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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
argumate
shlevy

If you want to claim that the distinction between economic incentives and physical force is often irrelevant, fine, make your case. But if you’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist, why should people who built their whole economic system on that difference pay attention?

shlevy

Also, these arguments usually suffer from the same flaw as “atheism is just another religion”: they are almost always part of a call for more physical force, but if you’re cool with that what exactly is your objection in the first place?

argumate

there are no economic incentives that aren’t ultimately backed by force, in any system

mitigatedchaos

Exactly.

And the objection isn’t so much “but they use force,” but rather “you’re claiming your system is Special and therefore should be treated differently.  It is not Special, and therefore it lacks moral weight to prohibit us from altering it.”

Typically, it’s in response to bitching about “how dare there be taxation!  commerce is freedom!”, when someone suggests some redistributive program.  But if it’s work-or-starve, then this whole “commerce is freedom” thing is fundamentally undermined, and you don’t get to claim you avoid any responsibility just because you’re not the one holding the metaphorical gun.

Property, as it exists in nature, is not morally binding, and that’s the only sense in which it exists independently of malleable human construction.

Property might be useful as a concept, but that’s very different from it having inherent rather than instrumental moral binding.

(tired in writing this, maybe a bit confusing.)

Source: shlevy the invisible fist the iron hand
discoursedrome
shlevy

If you want to claim that the distinction between economic incentives and physical force is often irrelevant, fine, make your case. But if you’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist, why should people who built their whole economic system on that difference pay attention?

discoursedrome

Hmm, I dunno. Pretty much all states forbid some kinds of physical force but not others, and some kinds of economic incentives but not others. This is especially true when looking at de facto rather than de jure enforcement. In the eyes of the institution, I’d say that the kinds of economic incentives that are banned are more like the kinds of physical force that are banned than they are like the kinds of economic inventives that are permitted. “Is this permitted or not” is just about the most institutionally-salient quality.

Thus, I’m not sure any actually-existing systems really are built on a clear differentiation between those two categories. They tend to be grouped as distinct species in the sense that, say, bribery is distinct from assault, but this seems more like statutory syntactic sugar than the kind of substantive qualitative difference that the “physical versus and economic coercion” distinction is purported to represent under liberalism. It seems like more of a rhetorical distinction than one that people actually build societies around.

Source: shlevy the invisible fist the iron hand

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.

policy flagpost the iron hand the invisible fist
mutant-aesthetic
anarchyinblack: “ In honor of the brave men and women of Loss Prevention, who work tirelessly and thanklessly as gainfully employed workers of the private sector, and protect the many goods we enjoy from being stolen by looters and parasites, I’m...
anarchyinblack

In honor of the brave men and women of Loss Prevention, who work tirelessly and thanklessly as gainfully employed workers of the private sector, and protect the many goods we enjoy from being stolen by looters and parasites, I’m promoting this, the Thin Yellow Line flag.

These men are on the front lines every single day, preventing communists and advocates of alternative lifestyles from stealing makeup and other luxury goods ostensibly in the name of worker liberation, preventing their fellow workers from bearing the costs in the form of shortened hours and layoffs, and keeping prices low for the rest of us in society who actually produce utility for others.

When you see these private security enforcers at your local Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, or Macy’s, salute them, because they are the line between civilization and barbarism, and they do it without extorting the taxpayer or murdering innocent people in the street.

mitigatedchaos

This works both with a sincere and an ironic reading.

Source: anarchyinblack the invisible fist the red hammer the iron hand
its-okae-carly-rae
mitigatedchaos

@poipoipoi-2016

In response to that last, I’ve heard enough stories about my paternal grandparents to really want divorce to be a thing that happens more often, but at the same time, I heard enough stories about Grandma and her six husbands to be deeply suspect of divorce.

I realized that something related showed up in my life. There was a guy I knew online. Black guy living in a city. His step dad had him working at his small business, and it interfered with his ability to complete school. Then he was of age, and the step dad tried to kick him out, but he didn’t have a job, so he was sneaking into the house to avoid ending up homeless. His resume was terrible, just a few cobbled-together, unformatted paragraphs. I would say “shouldn’t they teach resume writing in school?” but even if they did, the terrible step dad might have had him working or something so that he wasn’t able to attend or complete that! But he was a decent guy, and had a good work ethic, so I went through carefully building a resume with him, and he got a job soon enough after and was able to move out. It’s no wonder he had been depressed earlier! And, like, in between then, we got advice from my ex-girlfriend’s partner, who has lived the low-class life, on how to try to keep him out of the street at night until he could move out.

But how many guys like him are out there, even in this country, you know? Who don’t have a hand-me-down laptop and a connection to a bunch of random nerds who know how to write a resume for him so he can get a stable income?

So I can’t really be a true GOPper, but also the risk with the step parents stuff is real.

mitigatedchaos

@neoliberalismnightly

still though, aren’t libraries a thing?

