Agreed in general. I don't know how much of the COVID mess is going to pull production back towards domestic, however. The US regulatory regime is really anti-manufacturing in a lot of ways, so it is going to take a lot to make domestic manufacturing less costly than foreign, even if really robust supply chains become a desirous property. Hell, just holding more inventory domestically solves most of that problem, and cheaper than compliance.
Now, eventually wages across the world will start to level out and that will tend to make domestic production more desirable. Just as Japan made cheap stuff, then Hong Kong/Taiwan/Macao, then China, now Sri Lanka and Laos in Asia, or various South American countries, sooner or later there won't be super cheap labor anywhere and the differences will all come down to regulatory burden and logistics. Even in that case, though, moving stuff by boat is super cheap, and US business regulations are really anti-manufacturing, so it might take a lot more than simple labor costs to make the difference.
To put it another way, the US could bring manufacturing back to the states any time they want. We just need to click our heels three times and stop fucking everything up with regards to industrial policy and regulation.
I dunno. Antitrust is a very... questionable area, one that looks a lot more like coming up with reasons to bludgeon people you don't like than anything approaching principled application of rules. I think it was Rand who pointed out that antitrust enforcement was basically "If you raise prices, you are a monopoly and need to be broken up. If you lower prices too much, you are engaging in unfair practices and need to be broken up."
See, I don't think regulations are as good as made out. I think the socially accepted parameters do a lot of the work themselves.
With financial regulations, they are incredibly meaningful, but they are also bad. Badly designed, and badly intentioned in many cases. It is very difficult to say start up a simple bank (not the company named Simple Bank, but the idea of a bank that has 100% reserves and doesn't lend, but just takes a fee for allowing you to do checking and holding you money). If you are a legal pot farmer you can't get a bank account due to "know your customer" regulations. Etc.
Yet the financial system that is so dangerous it must be regulated to the hilt also must be bailed out every time they do something horrible and would lose a lot of money. That's a lot of regulation that doesn't line up with socially accepted parameters.
Long story short, you need rules to enforce justice (no stealing, through theft, fraud or murder) but most regulations have nothing to do with that. You might not need any regulations above and beyond the standard law, or maybe you do in some cases. What we have now, however, has nothing to do with justice or socially accepted rules, and is entirely rule making to benefit those who can purchase the rule makers.
The problem with the super wealthy isn't that they are rich, but that they are powerful. You can shape and change the world by buying politicians, funding NGOs, and demanding that the media you fund run the stories you want them to, while suppressing ones that you do not like. And right now, there isn't a lot we can do about this.
Agreed, power is the problem. I see the buying of politicians, who sell the power to use violence on people, as the biggest problem. The media and NGOs I see as less worrisome, mostly because they focus on influencing politics as well. I am open to the idea that I am too focused on political power and not enough on persuasive power without violence, however.
If I were to name one thing we could do to keep power out of the hands of the rich, it would be to take it out of the hands of politicians who want to sell it to the rich.
Yup... that's one of the big reasons I am not optimistic about us solving our problems cleanly, inside the system. (Not that the right wing politicians have been much better, but the far left ones are extra crazy.)
Who needs solutions so long as there is a "they" to blame the problems on? Solutions don't fund re-election campaigns as effectively as other-izing the opposition. As long as that's the calculus, we're worse than on our own - the problems need to remain so as to justify the continuing growth of the state; those vested in the status quo will quash any meaningful attempts of the people to solve problems on their own.
I don't think either party has a monopoly on bad people, although the tribe named "politicians and bureaucrats" has a lot of market power there, as it were. The trouble I have with Dems is that they are openly big government; every problem has a government solution, never a "Look, this isn't our business. We should stay out of it." solution. The trouble I have with Reps is they aren't open about it.
The other problem with Dems is (I think) that they don't have a limiting principle on their beliefs that keeps them from going full woke. That is to say, the woke are the more internally consistent Dems, so when some wokie says something crazy moderate Dems can't really argue because by their own lights the crazy is correct. It is the same problem that many religions have with their crazy fundamentalist wings: by the rules the fundies are actually correct, and most of the normies just ignore those rules to function properly, but in a confrontation the normies have to admit that the fundies are actually doing what the normies profess to believe is right.
