Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

andrewbatson.com

Can economics offer more than a counsel of despair to struggling places?

I just finished Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs, an admirably clear book about one of the most important trends of the day: the increasing concentration of American jobs, wealth an…

[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 

• spent on another government program (or infrastructure)
  
• used to potentially lower wages without lowering standard of living, making the city more competitive for employers
• allowed to escape untaxed, raising standard of living for citizens

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!)

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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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

It’s not Time Travel Ethics

Suppose there is a girl who was born when her mother was sixteen.  And her mother was born when her grandmother was sixteen.  And suppose this burden of caring for a child at the age of 16 has contributed to an intergenerational cycle of poverty that has harmed her family and her education.

A boy of sixteen comes to her and says (roughly translated),

“Hey girl, your mother recklessly had a kid at age 16, and her mom recklessly had a kid at age 16, so you should get with me and recklessly have a kid at age 16!  After all, if they didn’t do the same thing, you wouldn’t exist!”

Is this a good idea?  I mean, after all, if they didn’t do it, she wouldn’t exist.

No, it is not a good idea.  In fact, this argument does not make sense…

unless, implicit in the argument, you have access to a time machine and can change the past.

However, if one did have a time machine, that opens up an entirely different bucket of ethics which this argument completely fails to address.

This applies to abortion regardless of whether other arguments are also valid - “but if your mother aborted you…” implies time travel.

This applies to immigration, regardless of whether other arguments are also valid - “but if immigration laws were different…” implies time travel.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Who captures a wage subsidy?

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.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

A Price Paid in National Will

We’ve all seen various Leftists denouncing “Nationalists and their dumb wars.”  While it can be tempting to argue the point regarding past interventions, the future of Nationalism must lay in the future, not the past.

It’s important, in attempting to define a new form of Nationalism, to understand that dumb wars don’t just have a price paid in blood and treasure, but also in the national spirit.  Dumb wars undermine and destroy Nationalism.

Nationalism is not only an ideology, but it’s also a form of ideological or political capital.  The will of the people to support the government and fight on behalf of the country, while necessary to secure the national defense, is an exhaustible resource.  It is very precious, for without it there cannot be a nation.  Therefore, in addition to acting to promote it, we must also act to conserve it.  A nation that can rise up as one in military response has far greater power and sovereignty than those with only fragmented support, as both its threats and defense are more credible.

Propaganda cannot be the answer, as truth has odds of coming out eventually, since it is less in conflict with reality.  And it was some truth or another that lead many of us to become Nationalists in the first place.

Think about it.  Suppose you get into some dumb, unwinnable war in the middle east or southeast Asia.  In order to pay for the war, you have to raise taxes (if not now, then later), diverting resources from the civic goods those taxes might have paid for.  To get the necessary manpower, you must either create a draft, which creates opposition to the draft and thus empowers internal opposition and counter-culture, or your have to raise taxes higher and send some of your most loyal men to get shot at.  

Then the history comes along later and says that not only was the mission not a success, but you didn’t even get any resources out of it for the country.

Not only does this make people less likely to sign up for or provide material support for the nation’s wars, but they may come to believe that the nation is bad and turn against Nationalism itself.

How much less powerful would left-wing anti-Nationalists be without the Iraq War?  How much less powerful would they be without the Vietnam War?

On top of this all, it may end up preventing the country from having the ability to fight wars in ways that it can win.  Having sowed substantial doubt about the virtue of the nation’s military action itself, it will be harder to obtain the necessary political will for the required partial cultural conversion needed to ensure the invaded territory is permanently no longer an enemy.

(Of course, there are other factors that can lead to declines in Nationalism, even in countries with less substantial military adventurism.  But those must be addressed separately.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

The National Delegation

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.

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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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

What GOP Must Do to Avoid an American NHS

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.

