Politics Discussion Thread September 2012

Is politicization of the personal inevitable? My model is that there are groups of people with common personal-life interests, such as raising the status of one sub-group or another. Those who can band together to exert coordinated social pressure, win. So unless there is some friction to group formation, politicization seems inevitable.

Note that the nature of the groups that are politically relevant may change (ie the relevant group may be an extended family, an occupation, a religious sect, a social class, etc.)

Nah, this is an empirical claim. That is, not acknowledging that the personal is political will only leave 'the personal' trapped in the current discourse, accepted as the way of things.

I very much think the personal should not be the political.

Are there any subjects that should be political?

This post single-handedly made me think this entire thread was a good idea.

But somehow I never get around to thinking much about which political and economic policies are best for x-risk reduction. I wish somebody else (somebody who knows their shit) would do so.

A sequence on this would be of high value. But I wish we had more recent articles on economics on this site period. Considering how closely related that field is to the study of rationality it is surprising we explicitly say as little as we do on it, nor do we provide anything like an introduction for new readers. Actually on second thought it isn't that surprising since we needed a long time to give game theory the latter treatment. More economics related links in discussion, posts and book reviews are something that would be easier for us to do right away.

Perhaps that would help attract the right cluster of people interested in the topic and capable of contributing to the site? I thinks the results (even in this early stage) of the writing and networking that happened around effective charity show that growing the community in useful directions can be a good way to make progress on such questions.

Also worth knowing: what incremental, actually-achievable political change would most reduce x-risk, and what is the ROI of lobbying or investing in projects to bring such a change about?

Well, I suspect one of the largest effects is that it's good to have a class of people with excess cash that they can afford to donate to speculative X-risk reduction projects.

Tax incidence is not affected by which party pays the tax.

In a world with no transaction costs, perfect competition and full information, this is correct.

In a world of high transaction costs, market power and information asymmetry, this is not necessarily the case.

Which world does the dating market look more like to you?

The men-pick-up-the-check norm can also be modeled as an opportunity for men to signal in a costly way. An opportunity to signal may be positive or negative or neutral, depending on the game-theoretic details (as well as side effects further removed from the immediate "game"). Removing the opportunity from one group of people and giving it to another may well increase or decrease the aggregate social welfare and/or cause a transfer from one group to another.

ETA: In case it's not clear, “working out or buying nice clothes” are not perfect signaling substitutes for paying for dinner at an expensive restaurant. Someone with good physique might have good genes, a lot of spare time, or just enjoys exercising. Nice cloths can be reused for other dates and hence can't be used to signal interest in a particular person.

My naive internal economist agrees. However, culture matters! I would guess that such a norm, with a persistent minor reminder of who is privileged to have whose company, would subtly shift the norms of which sex is higher-status.

Much depends on the presentation though - is it "payment for (highly-valued) company" or "responsibility for the less capable"?

This argument can be generalized for any sex/courtship double standard.

Really? That is a strong claim. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that some sufficiently arbitrary discrepancy could violate one of the premises that this kind of economic generalization relies on.

Are you aware this reads like a piece of satire?

What if we mandate splitting the check?

Your argument sounds correct to me. To change tax incidence, you need to change one of the parties' preferences, e.g. get most men to sincerely believe that picking up the check isn't worth it.

If Congress suddenly mandated that all women pick up the check, men would want to date more.

Are people actually willing to date someone they otherwise wouldn't just for the free food? I've seen this claimed elsewhere, but personally the amount I'd have to be paid for me to be willing to spend a few hours with someone I dislike is higher than the amount I'd pay for a meal by at least half an order of magnitude. So, was I incorrectly generalizing from one example?

When looking at the sexual marketplace from an economic standpoint, I think the most ideal solution is hiring a prostitute or a gigolo. Here are my reasons: 1) Prostitutes/gigolos usually have more "fit bodies and nice clothes" than the ones you would normally get in the dating market. 2) Prostitutes/gigolos are more experienced and adventurous and therefore more capable of satisfying you sexually. 3) You don't need to waste time with prostitutes/gigolos before having intercourse with them. For normal dates, you will have to court them several times amounting to dozens of hours, and even then, they might decide to break up before you even hit second base.