I don't know that Lina Khan is far left or not. I was referring to the law schools filling up predominantly with wokies who disdain the traditional checks and balances of jurisprudence in favor of getting what they want.
I am highly skeptical of Lina Khan because she is the kind of person who becomes the head of the FTC :)
I don't think that the politicians are selling power to the rich because they want to. I think that the politicians are beholden to the rich who funded their campaigns, and it's 'quid per quo' time.
I take a look at the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders" initiative, and see how many of the graduates are now well placed as leaders of Western governments. And they mostly produce policies I hate, in large part because I am not a globalist. The people who get rich from globalism will always have more money to promote globalism than those who prefer stronger national sovereignty. Since the elitist-globalist-technoautocratic/popularist-nationalist-democratic split is the new real political divide, rather than the old left/right, this is a severe problem for those of us on the less well funded side.
Possibly, but the politicians seem to be really good at turning "acquiring power" into "having lots of money", all while making some really strange decisions to benefit the rich. That suggests to me that it is a very cooperative arrangement, where politicians happily sell power to those who happily buy it. Sometimes politicians will brow beat the rich into paying them off, and probably the rich say something to the extent of "it'd be a shame if I had to support your primary opponent." But like most exchange, I expect it is largely mutually desirous.
I think you are unfortunately correct about the new nature of the most relevant political divide these days, however. The WEF has been remarkably good at placing prebought leaders/cult members.
It's the flow, back and forth, of the wealth and the power where the trouble lies. The pols turn their power into lots of money; the wealthy, turn their money into lots of power. It's rotational, like buzzards over a battlefield; going from a job at the FTC or the Fed to a job at some huge bank whose malfeasance wiped out the savings of millions; like going from the board of Raytheon to SecDef. For those of us below, if it flows left to right or right to left doesn't matter - it doesn't flow down. It all gets sucked up, up to and by those with the means and connections to stay above.
Unfortunately it is the citizens at large. If we can't convince people to remove power by the ballot now, we are going to have to remove power by the bullet later. The question is only how much later and how many bullets, and it won't be pretty no matter the answer. I think that is why it is so important to diagnose the source of the problem and talk about it so people understand.
My position, which is mostly philosophical, but i think has some support in the factual record (including much of 20th-century history), is that
1) coercion is a bad thing in and of itself (this is the philosophical part);
2) coercion with good intentions usually yields either unintended bad results or corrupts the coercers into going for bad results for their own good (this is the historical part);
3) given (1) and (2), we should be very, very careful about coercing people;
4) given (1), (2), and (3), we should be very, very, very wary of people who stand up and say they are the ones who should have the power to coerce, and especially those who say things like "real socialism hasn't been done correctly yet, but I'm the one who will be able to do it");
I would also suggest that one problem in modern times is legislation targeting second- or third-order effects by directly punishing a neutral or positive activity that *may* lead to those negative second- or third-order effects but also leads to neutral or positive outcomes. Taking all money from [whatever level of rich people you target] to punish an activity that only some of those people use their money for (illegitimate power) is not only inefficient, it usually leads to even worse outcomes.
I'm not accusing you, Laura, of having this intent, but you could easily see how people could easily infer that someone saying, "punish all wealthy people because some wealthy people do bad things" is driven more out of envy of wealthy people than out of a desire to avoid the bad consequences some wealthy people cause.
2. This is not about 'avoiding the bad consequences'. This is about naked power, pure and simple. If you find a way to make sure that the very wealthiest cannot use their power to oppress others, subvert their political governance, indoctrinate future generations into servility, and do away with nations, all of which I would call coercive ... then I would conclude that despite being rich, they weren't all that powerful, because their power to act has been constrained. Wouldn't that be _wonderful_?
This was the basic gist of what I was going to say. You became a gajillionaire all on the up and up? Good on you, bud.
