ＲＥＶＯＬＵＴＩＯＮ ＩＳ ＯＶＥＲＲＡＴＥＤ
Crypto-Centrist Transhumanist Nationalist.
Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. Wanted time criminal. Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, the Ultra-Caliphate, Google Defense Network, and the People's Republic of Cascadia. National Separatist, enemy of the World Federation government and its unificationist allies.
Blogs Topics: Cyberpunk Nationalism. Futurist Shtposting. Timeline Vandalism. Harassing owls over the Internet.
Use whichever typical gender pronouns you like.
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There is a common back-and-forth where the outgroup points out toxic people on the your side doing bad things, and your first impulse is to defend them, but your second impulse is to point out that these bad people are not typical of the ingroup.
The outgroup then clarifies: These people are what’s wrong with ingroup, because these shitty people are a symptom of all the shittyness, and suddenly you have to defend them and say they are not so bad after all.
You’re showing plots and data from the Great Leap Forward, I believe the point that Chomsky’s making is that it ended. Killing people was not effective in developing the country. Actually doing public health is.
I said “industrialization“ when I probably should have said “development,“ because it’s not industrial capacity they needed but medical infrastructure, but in all this you have to ask the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?“
Like @mitigatedchaos, I don’t think India is the relevant comparison. I think China is better compared to other centralized, authoritarian states in East Asia, like Taiwan and South Korea, rather than a decentralized, democratic state like India. But that comparison does suggest an answer to the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?”
Democratic, decentralized states have more trouble coordinating public resources and marshaling public effort. Amartya Sen, comparing India to China, thought that there was “no mystery in explaining these failures” in public health. It wasn’t because India didn’t have egalitarian goals. India’s National Congress was an admirably egalitarian and social democratic party, with a 1955 manifesto commitment to “planning with a view to establish a socialist society in
which the principal means of productions are characterized by social ownership or control.” India didn’t fail because it didn’t have the right goals. India failed because it lacked the means.
Sen writes that India failed “because of the extraordinary neglect of these goals in
choosing the directions of planning and public policy”. Sen describes the failures not as failures of substance – although he concedes that India should have focused on export promotion, agricultural development, and economic incentives rather than import-substitution, industrialization, and state-directed planning – but failures of will.
The picture is, however, quite different when it comes to means
using failures. There is a surprising amount of tolerance of low
performance precisely in those areas, vital to the living standard, that
had grabbed the imagination of the nation at the time of Independence and that, in the ultimate analysis, give significance to planning
efforts in transforming the quality of life of the masses. There is, in
fact, remarkable complacency about India’s moderate record in
removing escapable morbidity, avoidable mortality, and astonishingly low literacy rates.
I think this is just the mirror image of the virtues of a democratic and decentralized government, and the pluralism of Indian society, which Sen praised so fulsomely in the context of famine prevention. “No government in India – whether at the state level or at the center – can get away with ignoring threats of starvation and famine and failing to take counteracting measures,” but China could survive years without any change in policy.
But the pluralism that prevents the central government from ignoring threats of starvation – that supplies the powerful opposition pressure to change its policies – is the same pluralism that discourages it from expropriating private wealth, directing public wealth to national programs, prioritizing public health over the preferences of strong interest groups, or delivering the same public investments for decades without democratic control.
Sen says as much:
In China, where the driving force has come from inside the state
and the party rather than from the opposition or from independent
newspapers, the basic commitment of the political leadership – not
unrelated to Marxist ideology – to eradicate hunger and deprivation
has certainly proved to be a major asset in eliminating systematic
penury, even though it was not able to prevent the big famine, when
a confused and dogmatic political leadership was unable to cope with
a failure they did not expect and could not explain. The advantages
and disadvantages of the different forms of political arrangements
and commitments in China and India provide rich material for social
comparison and contrast.
China was a totalitarian country. Comprehensive planning meant the Communists were able to coerce individuals into professions for much less than it would cost them if they were free – “the relatively low wages paid to highly specialized medical personnel help keep total expenditures down” – allowing the planners to deliver as many personnel as they needed, at nominal cost.
