The argument “if you like taxes then simply go donate money to the government. You don’t? Then stop being a hypocrite and talking about how taxes are good” seems a bit silly to me. Sure, if you believe that any centralized taxation and spending is bad, then there’s no reason to support taxation. But if you do think that centralized spending can in certain situations outperform a free market, then you see taxes as a prisoner’s dilemma. If everyone cooperates, and voluntarily donates to the government, then everyone would be better off, but this is not a stable equilibrium, and every individual agent can benefit from defecting, and then everyone is much worse off, but trying to unilaterally start cooperating and donating money would make you even worse off. So you employ a very common way to resolve prisoner’s dilemmas: elect a guy with a gun who shoots at defectors. In this situation you end up being better off than without this guy, but your incentive structure changes only by the amount of shooting, and it’s still rational to not cooperate by any amount higher than what is being enforced. It is rational to want to resolve prisoner’s dilemmas this way, and it’s also rational to not be a cooperate-bot in dilemmas that aren’t being resolved.
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Anonymous asked:
how do I sign up for your politics
If funding could be secured, it would be possible to start a think tank, because there is a lot of work to be done. These ideas are exotic, they escape the Overton Window by travelling orthogonal to it, but they have to be refined, tested, and experimented with.
The goal would be to synthesize a new scientific art of organizational design and policy incentivization from a diverse group of fields, including political science, economics (particularly behavioral economics), psychology, philosophy, and mathematics. Most existing organizations and politics are running on pre-digital organizational technology, and very few people even think of “organizational technology” as even being a concept.
Various proposals would be drafted, analyzed, refined, and then simulated using human testers (against competing speculative policies) before being refined again cyclically and suggested for institutions smaller than the US Federal Government. To improve efficiency, various competing domain experts would be hired for short periods of time.
Actually improving governance in the United States would require doing things that deeply offend both the Democratic and Republican parties and which are at odds with their ideological pre-commitments. Formation of a political party is right out due to the First Past the Post System which makes success with policies that are only inspiring to the kinds of people that read this blog extremely improbable. Policy advocacy should therefore focus on attacking avenues which are not sufficiently defended by partisan trench warfare, municipalities, and shifting politicians on individual issues through lobbying and electoral guides, functioning as a Special Interest Group.
Until then, one can follow this strange political time travel blog and dream of the future, if one wishes, in addition to whatever political activity one normally carries out.
Missing Scarcity?
A number of the “No Robot Jobpocalypse” arguments seem to hinge on the idea that as productivity increases, the costs of goods and services will approach zero.
But this seems based on the assumption that resources are effectively a function of labor. However, if base resources are largely fixed after some level of labor (e.g., there are only so many iron atoms in a volume of dirt), and there are other potential uses for those resources than feeding the proles, then the laborers must competitively bid for the resources.
In that bidding, they may have to bid with someone several orders of magnitude more productive than they are (either due to owning the robots or just being that much more skilled/productive). What guarantee is there that, even as the price of goods produced from the resources decreases overall, they are not bid out of the reach of the low-marginal-production workers?
Instead, the attempted transformation of the euro area into Greater Germania has simply dumped the persistent surpluses of German-speaking Europe, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia onto the rest of the world. Between 2008 and 2016 the combined current account balance shifted by 0.8 percentage points of world GDP. This can be explained almost entirely by a collapse in consumption and investment in Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Spain. That was mostly a consequence of policy choices pushed by the European Central Bank, the Eurogroup, and the IMF, with strong guidance from Germany and the Netherlands.
AKA: Michael Pettis has been saying this for 2 decades, Mark Blyth’s been on the train since… at least 2012, and now we’re finally catching up.
Free Trade doesn’t work.
(via poipoipoi-2016)
Heck, Keynes said it in the 1940s and gave the solution.
(via collapsedsquid)
If this is doing what I think it’s doing, a single country could get part of the way there by having its own currency and applying tariffs at a rate based on its trade balance. I was kind of hoping the Orange Man might do something like that, but it looks like he won’t and will do per-country punitive tariffs instead.
@remedialaction Although I guess I will add on one more thing, regarding my policy proposals not being “innovative” enough -
I’m an edgy centrist, not a far-right reactionary, extropian, or Anarcho-Lumberjack. My idea of a “cool authoritarian regime” is Singapore, which is noted for being successful, safe, fairly open, and wealthy.
I tend to favor incremental policy rolled out experimentally, which won’t break the economy or be non-reversible. I’m proposing things that I think are likely to actually work, which in some ways means they won’t be so different in kind from existing programs. Revolution is, after all, overrated.
