@neoliberalism-nightly
this is okay, but the real question is the degree of non-viability of certain small cities, and the contingent nature of that viability on technological development and unspecified exogenous shocks
True, but I reckon it hurts less to move from Cornville, OH to Cleveland, OH than it does to move from Cornville, OH, to OverpricedBurough, NYC, NY.
[epistemic status: significant fatigue is being masked by caffeine and other effects]
The best time for your city to be built for efficiency is the year 1950, when it was initially laid out. The next best time for your city to be built for efficiency is now.
Rent - Housing is a very significant expense. It can range from 22%-50% of income. Every dollar that your citizens spend on housing is a dollar that they cannot spend on something else.
There must be enough housing units, but they must be built in a way that is intelligent, and which does not conflict with other goals of efficiency. The regulatory regime for both renovation and new housing construction must be both effective and efficient.
If median household income in your city is $50,000, each one point reduction in rent frees $500 per household per year. If the city has 500,000 households, this amounts to $250M annually, which could be
Transport - In the US, a car costs over $8,000 a year. If the average household in our city has an income of $50,000, this is 16% of total annual income. At one car per household for 500,000 households, this amounts to $4,000M annually.
We can work to make car usage less frequent or necessary, which prolongs car lifespans and reduces accidents (and associated costs). However, the real binary is deciding whether to own a car at all.
For every 5% of our city that does not own a car, we free up $200M, minus the cost of our public transport network, to spend on something else that could be making our city more competitive, each year. If our public transport network were free, we could send 5% of our city’s population to university with this money (using a series of expiring loans that only have to be repaid if the person moves out of the city).
At the regional level, our city should have good commercial (airport) and industrial (seaport, river, rail) transport options, for cost-effective shipping of raw materials and goods and cost-effective business meetings.
Regulations - Regulations do not have to be non-existent. If we let companies step all over our city too much, the resulting social and environmental damage will render the city uncompetitive, and the costs pushed off onto the citizens will lower their effect standard of living. However…
Our regulations should be predictable and easy to comply with. Companies can plan for costs that they can foresee, but unplanned costs are significantly more expensive. Additionally, while allowing companies to pollute without consequence pushes costs off on everyone else and may decrease net efficiency, any regulations beyond those which are necessary is a loss - it is a form of waste.
Infrastructure & City Services - We want our infrastructure and city services to be cost-effective, as again, any money we save can either be spent on something else, or spent on more city services. Nailing the efficiency on every other aspect of the city will help with this - if half of our city doesn’t own a car, we’re talking a potential average %8 decrease in the cost of our cops, clerks, and judges. If our rent is only %25 of income, compared to other cities we could be looking at at 45% of income, our cops might cost $14,000 less, or we could get cops that are $14,000 better, because they have an effective wage which is 28% higher.
Triage - As the city’s population is falling, however, we may want to look at in-city relocation programs for residents which would allow us to de-urbanize subsections of the city.
In particular, this would allow us to maintain service levels by keeping density high enough for infrastructure and city services to remain cost effective. Infrastructure in the de-urbanized areas would be shut off and no longer maintained, and buildings would be demolished to prevent the pro-crime effect of vacant buildings.
Attracting Talent - You probably won’t attract all the talent of the cool, hip places, like New York - but you don’t have to. If your city offers high quality of life with low cost of living (a profit for employees!), it can attract sensible, competent people that are attractive to employers that aren’t looking to skim the cream of the crop from the entire country in a desperate arms race of absurd rent prices along the coasts.
It probably still pays to develop a university that has excellence synergistic with a key industry in the area to build up a unique talent pool allowing for city specialization competitive globally (although this is still somewhat risky).
However, I’d like to reiterate the idea of conditional loans here, depending on how much funding the city has available. These would go to promising people pursuing degrees in key local industrial/commercial sectors, which would gradually be paid off by the city so long as they remained in the city, or until paid off completely. This allows us to build a talent pool which is unique to our city, providing an indirect subsidy for employers, employees, and potentially improved economic productivity.
(Low cost of living per quality of living also helps us attract professors for our university!)
How do we get there?
That, I think, is a very good question. It is economically infeasible to rebuild the city into a more efficient form all at once. You’d go bankrupt if you tried.
I think, aside from some of these matters that exist primarily at the municipal level, the answer is that we redevelop subsections of the city around principles of efficiency over time. This allows us to maintain a productive base to keep our city alive long enough to build the next one, and as we connect these areas together with public transport, the overall value of each one will improve.