  1. Is the library going to let him stay overnight?
  2. Is the library going to tell him what he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know?
  3. Is the library going to think to ask him to look at his resume to try and find out why he’s having so much trouble getting a job?
  4. Is the library going to carefully go over his first draft at a new resume according to an intuition on writing these things by someone who can speak a bit of corporatese?
  5. How fast can the library improve his professional (not casual, which in this case was fine due to his communicating on the internet a lot before) writing skills?  Is it fast enough?
  6. Is the library going to help him filter the information he does receive in case some of it is junk?

Having libraries is good in part for these reasons, but it isn’t really enough.

its-okae-carly-rae

Does the US have anything equivalent to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau? They can probably help with 2, 3, maybe 4, maybe 5, and 6, and they’re in at least some of the libraries here. 

mitigatedchaos

I’ve literally never heard of such a thing.  It might be a suitable use of government funds.  After all, markets don’t function correctly without information, right?

Source: mitigatedchaos the iron hand the invisible fist
slartibartfastibast
slartibartfastibast: “ anaisnein: “ It’s not just this, it’s a fundamental inability to *identify* with other people and realize that *that could be me*. Today I am 31 and healthy and always exercise regularly and eat well so why should I pay for...
anaisnein

It’s not just this, it’s a fundamental inability to *identify* with other people and realize that *that could be me*.

Today I am 31 and healthy and always exercise regularly and eat well so why should I pay for other people’s expensive preexisting conditions and disabilities? Because obviously it’s not possible that when I’m 34 I might get diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or a chronic leukemia and need expensive meds forever. Or that when I’m 36 I might have a child with cerebral palsy who is able to live a full, rich, happy and ~productive~ life but will need expensive healthcare and ongoing assistance to do so. Or that when I’m 48 I might get hit by a car and be left unable to work full time, in need of assistance, etc, myself. Or that when I’m 53 I might get some random-bad-luck cancer (let’s make it easy: not even talk about how lung cancer does in fact happen to nonsmokers or how in any case it’s disgusting to call it “fair” when it happens to a smoker because that punishment doesn’t fit the crime you sadists; instead, let’s consider one of the myriad cancers that hits at genuine fucking random or by some familial genetic vulnerability the individual can’t affect) for which a curative treatment actually exists but it costs $260,000 and without it the prognosis is eighteen months.

Same applies to poverty. (And for some of the same reasons as already sketched, as well as economic cycles and industrial shifts and automation and so on.)

It’s this pervasive prosperity-gospel belief that bad things by definition only happen to the undeserving and trying to help people who experience misfortune is hubris and interfering with the will of the great gods Natural Selection and The Market and doomed to create more problems than it solves because fate favors the lucky because the lucky are deserving because Gnon because *blithering evil*.

slartibartfastibast

I don’t know how to explain thermodynamics and free lunch stuff to people who don’t already have some acquired grounding in physical reality. I also keep saying that caring about other people isn’t the problem (Richard Spencer would probably say he “cares about people”). It’s caring about systems, some of which take care of people (and in a catastrophic failure would become unable to take care of people at all) that’s the problem. If you’re too nihilistically individualized, you’ll apparenrly fail to notice how systems fit together (and don’t). Screaming about it doesn’t seem to help, because systems still fail even when you scream at them. I don’t have an easy answer, but if the most widespread centrist position means ignoring Rotherham-type stuff, then fuck that too.

mitigatedchaos

The economy is like the tyranny of a rocket equation.  You only have so much fuel, the gravity between the worlds is already there and you can’t change it.  

It is physically impossible to meet all the goals - there just aren’t enough resources (natural resources * capital * labor * technology) to accomplish them all.

American GDP-per-capita is above $50,000.  Foreign GDPs outside of a few hyper-efficient places like Hong Kong or Singapore are lower.

If one person takes $3,000,000 to keep alive, you have effectively consumed the complete economic output of one person’s whole entire life.

But it’s worse than that, because our worker had to pay for housing, for food, for transport, for education, and taxes to support all the secondary systems required, and also raise a child to perpetuate the system.  If all that’s leftover after all that is $10,000 per year, then any $3,000,000 case consumes the total lifetime surplus resources of five workers.

And I look at many of these cases and do think “fuck, that could be me” - which is part of why I suggested a wage subsidy program!

But a lot of Leftist or Liberal language wants to allow people to create unlimited burdens on society.  They want us to pay for treatment while not allowing us to prohibit people from doing things that would require more treatment, or creating people that require more treatment.

You can’t have both!  You can’t have both!

The fewer the number of people that require expensive treatment, the more resources you can spend on them.  The more that need expensive treatment, relative to the size of the productive economy, the less you can spend on each one, until it falls below the level required for them to survive.

