listen. i know jk rowling knows absolutely nothing about america but for the entire country to only have a single wizarding school there must be either 200 professors working at this place or you get to your first potions class and it’s held in a fucking baseball stadium.
SO A FRIEND AND I ACTUALLY JUST DID THE MATH ON THIS.
Between 1972-1979 there were 5,802,282 live births in the United Kingdom. These live births account for the roughly 600 Hogwarts students during Harry’s first year, and would make the birth rate of Wizards approximately 0.01% of the population.
The population of the United States in 2014 was 318.9 million -
23.1% of which were children 0-17. That would mean there were 73,665,900 children in 2014. Checking live births from a time period of 1997-2003 (which would account for children aged 11-17) gives us 27,978,287 children. If 0.01% of them were magical, we’re left with 27,978 school age magical children in the United States in 2014.
If we wanted school sizes similar to Hogwarts - 600 children to a school - we would need at minimum 47 magical schools. If we wanted it more comparable to our own schooling - with an average student body size of roughly 1,430 students combined between middle school and high school during the 2009-2010 school years - we’re down to a minimum of 20 magical schools.
So, long story short. It is statistically impossible for there to be a single magical school in the United States.
It’s far more likely there is at least one school in each state, possibly more than one in much larger states like Alaska, Texas, and California while a single school could feasibly serve the clustered smaller states like Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
HUNDREDS OF WIZARDING SCHOOLS IN THE VAST STRETCHES OF UNPOPULATED WESTERN AMERICAN WILDERNESS
PUT THEM ALL IN ALASKA! THEY’D FIT!!!!
Magic is heritable. While spontaneous Muggleborns might have the same prevalence everywhere, I see no reason why that would hold for other wizard types.
Off by an order of magnitude, even if assuming the same prevalence of magic (although, by historical patterns, one could argue that magic-users could be extra-likely to emigrate to the colony/country that isn’t chock full of nosy muggles poking into things they shouldn’t be poking into, and thus the prevalence of magic would be, if anything, higher in the US (especially if muggleborns were to flee discrimination to the frontier, knowing that it’s the place where magic-users are disproportionately other muggleborns and even the purerbloods would be less likely to have a stick in their posterior)).
The US would actually need only 5 Hogwartses or 2 average-sized schools, or one which is way smaller than a reasonably-sized university.
Assuming 2 times higher number of wizards per capita because immigrants, that would be one school ten times the size of Hogwarts which is only implausible culturally, not demographically. The problem is not that there would be too many people, but that the people would be scattered all over.
I find it utterly absurd that a single institution would be able to monopolize everything. Sure, The Big School would be bigger than Hogwarts, but the ~american way~ would be to also have numerous small schools scattered all around, people teaching their children, etc. (I’m assuming no Federal Agency of Magic tracking unauthorized sorcery either, stuff being dealt with in a far more ad hoc fashion when something actually comes up) and probably entire communities with their own culturally distinct traditions and knowledge.
Has someone done the joke yet, where you can post one trolley problem meme or five trolley problem memes, no other choice!
Assuming we know nothing about the other dudes, their chance of picking switch is n for each of them. If I pick stay, the death count is 5. If I pick switch, the following happens: If the first picks stay (1-n chance), the death count is 6. If the first picks switch (n), 7 deaths with (n-n^2 ). If the second picks switch, 8 deaths with (n^2-n^3), otherwise 3 deaths with (n^3).
The total death toll is 6+n+n^2-5n^3 for switch, 5 for stay. When n is less than approximately 0.8, you should stay.
In surveys around 90% of regular people say they would switch, suggesting you should switch, but experiments trying to make the setup more realistic reduced the switching probability. Of philosophers around 68% would switch, suggesting that philosophers are evil and should be the ones tied to the tracks, but if that’s not happening you should probably stay if you’re playing against philosophers. All in all the empirical evidence suggests you should probably stay, because in addition to the deaths you cause a lot of psychological distress to other people if you switch and all it takes is for one of them to stay to ruin everything.