I can think of other reasons, but you can understand where this is going.

If I am in the market for long term relationships, I would like to have the capability of filtering out the moneydiggers who don't particularly feel attracted to me and are only interested in my money. These are the only people who are less likely to date me if they were going to pay for my dinner. Women who are truly attracted to me will find the whole issue of who is expected to pay no more than trivial.

If possible, turning on the anti-kibitzer automatically for political threads might help.

I think monthly is too often even though I enjoy these threads

My impression is that there is a bigger problem - some LW-relevant issues become political inside LW.

I have no reason to claim that poitical threads help or hurt, though.

we have reasons to suspect we are already seeing politically tinged fragmentation.

What reasons are these?

No good way to stop it. Might as well enjoy the ride.

I've read the last one, it's extremely typical of Moldbug IMO. He rather distinctly perceives what sort of thing is going on (yes, "diversity" is a political weapon, not so much "towards" political power as to undermine the influence of the New Left's perceived enemies; personally I am lukewarm on it) - but he engages in a lot of empty rhetoric and faux-cynical views of human psychology (it's silly and unfalsifiable - not to say invidious - to say that most ideals of the Left are merely well-internalized means to get the thrill of wielding influence!).

Meanwhile, he details nothing about how it is used as a political weapon, why it could have been picked by the post-60s Left over other kinds of weapons (the Old Left didn't care much for it), does it really further the New Left's other unspoken goals well, whether the New Left is aware of the openings this strategy provides to the Right, and so on.

I think I have acquired a pretty clear - and uncommon - understanding of those why's and how's of "diversity" and "anti-racism" (as it's commonly used, not all opposition to racism). I've been reading a lot about the Western Left throughout the 20th century over the last months. So I'm trying to write a comment about it right now - but it's necessarily a damn long one, with some background about the general left-of-center/Universalist view on means and ends of political change and how it fundamentally shifted around the 1960s (what the Old Left/New Left divide is all about!). And although a general picture is now rather easy to envision for me, it's a LOT to explain, with fairly large inferential distances to both the Alt-Right view and the politically-aware-LW-mainstream view. And it'll take me a concentrated effort.

So I'll try to write it throughout an all-nighter I'm pulling tonight, and even then I'm not promising anything. :) (and damn, I have so many other things to write for LW that no-one else is likely to post, I feel rather guilty for procrastinating)

BONUS! Something I should've linked to a lot earlier. A great article by Linda Gottfriedson, an illustrious old lady who does ev-psych like Razib Khan but gets more status for it. What if the Hereditarian Hypothesis is True? - on how there are better, more fair ways to reduce racial achievement gaps than Affirmative Action in the oft-dreaded case that group genetic differences determine individual IQ a lot. Everybody please read it.

P.S. On Lev Navrozov: definitely worth reading, but I'm still munching over it. That is, don't get caught up in the halo effect - most Soviet dissidents were indeed heroic people with uncommon clarity of vision towards their own system of repression in their own time, but that doesn't mean you would find their "general" judgment of things at all acceptable. Take Solzhenitsyn - both a mystic hostile to material concerns and a fascist of sorts. Moldbug would take issue with the former, a Universalist like me with the latter - yet he's likely among Moldbug's primary sources on the pre-war USSR.

Or - a better example - take Alexandr Zinovyev, I've read him. Emigrated to Germany, yet attacked Western individualism and was aghast at the dissolution of the USSR, saying that the Soviet regime had many good aspects like the abolition of private property, etc, and that it at least gave a proper place to old good Russian collectivist values. I hardly agree with any of his points at all, much less the way in which he makes them, but his stuff would bounce right off Moldbug's black-and-white brain!

Selling your company to someone for huge amounts of money isn't exactly "punishing" success

However, I think there's something massively wrong with a system that punishes success. What might need to be different to prevent that sort of outcome?

Letting founders remain permanently in control under all forms of incorporation is very far from profit-maximizing, sorry! The system is working as designed.

