The problem is that nobody cares about corruption, or the so-called "lobbying". Big companies get their way at the expense of regular citizens meanwhile police and other agencies are busy enforcing big pharma monopoly on drugs. Most governments run until they are exposed and people are mad enough to march on the streets, or they simply run out of "their" monopoly money.
To improve that we need a ruthless agency that will remove corruption from politics once and for all.
>a ruthless agency that will remove corruption from politics once and for all.
Used to be called a free press, until we allowed massive mergers creating single companies with control of a massive media market share, and journalism trade unions to be eliminated, leaving journalists no choice but to cover what they're told.
I think you're missing the other half of the problem, which is that people actively seek out "journalism" that confirms their world view, regardless of whether it is true.
Despite the mergers, there are still news outlets that produce accurate and in depth reporting, and of course it's possible to consume news from multiple opposing sources, but most people either don't care about the news or only care if it gives them a reason to hate the other side.
"Where do rich people hide their wealth in the West?"
"In tax havens."
"And where do they hide it in Eastern Europe?"
"In plain sight".
A free press won't do squat if there is no consequence for the behavior they expose. If neither the public nor the courts punish such behavior having a free press cover it will amount to very little.
In places where press is licensed, it is not free - because they must report in a certain way to not lose license - it also includes being nice for whomever is currently on top. I've seen here in the UK where Russia Today reported a story that should have collapsed the government, but none of the other main stream media investigated the story until few months later where the party has concocted a plausible explanation why something happened. Between that RT was given a warning that they'll lose license for interference in UK affairs... Madness.
Media has perhaps the most competing firms of any nationwide industry. I don't understand this take, and I see it a lot. There are probably 20 relatively trustworthy outlets through which you can consume US news.
That is a lot. Look at the competitive landscape in other industries. There are basically 4 tire companies, 4 or 5 home builders, 6 or so mobile handset manufacturers, 4 or 5 US based airlines... You get the picture. And all of those industries are still decently competitive.
This misses the actual mechanism by which political corruption works. Lobbying is merely any person going in to press their interests with their representatives. Where large, monied interests rig the game is because they run election campaigns and implant narratives in the media.
In other words, the mechanism by which lobbyists get their way is by weaponizing regular citizens into voting in their interests. It's marketing and mass manipulation rather than the "quid pro quo" corruption people imagine it is.
> weaponizing regular citizens into voting in their interests. It's marketing and mass manipulation
Which means there is a problem even if the money never even touches a politician's / campaign's bank account. It's too easy for a politician to say something like "If elected, I will remove burdensome regulations on airlines" as a dog whistle for "I want the airline industry to buy ads that attack my opponent".
The only obvious ways to prevent that are to somehow prove that the politician coordinated their position with the industry (which seems impossible) or banning companies from ever expressing a political opinion (which apparently some politicians would like to achieve, but only those political opinions that they disagree with).
Fortunately there does exist one slightly less obvious way of preventing this, which doesn't require nullifying all the freedom of speech principles of the First Amendment. What is needed is a law (and probably an enabling Amendment) which limits political advertisements to N dollars per person per year (with N being 1% of the median US income).
Importantly, other forms of political speech and expression wouldn't be restricted. This way the law is targeted at the specific loophole that lobbying exploits, which is that people can be bombarded with a message against their wishes, generating an "illusory truth effect". People can still go out and find information, or march in the street to spread awareness of a political cause, but having more money wouldn't give you a greater ability to get your message in front of people who aren't interested in it.
The idea above is basically the core of CFR28 which is explained more in the relevant Wikipedia article:
Lobbying itself is fine - we want experts with deep domain expertise interacting with law makers. We just don't want them also funding their campaigns.
Put more simply, lobbyists are just the bag men. They facilitate payoffs that are laundered through junkets, book deal advances, insider trading opportunities, and who knows what else. The lobbying firms certainly have little or no idea why the proposed bill they are selling was crafted.
It’s a sobering realization that none of our elected legislators are competent to actually write laws. Occasionally you’ll see an example where they’ll have a staff attorney draft something for the purpose of political grandstanding, but that’s a sideshow compared to the amount of legislation written by the people with the real power.