There are only 2,458 people per (fully qualified Western) doctor in
China, as compared with 9,900 in other low-income countries and about 4,310 in
middle-income countries. The ratio of population to other medical personnel
(including nurses and doctors of Chinese medicine) is even more favorable -
892 excluding barefoot doctors and 365 including them, as compared with 8,790
in other low-income countries and 1,860 in middle-income countries.
In part because the pay of most medical personnel is very low by
international standards, this has been achieved at an estimated total annual
cost of under $7 per capita, of which $4 is public expenditure. Almost
two thirds of expenditures are for drugs. By the standards of low-income
developing countries, the level of public expenditure is high - it compares
with $2 in India and $1 in Indonesia.
You could do the same thing in an open society – Korea and Sri Lanka did, and without spending much – but it’s harder.
I think @mitigatedchaos is right to focus on homogeneity. It’s harder to deliver public goods when you’re a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic society. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it – Sri Lanka and Kerala did – but it makes it harder to coordinate resources, especially when you’re facing strong incumbents.
China did away with all that. It did away with democracy, decentralization, and pluralism. It liquidated its incumbents. That made it easier for the Communists to pursue their plans to “eradicate hunger and deprivation,” but it also made the Communists liable to reproduce hunger and deprivation – both inadvertently and on purpose.
Beijing children born after 1965 were half as malnourished as children raised in other cities, and twenty times less malnourished as children raised in the suburbs. (One wonders what happened in the countryside.) In poorer provinces, life expectancies were 10 to 13 years shorter than they were in Shanghai. Communism reinforced that urban bias.
So long as we’re comparing autocracies with autocracies, it’s pretty clear that Taiwan and South Korea have a better record than China – or Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam – and China has a much better record after 1978 than it did beforehand, notwithstanding Sen’s amusing belief that perhaps Reform and Opening stopped China from achieving first-world living standards.
Taiwan and South Korea had the same insulation from democratic control that was proves such an “asset in eliminating systematic penury” through credible commitments, but they lacked the socialist platform that made China such a basket case. They didn’t liquidate the small farmers. They didn’t nationalize the land. They draft the peasants into work teams. They didn’t centralize food marketing. And they got by without famines. Not because they were democrats – they weren’t – but because they weren’tsocialists.
Taiwan and South Korea also dramatically reduced mortality. They just didn’t kill tens of millions in the process.
Honestly, I don’t know if I’m going to even bother voting in the next election. I mean probably, civic duty and all that, rah rah USA, but I’ve seen nothing to convince me that the DNC isn’t a popularity-devoured ideology-huffing institution that will throw me under the bus the first chance it gets.
The political currents are defined by larger groups of people, but we can reason about “what would we want someone like us to do in our place?” If there are enough people similar to us, then it makes sense to prefer marginal action, even if it’s statistically unlikely that any of our individual actions will produce enough change by themselves.
Economists say voting is not a rational behavior, but that fails to take this into account.
The political currents are defined by larger groups of people, but we can reason about “what would we want someone like us to do in our place?” If there are enough people similar to us, then it makes sense to prefer marginal action, even if it’s statistically unlikely that any of our individual actions will produce enough change by themselves.
Economists say voting is not a rational behavior, but that fails to take this into account.
There’s a lot of… dialogue about monogamy vs polyamory these days, in our cosmopolitan little bubble. No one wants to tell others which lifestyle you should choose so I wouldn’t call it a debate, but there’s a great deal of defending “how your lifestyle works, and why you’re happy with it” that can’t save itself from becoming discourse about the two main options.
This happens enough that we fail to recognize that no, polyamory just won. We all live in its world now.
Or more accurately, we all live free of monogamous ideology now.
Case in point. I have a friend, and she’s monogamously committed to her boyfriend. Sure, she hangs out with a lot of other boys. She even visits them by herself, and crashes in their bed. She’s generous with hugs and other mild displays of physical affection to men. And she kind of pines after some specific men, wishing for greater emotional attachment. This isn’t even hidden, it’s all openly acknowledged. But, this is the definition of monogamy she and her SO have worked out.
The reaction of people from her social circle, the people from our general social bubble is “fine. Whatever works for the two of you. If that’s what you call monogamy, I have no reason to disagree with you.” There’s no call for us to try to strictly define what monogamy should mean for them.