It’s true that in the space of all possible political policies, “ease up on zoning laws, end rent control and issue housing vouchers instead, throw on a tax based on expected new infrastructure required, then let the new housing stock roll in” is not particularly radical or revolutionary, but it’s likely to work and if it fails it isn’t likely to fail catastrophically.
It’s still innovative relative to typical American and European politics, but my goal isn’t to be an innovation-maximizer within the absolute space of all political ideas.
Nativism is bipartisan.
Oh, huh, a Democrat who thinks that raising the minimum wage at which (foreign) workers can be hired causes less of them to be hired? I don’t think they got the memo about how price doesn’t actually affect demand and economics was an inside job.
The system does need to be reformed, but a better way would be to replace the lottery system with a blind auction rather than setting salary requirements.
Yeah, an auction would price it more accurately. Other interventions include making it easier for H1Bs to change jobs - thus if they really are worth more than the lower wages that are claimed, they won’t stay at the company. Making it easy to deport but hard to change jobs is just begging for corruption and replacing the native labor pool with labor that can be credibly threatened with being kicked out of the country.
Though, I admit my first instinct was to limit the number of slots and auction them off. “Oh, it’s so important to you? Then clearly, you’ll be willing to pay the necessary amount of money to show it’s important.”
Ideological Spread with Nationalist Characteristics
I was half-joking when I suggested that I’d use the statue controversy to remark on how to carry out an imperialistic foreign policy.
But I was half-serious as well.
Nationalism is one of the main drivers of imperialist foreign policy, but it is also one of the primary forms of opposition to the same.
Consider, however, an Empire with a different plan - it wants to spread not its people, nor, per se, its culture, but its ideology. (It may not even consider itself an Empire.)
The thing to do with Nationalist sentiments in other countries, then, is to merge and entangle them with the ideology to be installed (or rather, instilled). For each country, an adapted version of your ideology, fit more closely to the local needs and patterns. Not all countries need to be exactly the same. This allows you to deflect some of the popular will away from direct opposition to your imposed form of government.
This is actually part of why Democracy has had what success it has in its acts of imperialism. (And yes, Democracy as an ideology has a bit of a habit of imperialism, though a lot of that has been driven by America.)
How to interweave them?
Take elements of the local culture that are aesthetic or which are not in opposition to your ideology, and make them official and protected. (For instance, you probably want people to be timely, so if being chronically late is one of the local things, you need to get rid of that. On the other hand, architectural style can generally vary without crushing the GDP.) Pick various writers, historical works, and so on. Tie your ideology into the history of the region, as part of its self-narrative. Elevate local historical thinkers that can be described as proto-your-ideology. Build statues of locals that exemplify the positive qualities you want your ideology to represent.
You must create a new national mythology as a legitimization for the new government.
Over time, if executed well, your transplanted ideology will become part of the socially legitimized history of the country and thus gain the protection that affords.
In the meantime, most countries you could conceivably do this in are going to be relatively underdeveloped. Take advantage of the physical security you can manage to impose in order to pursue a long-term program of development.
Borrow a page from Milton Keynes and have the price of the development paid for by speculating on the values of the land to be developed. If you don’t drop the ball on this, the country is going to undergo a 7-10% annual rate of economic growth for some years. Investors would normally be skittish due to concerns about corruption and physical security, but you have the power to calm those risks.
The development doesn’t have to take place across the whole country, but a critical mass is needed so that future development will be self-propelling, and local talent must be trained (in your universities) so that it can continue to operate in the future.
Now I know this sounds incredibly expensive, and of course it is, but the goal here is to turn those countries permanently to your ideology and increase your ideology’s share of total global resource output - and that is, in itself, very valuable.
(Also, your pension funds can ride that 7-10% annual growth as your corporations are able to buy up assets at low prices.)
It also requires a great deal of political will. Will that, in Afghanistan and Iraq, America did not have.
The simultaneous cowardice, foolhardiness, and ignorance of the American political establishment and voters made for a military campaign that was not only highly aggressive, but failed to accomplish all that much for all the blood it spilled.
Something more ideologically imperialistic that sought to convert Iraq and Afghanistan into true, developed democracies, with all the basic underpinnings that required, would have been better. Alternatively, not going at all would have many advantages. Instead we get the worst of both worlds - a willingness to invade without a willingness to see a conversion through to the end, fueled by the naive belief that liberal democracy is the natural state of humanity and will flourish in all soils if it is simply unleashed.