The dynamic of how the sausage is made in DC is why, incidentally, Trump had to go. For all his many many faults, one thing he did right was bring buying legal privilege in the form of laws or federal regulations to a grinding halt.
Lobbying is a form of self-defense against the real corruption - a government that has assigned itself the power to interfere in our day-to-day lives. Most people today take it for granted that "regulations" must exist because they solve some actual problem.
Usually, the "problem" they exist to solve is that some government functionary wants to look like they're "doing something", which is itself a form of corruption. Regulations also commonly serve ideologically-motivated belief that some faction has managed to force on everyone else. Everything else that is "corrupt" about proscriptive regulations follows from the fact that the belief in proscriptive regulations is a corrupt belief (and illegal under the US Constitution as it was actually written).
Like child-labor laws? Public education? Your comment has a point, but it is quite black and white.
Governments are a service that people buy, which we have collectively voted on, agreeing that there are things that a purely corporation driven society would not do.
> Usually, the "problem" they exist to solve is that some government functionary wants to look like they're "doing something",
I tend to disagree. Most regulations address some problem, and in fact, the rules around changing regulations are strict enough that most of Trump's appointees' attempts to do away with regulations were ultimately reversed by the courts.
Sometimes, the problem no longer applies. But, I don't just want to disagree. So I'll tell you what. Throw 3 or 4 regulations out there you think are insane, and we'll see if I can explain a real problem for at least 1. I'd bet I could with a single regulation chosen at random, but your choices will be anything but random.
> serve ideologically-motivated belief that some faction has managed to force on everyone else
This one is true. Like, I believe murder is wrong and want it to be outlawed. But there are tons of other beliefs - e.g. rich people should a higher percentage of their income - that are ideological as well as pragmatic.
And what is to stop or check that ruthless agency when it is corrupted?
It is a fundamental attribute of power that it corrupts, and any agency with the power to decide what is corrupt and enforce against other agencies /government bodies their idea of corruption - is pretty much all powerful no?
It's not a problem! Maybe it is a problem but China is even more corrupt!! They're gonna fall apart any day now! We don't have to be worry about ourselves look at China!!!
There's a lot in here. I was going to make some quotes and comment about some of this, but it's a pretty diverse set of topics.
The main thing is that I didn't see a solid definition on how a failing government is defined or a concrete connection between that and the topics covered. It seems to be Q&A about a bunch of loosely affiliated topics.
> I didn't see a solid definition on how a failing government is defined
I was going to say the same thing!
I would be interested in breaking down the question into much more comprehensible chunks such as, "What does a Government do that they are unable to do effectively by definition?"; "Is there a balance between public and private sector providing services to the taxpayer and how do we decide the balance?"; "If a Government is necessarily slow-moving, what is the correct way to achieve fast-acting and tactical solutions that will be accepted by the public when the time comes to do them?"
I think a really common issue is that Governments are seen as a single entity, when in fact they are more like an ever-changing combination of ideals, abilities and pragmatism. The UK Government is not the same now as it was even 6 months ago, so learning lessons never really works. Any retired Politicians going to face the music for a decision made 10 years ago?
The discussion is a bit all over the place. The main points are that EU failed vaccination, and US failed covid testing (Statista disagrees https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104645/covid19-testing-...) , as well as having a decline of innovation and movement (disagrees here, people moved everywhere during covid, and US came up with tons of effective vaccines)
It's pretty hilarious both ignored discussing the current failing government: China.
- Came up with a 50% effective vaccine sinovac, and forces its citizens to take it
- Wolf warrior politics has infuriated almost every democratic countries on Earth, and alienated China. When Merkel steps down in Sept, the Green party candidate is most likely to succeed. And the newcomer will act tough against China and Russia
- Ballooning debt (they don't own global currency, unlike US), declining marriage/birth rate, middle income trap, unrest in many provinces
- The CCP is so insecure that they banned broadcast of oscars because of Chloe Zhao, because she mentioned CCP as failing one time in 2013
People have been predicting China's government to fail since 1948. If Mao couldn't do it with his disastrous communist nonsense it's going to take a lot. The CCP has cleverly pivoted to Chinese nationalism (the wolf warrior diplomacy is for internal consumption).