It seems easy enough for a perfect Libertarian state to evolve/devolve into something very similar to what we have now without any non-Libertarian actions being taken along the way, if that makes sense.
If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.
To me this makes Libertarianism relatively uninteresting except as a reminder not to micromanage things and that centralisation has costs and should be employed sparingly.
This is a bizarre criticism to me.
If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.
There is no reason this would happen. If it did happen, it would be a bad outcome, because we’d be back in the position of an interventionist state. But again, I don’t see any reason why such a thing would happen without “non-libertarian actions being taken along the way”. And how to design institutions to minimize those is the chief project of libertarian jurisprudential theory.
In any case, I don’t see how this reduces the main points put forward by libertarianism, such as that nearly all of the arguments used to justify the existence of an expansive state are invalid, that nearly all government interventions in the economy or in people’s private lives are net harmful, etc. And if you agree with those, it’s hard to see how you could support an expansive state.
But if those arguments are wrong, that would be an entirely separate line of criticism from “a libertarian society would devolve back into a non-libertarian society”. Because in that case, the goal would be to prevent this from happening and/or minimize the role of the state as much as possible. Which is hardly the “middle of the road” position.
I think there are reasons why consolidation and centralisation would happen, as we are seeing in the corporate world across many industries today.
(In the case of monopoly on violence this is even more critical, and it is typical to see turf wars between nations or gangs flare up from time to time then settle into a steady state once they have negotiated who has control of which territory).
But the fact that this can easily happen means continual interventions and tweaking to keep the system from collapsing, maintaining it in a kind of dynamic instability much like a modern fighter plane, or going back further to Romance of the Three Kingdoms where any two of them can always gang up to prevent a takeover by the third. That’s not necessarily an efficient or fun process, though.
To take this line of thought further requires clarifying whether we are talking about a hypothetical state that still holds an absolute monopoly on violence or not, because that makes a huge difference.
Even a strong centralised state can be more discriminating in the interventions in which it undertakes, eg. a more sensible drug policy, fewer foreign wars, etc.
Doesn’t this sound exactly like how the world have been for a long time until relatively recently? It’s not not states even now holds absolute monopoly on violence.
I mean you are seeing the consolidation in industries, but not really comprehensively across industries. And it could be argued that tax systems and regulations actually disfavor non-big-businesses.
Few big corporations would be competitive against smaller challengers without state intervention to establish barriers to entry. Even the businesses themselves know this; advice to invest in those that have strong “moats” around them is cartoonish villainy and totally true.
Corporations aren’t magic; they are subject to the same information problems centralized states are. People usually know their own situations better than outsiders do, and a lot of the problems in eg. universities emphasizing “””productivity””” in terms of publications, or employers of programmers counting lines of code, are instances of precisely this: people can’t do the actually useful things because someone is trying to measure something that doesn’t lend itself to effective measurement, and the bad measurers should get outcompeted away in a functioning market by those who aren’t impacted by mismeasurement. This probably explains a lot of why academicians perform best in traditional public/monopoly-corporate settings where the rules are basically “you’re smart, here’s a bunch of money, figure out something cool, we won’t bother you in the meantime” and programmers are more productive in startups instead of corps burdened by mismanagement.
And state intervention also creates artificial and inefficient property rights. Copyrights, patents, etc. would be basically unenforceable without the state or an organization equivalent to it, and they have a massive centralizing effect on the economy. I don’t believe organic-pragmatic property rights would ever be able to extend to information in such a way as nobody could afford to hunt down pirates on their own unless the starting position is absolutely centralized to begin with (and that’s like “what if we turned the Soviet Union into a megacorporation but didn’t change anything else”; not libertarian at all in practice).
