Of Course, “I Support Socialism, Like They Have In Denmark. Workers Of The World, Unite!” Is A Common

No ruling class has ever acted like gentlemen, precisely because rulership rooted in exclusive rights and privileges (property, literacy, religion, rank, prestige, etc) requires and incentivizes constant paranoia to ensure that the non-elite don't get too uppity.

As long as conflicts of interest exist between leaders and citizens, the ruling class will consist mostly of frightened, grasping, strivers, and almost nothing can be done to produce gentlemanly conduct from them.

If you want your elites to behave like gentlemen, you have to give them the status and the security of gentlemen.

If you make a project of keeping your elites scared and on their toes -- if you work to convince them that they have to scrabble for every advantage and that they're always in danger of falling into the abyss -- then you will have elites who act like frightened, grasping strivers. Which is what you have. Do you like it?

I've made this point like a dozen different ways by now. Perhaps someday I'll actually write the essay, instead of tossing off yet another few frustrated paragraphs.

"Importantly, the market and private property by themselves cannot prevent the total depletion of the commons. In fact, the depletion of the commons follows inexorably from the distributed actions of agents following profit and loss signals. It is only when private property is circumvented, where information not revealed by prices or profit and loss signals is taken into account, that sustainable use of common resources becomes possible."

Very few believers will seriously claim that morality can only come from religion anymore (that argument seemed to die with the religious debates of the early aughts) but they've seemed to switch tactics recently to claiming that culture and religion are inseparable. This strikes me as an even worse argument: arguably, religion *destroys* culture by suppressing full human thought, creativity, and exploration of ideas- often other religions!

Once again begging anti-theists to realize that to get to a world without religion you’d have to commit cultural genocide. So maybe you shouldn’t push for that

Perhaps it's time to resurrect the tradition of Soviet jokes, but retooled for modern cyber-capitalism.

"We pretend to pay them and they pretend to make us happy."

People make bones about the USSR’s project of creating a “new Soviet man” - how quaint! - without appreciating that the American-led development of the 20th century “demand economy,” culminating in (but by no means limited to) the creation of the “postwar middle class,” represented a human-engineering project of no less ambition and infinitely greater sophistication than the Soviet one. The new Soviet man is a joke, a failure; we are the new capitalist man. And we don’t even realise it!

What is the new capitalist man? It is a person that desires infinite houses quantities of things they cannot use. It’s a person constitutionally incapable of stopping to say “I have enough, I’m happy.” Can you imagine how threatening a contented mindset is to ever-expanding commodity circulation (in other words, to national GDP growth)? Can you conceive of the vast resources, private and public, that were and are being poured into permanently eliminating every hint of that mindset from the American psyche?

This is the essence of the advertising industry, the raison d'etre of Madison Avenue and its (historically overlooked) collaboration with the U.S. government: the manufacturing of demand to meet supply, and the manufacturing of an indefinitely increasing demand to meet a supply of comparable dimensions. It is, as a necessary stepping stone to the manufacturing of this demand, the wholesale reshaping of what it means to be a human being: not into a selfless, musclebound Superman, as the Soviets would have had it (and say of that what you will), but into a spiritually impoverished and pathetic wretch, a meat-vehicle for a ceaseless material appetite.

It’s not that it’s not commented on. Many people have observed the way that interfaces like YouTube and Facebook keep us trapped in miserable little cycles of consuming, clicking, consuming, clicking (and to what end, financially? Serving us advertisements! Yet more psychological conditioning!). But too often this is understood as something sui generis, a unique malady of Internet capitalism, rather than as an elaboration of and refinement upon a single, vast project that has been in the works for longer than Mark Zuckerberg has been alive. The “loops” and tiny dopamine spurts of social media and video games are in fact just one more chisel in the hand of those sculptors attempting to fashion, from the soft stone of the human psyche, the type of person that can sustain global capitalism.

Is it cybernetic? Automatic and self-perpetuating? Certainly, to a degree. But it was planned, once. And for every clearly pathological and immiserating behavioral pattern that is discovered through new technology, there is a person whose job is to find out how to get more people to behave that way and use it to move product.

Good writeup. Maybe I'm too dumb to comprehend the answer, but I do wonder why bother with predictions markets instead of just letting people vote on what they want?