I think that one of the main reasons why the US has the complicated welfare state that it does, instead of simple cash transfers, is that unconditional cash transfers to the poor are unpopular among the general public. They make a lot of people feel like they are being taken advantage of. Instead of working like we are, these people are just mooching off of us. The government is taking our hard-earned money, which we deserve, and giving it to people who don't deserve it. That feeling was one of the main motivations behind welfare reform in the 1990s (recall "welfare queens"). When the word "redistribution" does come up in American politics, it's almost always as an accusation by the right against the left (like in response to Barack Obama's "spread the wealth around" comments during the 2008 election).

If you look at the various safety net programs that the US has (alternate sources), they're designed in a way that avoids that impression that they are just giving your money to the undeserving poor. The recipient seems deserving, because the program does some combination of the following:

• help people who are especially needy, sympathetic, or helpless on their own, like children or the disabled (e.g., SSI, school lunches, CHIP). They're the ones who really need our aid. Programs for the elderly (like Social Security) might count here too.
• meet people's basic human needs, rather than giving them money which they can spend on anything that they want (e.g., SNAP, housing assistance, Medicaid). Everyone ought to be fed; giving people food doesn't feel like you're being taken advantage of in the same way as giving money (and similarly with healthcare, housing, etc.). In some cases, like SNAP (food stamps), this can be pretty close to a pure cash benefit since money is fungible and pretty much everybody buys food. In other cases it involves a lot more meddling.
• reward good behavior, giving money to poor people who are doing something to deserve it - especially those that are working or seeking work (e.g., EITC, TANF, job training). This category has grown the most over the past couple decades, with welfare reform (making welfare dependent on employment-seeking) and large increases to the earned income tax credit. EITC is pretty much what you're looking for - a negative income tax - but it only applies to people who are working.
• are shared benefits for everyone, not special benefits for the poor (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Alaska's oil fund). The social insurance model fits this category. I paid into Medicare so I deserve my benefits. Anyone who gets hurt on the job and is unable to work will collect disability insurance. That's our oil so we should share the profits. (Alaska's program has the additional advantage of not needing tax money for funding.)

I think that all of the main safety net programs (listed on the sites linked above) fit pretty cleanly within one (or more) of these four categories, except maybe Pell Grants for college expenses (which is at least loosely related to each of them, but might be better thought of as a part of the publicly funded education system).

To fit into one of these four categories, cash transfers would either need to go to everybody (which would be a huge program, e.g. $10,000 per American would require collecting 20% of GDP in taxes and then redistributing it), or only go to the working poor (which is already done with the EITC), or only go to the particularly needy (which is already done for the disabled and the elderly, and wouldn't really work for children). Unconditional cash transfers to generic poor people just don't poll well, and leave politicians vulnerable to political attacks.

Changes at the margin could involve increasing the size of programs that are closest to pure cash transfers (like EITC), shrinking or eliminating programs that involve more meddling (like some kinds of housing assistance), or loosening the restrictions/conditions on specific programs so that there's less hassle in running it (e.g. eligibility requirements for SNAP). Each individual change has an obvious partisan valence. Another option is to try to make the tax system more progressive (or oppose efforts to make it less progressive) - a simple way for the government to get more money into the hands of the poor people is to collect less tax money from them in the first place. That also has an obvious partisan valence.

A basic income guarantee is also endorsed by Charles Murray in his book In Our Hands : A Plan To Replace The Welfare State.

The basic income guarantee has the neat feature that it eliminates some of the perverse incentives of welfare as well as possibly being psychologically much more beneficial since people will know they have a secure revenue stream no matter what, while government programs often require compliance to all sorts of requirements.

For the libertarians, wouldn't you, like Friedman, prefer a basic income guarantee to the paternalistic regulatory state?

Asked in this form, this is a request for collecting information about distribution of opinions in the form of a few self-filtered anecdotes. The data thus collected is completely useless, so it might be better to look for data collected elsewhere or by other means.