I think it would be best to have a backup plan for what happens if China doesn't implode.
> Came up with a 50% effective vaccine sinovac, and forces its citizens to take it
is this worse than not having your own capacity to manufacture vaccine and having to beg other countries for vaccines? 50% efficacy is for transmission prevention, however when you consider effectiveness against deaths and hospitalization, it's >90%
> Wolf warrior politics has infuriated almost every democratic countries on Earth, and alienated China. When Merkel steps down in Sept, the Green party candidate is most likely to succeed. And the newcomer will act tough against China and Russia
oh god forbid a country standing up for its own interest.
> Ballooning debt (they don't own global currency, unlike US), declining marriage/birth rate, middle income trap, unrest in many provinces
something that's been touted for the past 30+ years. can we just wait until it happens?
> The CCP is so insecure that they banned broadcast of oscars because of Chloe Zhao, because she mentioned CCP as failing one time in 2013
funny that indian government asked twitter to remove anything critical of its handling over COVID, with 350k daily cases, but they are democratic so they get a pass. no this isn't whataboutism, this is pointing out the double standard.
Something about the statement 'So inequality is not the problem, poverty is the problem' is wrong. I can't quite put my finger on it -- it sounds along the lines of 'So falling from the 20th floor is not the problem, hitting the sidewalk is the problem'.
Nice analogy. I think that Tyler Cowen statement is a symptom of Procrustean thinking from someone who starts reasoning not with an understanding of how humans are, but starts “logically” from the principles of economics and how humans ought to be per the economics rule book.
IMHO, (too much) inequality is fundamentally a problem because respective people’s power/influence in a market society (which we’re tending to) is proportional to their wealth — and that is intrinsically incompatible with the notion of participative democracy.
Inequality as some level of uneven distribution is not a problem iff that distribution keeps the lowest percentile above poverty. In the real world this doesn't happen, because not only is the distribution not bounded for minimal fairness, it has been shifting by those who have capital to further push value upwards - so it's a problem that never self corrects.
Imho Cowen makes obscure arguments to inequality not being a problem because he is paid from the Koch empire (for at least a significant portion of his career w/ George Mason University) which has put in significant resources into developing multiple Economic arguments their their wealth and influence are not a problem.
Inequality is the water balloon argument - that for one side to go up, the other side has to go down. It's fixed amount thinking.
Poverty is the water source argument - let's just have more water flow so that those that want to keep it in buckets can do so without affecting anybody's ability to drink. That's floating amount thinking.
Money is a floating concept not a fixed one. The fixed amount is the amount of hours a person has in a day.
Poverty is solved by distributing needs by hours and relegating money to the distribution of wants.
You implicitly (and are not alone in this) place negative value on the “wrong people” or even on other people in general having more, even if you are no worse off. It stems from the human brain being very perceptive of hierarchy and wanting to move up the totem pole by any means necessary.
I don't think that's a good analogy for the statement given. I think a better analogy would be "the difference between your floor and the top floor isn't the problem, falling out the window is the problem."
Your analogy implies that inequality creates poverty or that there is some casual relationship. This is what many people intuitively believe. It is not true.
As a rule, when people try to remove inequality everybody gets poorer, not richer. Countries are more successful at reducing poverty when they focus on lifting all boats. India and China were communist countries in the mid 20th century. As a result of them abandoning that approach, we have seen the greatest poverty reduction in human history. Check the GINI coefficients of those countries, it isn't great. Ask Chinese/Indian citizens if they are wealthier now than 60 years ago and its not even a question.
Since India was never what many would call a communist country (the communist party was outlawed less than 5 years after independence), I would question the veracity of everything else you say.
Every organisation has 3 major stages: newborn, mature, and old. When competition is present, old organizations are eaten by newborn organizations. Government is monopoly, so no competition, thus old organization must die first.