Bans on stripping DRM and stuff get legitimacy from the state; we’re seeing the backlash to “corps are trying to steal the stuff we own” even now and absent a state-equivalent enforcer all it would take is one defector who sells free-as-in-speech 3d-printers etc. to render such positions unfeasible in practice. And the world has way more idealists than a single one.
State and gang violence is seldom economically efficient either; a lot of it relies on the existence of a population those benefiting from violence can pass the costs of that violence on. Drafting soldiers, harming civilians, destroying value, etc.
So all of this turns into an engineering problem: how to craft a system that has, when accounting for known human biases, stable incentives against harmful centralization. My anarchist side suspects that the monopoly on violence is the key, specifically in the sense that its existence enables all the other centralization by passing the costs of enforcing that centralization onto others. When someone has that degree of power, it can be abused to create other forms of power as well, but if violent enforcement of monopolies of any kind is ~disrupted~ the prohibitive expense of trying to recreate them could protect a system made of smaller, competitive actors, from re-establishing them.
Of course, this necessitates solving the three key issues that the popular legitimacy of states presently rests on. One is safety, one is equality, and one is moloch. If people believe that only a state can protect them from crime, they will want a state; and if people believe that only a state can prevent a slide into feudalistic rentseeking by capital-holders and destitute indebted poverty for the rest, they will want a state; and if people believe only a state can disarm the shitty multipolar traps that will destroy everything of value, they will want a state.
The first one has seen a decent amount of work done on it, and I guess empirical experimentation would be enough to sort it out.
The second is what a lot of people object to, but I think simply stopping the state/crony-capital symbiosis of using artificial property rights and assignments to monopolize zero-sum things and propertyize non-scarce things would render it relatively inconsequential (of course, easier said than done); a lot of deliberate violent, coercive, and value-destroying action has gone to creating and maintaining economic hierarchies between people favored by states and people preyed upon by states, and modern technology makes maintaining a basic standard of living trivially cheap if one isn’t bound by rentiers holding artificial property rights. Thus basic solidarity, mutual aid, distributed productive capital etc. could ensure that even non-productive people would be able to have their needs met better than in current illfare states.
The third one is hard, but even states themselves are subject to the same pressures, and if we got from “states everywhere” to “Firewall has the monopoly on x-risk prevention and will nuke you if you act irresponsibly and refuse to stop doing it but otherwise you may do whatever you wish” it would still be a drastic improvement. And the less significant multipolar traps aren’t that terrible; I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.
For example, the most simple solution would be that the Filter Pact threatens to kick Mike’s ass unless Mike uses the filter. Or Mike’s Dia Paying Group, having negotiated the same deal with everyone else’s protection agencies, would tell him that disconnecting the filter is agreed to be illegal and obligates him to pay $999 in damages to everyone else (+10% for DPG) or they won’t protect him from attempts to kick his ass. The state bans this because kicking Mike’s ass is a crime but polluting everyone else’s fish farms isn’t, but an anarchistic system of organic property rights wouldn’t draw such a distinction as Mike isn’t able to lobby himself a special protected position from which to harm others.
Alternatively, everyone could agree to start paying $.29945 a month to everyone else who uses a filter once everyone has agreed to this deal and joined the Filter Fund. Thus, everyone will join it to earn $700, and Mike won’t disconnect his filter because he would lose the $299.15 he gets from others plus $1 from pollution while only gaining $300 from not operating the filter, making a net loss of $.15. And Mike won’t stop paying the Filter Fund because if he does it, everyone else will disconnect their filters because now they would make a profit of ~$.15 from doing so, and everything will go to shit. This should be a game-theoretically stable equilibrium afaik.
But the basic thing is: if there’s a problem that causes net harms, someone could make a profit by solving it. In the fish farming example, the solution will exist if implementing it costs significantly less than the $700 000 a month it would create in value.