For some locations, even a genius invested with absolute municipal power could not pull it off, as the fundamentals of the location are not viable within the current economic context, but IMO, it is likely that combining everyone into a few ultra-dense, ultra-high-rent coastal cities is not actually the most economically efficient possible use of resources.
@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.
Anonymous asked:
argumate answered:
Actually a fair critique in some ways; the early years of concrete/glass/steel construction were not pretty.
I have no clue why some buildings are considered pretty and others ugly, it all seems so arbitrary to me. And like the point of buildings is to protect the people and machines inside from the elements, not to look pretty, why does everybody care (this is all a subset of the sentiment “why does everybody but me have such a strong visual aesthetic sense”)
It’s a sort of passive emotional buff. Good-looking buildings feel better to be in and around even when they perform the same function. Bad-looking buildings are a bit emotionally draining.
edit: I mean, this doesn’t explain why some buildings look better or worse, but that is how people react to/treat them.
…that’s true.
I don’t know what a good solution would look like, but it doesn’t have to involve any more high-IQ individuals than we have now, just a better distribution of resources schools already have.
I want to test solutions to the current system, and to find many different possible set-ups that are different from the one we have now. (They might not scale well, of course.)
Even improvement in a limited geographical area or to some minor aspects, for relatively affluent middle-class individuals, would be really valuable to me.
Roight, let me suggest my plan, which would only help matters that you want tangentially most likely.
Are you familiar with Spaced Repetition? It’s used in programs like Anki. The basic summary is this: your brain flags things as important by whether or not you use them, and forgets them gradually over time. Spaced repetition brings the item up again at a certain point in the forgetting, so that your brain goes “oh hey this came up again, it must be important, I better remember it!”
Gamification is also a thing, and I have a theory that a big part of why people don’t like school stuff is that it doesn’t feel applicable, or that it will ever be applicable. But while I do not enjoy math for its own sake, I feel almost no resistance to doing math when I have to in order to accomplish some other task.
I’d like @argumate to read this post, too, and probably a few of the others as well.
So here’s my proposal:
1. This will be primarily implemented as a computer program. It will be implemented on a custom computer system that is not easily compromised.
2. All textbooks will be presented in both a fuller, contextualized format, and as semi-atomic facts of information, ready for use for spaced repetition memorization.
3. Exercises will be split between grinding and synthesis. Synthesis exercises will sometimes be in the form of game-like programs that have a complex problem which the students must integrate their knowledge of the subject to perform. (That is, students must be able to take the knowledge and use it and apply it, not just repeat it.) Other times, for other subjects like English, they will be items like essays that are manually graded by teachers. Students earn resource points to attempt synthesis exercises through grinding exercises, which are the rote learning component intended to reinforce the knowledge and speed up processing (e.g. of doing math). If you fail the synthesis exercise, you may have to do more grinding to attempt it again.
4. The computer program will conduct a review of all the subjects the student needs to know, based on spaced repetition algorithms and data about the student and their previous performance. This prevents the constant information loss that is pervasive in the American school system.
5. All of this is individualized. Students go at their own pace, and graduate when it has all been completed, or are pushed out of the school system at 21.
6. Homework is mostly rare or non-existent. Instead, students will stay another hour or two at school. Homework is for doing exercises, which we are having them do at school.
7. The school day will be broken up by various social activities to let students’ brains relax in between blocks of studying, which will still be somewhat unified by subject of study to make #8 easier.
8. In addition to grading work, teachers will also act as tutors to individual students. Students will be grouped in classes with students who are in a similar position of progress within the system. Teachers will go around the room answering various questions and helping students with items they are having trouble with. There may be some small lecturing sections, maybe.
The following is less necessary, but additional depending on your balance of Nationalism/Capitalism/Technocracy/etc.
9. Students will be awarded points based on a mix of (about 1/3 each) progress, attendance, and and percentile academic standing within their school. These points can be spent on a very larger variety (over 100) of uniform parts, snacks, media, and other items at participating retailers. This has the virtue of aligning the school’s social hierarchy more closely with the desired outcome of learning & academic performance, as well as giving students practical experience with small amounts of “money”.
10. Research shows that teaching math below a certain age doesn’t actually accelerate learning progress on it much at all, so for very young students, the system will focus on “moral/social” education and socialization and potentially language skills.
Basically every benefit we give to the working poor ends up being an indirect subsidy for business - see, for example, employers telling their employees how to obtain food stamps.