Governments seem like legacy code bases. Technically the laws are a form of code. People and institutions are the hardware the code runs on.
Changing requirements of the environment the machine runs in (reality) mean we must refactor and maintain the code.
If the environment changes too quickly and the code is too fragile to change at the required rate then some part of the system will crash. Enough crashes and the whole thing collapses.
Then we have to rewrite the thing from scratch with the lessons we learned from the previous version. Unfortunately some governments make use of dark patterns that are bad for users but good for a few.
This doesn't seem in agreement with the parent comment, and is a much better analogy than a mere 'government as something that will eventually die'.
Sure, governments are organizations that will eventually 'die' in some form, but how is that a useful observation? The British government has a lot of 'legacy code' going back to the deep middle ages, and yet (in its current 'state of the codebase', which can improve or worsen over time) it is much further away from 'death' than many newcomers in the third world who had no codebase to speak of 60 years ago. Theirs are badly maintained forks and occasionally the whole thing blows up and needs to be monkey-patched to keep creaking on in some fashion.
Age is thus no impediment at all to having a well-functioning, efficient government, and 'startups' are often in the most disadvantageous position of all. So even the software analogy fails us at some point, and cannot be taken any further.
Yes I agree. It's difficult to switch to a new code base (government) because the legacy system (current government) also has authority (most citizens recognize government with the most enforcement), incentive (lawmakers want to keep their power), and power (military) to keep itself there indefinitely.
> old organizations are eaten by newborn organizations
I would argue that what happens in practice is newborn organizations are eaten by old organizations. In fact, startups are being born these days with the express purpose of being eaten by a multinational.
There is no competition whatsoever between the old mammoths and the new things, and in fact it is the exception rather than the rule to see an "old mammoth company" disappear, fail, or be eaten.
Are you saying that we should have competitive governments? Interesting idea!
Unfortauntely, I think the states are too high at government level. Nothing too bad will happen when one trash company takes over from another trash company but what would happen if some random group took over the defence policy for a country because the current government didn't seem to be doing very well at it?
(Competing state and local governments, federated together and governed by a centralized federal government, which grows over time as citizens of the states agree on what laws they want to enforce).
Most laws passed by the federal government were first experimented with at the local or state level, until a majority of the peoples’ representatives believed they should be applied universally with a centralized implementation. Of course there are many loopholes and exceptions in the US’s system, but this was one of the foundational ideas of the current constitution.
Some form of competition is nice to have. For example, it's better to have a parliament than a dictator, because parties will compete with each other to fit people needs (or oligarch needs, if democracy is broken).
In Canada, police forces are compete. For example, municipality can sign contract with one of provincial police force or municipal police force, or create their own police force. This competition creates a positive feeback loop.
Personally, I'm a little less convinced of the 1st bullet point.
In particular, I see many obstacles to a "free society in which everyone gets to pursue a dignified life": healthcare costs, ongoing climate disaster, erosion of labor rights, rising nativism and authoritarianism on the far-right, etc. chief among them. To be as monomaniacally focused on "cancel culture" as Mounk (and many others on the center/right of the American political spectrum) strikes me as misguided at best and disingenuously self-serving at worst.
Persuasion seems to me a massive over-reaction to the minor injustice that is "cancel culture" wrapped in some self-important and grandiose rhetoric.
Clickbait title is clickbait. Not a single mention of why government fails from the past 5,000 years of history. The entire discussion is US-centric. And they don't conclude why governments fail.
>. I'm just saying the observed increase in wealth inequality in these nations goes away when you abstract from land. So capital is not the problem. Let's deregulate building.
Yeah cuz the fortune 500 list is dominated by land-owners such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Google. Wealth inequality arises from capital concentration, of which land is just one of several forms of concentration. But the ability of large, powerful companies to protect intellectual property and harness network effects to derive large, reliable recurring revenues, which are passed on to shareholders, are other contributing factors. Tyler is a smart guy but is he like a fire hydrant at time that spews out things that are wrong or incomplete.
The work Tyler cites demonstrates that inequality in the US is almost entirely a function of real estate. Let that sink in. This implies that the vast majority of inequality comes from owning land.
