective at dispersing and diffusing power than Liberal democracy.
>There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible.
Only if by that you mean equal opportunities for everyone.
But if you mean equal outcomes, then you're guaranteed to get USSR/Cuba/Venezuela poverty, famines and shortages, and even there that didn't fix the issue of the elites being super wealthy, it just made everyone else equally poor.
People will never end up equal no matter how many thumbs the government puts on the scale, that actually makes it so much worse.
Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes. Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.
All the countries you mention had a lot of power centralization, which I'm arguing is the reason all systems fail. If we avoid centralized power, we avoid the corruption and theft that inevitably comes with it.
Can you go into detail how your ideal system would work?
I don't have details. It'd need to be based on direct democracy, but for now we don't have any way to make good decisions efficiently with it. I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.
>I don't have details.
No way. I'm shocked.
>Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes.
And how is 'equal outcomes for everyone' as the end goal, different than communism?
Even if you think it's not communism, the results will still be the same: poverty and famine for everyone but the elites since, news flash for you, people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures just like our ape ancestors, and if you force equality of outcome upon them, you take away their opportunity to try to better themselves in respect to their peers, so then society spirals downward into everyone refusing to work or at most doing the bare minimum since there's no incentive do work harder if you'll end up equal to Bob the uneducated alcoholic.
>Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.
Yes the lottery of birth in life is unfair, welcome to the real world. Some people are born rich some are born poor, some are born tall some are bone short, some are born pretty some are born ugly, some are born smart some are born stupid, some are diligent and hard working, some are lazy and procrastinative.
You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels. The only thing you can do is tax inherited wealth better, and try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.
>I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.
Yeah, no. It's gonna be the exact opposite of that: more surveillance, more targeted propaganda, and less democracy. See Palantir.
> No way. I'm shocked.
Please don't do this. Criticizing and thinking about the outlines of new solutions is a necessary first step. Details can be figured out after people agree on what the problems with the current systems are. Obviously I'm aware of the problems of previously attempted systems and don't wish to repeat them. If we can't figure out better details than those tried before, then of course I would prefer the current system.
> people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures
Sure, humans have many kinds of needs and wants, and climbing the social hierarchy is just one of them. Why should we base our governance and our economic system on that need instead of something less destructive? There can still be hierarchies, just not the kind of hierarchies that give people power over others. An olympic gold medalist is at the top of a hierarchy, but doesn't have much power to control other people. Hierarchies like that could still remain to satisfy the people who have a strong need for such a thing.
Also, as I've said in other comments, I do believe there might be a need for some level of differences in rewards, as not all jobs are such that enough people would want to do them purely from intrinsic motivation. In such cases there should first be attempts to find rewards that don't provide control over other people, and if that is not enough, then we should figure out if the job is absolutely necessary and increase the rewards little by little until we have enough people doing it. Not all power differential can or should be avoided, but creating them should be the last resort and they should be as small as possible.
> You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels.
Maybe not entirely, but we could do much much better than what is happening now. It's important that we have a system where people are encouraged to use their abilities to improve society, but the huge differences in the resources people get is surely not the only way to achieve that. A lot of scientists do science not because the pay is great, but because they're interested in the topic and there's fame and knowledge to be had. Also the rewards that people expect are relative. In a society where someone gets paid 300 times more than others the most skilled people won't want to do the work for less than that, but in a society where the highest reward is 5 times more than others the most skilled people would still gravitate towards that work. Maybe personal interests would have a larger part in deciding what a person chooses to work on, but I don't think that would be a bad thing.
> try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.
But this will eventually lead to the winners taking more and more, we end up with a system similar to what the soviet union was and we will crash. The direction we are heading in is plainly visible. The capitalist system is better than the soviet one, as it's slower to centralize power, but eventually the power differentials and resulting corruption will be large enough that the system no longer functions, and we are very close to it I think.
We can continue this way and crash and reset every few hundred years, or we can acknowledge that it is the centralization of power that causes these issues and try to build a system that avoids it as much as possible.
This is nonsense. Most/all democracies have laws that only certified doctors can practice medicine. This makes doctors unequal from other people. Is this incompatible with democracy?
Democracy is about equality of rights, not equality. People are not equal in every aspect, but they should be equal in front of the law, for example.