One of the complaints about a wage subsidy over a higher minimum wage is that it will just be captured by employers, who will pay their employees less by that amount. That’s also potentially true of a basic income, and with a minimum wage, employers may opt to gain non-monetary compensation (e.g. terrible hours).
Now, here’s where the limits of my economics education probably show a bit, in that I’m not familiar with the literature on how, empirically, this works out. (Maybe @xhxhxhx can chime in.)
I realized that this is actually related to the marginal productivity of labor - how much revenue (and thus, potentially, profit) does each additional employee bring in, across the whole economy? There are limits to this based on the amount of equipment/capital needed for a marginal employee or marginal hours, including facility size, as well as the potential customers it might bring in (e.g. why haven’t they hired additional labor already?).
The reason for this is that to determine the leverage of a low-wage employee under a wage subsidy system, we need to know how many potential jobs our wage subsidy can create, and at what quality. How easy is it for an employee to just walk right out of the store, walk right in to another store, and get a new job? Even if the pay is somewhat lower, this creates a much stronger incentive against bad hours, bad bosses, and unsafe practices, about which employees will then either demand higher pay, or just tell the employers to knock it off.
However, that increase in leverage only occurs if enough potential jobs emerge, and this is more or less an empirical question.
The greater the marginal increase in the number of jobs per marginal decrease in minimum wage prior to subsidy, the more of the subsidy that will be captured by the workers. However, if cutting the minimum wage creates no new jobs, then leverage doesn’t change much at all and employers capture the majority of the subsidy.
If the leverage is high enough, wages may even be driven higher than they were prior to the subsidy, depending on employer margins that they were exploiting leverage over against employees.
However, since employers capturing part of the subsidy is potentially true for all subsidies for the working poor, even rental vouchers or healthcare, it has to be compared with other alternatives (such as basic income).
(For my preferred implementation, the accompanying decrease in minimum wage should be lower than the wage subsidy, and the wage subsidy should be paid directly to the employee, thus at least not resulting in a decrease in effective income even if the entire subsidy is captured.)
In case you haven’t noticed recently, democracy has major issues. Every major developed state is strewn with dysfunction and programs that are actively at odds with their intended purposes. Our politicians are either incompetent idiots or shrewd operators working against our interests.
Policies routinely have reasonable stated values, but terrible efficacy.
Organizations such as the RAND Corporation knew the Iraq War would be a lot tougher than the Bush administration said it would be. Policy plans coming out of think tanks seem to be better than the actual policies we get.
If we didn’t know they’d immediately get subverted, we’d almost be better off with think tanks running the country.
Better results are necessarily different results, and systems produce the outcomes they incentivize, so to change the results it is necessary to change the system.
The truth is, it may be possible to get something like think tanks in charge of the government, a hybrid between them and political parties, but we will have to add selection pressure to ensure they work towards correctness.
I propose a new legislature, composed of a new kind of corporate entity, the Delegate Candidate Organization (DCO).
Every three years, at election time, each voter delegates their vote to a DCO. The top 50 Delegate Candidate Organizations then form the legislature, becoming that term’s Delegate Organizations. This legislature is known as the National Delegation.
In a second election, those DCOs that did not make the cut delegate their votes to members of the top 50.
(In an optional alternative, the vote could be split between DCOs by categories by voters, allowing a truly innovative level of representation. Bills would have to pass on all categories to pass, and the tax category would determine how funding is obtained, but not total expenditures. Sadly, this is probably too complex for typical voters.)
A Delegate Candidate Organization receives its funding exclusively from the State. For each delegated vote it receives, the DCO receives $5 in annual funding, and an additional $5 times its percentile standing in a legislative outcome prediction market.
(That might sound like a lot. America has around 300 million people, so you could potentially be looking at three billion dollars. I would answer that the 2016 Presidential election cost $2.6 billion by itself, and that money had to come from somewhere and is already influencing our political process. The size of the US economy is $18,570 billion dollars. The real question is whether better policy by the DCOs could improve that by 0.016% or more, which would make the National Delegation pay for itself. I believe that it would.)
The key factor that makes DCOs behave more like think tanks is that a significant chunk of their funding depends on correctly estimating the outcomes of legislation. What keeps them honest? First, competition with other DCOs that will pressure them against spoiling the metrics. Second, voters.
When a piece of legislation is to be passed, DCOs make predictions on outcomes and bet on them in a virtual currency called Credibility Score (or just “Cred”). Each outcome must be represented by a basket of multiple metrics, to prevent min-maxing.