Suppose then that we do collect such data. In what way would it be useful for the purpose of a theoretical discussion? Opinions themselves may be hard to interpret: different meanings may be intended by the same simplified statement (e.g. one policy may be "preferred" if it magically worked reliably, but a different one may be "preferred" to be actually attempted given the knowledge of how reliably various policies work); the reasons for people holding an opinion may not be indicative of properties of the referents of those opinions (due to errors in reasoning like cultural status quo). Also, opinions (conclusions) are not the best form of data for the purpose of discussing properties of various policies (which would be the basis for making decisions/conclusions).

I think it's best to avoid questions or declarations of opinion in either overly imprecise form (that would permit significantly different interpretations), or about conclusions that depend on many unclear considerations that should themselves be under discussion. A discussion should go forward from understandable facts to conclusions, not the other way around, from conclusions reached in an unknown manner, to justification of those conclusions.

The problem with being poor is you don't have money.

The telltale symptom of being poor is not having money. The problem with being poor is not being able to engage properly with the wealth-generating activities of society, and that happens for a variety of reasons.

Some of those (such as cyclical unemployment or childcare needs) are absolutely best tackled by direct wealth redistribution. Others (such as disability, substance dependency, a criminal record or a lack of marketable skills) by the provision of services, which government may be best placed to orchestrate. Others still (such as statistical discrimination) are most directly addressed by employment legislation, which only the government is in a position to carry out.

All of these interventions can be carried out badly. Since mechanisms of social welfare tend to be one of the big issues on the table for party politics, they usually are carried out badly. This is a problem with prevailing methods of governance, not with welfare programs in and of themselves. It's far from clear (although quite plausible) that no welfare is preferable to bad welfare.

Yes. I am in favor of an allowance being paid by the government to all citizens. The simplest way to do this would be to impose a flat tax on top of existing income tax, and redistribute the revenue equally to everybody. So that it works out as a negative tax for those making less than average (arithmetic mean) income. People making exactly mean income are unaffected. And the very rich get almost nothing back relative to what they put in.

In the short term, most people would benefit, because most people make less than average. That is, median income is less than mean income, because wealth is concentrated at the top. And net utility would increase, because the marginal utility of each additional dollar is greater for the poor than for the rich.

The long term effects of course are more complicated. But it's not obvious that this policy would result in less productivity. In the US at least, there's plenty of room to raise taxes on the rich without approaching historical highs. And for the very poor, having a tax structure like this replace welfare could actually make it easier to transition from complete government dependence to a low-paying job, since there's no fear of suddenly losing your support.

I suppose I qualify as a liberal for purposes of this question.

If you're asking whether I'd support this as a political platform, my answer is mostly no.
If you're asking whether I'd support this as a way for the world to be, my answer is mostly yes.

To say that perhaps more clearly...
While I don't think a guaranteed minimum income addresses all problems related to poverty (as sixes_and_sevens points out below), I do think there are a number of poverty-related problems that we currently solve in ways far less sensible than a guaranteed minimum income. If I could wave my magic wand and replace the former with the latter in a politically sustainable way, I probably would. (I haven't looked into this at all carefully and would have to think much harder about the details if I actually had such a wand, but I'm sympathetic to the strategy.)

OTOH, if I don't have a wand, but rather have to work through political mechanisms to implement such a policy change, I doubt I support it... it doesn't seem like a viable political move in my country.

I'm a leftist with some sympathy for libertarianism. I don't know how typical my views are of left-leaning people on LW, but I'd guess they aren't absurdly far from typical.

I'm all in favour of redistribution. If by "expropriation" you mean tweaking the tax rates then I'm in favour of that too, with the proviso that I'd want to take a really hard look at the relevant history and economic theory before tweaking them too hard. If you mean something more coercive -- large-scale confiscation of property, say -- then quite aside from the question of whether it could be just, it would be destabilizing and divisive. Not to mention that in order to do enough good to be worth even considering, it would need to be a really big expropriation.