Freedom is not absolute because your freedom stops where somebodys freedom beginns.
Hence, if you practice medicine without qualifications there is a high chance you will hurt somebody. It is not undemocratic to protect against hurting others. Hurting others is not a right.
Interesting thought exercise though.
> Is this incompatible with democracy?
Yes. This is why every society of note limited the franchise prior to the 1900s. You can only have debates among equals among people who are equal. The sort of equality communists imagine requires that you either radically re-engineer the human pysche or implement Harrison-Bergeron-style handicaps on exceptional people.
Depends on what the doctor can do with that inequality. If it means the doctor gets paid 20 times more than others then yes that is incompatible with democracy, as over time that wealth difference will be used to increase the inequality. But if the power is limited to only decisions about health, which is necessary for healthcare to function, then it should be acceptable. You'd still have to make sure that even that level of power is not used to gain more power, though.
One can argue whether 20 times more is too much or too little but I would say that it is correct that a doctor gets paid quite a bit more than unskilled labor. Some people who become doctors might still go through with it if it were not but most (sane) people would not go through the lengthy and very demanding path that is medical school and residency if it was not a better paid than a job that very many people could do. I can tell you here and now that I don't think I personally would have had the stamina to become a medical doctor.
Sure, I can agree with that. There does need to be some kind of incentive to do jobs that enough people don't naturally want to do. But the differences in rewards should be kept as small as possible and created only as a last resort. As I said, power concentration should only be allowed if absolutely necessary. If no one wants to become a doctor, then I'd consider it absolutely necessary to increase the incentives of doing so bit by bit until we have enough doctors while keeping in mind the risk that comes with the power differentials created. At some point an extra doctor might not be worth the extra risk of power concentration.
> Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies.
No, Capitalism can only reinforce hierarchies. Its core tenet is accumulation of capital, and thus power.
> corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.
Corruption is what happens when the capitalist class gets powerful enough to bend the rules. Incompetence is what happens when they figure out they can put a puppet in place and order him to bend the rules faster for them.
>that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them
That's true even in the most leftist and forcefully egalitarian regimes like communism. There are a few taking the ultimate decisions and there are some that benefit.
Our current regime lies through their teeth daily. Like obvious, completely made up lies. Every. Day. It's not a misunderstanding. One side is pushing for authoritarianism, one is not. One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence. I'm so fuckin tired of pretending there is just some kind of misunderstanding between both "sides".
No, the video makes the point that it's not really a misunderstanding, there are fundamentally different values in tension. If you believe in and value hierarchy then authoritarianism is natural and desirable, the lies are just for assuaging your less committed or more sensitive allies and befuddling your enemies.
But people do not value hierarchy for its own sake. They value hierarchy when they're on top of it, or at least in the top half. There are not actually fundamentally different values, but different interests.
It's a mistake to assume that it's just about advantage or greed.
People even relatively far down may believe The Hierarchy offers predictability and stability—even if I think their belief is incorrect.
Authoritarians tend to be fearful, and it offers a partial answer to those fears.
>One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence.
Violence like shooting political opponents for voicing their opinions?
Proof by counterexample: I think it would have been a good decision to shoot Adolf Hitler for his opinions, don't you?
Simpler example: WWII happened, causing more than Hitler to be killed. Wars are political acts.
Sure would have been good if someone had killed Hitler before he started the war.
I would have made a donation to his art school in return for admitting him and keeping him busy.
BF Skinner had the same idea. You can read it in his book, Walden Two.
I don't think we can. I think video game worlds (especially MMOs) have somewhat similar structures appear, where there's a portion of people that seem to become rich.
>I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
That would work in MMO games,not in reality. If the system is not naturally evolving, it will produce tragedies. Look at communism. It was supposed to produce "a better" society but resulted in tens of millions of deaths, loss of freedom and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent
Hierarchies and funnelling behavior seems to be emergent from people desiring more, and some securing it.
I disagree, though only slightly:
I would say that it's rare that a hierarchy is deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward.
Rather, many hierarchies emerge organically, but those at the top seek to eliminate any that do not funnel surplus upward.
It's less a process of deliberate construction, and more a process of deliberate curation. Something like cultural bonsai.