This structure allows us to build a differentiation between a policy’s values and its efficacy. Previous discourse has often viewed policy as solely a matter of efficacy, but of course in practice people have different preferences and are not a unified mass just waiting for enlightenment into [your political ideology]. Preserving the values component (in part through voting) also allows bits of efficacy that have slipped through to be represented on the other side of the equation.
The bets serve two purposes. The first is to reward policymakers that are actively effective at achieving their stated objectives, and punish policymakers that are too unaligned with reality. The second is to effectively tell voters what the plans will actually do, not just wishy washy language pols want people to hear.
“This bill will reduce gun crime.”
“By how much?”
“Uh… a, uh, lot.”
Not only can the DCO specify what its % estimate for a decrease in gun crime is, but it can also communicate its level of certainty - by how much it bets on the outcome as a percentage of its current Cred reserves, data that can be mined by political scientists and journalists.
DCOs must be able to amend predictions when new legislation is passed. A court will also be required to punish those who tamper with metrics, and resolve other disputes. The details of that are a challenge in themselves, but should be feasible to work out.
Each DO has as many votes in the legislature as have been delegated to it. A majority is required to pass legislation.
The accumulated Credibility Score/Cred across all bets is used to determine the percentile standing of all DCOs, used to determine funding (as above). Percentile standing is listed on the ballot next to the DCO’s name, but to simplify things for voters, DCOs are listed in the order of votes received in the previous election.
Practical experiments will be necessary to assess the viability of this model, but I have high hopes for it. If we want to advance as a civilization, then we must develop new organizational technologies.
Alright, US Republicans, listen up.
You think your goal right now is to “Repeal Obamacare”.
But that has issues. Given your values, your goal should not just be to repeal Obamacare, but to prevent the emergence of a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, in which the US Federal government monopolizes 1/5th of the US economy in a botched attempt at recreating the NHS.
This does not mean trying to pass laws to sabotage the attempt. They’ll just get overturned, and that will be celebrated as a Democratic party victory.
You have to deflate the demand for single-payer healthcare. That is what is necessary for market-based healthcare to continue to exist in the United States. As long as the demand is there - and it is growing, as middle-class families come under increasing pressure - the desire for single-payer will re-emerge.
Yelling at people about how they don’t deserve healthcare because they haven’t worked hard enough will not help. You just picked up a bunch of rural voters that got laid off at the factories and can’t meet their deductibles. You have to focus on preserving the market-based allocation.
There is a simple way to do this.
Now, first objection is probably that this will bid up the price of medical care to the new floor. I believe that is unlikely - because the voucher accumulates and people don’t actually like randomly buying healthcare, it makes much more sense to save it up and spend it later as you normally would, or else just buy insurance.
Second objection is that people might launder the money to get it for themselves. In this case, the person they are screwing over is mostly their future self, so they have incentive not to do this.
Third objection, which I’m likely to get from my left-wing readers, is that this isn’t enough money. That’s probably true, but this is likely of more benefit than whatever the Republicans are currently cooking up. In the current situation we have some poor people buying the mandated insurance, but unable to actually get medical care because they cannot afford the deductible. Under this system, they can go get medical care tomorrow. Likewise, for pre-existing conditions, this ensures that at least the value of the voucher is available each year to pay for it.
Later administrations could raise the amount, but the benefit for the Republicans here is the preservation of the market mechanism. This is likely to be a popular program.
This could be coupled with a variety of other reforms to reduce overall healthcare costs, such as requiring hospitals to post information about their prices, success rates, etc. Don’t just cross your fingers and hope the market works. Education alleviates information asymmetry and lubricates markets. Create the right framework for suitable informed competition to take place in.
To jump off of @the-grey-tribe‘s joke post:
I think one of the key discoveries of the 20th century that has not yet been realized is that, contrary to the beliefs of many factions, including the globalist liberals and the Communists, there is not one right way to live, one set of laws which is the correct one for all people and all groups, and that all alternatives must fall away and either die off or be destroyed.
We must recognize that political policy is not a strict hierarchy of better/worse left/right, but a vector with two components - values (or terminal goals), and the means or effectiveness of means by which those values are to be realized or achieved.
Often, the failures of politics are not the result of terrible values, but ones of effectiveness. And some of the failures of modern, “rational” planning would be mitigated by the recognition and inclusion of alternate values, alternate ways to live.
