exsecant:
I like where you’re headed with this. Would you mind telling me about some of your alternate institutions?
By EV, you mean expected value, right? I was thinking electron-volts at first, and it took me a few minutes to come up with something that makes a little more sense. :-)
Yes, expected value.
I’m basically working on stuff to substitute the state where it fails to serve the people it claims to serve.
I’ve seen firsthand the failures of the traditional welfare state, and creating some kind of mutual economic security mechanisms to replace its humiliating means-tested benefit schemes would be a really big deal. I don’t trust the state to handle the upcoming issues with automation-induced unemployment in any reasonable way, so I obviously must do it myself, and the faster I get it going the better prepared it will be.
Traditional welfare has a really big problem with incentives, structural unemployment, lack of dignity and feeling of self-determination etc.; traditional religions and extended families demand comformity far in excess of what’s reasonable, and restrict entry and exit in ways that expose people to risks of abuse; traditional workplaces have no place for people whose productivity isn’t high enough. Hacking that into something that can credibly guarantee people their basic needs, a sense of dignity and belonging, and opportunities for growing stronger and more productive, without imposing burdens to dogma, authorities etc. while still solving the problem of incentives would be very useful.
While I obviously don’t know what form it would ultimately take, I think it could be visualized as a decentralized network of small communes and individuals sharing common ideals; that unconditionally help other members but expect a reasonable contribution in return (and have some ways to enforce that if mutual solidarity is broken), while running their own businesses and offering other opportunities for contributing internally that aren’t restricted by the broken rules of state bureaucracies; and the system is backed by capital in minifacturing equipment and investments to supply people those basic needs as cheaply as possible and provide a stable source of income for things that need to be bought from the markets. And that system is enclosed within a shell of a corporation, a co-operative, or whatever is needed to interface the internals with the external society while minimizing the burdens of taxation etc. and giving it some high-level coordination mechanisms wherever those are needed. Solidarity, Inc. or something like that. At least this describes the general weirdness-space where I’m searching for solutions.
In more general terms, I expect it to require a combination of social engineering, business, and technology to create a system where incentives (when considering the known quirks of human psychology) are aligned towards stability, growth and co-operation.
David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom pointed out that most workers could afford to simply buy out owners in a few years of sustained effort (in reality it wouldn’t be that mathematically neat as the increased demand for capital would drive prices up, further enrichen the initial owners, and possibly loop back into raising the prices even more); and after I got over the despair of “why the fuck has everyone on the left been ignoring this incredibly obvious solution forever just because it doesn’t look like the revolution they are looking for” I decided that I’m going to build something to solve the problem of people sitting on their asses, voting, and whining, instead of actually preparing for the post-labor future.
There’s the obvious problem of people barely able to provide for themselves even now, and who definitely can’t afford to invest, and hacking that is important as well. Regular forms of work severely restrict the ways people can create value to capture, and a lot of people are suffering from chronic hypo-opportunititis. An internal system without taxes, minimum wages, psychologically damaging environments etc. but instead an universal atmosphere of growing stronger and contributing in some way, even if the outside economy doesn’t appreciate it, would probably alleviate those issues substantially. Fostering social bonds makes it easier to support those who need it without having those who support them feel resentment towards “moochers”. Easy access to credit would help with the current situation where poor people can get desperate from even small debts because they can’t ever actually pay them, and if the system is built on a strong base of capital it can afford to absorb some inefficiencies to be more humane.
But what do the monetary contributors get from this? I’ve identified some interesting loopholes in the tax and pension laws of Finland which basically allow anyone to boost their wages 25% at the price of becoming ineligible for pensions (nobody born after 1980 is ever going to get any pensions anyway so it’s practically free), with some perfectly legal accounting tricks. Building a system to consistently deliver those returns would be worth solid cash, and I’m expecting a lot of countries and economic systems to have similar unexpected sources of exploitability hidden somewhere. Then there’s the opportunity of providing bureaucracy-resistant safety nets which many people with irregular incomes would probably gladly take. Then there’s pure altruism, community, being involved in a movement that’s going to Solve big structural problems instead of just talking about how they will be solved once idea X is pushed through the democratic political machinery or enforced with a revolution (I’m totally going to try to discredit the “our revolutionary discussion club celebrates its 50th anniversary of never getting shit done” style of activism), and the investment base I’m expecting to build (with the implication that people who start contributing early will get a bigger slice of the pie later once their jobs get automated away and they turn into recipients).
Basically, libertarians say that “the free market will figure out some way to make the poor not starve” and leftists protest that “it hasn’t happened yet, how on earth would it happen then” and here I am, being the free-market messiah rejecting the traditional political tug-of-war and pushing forward an extraordinary effort on the question of “how do we make it so that poor people don’t starve even if states fail and utopian revolutions fizzle out”. (It was really weird to realize that I was headed straight towards the magical three question marks between “1. Free markets” and “3. Poverty and destitution are solved” without consciously thinking of it that way; all I wanted to do was to do better than the government.) I’ve literally had an anarchist tell me that if my plans succeed history will probably remember me as an anarcho-capitalist (I don’t do labels. Boxes don’t work and words don’t feed people. All I care about is results.) and that they’re going to help me with making that happen anyway. Weird things happen around me.
Then I’m also the person who made the system in Finland de facto recognize that gender is self-determined when it comes to conscription and thus a person who’s legally male can still be exempt if they consistently insist that it’s simply not true, without needing any official papers “proving” it; and the person who forced the system to allow non-binary people to change their legal gender without pretending to be the other binary option.
And then there’s my practical transhumanism. Actually taking control of my body and brain to do whatever I want (at least within my financial and technological constraints). When someone says “nice body” I could honestly answer “thanks, I made it myself”. And I’m totally in favor of eliminating gender as we know it, and actually working towards it. If I ever had children I’d put them on puberty blockers until they could give informed consent to a puberty of their own choosing, medically controlled to produce exactly the desired results regardless of what they are. Because I’m not going to have children, I’m just going to show the world that there are options and that being restricted to two boxes shows an absurd lack of imagination.
(Also, you mentioned your disappointment with people who share your political philosophy; and I’d be interested in hearing out what it actually is because it’s not obvious. Of course, I’m having some predictions because I always try to predict and model most things, but I’d like to get some feedback on my calibration.)
Okay, wow. I am going to need some time to think about this, but here are my quick first impressions:
Are you sure you didn’t just reinvent the kibbutz, except without the socialist jargon and shared property? Actually, wait a minute, a kibbutz without shared property is a totally new and exciting thing. Sometimes it just takes a slight design tweak and a new marketing strategy to make an existing thing go from okay to legendary!
I haven’t done much in comparison to you, I guess. I’m currently in the stage of figuring out what it is I want to make, how to do it, and who else will be on the team that does it with me.My disappointment is pretty much exactly what you’d expect–people talk about how they should create gradual change by creating new institutions that out-compete current ones, and then they do 1 of 3 things. Either they continue writing about their revolutionary new systems and taking no steps toward actually trying them out in a situation where there’s a chance they might fail, they create systems that only benefit themselves and their close friends and never bother extending them to anyone else, or they create “resource vortexes” that take in donation money and do barely anything with it. I guess those 3 kinds of failure are common for any type of charity, including ones that are in favor of high-speed systemic change, but it’s particularly annoying when it comes from “my team.” I may not be Social Entrepeneurs Georg, but hey, at least I don’t go around inventing systems and publicizing them as solutions to every problem ever, then refusing to actually do anything that determines whether or not those systems will advance society.