Big Tech companies are not a real estate business. To believe that they are indicates extreme confusion about what a company like Netflix does. To shoehorn them into culpability for rent seeking in the housing market is to substantially miss the point.
Yeah, that explanation calls on its face because it cannot explain low interest rates. If land owners have excess savings that drag the interest rates down why aren't they spending them to buy more land until interest rates rise? If they don't have excess savings why aren't they borrowing more money to buy land until interest rates rise?
The weird part is that if we assume that land owners are the only ones with the inequality, this is a self reinforcing cycle that keeps growing stronger to take over the entire country but yet somehow balances itself to keep interest rates and inflation low. They somehow control the entire economy and yet they don't have any effect on it at the same time.
> Wealth inequality arises from capital concentration
No. Wealth inequality is capital concentration. What you're saying is that rain causes rain. In actuality what causes wealth inequality is corruption. The financial sector has been extracting wealth from the people since the 70s. That's what causes wealth inequality.
It's a little ironic to use that as an example, because rain actually does cause rain. Falling water droplets induce a down draft which causes other water droplets to fall out of the sky as well. This is why water precipitates rather suddenly rather than as a constant gradual drip.
Readit News
Used to be called a free press, until we allowed massive mergers creating single companies with control of a massive media market share, and journalism trade unions to be eliminated, leaving journalists no choice but to cover what they're told.
Despite the mergers, there are still news outlets that produce accurate and in depth reporting, and of course it's possible to consume news from multiple opposing sources, but most people either don't care about the news or only care if it gives them a reason to hate the other side.
"Where do rich people hide their wealth in the West?"
"In tax havens."
"And where do they hide it in Eastern Europe?"
"In plain sight".
A free press won't do squat if there is no consequence for the behavior they expose. If neither the public nor the courts punish such behavior having a free press cover it will amount to very little.
That is a lot. Look at the competitive landscape in other industries. There are basically 4 tire companies, 4 or 5 home builders, 6 or so mobile handset manufacturers, 4 or 5 US based airlines... You get the picture. And all of those industries are still decently competitive.
In other words, the mechanism by which lobbyists get their way is by weaponizing regular citizens into voting in their interests. It's marketing and mass manipulation rather than the "quid pro quo" corruption people imagine it is.
Which means there is a problem even if the money never even touches a politician's / campaign's bank account. It's too easy for a politician to say something like "If elected, I will remove burdensome regulations on airlines" as a dog whistle for "I want the airline industry to buy ads that attack my opponent".
The only obvious ways to prevent that are to somehow prove that the politician coordinated their position with the industry (which seems impossible) or banning companies from ever expressing a political opinion (which apparently some politicians would like to achieve, but only those political opinions that they disagree with).
Fortunately there does exist one slightly less obvious way of preventing this, which doesn't require nullifying all the freedom of speech principles of the First Amendment. What is needed is a law (and probably an enabling Amendment) which limits political advertisements to N dollars per person per year (with N being 1% of the median US income).
Importantly, other forms of political speech and expression wouldn't be restricted. This way the law is targeted at the specific loophole that lobbying exploits, which is that people can be bombarded with a message against their wishes, generating an "illusory truth effect". People can still go out and find information, or march in the street to spread awareness of a political cause, but having more money wouldn't give you a greater ability to get your message in front of people who aren't interested in it.
The idea above is basically the core of CFR28 which is explained more in the relevant Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_reform_in_the...
I think Lessig's talk is the best summary of this: https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_...
Lobbying itself is fine - we want experts with deep domain expertise interacting with law makers. We just don't want them also funding their campaigns.
It’s a sobering realization that none of our elected legislators are competent to actually write laws. Occasionally you’ll see an example where they’ll have a staff attorney draft something for the purpose of political grandstanding, but that’s a sideshow compared to the amount of legislation written by the people with the real power.
The dynamic of how the sausage is made in DC is why, incidentally, Trump had to go. For all his many many faults, one thing he did right was bring buying legal privilege in the form of laws or federal regulations to a grinding halt.