There are, of course, far crueler ways to expand dominion if one has different goals. I will not go over them here. The age of such empires is over, now, and for the better.
One of the weirdest policy proposals is where you put an expiration date on cash, to encourage spending.
ooh I’ve played with that one, it also fits well with some basic income proposals
inflation
All the kool kids nowadays are talking about negative interest rates.
They’re not yet talking about forming quasi-autonomous state agencies that compete for assignment of implementing government programs, with contracts that can be renewed, but
Shhhh, they aren’t supposed to know about it yet. I only know because I’m from the future.
Anonymous asked:
immigration policy is the equivalent of the state offering insurance for damages to the host nation. not gonna convince progs, might convince libertarian or ancap types.
esoteric-hoxhaism answered:
what
I tried to figure this one out, but I don’t get it either, and I think about applying insurance to everything.
Some Ideas on Political Experimentation
A. Outwards-spiraling iterative development across multiple successive levels.
- First level is the guy that actually comes up with the idea. Naturally, when someone develops a policy, they usually come up with some of the initial objections and work through them.
- The “wisdom of crowds” in some studies ended up being the wisdom of a number much smaller than a crowd. Get 2-5 others to review it and search for holes. Iterate.
- After several iterations, conduct more extensive modelling based on expected behavior.
- The policy is brought to a group of 10-20 people to review and find flaws in. (To get a proper review, incentives may need to reward good flaw-finding, perhaps according to a few supervisors.) Iterate.
- After several iterations, a small “lab-based” experiment is devised to test the policy, approved by some number of the flaw-finders. While this might seem like a toy model, behavioral economists have been able to develop some real findings by just seeing what smallish numbers of people actually do in their simulations. The experiment members should be prevented from suffering any negative repercussions for the providing politically “wrong” answers, and possibly assigned aliases for the experiment.
- Depending on results, go back to 1-4 to incorporate the new data. Iterate.
- Larger experiment with more complex model and more actors.
- Policy is rolled out to a small, real-world group that volunteers for it. Wait some appropriate amount of time to see initial results, mostly to rule out catastrophic failure. Iterate.
- Policy is rolled out to several, somewhat larger groups. Data is collected. Iterate.
- At this point we should have much more confidence in the policy, and can roll it out to a much larger organization, but still something below a whole state/multinational corporation (depending on the policy).
- Continue up/outwards.
Among key factors is that the experiments must have ways for experiment members to act contrary to the wishes of the pro-policy members, or to move sideways within the model as it were. Additionally, experiment members should be rewarded with real-world money to drive an incentive other than just appearing nice/virtuous. To achieve this adversarial nature, the anti-policy forces must be involved in planning or approving the experiment.
A framework of methods for game-theoretical defections (or however you want to put it) could be developed, since in the real world, “cheat and kill the guy” is an option in many scenarios.
While not strictly going to capture every way that a policy could go wrong, this should act as a series of sanity checks for preventing some of the worst policies, and highlight promising policies.
B. Proportional Block Grant Committee.
Have the national government collect some share of national tax revenue for conducting policy experiments. Since most experimental policies would be de facto subsidies relative to other states, issue it to states proportional to some factor like population or size (or maybe population times size). This means all the states are subsidized about the same, at least in terms of the policy spending, depending on implementation.
Use block grants awarded in such a way as to make it difficult to just use the money to offset tax cuts. Generally, give experiments to the subnational governments that most want to attempt them, since those same governments will be less likely to sabotage the experimental policies.
C. Internal migration is an experimental result.
Yes, putting a UBI in a province might result in people migrating to that province to freeload off it. Or it might result in taxpayers fleeing. Alternatively, it might not.
However, unless your country is going to ban emigration and immigration, this is actually important information, as are shifts in jobs, building, etc across the economy so long as your country must compete in the global economy.
None of this will be perfect, but it should be feasible to gather a good harvest of information.
learn-tilde-ath asked:
If you would, could you please say some thoughts (even yay/nay/mu) on this policy proposal? : When taking the census in order to determine the number of house seats for each state, people who the state has revoked franchise/voting-rights from (as part of result of being convicted of a crime) don't count towards the population of the state for the purpose of determining number of house seats.
This seems reasonable to me on first reading.
My late night tired concern is that the census might not update the house seats fast enough to account for changes in policy or something.
It could act as a pressure against the politicians to be Tough On Crime, or at least for them to use whatever means they can to try to strip their opposition from voting. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want certain convicted criminals voting until they are, at least, out of prison again.
I may return to this later.