BUT if you are now going to use that wealth to restrict or eliminate any competition, or to purchase or lease the government to enforce your profitability, now the rest of us have problems. And yeah, Laura - not sure how we get from here to where we have a government unable to be a tool to be used against us. If only there was a document to limit the size and scope of the federal government.......
Yeah I thought that was a pretty poor article compared to his other stuff.
I suspect Alexander is eventually going to end up a communist. Not because that's the right answer to anything but simply because his primary income and role in society now comes from his status as being a public intellectual (of sorts) and the psychiatry is increasingly a side business, or so I understand. At least it cannot pay as well as Substack does. Communism is the kind of idea that appeals strongly to intellectuals who write or want to write a lot about society. So maybe not a big shock to see him write weird arguments about redistribution.
Another reason for suspicion that it's going that way - the odd focus on super-intelligent AI risk and "effective altruism". Obsession with the coming arrival of a world-ending crisis that only a small clique of intellectuals is smart enough to perceive is a common marker of intellectual corruption, especially if it involves arguments about exponential growth. Whether it's the collapse of capitalism, overpopulation, COVID, climate change, the "sperm crisis" etc, people who are paid to sit around and theorize all day frequently seem to end up concluding the world will end without their unique insight.
If I'm right about this trend it's a pity, but c'est la vie. All good things come to an end. Alexander has still gifted the world a great body of excellent articles that will probably be famous long after he's dead.
I fear you might be right, although I am wondering if the reason isn't social contagion tied with a habit of thinking "What should we do if we can change anything we want?" that is endemic in the EA and intellectual spaces. I find that utilitarian philosophers in general have a tendency to start with the assumption they can measure the overall goodness of world states and then choose between them, which strikes me as just assuming omniscience. Sure, that's great, but deciding to choose based on omniscient knowledge isn't the problem humans face. We face the problem of not knowing a damned thing and trying to do the best with what we have, which suggests very different process designs.
-Maybe Wal-Mart should give K-Mart some sort of "land acknowledgment" on every sale. K-Mart got to most of where Wal-Mart eventually got to before Wal-Mart did.
-I wonder if Scott A would agree to redistribute his substack revenue to Doc or Arnold on the ground that all Scott A ever did was recognize a niche and fill it.
-Scott A's argument falls prey to some of the EA issues you pointed out in your "help a friend move" essay. As you suggest, he's trying to add up all of Amazon's value *to society* without recognizing that this total value is an accumulation of millions of voluntary transactions, each of which created value for Amazon and whichever of its employees or customers was involved in each transaction (those parties themselves being the units that make up the *society* who got the value Scott A is trying to calculate). It seems to me that Scott A is just mood-affiliating and then attempting to use logic to justify it post hoc, while simultaneously ignoring the logic that goes against the argument.
-Scott appears to have set up a very good example of a strawman in the "The typical neoliberal defense..." paragraph.
-Full disclosure: I did not read the entire ACX post or Arnold's post.
"losing that first duel wouldn’t be good for your career, but you also had to win the next 99…"
I think this gets to the heart of Scott's hypothetical. Not only did Bezos have to win 99 more duels, he had to risk his life (fortune) every step of the way. If we set a cap at some amount (say one billion), then that also caps the incentive to further risk existing capital behind new ideas. By accepting the possibility of limitless rewards, we are in effect incentivizing knowledge creation (the knowledge of how to build and operate an effective online shopping process). This is no trivial matter.
Bezos made a fortune by making the world a better place. In other times, with other institutions, people made fortunes by impoverishing everyone else. Yet, intellectuals pat themselves on their own backs by creating arguments to neuter the guys that are adding value.
Agreed in general. I don't know how much of the COVID mess is going to pull production back towards domestic, however. The US regulatory regime is really anti-manufacturing in a lot of ways, so it is going to take a lot to make domestic manufacturing less costly than foreign, even if really robust supply chains become a desirous property. Hell, just holding more inventory domestically solves most of that problem, and cheaper than compliance.