The continue the bonsai metaphor: would its inevitable demise tell us about how hierarchies can be uprooted? Or conversely, that existing hierarchies that are well tended to rarely meet their end?
And that's why I say power must always come from the bottom.
Many people have anti-social traits which manifest by seeking power and then using it to extract value from other people at their expense.
Meanwhile the people doing real work are almost always pro-social but are too busy to play these power games, unless the power imbalance gets too large.
Even YC is designed that way, they fund people that can get into MIT or stanford or harvard maybe? Others with great records are rarely accepted, this is a known fact
this is easily shown to not be true? from 2025 numbers I think:
University of California, Berkeley - 26 founders Stanford University - 21 Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 17 Cornell University - 10 Georgia Institute of Technology - 7 Carnegie Mellon University - 7 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 7 Harvard University - 6 University of Oxford - 6 University of Cambridge - 6 University of Pennsylvania - 5 University of Washington - 5 Columbia University - 5 Johns Hopkins - 4 Yale - 4 Caltech - 4 UCLA - 4
YC is, last I heard, largely an in-person thing. And it makes sense for CA schools to be highly represented because of that.
Doesn't that list consist entirely of the top of the top world universities, with small-ish admittance numbers and sky-high tuition price per year? I think you are kind of proving the point of the top commenter :)
[flagged]
There is in one sense the king and the pawn are similar. Pawns are many, kings are few. If one pawn sacrifices itself to sacrifice the king, then kings ought to fear pawns and not take undue advantage.
The power (access to tools, system, and opportunity) to sacrifice an individual by another individual has become immensely disproportionate of late among individuals of different social and economic strata.
If you look at history, that's really not how elites react to violence (or its threat) from the 99%. Regicide is a Crime against God - meaning the social order which puts the elites on top. Vs. peasants are expendable at scale if the elites feel that they need to violently defend their elite status.
And this ain't chess, where Pawn x King is just another move. Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle and 4X scope by mail order, then get a job in a convenient book depository. If an assassin manages to kill a king, then 100:1 that it's an inside job - the perp is either another one of the elite, or acting his behalf.
This is an odd thing to say given the events of the past few days and even last couple years:
“Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle and 4X scope by mail order, then get a job in a convenient book depository”
Your broader argument still holds that those in power often don’t tend to view isolated threats from the public as truly existential threats (until they do, like we just saw in Nepal).
But it’s a bit hard to agree that even in America things are truly that much different.
Can we please move to a more intelligent discourse on this than “rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down”? The social hierarchy shows self sustaining intent on small scales, but by and large it has been clearly shown to be emergent and ever-evolving. Believing that someone is keeping you from moving up the hierarchy is a story you tell yourself.
Nobody said it's a conspiracy. It's simple specialization. Some people are good at productive positive-sum work, others are good at office politics, manipulation and scams. The latter are good at accumulating power to extract value from the former.
Imagine a world where workers decided how much to pay their assistant ("manager") according to how much tangential effort and overhead he saves them so they can focus on their core competency.
> rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down
I mean, project 2025, heritage foundation, Thiel, Trump ... like in fact they are exactly on it.
The way labor availability doesn't actually help most peasant families if they don't have land to use it on. And when land is locked up by Big Men or temples or aristocrats, the system traps excess labor in a way that looks inefficient, but is actually great for those doing the extracting
People make mistake assuming that system is the same inefficient and exploitive for everyone. The owners and rule makers have everything in abundance, service providers from construction to healthcare queue at their doorstep. You might hear the owners and rule makers complaining about the reality and economy but it's something completely different from what you think.
This blog series by Bret Devraux keeps bringing me back to the black death, and how that reformed labor relations.
I have heard about that a few times now. But this series really emphasizes how much surplus labor the rich could extract. And hence shows how much social impact it had when that labor reduced, and could suddenly negotiate.
I wonder if the black death, and subsequent social change, might have been the best thing to happen to the peasant class.
I wonder what would happen given today’s demographic if mass migration was shut down. There may be similar change. But ruling class is hard at work to avoid that.
The black death killed a lot of people, but mostly the old and infirm. Europe was left an extremely young and dynamic place.
Today's demographic situation also involves a shrinking population, but it's for lack of young people. The world is getting a lot older really quickly, and that means less energetic and dynamic, and it means a lot of resources flowing to older unproductive people.