Usually, the "problem" they exist to solve is that some government functionary wants to look like they're "doing something", which is itself a form of corruption. Regulations also commonly serve ideologically-motivated belief that some faction has managed to force on everyone else. Everything else that is "corrupt" about proscriptive regulations follows from the fact that the belief in proscriptive regulations is a corrupt belief (and illegal under the US Constitution as it was actually written).
Governments are a service that people buy, which we have collectively voted on, agreeing that there are things that a purely corporation driven society would not do.
I tend to disagree. Most regulations address some problem, and in fact, the rules around changing regulations are strict enough that most of Trump's appointees' attempts to do away with regulations were ultimately reversed by the courts.
Sometimes, the problem no longer applies. But, I don't just want to disagree. So I'll tell you what. Throw 3 or 4 regulations out there you think are insane, and we'll see if I can explain a real problem for at least 1. I'd bet I could with a single regulation chosen at random, but your choices will be anything but random.
> serve ideologically-motivated belief that some faction has managed to force on everyone else
This one is true. Like, I believe murder is wrong and want it to be outlawed. But there are tons of other beliefs - e.g. rich people should a higher percentage of their income - that are ideological as well as pragmatic.
It is a fundamental attribute of power that it corrupts, and any agency with the power to decide what is corrupt and enforce against other agencies /government bodies their idea of corruption - is pretty much all powerful no?
The main thing is that I didn't see a solid definition on how a failing government is defined or a concrete connection between that and the topics covered. It seems to be Q&A about a bunch of loosely affiliated topics.
I was going to say the same thing!
I would be interested in breaking down the question into much more comprehensible chunks such as, "What does a Government do that they are unable to do effectively by definition?"; "Is there a balance between public and private sector providing services to the taxpayer and how do we decide the balance?"; "If a Government is necessarily slow-moving, what is the correct way to achieve fast-acting and tactical solutions that will be accepted by the public when the time comes to do them?"
I think a really common issue is that Governments are seen as a single entity, when in fact they are more like an ever-changing combination of ideals, abilities and pragmatism. The UK Government is not the same now as it was even 6 months ago, so learning lessons never really works. Any retired Politicians going to face the music for a decision made 10 years ago?
It's pretty hilarious both ignored discussing the current failing government: China.
- Came up with a 50% effective vaccine sinovac, and forces its citizens to take it
- Wolf warrior politics has infuriated almost every democratic countries on Earth, and alienated China. When Merkel steps down in Sept, the Green party candidate is most likely to succeed. And the newcomer will act tough against China and Russia
- Ballooning debt (they don't own global currency, unlike US), declining marriage/birth rate, middle income trap, unrest in many provinces
- The CCP is so insecure that they banned broadcast of oscars because of Chloe Zhao, because she mentioned CCP as failing one time in 2013
They're even here downvoting you.
When they're willing to censor pooh bear there's nothing that doesn't cross that insecurity threshold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie-the-Pooh#Censorship_in_...
I think it would be best to have a backup plan for what happens if China doesn't implode.
What does the debt buy them? If it buys them increased growth why even care? Assuming you can grow forever, you can get into infinite debt.
is this worse than not having your own capacity to manufacture vaccine and having to beg other countries for vaccines? 50% efficacy is for transmission prevention, however when you consider effectiveness against deaths and hospitalization, it's >90%
> Wolf warrior politics has infuriated almost every democratic countries on Earth, and alienated China. When Merkel steps down in Sept, the Green party candidate is most likely to succeed. And the newcomer will act tough against China and Russia
oh god forbid a country standing up for its own interest.
> Ballooning debt (they don't own global currency, unlike US), declining marriage/birth rate, middle income trap, unrest in many provinces
something that's been touted for the past 30+ years. can we just wait until it happens?
> The CCP is so insecure that they banned broadcast of oscars because of Chloe Zhao, because she mentioned CCP as failing one time in 2013
funny that indian government asked twitter to remove anything critical of its handling over COVID, with 350k daily cases, but they are democratic so they get a pass. no this isn't whataboutism, this is pointing out the double standard.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
Can someone explain me to myself?