Now, eventually wages across the world will start to level out and that will tend to make domestic production more desirable. Just as Japan made cheap stuff, then Hong Kong/Taiwan/Macao, then China, now Sri Lanka and Laos in Asia, or various South American countries, sooner or later there won't be super cheap labor anywhere and the differences will all come down to regulatory burden and logistics. Even in that case, though, moving stuff by boat is super cheap, and US business regulations are really anti-manufacturing, so it might take a lot more than simple labor costs to make the difference.
To put it another way, the US could bring manufacturing back to the states any time they want. We just need to click our heels three times and stop fucking everything up with regards to industrial policy and regulation.
I dunno. Antitrust is a very... questionable area, one that looks a lot more like coming up with reasons to bludgeon people you don't like than anything approaching principled application of rules. I think it was Rand who pointed out that antitrust enforcement was basically "If you raise prices, you are a monopoly and need to be broken up. If you lower prices too much, you are engaging in unfair practices and need to be broken up."
See, I don't think regulations are as good as made out. I think the socially accepted parameters do a lot of the work themselves.
With financial regulations, they are incredibly meaningful, but they are also bad. Badly designed, and badly intentioned in many cases. It is very difficult to say start up a simple bank (not the company named Simple Bank, but the idea of a bank that has 100% reserves and doesn't lend, but just takes a fee for allowing you to do checking and holding you money). If you are a legal pot farmer you can't get a bank account due to "know your customer" regulations. Etc.
Yet the financial system that is so dangerous it must be regulated to the hilt also must be bailed out every time they do something horrible and would lose a lot of money. That's a lot of regulation that doesn't line up with socially accepted parameters.
Long story short, you need rules to enforce justice (no stealing, through theft, fraud or murder) but most regulations have nothing to do with that. You might not need any regulations above and beyond the standard law, or maybe you do in some cases. What we have now, however, has nothing to do with justice or socially accepted rules, and is entirely rule making to benefit those who can purchase the rule makers.
It is impossible not to screw up industrial policy if you engage in industrial policy.
Ding ding ding. Give this man a prize. :)
The problem with the super wealthy isn't that they are rich, but that they are powerful. You can shape and change the world by buying politicians, funding NGOs, and demanding that the media you fund run the stories you want them to, while suppressing ones that you do not like. And right now, there isn't a lot we can do about this.
Agreed, power is the problem. I see the buying of politicians, who sell the power to use violence on people, as the biggest problem. The media and NGOs I see as less worrisome, mostly because they focus on influencing politics as well. I am open to the idea that I am too focused on political power and not enough on persuasive power without violence, however.
If I were to name one thing we could do to keep power out of the hands of the rich, it would be to take it out of the hands of politicians who want to sell it to the rich.
Yup... that's one of the big reasons I am not optimistic about us solving our problems cleanly, inside the system. (Not that the right wing politicians have been much better, but the far left ones are extra crazy.)
Who needs solutions so long as there is a "they" to blame the problems on? Solutions don't fund re-election campaigns as effectively as other-izing the opposition. As long as that's the calculus, we're worse than on our own - the problems need to remain so as to justify the continuing growth of the state; those vested in the status quo will quash any meaningful attempts of the people to solve problems on their own.
I don't think either party has a monopoly on bad people, although the tribe named "politicians and bureaucrats" has a lot of market power there, as it were. The trouble I have with Dems is that they are openly big government; every problem has a government solution, never a "Look, this isn't our business. We should stay out of it." solution. The trouble I have with Reps is they aren't open about it.
The other problem with Dems is (I think) that they don't have a limiting principle on their beliefs that keeps them from going full woke. That is to say, the woke are the more internally consistent Dems, so when some wokie says something crazy moderate Dems can't really argue because by their own lights the crazy is correct. It is the same problem that many religions have with their crazy fundamentalist wings: by the rules the fundies are actually correct, and most of the normies just ignore those rules to function properly, but in a confrontation the normies have to admit that the fundies are actually doing what the normies profess to believe is right.
I don't know that Lina Khan is far left or not. I was referring to the law schools filling up predominantly with wokies who disdain the traditional checks and balances of jurisprudence in favor of getting what they want.