If is vitally important that society become more efficient and more technologically advanced.  We must produce more, and more efficiently.

And we can’t just throw aside social technologies.  If broken homes fuck people up, statistically, and cause them not to do well in the labor force, then the cost of that comes out of liver transplants, not just ferraris.

Source: resistdrumpf the invisible fist the iron hand flagpost policy my politics national technocracy politics
collapsedsquid
stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com

Economic roots of post-truth politics

Here’s a conjecture: the rise of “post-truth” politics (defined by the OED as a process whereby “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals”) is in part the product of deindustrialization. What I mean is that...
collapsedsquid

Here’s a conjecture: the rise of “post-truth” politics (defined by the OED as a process whereby “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals”) is in part the product of deindustrialization.

What I mean is that in manufacturing, facts defeat emotions and opinions. If your steel cracks, or your bottles leak or your cars won’t start, all your hopes and fancy beliefs are wrong. Truth trumps opinion.

Contrast this with sales occupations. In these, opinion beats facts. If customers think a shit sandwich is great food, it’ll sell regardless of facts. And conversely, good products won’t sell if customers think they’re rubbish. Opinion trumps truth.

(Finance is a mix of these. In trading and asset management, beliefs are constantly defeated by cold hard facts. In asset gathering, sales and investor relations, however, bullshit works.)

Isn’t it therefore possible that a shift from manufacturing to other occupations will contribute to a decline in respect for facts and greater respect for opinions, however ill-founded? In 1966 – when employment in UK manufacturing peaked – 29.2% of the workforce were in manufacturing. This meant that millions more heard tales from fathers, husbands and friends about how brute facts had fouled up their day. A culture of respect for facts was thus inculcated. Today, however, only 7.8% of the workforce is in manufacturing and many more are in bullshit jobs. This is an environment less conducive to a deference to facts.

Hot take on how method of labor influences mode of thought.

mitigatedchaos

I hereby award this take one pepper for spiciness.

I can think of two supportive facts. One is that post-truth politics seems (I might be wrong) to be less strong in countries where manufacturing still looms large in culture if not in economics, such as in Germany or Japan.

However, many of the people decrying Post-Truth Politics don’t particularly care for the policies of Japan, and Japan’s politics are quite different from Germany’s.

the invisible fist the culture war
mitigatedchaos
mitigatedchaos

Protectionism is supposed to be an evil bastion of inefficiency, but I’m not so sure that, in a loose sense over the policy space of various protectionisms, none of them are wise policy.

It isn’t just about protecting a baby industry in your country while it develops, but *also* there is the matter of retaining a network of industry necessary to achieve economies of scale in the first place, which may also have an impact on other industries. The marginal cost of the first auto factory is much higher since it includes the entire rest of the supplier network!

Motorola’s attempt to build a phone in the US did not fail due to insufficient virtue of the American worker (“shame on you for not living in a company barracks! lazy! so lazy!”), but rather the lack of this network, and we must also NOT ignore the political and geopolitical environment, where a slight marginal cost may be worth paying in order to avoid strengthening major ideological and political rivals.

mitigatedchaos

@neoliberalism-nightly

um, you mean that the virtue of the american worker was insufficient to overcome the apparent lack of the relevant supply chains. you could change either of them, or some combination, and other variables that are unspecified but yet still exogenous.

In this case, I am not praising American workers as exceptionally virtuous.  (Though they do work long hours by the standards of developed economies in Europe, our colleagues in Japan and Korea are very busy people indeed.)

Rather, there is an implicit argument that, in order to compete with China, America must go to the level of the Industrious Chinese Laborers living in company barracks, and remove its environmental tyranny and let the rivers run red with nickel processing runoff.  That the failure to do so is a moral failure of the American people to compete adequately in the global economy.

I think, instead, that it is possible for America (and the other developed nations) to have some of these industries without doing so, assuming the correct policies are in play.

Speaking of environmental tyranny, undermining the ability of companies to engage in environmental arbitrage which allows them to get away with not paying the true costs of their environmental externalities would be one method to push for this in terms of policy vectors.

the invisible fist

Protectionism is supposed to be an evil bastion of inefficiency, but I’m not so sure that, in a loose sense over the policy space of various protectionisms, none of them are wise policy.

It isn’t just about protecting a baby industry in your country while it develops, but *also* there is the matter of retaining a network of industry necessary to achieve economies of scale in the first place, which may also have an impact on other industries. The marginal cost of the first auto factory is much higher since it includes the entire rest of the supplier network!

Motorola’s attempt to build a phone in the US did not fail due to insufficient virtue of the American worker (“shame on you for not living in a company barracks! lazy! so lazy!”), but rather the lack of this network, and we must also NOT ignore the political and geopolitical environment, where a slight marginal cost may be worth paying in order to avoid strengthening major ideological and political rivals.

the invisible fist
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