For food regulation I could join with a bunch of people to pay our own food certification agency, which in turn is held responsible for the costs of illnesses caused by tainted food, and is thus incentivized to minimize its occurrence. And it itself would pay restaurants, manufacturers etc. to inspect their facilities so that it could get accurate information on risks. If the seller pays the regulator they will have an interest to collude, but if the buyer pays the regulator (whose entire point, after all, is to be serving the buyer’s interests) it’s possible to construct a system where nobody has an incentive to sell unsafe food. And this can naturally be bundled with a whole lot of other services in insurance, healthcare, etc. to create a de facto regulatory regime that is nonetheless voluntary and actually incentivized to serve the people, instead of special interest groups and the careers of lobbyists and cya-obsessed bureaucrats.
So in ~theory~, (and this is very much the sort of theory which is just entertaining instead of serious) if the emergence of states is a harmful thing, people would find a clever way to prevent it as long as they are permitted to do so.
And then there’s the cultural thing. Nowadays when there is a problem, people automatically think the state should do something about it, and try to pass a law. Fixing that would go a long way; instead of what-is-basically-violence-at-the-bottom people could try a different way of solving it.
Unregulated trade unions were nice until the state stepped in and ruined the labor market (the socialdemocratic corporatist labor laws in Finland were literally implemented as an anti-communist conspiracy, but just as usual the left has forgotten this and nowadays everyone in the unions defends the thing that was intended to destroy their influence, because redwashed rentiers got comfy jobs from it and it got tribally associated as “left” so of course they must support it; and nowadays everything related to work and welfare is an unholy hell of bullshit which hurts workers and honest entrepreneurs alike).
Mutual aid societies were nice until the state stepped in to implement price floors for doctors and artificially restrict the supply because doctors didn’t want to be in an equal bargaining position with working-class customers; they wanted to be authorities and the state obligingly served those interests because screw the poor that’s why.
Rojava is nice, but Turkey is a state which is doing its damnednest to step in and prevent it from being successful.
But basically, getting people from the mindset “the state should solve this” to “okay how do we solve this” would help a lot. And that’s the mindset I’m trying to operate in, and I’d love for the state to get out of my way when I make the world better.
okay this got excessively long and rambly and I lost track of what I was originally saying and whatever, enjoy
Egalitarianism vs neutrality towards hierarchy vs hierarchy being a positive good Cosmopolitanism vs nationalism Individualism vs communitarianism Economic efficiency is good vs economic efficiency is dehumanizing Nature is a resource vs nature should be protected for its own sake vs we belong to nature Importance of tradition Importance of “order” Importance of autonomy Belief in the availability of positive-sum improvements Belief in the degree of coordination necessary to achieve/prevent positive/negative-sum changes Belief in collective responsibility Acceptability of coercion Acceptability of violence in general
On a more serious note, I always liked the three-axis chart from the online game NationStates (though the game itself has a very left-wing bias).
Okay, this chart is actually not that good. First of all, it undercounts the significance of economic freedom; and second, it truncates it into a single axis while I’d argue that a two-axis (at least) model of economy would be better.
Economic freedom is inevitably tied to personal and political freedom, as human behavior is economic behavior. There is no magical boundary between economic and personal. These are probably obvious, but I’m just making the background assumptions clear.
For example, how does sex work work in a “Scandinavian Liberal Paradise”? It supposedly has high personal freedom, but as sex work ties the personal to the economic very tightly I highly suspect that SLP wouldn’t have the Obviously Correct policy of decriminalization and non-regulation; instead it’d be likely to have a lot of licensing and regulation schemes intruding on sex workers’ bodily autonomy (if they’re at all legal in the first place).
Or drugs. If you can use drugs, but only if you buy them from Systembolaget, and they must be manufactured by licensed businesses, and they must have been approved by the state regulatory apparatus, it’s not such a high level of personal freedom.
Or in the different direction: “Corporate Police State”. Economic “freedom”? I don’t think so. Trans people can’t buy estrogen, people can’t trade anti-government material, Sex work is B&, drug users get V&.