I am highly skeptical of Lina Khan because she is the kind of person who becomes the head of the FTC :)
I don't think that the politicians are selling power to the rich because they want to. I think that the politicians are beholden to the rich who funded their campaigns, and it's 'quid per quo' time.
I take a look at the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders" initiative, and see how many of the graduates are now well placed as leaders of Western governments. And they mostly produce policies I hate, in large part because I am not a globalist. The people who get rich from globalism will always have more money to promote globalism than those who prefer stronger national sovereignty. Since the elitist-globalist-technoautocratic/popularist-nationalist-democratic split is the new real political divide, rather than the old left/right, this is a severe problem for those of us on the less well funded side.
Possibly, but the politicians seem to be really good at turning "acquiring power" into "having lots of money", all while making some really strange decisions to benefit the rich. That suggests to me that it is a very cooperative arrangement, where politicians happily sell power to those who happily buy it. Sometimes politicians will brow beat the rich into paying them off, and probably the rich say something to the extent of "it'd be a shame if I had to support your primary opponent." But like most exchange, I expect it is largely mutually desirous.
I think you are unfortunately correct about the new nature of the most relevant political divide these days, however. The WEF has been remarkably good at placing prebought leaders/cult members.
It's the flow, back and forth, of the wealth and the power where the trouble lies. The pols turn their power into lots of money; the wealthy, turn their money into lots of power. It's rotational, like buzzards over a battlefield; going from a job at the FTC or the Fed to a job at some huge bank whose malfeasance wiped out the savings of millions; like going from the board of Raytheon to SecDef. For those of us below, if it flows left to right or right to left doesn't matter - it doesn't flow down. It all gets sucked up, up to and by those with the means and connections to stay above.
Pretty much. All exchange is cooperation, but that doesn't mean that the end they are cooperating towards is good for anyone else.
"The problem with the super wealthy isn't that they are rich, but that they are powerful."
I think this argument calls for putting limits on power, not on wealth.
Who bells the cat?
Unfortunately it is the citizens at large. If we can't convince people to remove power by the ballot now, we are going to have to remove power by the bullet later. The question is only how much later and how many bullets, and it won't be pretty no matter the answer. I think that is why it is so important to diagnose the source of the problem and talk about it so people understand.
My position, which is mostly philosophical, but i think has some support in the factual record (including much of 20th-century history), is that
1) coercion is a bad thing in and of itself (this is the philosophical part);
2) coercion with good intentions usually yields either unintended bad results or corrupts the coercers into going for bad results for their own good (this is the historical part);
3) given (1) and (2), we should be very, very careful about coercing people;
4) given (1), (2), and (3), we should be very, very, very wary of people who stand up and say they are the ones who should have the power to coerce, and especially those who say things like "real socialism hasn't been done correctly yet, but I'm the one who will be able to do it");
I would also suggest that one problem in modern times is legislation targeting second- or third-order effects by directly punishing a neutral or positive activity that *may* lead to those negative second- or third-order effects but also leads to neutral or positive outcomes. Taking all money from [whatever level of rich people you target] to punish an activity that only some of those people use their money for (illegitimate power) is not only inefficient, it usually leads to even worse outcomes.
I'm not accusing you, Laura, of having this intent, but you could easily see how people could easily infer that someone saying, "punish all wealthy people because some wealthy people do bad things" is driven more out of envy of wealthy people than out of a desire to avoid the bad consequences some wealthy people cause.
Are you Sir Mixalot?
I am not, but I am intrigued by/don't understand the suggestion that I am, and/or don't get the joke. Enlighten me, please!
I ask because that comment is long, and its strong. I thought maybe you were down to get the friction on.
(Ok... that's a bad mix of dad joke and early 90's rap.)
1. I agree with you about coercion.
2. This is not about 'avoiding the bad consequences'. This is about naked power, pure and simple. If you find a way to make sure that the very wealthiest cannot use their power to oppress others, subvert their political governance, indoctrinate future generations into servility, and do away with nations, all of which I would call coercive ... then I would conclude that despite being rich, they weren't all that powerful, because their power to act has been constrained. Wouldn't that be _wonderful_?