Say you get 100 votes and can allocate them across different desires/outcomes proportionally to how much you want them ("I want more free time", "I want more of good X/Y", "I want faster public transport") which could be used by planners to determine total public preferences and provide an outline of a resource/labor budget. For example, if the majority of people strongly favor shorter commute times, planners could calculate the necessary labor time and resources required for R&D of new vehicles, transit software, etc. Then the budget would be put before public comment and approval. As a result, people would be committing to an actual expenditure of their time, labor, and resources rather than trying to play a game of signalling, like @brazenautomaton mentioned.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

investment proportional to prediction markets’ guesses about room for funding, or about the succcess likelihood of new cooperatives

discretionary investment by central planning boards, especially into public goods

loans at fixed interest rates

“sure, take a shot” no-questions-asked funding for people starting a cooperative for the first time

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

rotating appointment by the elected government, similar to the supreme court or fed 

appointment by a permanent planning agency

sortition by proxy (choose a random citizen and they appoint the board member)

prediction market guesses about who would perform best in terms of revenues - expenses or some other testable metric

election by the employees’ union or consumer groups

direct recall elections on any of the above by citizens

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

“ (Also, I’ll grant you there’s something to *the basic idea*, but “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is actually untenable.)”

Could you elaborate more on this? I’m curious how you arrived to this conclusion when we produce more than enough food to feed the planet and when we (in the United States, at least) have more empty homes than homeless people. If those kinds of surpluses can be achieved with only small parts of the population engaged in agriculture and construction, what could we achieve if everyone worked to the best of their ability? Even with marginal returns on labor.

I genuinely mean it; to me, nothing is more untenable than the idea that allowing a small percentage of people to control nearly all resource and labor allocation will benefit humankind in the long run, except maybe the idea that unchecked productive activity in a competitive system will somehow miraculously save us from the ecological catastrophe caused by that activity.

funny thing about talking about capitalism/communism is if you don’t explicitly say ‘capitalism’ or ‘communism’ and take out the marxist jargon people will agree with you 90% of the time

Matt Yglesias’ curiosity about the rationalist movement was apparently pretty serious; he sounds more and more like us all the time.

The last paragraph is the worst part. It's chilling that anyone would be impressed by-and offer a job to-someone so manipulative and deceptive.

Welcome to the tech industry, where cruelty, dishonesty, and callousness are rewarded as long as they're innovative enough.

The Tinder Hacker

When I asked Sean about his hobbies, I wasn’t prepared for what he said.

tl:dr: Guy writes a script to connect two men together on a dating app, both of whom think they are talking to a beautiful women. Many seem to like a woman as sexually forward as they are, some are confused, more still are thrown off by the not-so-great pronoun-switching part of the script.

He turns it off before things go too far. We learn some things about men (maybe), and about online dating.

Thoughts?

A quick Google would seem to indicate that Napoleon also:

-Forbid Jews from migrating within France

-Heavily restricted their ability to engage in moneylending

-Cancelled all debt owed to Jewish lenders

-Forced them to adopt surnames

-Conscripted them into the army

All of which are far more anti-Semitic than the modern policy of building a welfare state and offering people the choice to leave their religious communities.

Now I'll freely admit that I'm ignorant of Napoleon beyond some broad strokes. I would assume that, as a European gentile in the eighteenth century, he had antisemitic sentiments. But like, this seems insane:

Letting Jews out of the ghettos and removing the barriers to their participation in broader society is roughly the exact opposite of antisemitism, surely. If this is an accurate summary of Napoleon's policy towards the Jews then he was in fact a great champion of Jewish freedom, and a model for gentiles to follow rather than a cautionary tale.

this is horrifically uncharitable but I just… I know too many people right now who are dealing with steep cognitive decline/dementia/blah and I have reached Too Many Feelings

so

teach me how to believe. Teach me how to know what makes a good person is not inside our brains, that we can’t fall apart.

That we can still choose good even when we’ve begun to forget what choices are

When we lash out

When we truly don’t remember.

Teach me what the rules are when all that’s left is fear and anger. Teach me how they stay when everything else goes.

I’ll need them when it’s my turn, if cultivating kind emotions isn’t enough to be good in the end.

Teach me how to hope like you. Teach me how you write the moral law in something untouchable by plaque, unmaulable by aneurysm.

Teach me how the imprints stay when everything else disappears.