• Each year, every American receives a healthcare voucher for $2,500.  (Maybe more - this is way below our per-capita healthcare spending - but even you can do this much.)  You can hide this as an earned income tax credit for the poor, a tax deduction for the middle class, etc, if you have to.
• The voucher can only be used to purchase valid medical services and medical insurance.  We have licensing for doctors, so this shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.
• Any of the voucher not spent rolls over into a no-tax/low-tax Health Savings Account, where it builds up.  
• Private money can also go into the account.
• Tax is only assessed above a certain amount / on death.
• By default, it goes to a zero-interest government account, but this can be changed by opening a suitable interest-earning HSA account at any American bank or credit union.
• Hospitals are still required provide emergency care for the uninsured/poor, however, up to ½ of future vouchers can be garnished, proportional to the size of outstanding claims.
  
• Vouchers and money from the HSA can be given to spouses or children for their HSAs, though not other relations (normally).  It can also be disbursed in a will, but if so then it will be taxed as normal income.

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

mitigatedchaos

I cannot trust it will actually turn out like that at all due to how this has gone previously.

Why I specified “agreement to execute anyone who commits an honor killing” is that it’s an ideological sin to do that, and thus serves as a costly signal that they actually care and aren’t just trying to pull one over like they have previously, when they promised this stuff would not happen.

(Also it would de-normalize honor killings, but you get the idea.)

anaisnein

It brings in the whole existing orthogonal discourse over the death penalty and complicates the already complicated debate terrain. Also, summary execution is more of a What’s Wrong With Those Others thing and less a What’s Right About Us Here thing and I would think you wouldn’t be enthusiastic about that, it instantiates the cultural decay you’re postulating.

Well, let’s assume that the plan is to create an international-thinking city-state that values this free migration.

Right off the bat, the existing high-immigration city-state that does not have an issue with honor killings is Singapore, where the sentence for murder is death by hanging.  Until 2012, this was mandatory.  So flat out, if you engage in an “honor killing” in Singapore, they will kill you.

But of course, we don’t have to just copy-paste Singapore.

Cultural practices have inertia.  Apply that inertia to Italian cuisine and you get Chicago-style deep dish pizza.  Apply that inertia to throwing acid on women to control them, and you get acid attacks by British gangs.

They have to be stopped before that inertia can take hold.

And since we’re being so heavily about freedom of movement, we want to put the brakes on this within one generation, since we can’t necessarily rely on other methods, like limiting the maximum size of one incoming ethnic group and where they live in order to fragment them such that their number of cultural graph edges is insufficient to sustain their culture.  

That leaves responding to barbarism and medieval behaviors, to some degree, with medieval means.

To some degree you can rely on liberal atomization, but only if the conditions are right for that atomization to have an effect, which means no cousin marriages or other barriers that honor-killers and the like can use to stop their families from atomizing.  (And note that banning all new cousin marriages is, itself, not without controversy.)  It also takes a while.

The sharper the change, the greater the degree of braking force necessary.  It must be communicated not just to the men involved, but to the entire community they are a part of that this activity is not just socially disapproved of by the ethnic majority (who they may not care about), but that it is bullshit for chumps that only an idiot would engage in.

Getting executed because your took up arms against the state might be martyrdom, but getting executed because you honor-killed your sister is just stupid (and therefore low-status).

Otherwise you risk a long-burning change that could ride under the surface until it obtains enough political support (which may not be legalization, but just deliberately ignoring the problem).  

If 5% of your population cousin marry, it takes a congressman to end it.
If 10% of your population cousin marry, it takes a President.
If 30% of your population cousin marry, it takes a King.
The right time to end it, then, is before it cracks 6%.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

One Thousand and One Villages

Follow-up to my post One Thousand Villages, separated out so Tumblr won’t harm my precious, precious PNGs, so let’s tag some people from the last one. @wirehead-wannabe @mailadreapta @bambamramfan Let’s also tag @xhxhxhx in case he finds it interesting or discovers some glaring flaw or something.

We’ll borrow Mailadreapta’s word here and refer to the new model as a Quad - it’s a 500m x 500m area as part of a larger 1km x 1km pattern.  I decided to revisit the subject and get a better sense of the scale and proportions, and in doing so, I realized that 1km x 1km is just too big for a single unit (and also too big to start with as an experiment if someone were to attempt this).  We’ll call the collection of four quads a Klick.