But how to get there? How to bell the cat?
I don't have a great answer for that. I wish I did.
This was the basic gist of what I was going to say. You became a gajillionaire all on the up and up? Good on you, bud.
BUT if you are now going to use that wealth to restrict or eliminate any competition, or to purchase or lease the government to enforce your profitability, now the rest of us have problems. And yeah, Laura - not sure how we get from here to where we have a government unable to be a tool to be used against us. If only there was a document to limit the size and scope of the federal government.......
Full points. :)
Yeah I thought that was a pretty poor article compared to his other stuff.
I suspect Alexander is eventually going to end up a communist. Not because that's the right answer to anything but simply because his primary income and role in society now comes from his status as being a public intellectual (of sorts) and the psychiatry is increasingly a side business, or so I understand. At least it cannot pay as well as Substack does. Communism is the kind of idea that appeals strongly to intellectuals who write or want to write a lot about society. So maybe not a big shock to see him write weird arguments about redistribution.
Another reason for suspicion that it's going that way - the odd focus on super-intelligent AI risk and "effective altruism". Obsession with the coming arrival of a world-ending crisis that only a small clique of intellectuals is smart enough to perceive is a common marker of intellectual corruption, especially if it involves arguments about exponential growth. Whether it's the collapse of capitalism, overpopulation, COVID, climate change, the "sperm crisis" etc, people who are paid to sit around and theorize all day frequently seem to end up concluding the world will end without their unique insight.
If I'm right about this trend it's a pity, but c'est la vie. All good things come to an end. Alexander has still gifted the world a great body of excellent articles that will probably be famous long after he's dead.
I fear you might be right, although I am wondering if the reason isn't social contagion tied with a habit of thinking "What should we do if we can change anything we want?" that is endemic in the EA and intellectual spaces. I find that utilitarian philosophers in general have a tendency to start with the assumption they can measure the overall goodness of world states and then choose between them, which strikes me as just assuming omniscience. Sure, that's great, but deciding to choose based on omniscient knowledge isn't the problem humans face. We face the problem of not knowing a damned thing and trying to do the best with what we have, which suggests very different process designs.
"We face the problem of not knowing a damned thing and trying to do the best with what we have,"
Anyone who tells you differently is either selling you something or trying to sell you down the river.
This is so good.
-Maybe Wal-Mart should give K-Mart some sort of "land acknowledgment" on every sale. K-Mart got to most of where Wal-Mart eventually got to before Wal-Mart did.
-I wonder if Scott A would agree to redistribute his substack revenue to Doc or Arnold on the ground that all Scott A ever did was recognize a niche and fill it.
-Scott A's argument falls prey to some of the EA issues you pointed out in your "help a friend move" essay. As you suggest, he's trying to add up all of Amazon's value *to society* without recognizing that this total value is an accumulation of millions of voluntary transactions, each of which created value for Amazon and whichever of its employees or customers was involved in each transaction (those parties themselves being the units that make up the *society* who got the value Scott A is trying to calculate). It seems to me that Scott A is just mood-affiliating and then attempting to use logic to justify it post hoc, while simultaneously ignoring the logic that goes against the argument.
-Scott appears to have set up a very good example of a strawman in the "The typical neoliberal defense..." paragraph.
-Full disclosure: I did not read the entire ACX post or Arnold's post.
"losing that first duel wouldn’t be good for your career, but you also had to win the next 99…"
I think this gets to the heart of Scott's hypothetical. Not only did Bezos have to win 99 more duels, he had to risk his life (fortune) every step of the way. If we set a cap at some amount (say one billion), then that also caps the incentive to further risk existing capital behind new ideas. By accepting the possibility of limitless rewards, we are in effect incentivizing knowledge creation (the knowledge of how to build and operate an effective online shopping process). This is no trivial matter.
Bezos made a fortune by making the world a better place. In other times, with other institutions, people made fortunes by impoverishing everyone else. Yet, intellectuals pat themselves on their own backs by creating arguments to neuter the guys that are adding value.