Part of why I favour a somewhat-paternalistic regulatory state is because in many cases regulation benefits everyone overall by solving coordination problems, and governments are best placed (in status, coercive power, perceived legitimacy, resources, etc.) to solve them in this way. (This is mostly a separate issue from helping the poor.)

The other part is that in many cases where regulation doesn't benefit everyone, it does provide a clear overall benefit, but the people it benefits have relatively little economic power and therefore markets will settle on equilibria that are worse overall. Roughly, markets solve the problem "maximize net utility weighted by wealth" and I would prefer to solve something nearer to "maximize net utility with equal weight for everyone". An alternative way to deal with this problem would be to redistribute enough that the differences in economic power go away, but it seems like this would need a really big redistribution, much too big to look either practical or just to me. (This one is about helping the poor, and the reason why giving them money instead won't do is that they'd need to be given an infeasibly large amount of money.)

I would love to see something like a basic income guarantee. I think it could replace a lot of existing state benefits. Not all; sometimes people suffer terrible things that are very expensive to deal with, and I think governments are well placed to act as insurers in some such cases.

[EDITED to remove parentheses, which I overuse when writing hastily. No substantive changes made.]

I am as libertarian as can be, once one is aware of existential risk.

I prefer a basic income guarantee to a paternalistic regulatory state. I like the NIT for its simplicity, but am opposed to high income taxes. I prefer the georgist land tax. I believe that if the land were taxed well enough, people could not just hold it and make living expensive for other people. Almost everyone would have the option of going a distance and setting up something of their own over there.

That is the taking. Now the spending.

I believe that we should aim towards a meritocracy.

So, most importantly, a strong minimal state providing justice, protection, primary and secondary education should be present. If you're hitting marginal contribution of zero over there and still have money left, move to the next item that can help.

Basic research into intelligence and conscientiousness augmentation. Aim to make IQ85s into IQ 110s if possible. If, as a side effect, you can boost some already existing people to higher levels, that's lovely, but that is not the goal. The goal is to turn 80s and 85s into 110s and 115s.

Basic research into happiness augmentation without affecting effectiveness. Aim to increase happiness set points across the board.

If you're hitting marginal returns and still have money left, then try to institute a prize that will be given to firms that employ a large number of workers. The product of wages of the workers is a good proxy to try to aim towards. (This is actually quite hackable, but if done well, it does have the advantage of multiplying the prize amount, using dollar auction effects)

After all these, if you still have money left, one can try the NIT or Morgan Warstler's variant

Wouldn't negative income tax be a fairly strong incentive to stay/become unemployed for those near the cut-off?

I tend to associate the idea of a citizen's income with the left - eg, the green party in the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Party_of_England_and_Wales#Economy

Liberals feel Poor people are too dumb to be trusted with money, but no liberal is allowed to say and/or think this.

I too find Market Monetarism interesting. However, I find the discussion around it bafflingly incomplete.

I live in Britain, where legally the central bank (BoE) is supposed to target inflation at 2%. In actual fact, however, before the economic crisis the central bank had inflation consistently running well above its legal target. What it was doing, however, was keeping NGDP growing at approx 5.5% per year - and it had been doing so for over a decade. It was therefore generally thought that, letter of the law be damned, the BoE was in fact an NGDP level targeter, of exactly the kind recommended by Sumner et al.

Then 2007-8 happened, world financial crisis, bank failures, etc. NGDP collapsed despite (1) the BoE attempting to maintain NGDP and (2) the existence of the target. Moreover, despite the fact that the BoE continued its measures, NGDP did not recover to trend, and shows no sign of doing so. What is more, apart from a brief period in 2009, inflation has been well in excess of the BoE's legal target throughout the period in question. At the time that NGDP was collapsing most sharply, inflation was over 5%!

This seems like a direct challenge to market monetarism. If the expectations channel is so effective at determining NGDP growth, how did expectations become unmoored? If the central bank really can determine NGDP, how did it lose control - and note that this is not a situation like the US, where MMs can genuinely argue that policy has been too tight. The BoE allowed high inflation rates and a massive devaluation of the currency (the £ lost around 25% of its value), but still could not get NGDP back to trend. Moreover, despite monetary policy in the UK being much more accomodative than in the US, economic recovery has been much poorer. Why has this been the case? Why has base money ballooned here, like in the US, but unlike in Australia?