In the above images, green is residential, blue is mixed-use/commercial, yellow is light industrial, white is civic buildings, and orange is public transit.

Noting some feedback from @mailadreapta

I think the biggest problem is employment: there’s just no way you can ensure that everyone works in their own quad, so most people will still need to leave in order to work. I assume that a high-speed thoroughfare lie along the boundaries of the square (with transit) to accommodate this.

For a similar reason, I would put the commercial and civic buildings (except for the school) among the edge: these are these are places that will be visited often by people from other villages, so keep them away from the residential center.

This is, in fact, roughly the plan.  Although I did have the civic center in the middle last time.

Now then, now that that’s out of the way, let’s do some uncredentialed urban planning!

EDIT: Got a couple of numbers wrong.  That’s what I get for being so desperate to post this at 5AM in the morning.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

One Thousand Villages

@wirehead-wannabe I recall you talking about wanting a college-campus-like environment with activities and whatnot as a living area, but outside of a college campus.

@mailadreapta I recall you talking about the difficulty of getting people to go for medium-density housing.

And I guess @bambamramfan I think I’ve mentioned a similar idea already.  (Though it was a low-trust mechanism, I’m of the opinion that high trust is an equilibrium state which can be achieved through various mechanisms.)

There is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, which is to borrow an idea from computer science for resolving the challenges of urban areas by recursively reducing the size of problems until they can be adequately resolved.  Thus, the city is reduced to a bunch of villages/towns.

The above render is for a rough sketch design that spans one kilometer and houses a population of around 5,000 or more, assuming an apartment is about 100 sqm (based on the size of an average apartment in the US).  After reviewing it, I can’t help but think it should perhaps be about ¼ the size, but ah well.  Grey is civic buildings, light green is residential, light blue is commercial, and light brown is footpaths.

• Mixed use development has a lot of advantages, including reductions in commuting, but for various reasons people don’t like it.
  
• People seem to find themselves feeling less connected to, and less trusting of, others.
• Crime continues to be a problem for many cities.
• Childhood obesity is on the increase, and children most likely need to get outside more.
• Police violence is a problem in many cities.
• Greenery is important for human psychological health.
• High levels of traffic congestion.

My proposal, then, is to create a smaller community within the city with several key elements:

• Semi-permeable membrane - Outer wall reduces noise.  Security and level of surveillance can be adjusted according to local crime levels.  As crime rises, all visitors can be tracked, or access can even be limited.
• Quick access to public transportation (orange areas) - the average human walks at 5kph, and is therefore never more than about 700m and ~10 minutes from a public transport stop.
• Quick access to local shops - reduce unnecessary transport usage and make goods available easily to the locals, also it’s directly next to the transit stop.
• Community Center - Common facilities for exercise, social clubs, social events, and so on are near the center.  All residents own a share of the Community Development Board (or something) which hires personnel to clean up the neighborhood, maintain the facilities, and puts on community social events on the regular.  This is very local, direct political involvement with a high share of control per person.  
• Community Support Officers (CSOs) - (I only recently discovered UK has something with the same name.)  Trained not only in police work, but also emergency medical care, fire suppression, and social work.  Part of the idea here is that CSOs will engage almost entirely in foot patrols when not doing other support work.  They will know who is an actual threat, vs who is mentally ill, possibly be able to deflect bad paths before they become permanent, and pick up on crimes using high-context detective work.  The people of the block will be real people to them and they will see their consequences as they happen.
• Low-velocity roads - Borrowed from Barcelona, encourages and enhances walking, discourages car use, but still lets cargo move in and out.  Safer for children.  
• Ample foot/bicycle paths, ample green space for exercise, sports, and letting children outside to play.

Probably this needs to be revised a lot more, starting with a reduction to 500m.

I think something like this might have the potential to lower crime and police violence, while reducing the opposition to medium-density living and increasing psychological and physical health.  

But you know, I’m not an expert.  There’s probably something terribly wrong with this.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[ Values, Efficacy ]

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.