And what exactly is “Benevolent Dictatorship”? The government rules with an iron fist, but it doesn’t actually do much? Emperor Norton? Distributed power is distributed power and jure isn’t magic.
The personal and political are tied as well, but at least the political axis makes a bit more sense; “Conservative Democracy” vs. “Tyranny by Majority” vs. “Authoritarian Democracy” are distinctions I can intuitively grasp from this model.
But “Economic Freedom” is my favorite axis (because I’m really boringly consistent on “Personal”, and “Political” is mostly “could we just please make it go away somehow”) so I want to focus more on that one, and this assumes that there’s a simple unidirectional form. In other words, a society with heavy state intervention in the economy to reduce inequality would be basically the same as a society with heavy intervention to preserve inequality. That doesn’t make much sense.
A more meaningful distinction would be to divide the economic axis by that one. Thus, we get a two-dimensional graph which could be said to roughly resemble the traditional Political Compass (which is a shitty test with shitty questions and shitty background assumptions) or the Nolan Chart (which similarly confuses two drastically different forms of economic intervention into a less-than-useful mess):
(one could add a third dimension for public goods and other utilitarianisms but that’s basically “how smart is the implementation of this particular location on the 2D grid”)
In the bottom right quadrant is non-intervention regardless of its direction. Libertarian, classical liberal, ancap, etc.
The bottom left only has intervention to seek equality; pure redistribution, regulations that try to level society, eliminating the hierarchies that would naturally result from differences between people. Anarcho-communist, liberal socialist, etc.
The top right only seeks to keep hierarchies intact and deepen them, to maintain the position of those at the top and prevent challenges to their status. Crony capitalism, slavery, feudalism, state-sponsored cartels, corporate welfare, and all forms of nonproductive rentseeking with the guns of PoliceMob.
And the top left combines both; one might cynically say that efforts towards equality help legitimize efforts towards hierarchy, and efforts to maintain hierarchy help secure elite acceptance for redistribution.
And if one were to redefine the NationStates examples to this, one could get the sorts of results I’ve located as examples on the grid.
Basic income is perhaps the biggest example of a bottom-left policy, while regular forms of welfare establish hierarchies between the eligible and ineligible, the “deserving” and “undeserving” and so on, and are more top-left instead. Closed borders and protectionism are topwards, and the rhetorical swindle that gets people to support them paints them as leftwards instead. And patents and copyrights are classic topwards examples.
The most important thing in this is that the axes aren’t what they are traditionally thought to be; the Political Compass is shitty because it bundles them into one single axis as a result of its creators’ biases (its economic axis is all over the place; some questions are bottom-left vs. top-right, others are top-left vs. bottom-right, some implicitly present a false dilemma between top-left and top-right, etc.), and a lot of valid complaints ensue. The most simple formulation would perhaps be: “should redistribution happen downwards, upwards, or both, or not at all?” (Although when presented this way most people would shy away from admitting the positions their policies reveal a preference for)
This is illuminating of the tensions in state intervention to the economy and also perhaps helps understand different perspectives better. The left is suspicious of “economic freedom” because they’re used to it meaning top-right (because statist politicians are usually only offering a choice between top-right and top-left), and the top-left is a really profitable place for huge numbers of people with powerful special interests. And when leftists say “not the Soviet Union” they often mean “bottom-left, not top-left”. And when the Political Compass™ sorts Kevin Carson at the “same” “economy” score as statist corporatists, this model illustrates the massive difference.
(Of course, it gets weird at the edges but works reasonably well at the centre region; and these kinds of simplified models are always only useful around the centre)
And while this seems to resemble the traditional Political Compass™, the “Social” score is nowhere near 1:1 to this. A centrist position on this model of economic axes can encompass quite an astonishing variation in moral and cultural policy, although as they aren’t quite orthogonal either it’s impossible to be politically authoritarian at the bottom right, or genuinely socially permissive at the top left.