Let me assure you, this is not how it would work under monogamous ideology. In a society where monogamy was the reigning lifestyle choice, it includes a specific definition of monogamy, and “being too touchy with other men” would definitely violate that. Even with her partner’s consent, she would be found guilty of breaking social taboos. (Which is basically how her non-cosmopolitan co-workers react.)
But none of us (which I assume includes most of my readers) give a fuck. Call yourself polyamorous, monogamish, what the fuck ever. As long as you both are happy what business is it of mine? And that is the true spirit of polyamory - anarchism towards society wide definitions of romantic relationships.
You might individually choose to snuggle with just one person, and hopefully can get that special person to agree. But it’s very different when that’s a private agreement between two people (one which can be altered at any time they want), than when it’s an arrangement coded and enforced by the whole social world. And we just don’t have that in liberal cosmopolitania any more.
After all, one of the main benefits of monogamy was that you don’t have to negotiate shit. You’re together, you’re just dating each other, these are the default rules, and for people who don’t want to process and explicitly lay out their preferences, this is a lot easier. But that’s gone now - any couple does have to figure out whether they are poly or mono, and even if they are mono, where they feel those boundaries lie, because ain’t no one else doing that regulating for them.
I am… really really troubled by the idea that “monogamous ideology” exists. Or that if you don’t have a bad ideology, you have “poly ideology,” even if you have said “FUCK OFF, I’M NOT POLY” more than once.
Anti-poly ideology exists, yes.
But monogamy can mean anything from “I am attracted to one person at a time” to “I want three girlfriends but think God must hate me” to “more just sounds like a brain-breaking logistical nightmarish time suck, I’m good” to “you know, in practice I only ever dated one person at a time.”
The idea that that adds up to an ideology is why I… feel perhaps more suspicious than I should of loud poly people.
I don’t date one person at a time to spite people who don’t. I do it because I don’t like sensory overload.
The point is not “be monogamous or be polyamorous.”
The point is that ideology is a society wide phenomenon, and it is not located solely in the individual.
Under monogamous ideology, not only were most people monogamous (at least publicly), but what monogamy meant and enforcement of following this code was a public matter.
If you live in a bubble where polyamory is accepted now, then you also live in a bubble where no one is defining monogamy for you. You can make up the definition of monogamy to fit your relationship. It can include “cuddling other people is ok but no sex”, or hell, it can include “having sex with other people is okay but we still call it monogamy because we want to” and no one is really going to criticize you for that.
Guess what. This freedom is new. It’s a result of living under polyamory, which exists outside just the individual.
(It’s also a burden. It means when you start dating someone, you need to clarify whether your relationship is poly or mono, and if it’s mono what those boundaries are. You can no longer just assume the default rules. Some people understandably loathe this.)
Transitioning from “the rules of my romantic relationship are defined by the social structure around me” to “I get to / must choose the rules” is a big step. But it’s a culture-wide step, and can’t exist solely on the individual level, anymore than “I decide to have private property” is a decision solely by the individual. Both need the social structures that support them.
There’s no escaping this. It’s not saying “polyamory is an ideology yay”, but rather “your society is going to have an ideology about how much freedom people can expect in defining their relationships.” This has always been true, and will be true in the future.
You can say “FUCK OFF I’M NOT POLY” all you want, but I bet if your partner cheats on you none of your friends are going to immediately tell you (at least, as compared to how likely they were to under monogamy), because that’s now your business and not theirs to enforce. This is the anarchy I am talking about.
(And obviously, the current polyamory acceptance only exists in a few very specific bubbles, and monogamous ideology holds sway in most of America and the world still.)
I can and will tell anyone if I find their partner cheating. I can and will ostracize people from my social groups for cheating. I can and will abandon anyone that knows if my partner is cheating and fails to inform me. Fuck the ideology. I’m physically instantiating my own reality, whether they want me to or not.
The people behind this shift have no idea what it is that they’re unleashing.
How not to incite the End War with Moscow by going to war in Syria, staging an intervention only blood eagles and fools wanted, to deliver a country from the hands of a tyrant into the hands of monsters. (This one weird trick improves your property values by over 100,000% compared to post-nuclear apocalypse prices!)