I am not saying market monetarism is wrong as a theory, necessarily. But it needs to have something to say about this situation, because on the surface it appears to be a case of market monetarist ideas put into practice, and being a complete failure. However, market monetarists do not seem to have much to say about this, instead preferring to talk about cherry-picked examples - Britain pursued a much more market monetarist policy than any of Israel, Sweden or Australia, and has a larger economy than all 3 combined. Moreover, Australia in particular engaged in large-scale fiscal stimulus of the kind market monetarists say is unnecessary. The old joke goes that macroeconomics is the study of the American economy, and it looks particularly the case here. The issue has particular salience for me because I'm British, but even besides that, if a country puts your ideas into practice and it fails, you need to do some explaining.

80% confidence on the following:

Past economists are simply wrong about human nature. They look at humans in far mode and assume that they would agree to enjoy more leisure and de-escalate materialist status competition. In fact, humans, even wealthy humans, perceive status competition in near-mode as existential struggle. They're willing to work very hard, sacrificing leisure and quality of life, to avoid losing relative status. The fact that we continue to work hard is a fact about human nature not a fact about employee-worker power dynamics per se.

Falsfiable prediction: if a four-day work week were instated, and cultural norms shifted away from work and productivity as the primary domain of status competition, people would redirect the vast majority of their freed-up effort into status-boosting leisure activities, such as exotic travel or conspicuous altruism, much like high-school students diligently doing the "right" extracurriculars.

The boring, bourgeois but fairly diligent Mother Jones magazine has a nice report from last year on American companies driving their sl.. employees to greater and greater feats of Productivity. Don't you want to be Productive? No?! What kind of a parasite are you?!

You seem to be confusing productivity and drudgery. Productivity is the amount of "value" you produce by working, drudgery is the amount of disutility you experience while working. Marx's mistake was assuming that these two quantities were always the same and that therefore "progress" consists of forcing workers to endure more drudgery. In reality progress consists of increasing productivity per unit of drudgery.

We're working to pay off all the government enabled rent seekers, starting with land rent, sales of natural resources, intellectual property, government licensed occupations and industries, and finally, government workers themselves. And then we're working under regulatory regimes that cripple productive capacity and destroy wealth.

So yes, people are a lot more productive, but there is little of the wealth they produce left for them after the rent seekers have taken their cut and the bureaucracy has finished flushing most of the leftovers down the toilet.

How's this for an idea: Continue with the current system of market capitalism until humanity is wealthy enough to have colonized a few planets, then switch to socialism and kick back.

I see it as delayed gratification on the societal level.

Keynes, who is having a come back these days, was also in favour of a reduced week, based on the assumption that the prosperity societies have would lead to less work.

We can certainly afford it, but if 40 hours is more efficient than 30 hours, in a competitive framework the former will triumph. Of course, theres a reasonable amount of evidence (as I understand it) that beyond short pushes to get stuff done, stretching the working day reduces productivity: this is one of the reasons companies excepted union demands for an 8 hour day.

It is kind of weird that we have a 5 day working week and not a 6 day or 4 day week if you think about it. One suspects that thats a cultural creation rather than an inevitable one.

I have exactly one practical idea on how we can help bring about a better alternative to today's Western liberal democracy. See those three logos on the upper right? Click the middle one, and donate :)

(My serious AND precise estimate? "History doesn't work like that." Remember, some rather experienced and high-IQ statesmen got themselves into WW1. Just try to push particular policies that you want, like more welfare or less regulation or education reform or whatever, but keep in mind that the system might always explode in an unexpected manner and in an unexpected point. And, in some places and circumstances, do stuff like killing your family.)

I think the best strategies are those that lower the barriers to entry into the 'governance market' (charter cities, seasteading, etc...), but that these are unlikely to work (but more likely than anything else I know of). As for safeguarding against the Dark Arts in politics; read statistics, not newspapers.