If we design the political system from this perspective, I believe we could create substantial improvements, and also, perhaps ironically, a diversity of communities which are specialized according what best fits given populations without trying to transform them all into one homogeneous mass.
Anonymous asked:
Drownable-in-a-bathtub is too small for any reasonable national government, but setting that aside…
How perceptive.
That the dominant hegemony is a democratic republic founded on liberal and enlightenment values, human rights, and democracy as ideology has some advantages. For instance, it likely plays a part in just about every autocrat having to pretend to democratic legitimacy. But those advantages are pretty intangible, so we’ll set those aside as well.
And let’s assume a breakup of Russia and India as well.
Sometimes I oppose things not just because I disagree with them on values, but because I think they won’t even work for the stated goal. (Doesn’t everyone?) So a lot of the opposition to American power wants to supplant America with Communism, or Anarchism, or smash it to bits, or dissolve it into global capitalism, or install a world government.
And while often this is based on ideological values about how people should live,
it’s also based on “OH FUCK GEORGE BUSH COULD JUST RANDOMLY INVADE SOMEWHERE AND NO ONE COULD STOP HIM.”
But while knowledge is knowing that America has hegemonic power, wisdom is knowing that that level of relative power isn’t entirely unique to America.
So not only will those ideas, like turning America Communist, be undesirable in themselves, but they will fail to actually abolish hegemony. They won’t even work for that stated purpose that was supposed to justify such a radical course of action.
For someone like me, this is a terrible deal.
So as long as anyone else has a continent-spanning superstate, I and the other American nationalists have no reason to dismantle ours.
But this question posits that a breakup of the other 9 million square kilometer nations has already happened.
At that point, I don’t really need a continent-spanning superstate. It has certain advantages, but the pressing need, to avoid living under someone else’s hegemony, is gone.
And I’m willing to make weird ideological trades. (I may be a lot less pro-immigration than most of the ratsphere, for instance, but there are conditions where I’d be willing to add all of Mexico to the United States.)
It may surprise you to learn this, but I’ve periodically thought about breaking the United States into a new level of “Regional Federalism” to deal with the increased political polarization. It wouldn’t work as well as we might like for that, due to the primary divide being urban/rural, so some other designs might have to be investigated, but I’m not as opposed to the idea as some readers may expect.
So let’s suppose we take the idea of a North American Union. There’s a sort of slider on a continuum of being more like a unified central government towards being a bunch of barely-connected separate nations. We’ll put the slider more towards the latter.
The American states are too small to be effective countries in the way that we’d like, and many of them are landlocked - very unfair! So we break America into 3-6 countries, based on the regions. Each one has some coastline of its own (if 3-4 countries), or else, through the NAU, the Great Lakes Region gets prenegotiated access to the sea.
This gives us a group of countries which each have a power level somewhere between that of France and that of Japan.
Minimum military development spending is pegged by the NAU to some % of the GDP and is shared between all of them. Actual militaries are individual to each country. There is a mandatory mutual defense pact, and a military coordination center, but pre-emptive wars and the like are optional. If Texas decides to invade Iran, New York does not have to pay for it. Outside of this, minimum military % GDP spending is tagged to 2.5%, and NAU members can sue each other if they fail to meet it.
The US Dollar is not abolished, but becomes a basket currency based on the currencies of each of the new NAU member countries. New currencies are issued for the new countries so that their economies don’t have currency problems like the EU does.
The official language of the NAU is American English. Proficiency in English must be taught in every NAU member country. There is no prohibition on adding other languages at the member country level.
The Bill of Rights is kept.
Other than this, since we’re looking for a dismantling, the power of the NAU government is pretty limited. The number of representatives for each member country is not proportional to population.
For the individual countries, I think multi-party parliamentary systems might result in a bit less infuriating dipolar partisanship. However, to be more decisive, each should have a President elected by Approval Voting.
That’s all pretty radical, and it’s more of a rough sketch than anything, but I am willing to make ideological trades with people that are primarily anti-nationalist because of things like the Iraq War - they’re just trades that no one can realistically offer.
Then again, by the mid-century, who knows?
Suppose we have hired a contractor to build a bridge. We issue partial payment for the project in the form of a financial instrument (presumably in a mutual fund or something else that bears interest) which only pays out in X years from now if the bridge does not collapse by then. We then monitor the price of this instrument, particularly the sales by those holding it, in order to obtain information about the quality of the bridge. This allows us to obtain this information without incentivizing anyone to deliberately sabotage the bridge project (assuming we prohibit short-selling).
Huh.