Still less work hands would mean change of balance between the capital and the labour. The changes in real estate pricing, which is one of the main expenses for labour, would be massive.
It doesn't really mean that because there isn't a forever fixed amount of labor being bidded on by the workforce. That side of the market is also dynamic. As population ages and then shrinks, labor demand will also shrink. If supply and demand shrink in tandem, wages don't increase.
Real estate bubble would pop for simple reason that were would be significantly less people overall.
And much lower real estate prices could amortize a lot of wages shrinking, from labour perspective.
Real estate bubble won't pop with a shrinking population, because shrinking populations retreat to city centers. Spain, Italy, Japan, and Korea are full of $10,000 houses and all of them are overpriced. Meanwhile, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo, and Seoul are, without hyperbole, more expensive than they've ever been.
Japan or Korea are not shrinking that much, but they’re getting older. Give it a couple decades when last bigger generations start vanishing entirely en masse.
Japan is already shrinking a million people per year, and Korea about 100k, but both are accelerating. It won't be long before Korea is also shrinking a million people per year.
My personal guess about this is that wealthy people tend to lock wealth away in unproductive but safe ventures instead of value production. When there is a large labor population decrease and labor can demand more of the wealth of a society, they tend to use that wealth in a more productive way for the average person and that leads to social flourishing. Hence, I am not at all worried about the decrease in population - that will increase the power of labor and unlock a lot of horded wealth towards actually productive ends, not whatever dumb or safe shit rich people think is smart.
The modern UK leasehold system is, in many ways, rooted in the feudal landholding arrangements. In the UK, when buying a house, the buyer sometimes leases the land rather than owning it outright, and must pay ground rent to the landlord. A lease is usually bought for 80 years or more, but occasionally properties are sold with only a few years remaining. If the lease is not renewed, the homeowner risks losing the property to the landlord. The right to renew is not a given and comes with premium costs. Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to restrict or abolish this system but it continues to persist.
Vast majority of houses are not leasehold. It’s 125 years at lease, and aside from a couple of decades the ground rent was always a peppercorn (actual ground rents started in the 90s and have now finished)
You're right, but the proportion of leasehold is still somewhat high (about 7% of houses in the UK). Kinda weird that it's still a thing. There's also a good scam going where leaseholders will try and persuade you to buy out of the lease for X thousand £, because people want the piece of mind rather than paying the ground rent.
Is there a division within Weights & Measures that handles the regulatory framework for peppercorns?
Just a point to say leasehold is very rare in Scotland. I remember being told about this when I was looking at places near London and being surprised.
In UK and most of the rich EU, one doesn't even have to get indebted to be in precarious position. The land owning and tenancy alone make it, any person at any time is one letter away from being homeless or from at least months long legal battle.
When you get to the end, remember that's how many to most black people lived until very recently until they were expelled from the land with nothing, due to the rise of more efficient farming techniques. The very few who owned their own land were more slowly pushed out when they were denied farm loans. Black people owned about 15 million acres of land in 1910, now they own about 1 million.
how much have land ownership shrunk per person, for all americans, since 1910? i wouldn't be surprised if it was similar. which isn't to, in any way, discount the especially terrible treatment people of color have had in american history.
The idea that "efficiency" alone caused it glosses over how policy and power structures actively shaped who got to benefit from modern agriculture and who got left out (or pushed out).
Until the industrial revolution, 80% of people worked the land.
I can recommend reading ACOUP to any technically minded person even if it's about history.
I haven't had the time to read this series yet but I can recommend for example his articles about the industrial revolution, making of iron and steel or sieges in the Lord of the Rings compares to read world tactics.
He has a knack for analyzing society from a systems level perspective and going into the right amount of depth for somebody who wants to understand the principles without having any background in history.
Very good series on of all things, making bread.
It's a fitting title to describe life today for most people.
The series actually talks about this in detail, in particular the (incorrect) trope that medieval peasants worked a lot less than we do.
Yeah, and imagine how much more time could the medieval peasants have spent working if only they had electricity, machines and computers at their disposal.
The joys of progress.
Is that a trope?
Yes https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medieval-peasant-only-work...
I think the origin of the trope is that the peasants sat around doing nothing during winter, when there was nothing to plant or harvest.
It's probably true that there was less work in the winter (although you still had all your maintenance tasks, e.g. repairs and preparing firewood), but this was compensated by much more intense labor in the spring and summer.
Overall, though, it makes no sense to say medieval peasants worked less than people do now, it's likely very comparable, and the variations would depend on the quality of your soil/irrigation and how much you were going to get taxed.
Totally agree - their lives were no doubt hard and busy with back breaking work - my 'yes' was a 'yes it is a trope' - not a 'yes they barely worked'
Wtf? Ok I guess so. I would have never guessed.
Its a favorite among degrowthers and those who romanticise life in primitive societies
Also a favourite among those that compare apples to oranges.
It is really great that Snopes was around in medieval times and can confirm or deny! /S
The thing is, no one knows what medieval peasants were doing, cos we weren't there. We have this or that piece of evidence, but evidence can be misinterpreted.
We know enough facts to get a good picture even if we don't know exactly what they were doing\
The majority of people today don't work as hard as the farmers of today. It is completely implausible that they work harder than the farmers of the middle ages, who almost certainly had to work harder than modern farmers (thanks to no mechanization).
That’s not really a fair comparison when vastly more of the population worked as farmers. The article has a good bit of evidence though that the amount of food needed to feed laborers didn’t lower meaningfully during the period cited as having short work hours, while the economic record that statistic is based on is very spotty. They probably worked way more hours.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism provides a good description
https://www.amazon.ca/Peasants-Knights-Heretics-R-Hilton/dp/...
Highly recommend this book on the subject.
If you enjoy even a smidge of this, please look at other articles/series on their blog, ACOUP is absolutely phenomenal and I've not seen many writers (here also historian and tenured professor) both be so accessible and graspable while having a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation AND providing ample sources.
10/10 couldn't recommend more.
I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoyed the one on iron.
I found the one for Sparta too emotionally charged for my interest. But I really really endorse most of the other ones especially ones touching in economics and logistics of ancient world.
(Btw he's not a tenured professor, much to his chagrin, he's an adjunct professor. This is exactly why he wrote A LOT about broken academia system too.)
That's an oddly specific thing to point out
It's just funny since his blog is the entire reason I learned about the difference of adjunct and tenured professor, and why a big problem in academia is that they tenure less and less and rely on lots of adjunct professors instead.
There is a vast gap in how academia treats adjunct vs tenure track professors, a difference the author of this blog has spent a decent amount of words explaining and complaining about.
I've enjoyed Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond recently. If you have read it, how does it compare?
It's a problematic work. From what I remember from my time on /r/askhistorians, they really did not like it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wd6jt/what_d...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210619035356/http://www.columb...
My impression is that it is correct enough the look good on surface. Like learning Freud, you see his points, it makes sense, but the details are wrong and so you spend most of your time learning why he wasn't exactly right.
It's been awhile since I've read it, but it does offer a similar approach in the sense that it's an easy read. Bret does a good job of making the various topics fun and interesting, even in areas I normally wouldn't be interested in.
As a side note, I've read some interesting critiques on Diamond's theories. But I did find the whole book to be an interesting perspective, even just thinking about things North America lacked such as animal husbandry that may have drastically changed the way it developed.
> their blog
_his_ blog. It’s all written by one man. But I agree that it’s a remarkable blog, so fascinating and freely given.
While I’m in grumpy-old-man-shakes-fist-at-newfangled-grammar mode, I can _almost_ accept that people writing in the “historical present” is unavoidable these days since TV historians have made it so trendy, but it’s especially jarring when he changes tense in the middle of a sentence (emphasis mine):
> These settlers _were_ remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings _are_ trying to do is…
singular "they" is older than singular "you"
I'd normally be frustrated with all of the grammar mistakes, as it indicates to me that the author can't be bothered to proof read their own work before they expect others to read it.
However, now I see the mistakes as an indicator that it hasn't been written with an LLM which then makes me more inclined to want to read it.
Conflicted.
"chatgpt, a guy on hacker news just said spelling mistakes are a sign llms haven't been used - write <thing> with a reasonable amount of convincing spelling mistakes so that it appears to be written by a human."..
[dead]
[dead]