IMHO, (too much) inequality is fundamentally a problem because respective people’s power/influence in a market society (which we’re tending to) is proportional to their wealth — and that is intrinsically incompatible with the notion of participative democracy.
Imho Cowen makes obscure arguments to inequality not being a problem because he is paid from the Koch empire (for at least a significant portion of his career w/ George Mason University) which has put in significant resources into developing multiple Economic arguments their their wealth and influence are not a problem.
Poverty is the water source argument - let's just have more water flow so that those that want to keep it in buckets can do so without affecting anybody's ability to drink. That's floating amount thinking.
Money is a floating concept not a fixed one. The fixed amount is the amount of hours a person has in a day.
Poverty is solved by distributing needs by hours and relegating money to the distribution of wants.
As a rule, when people try to remove inequality everybody gets poorer, not richer. Countries are more successful at reducing poverty when they focus on lifting all boats. India and China were communist countries in the mid 20th century. As a result of them abandoning that approach, we have seen the greatest poverty reduction in human history. Check the GINI coefficients of those countries, it isn't great. Ask Chinese/Indian citizens if they are wealthier now than 60 years ago and its not even a question.
Governments seem like legacy code bases. Technically the laws are a form of code. People and institutions are the hardware the code runs on.
Changing requirements of the environment the machine runs in (reality) mean we must refactor and maintain the code.
If the environment changes too quickly and the code is too fragile to change at the required rate then some part of the system will crash. Enough crashes and the whole thing collapses.
Then we have to rewrite the thing from scratch with the lessons we learned from the previous version. Unfortunately some governments make use of dark patterns that are bad for users but good for a few.
I'm done ranting...
Sure, governments are organizations that will eventually 'die' in some form, but how is that a useful observation? The British government has a lot of 'legacy code' going back to the deep middle ages, and yet (in its current 'state of the codebase', which can improve or worsen over time) it is much further away from 'death' than many newcomers in the third world who had no codebase to speak of 60 years ago. Theirs are badly maintained forks and occasionally the whole thing blows up and needs to be monkey-patched to keep creaking on in some fashion.
Age is thus no impediment at all to having a well-functioning, efficient government, and 'startups' are often in the most disadvantageous position of all. So even the software analogy fails us at some point, and cannot be taken any further.
I would argue that what happens in practice is newborn organizations are eaten by old organizations. In fact, startups are being born these days with the express purpose of being eaten by a multinational.
There is no competition whatsoever between the old mammoths and the new things, and in fact it is the exception rather than the rule to see an "old mammoth company" disappear, fail, or be eaten.
Unfortauntely, I think the states are too high at government level. Nothing too bad will happen when one trash company takes over from another trash company but what would happen if some random group took over the defence policy for a country because the current government didn't seem to be doing very well at it?
(Competing state and local governments, federated together and governed by a centralized federal government, which grows over time as citizens of the states agree on what laws they want to enforce).
Most laws passed by the federal government were first experimented with at the local or state level, until a majority of the peoples’ representatives believed they should be applied universally with a centralized implementation. Of course there are many loopholes and exceptions in the US’s system, but this was one of the foundational ideas of the current constitution.
In Canada, police forces are compete. For example, municipality can sign contract with one of provincial police force or municipal police force, or create their own police force. This competition creates a positive feeback loop.
If you have multiple different policies (i.e. laws) with no clear indication of what is legal/illegal, you have neither law nor government
>“Persuasion” stands for:
>1) A commitment to a free society in which everyone gets to pursue a dignified life.
>2) A belief in the social practice of persuasion, which necessitates free speech.
>3) A determination to persuade, not to mock or troll, those who disagree with us.
In my view, they are succeeding admirably in meeting these 3 goals.
[0] https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1278707858188664832
In particular, I see many obstacles to a "free society in which everyone gets to pursue a dignified life": healthcare costs, ongoing climate disaster, erosion of labor rights, rising nativism and authoritarianism on the far-right, etc. chief among them. To be as monomaniacally focused on "cancel culture" as Mounk (and many others on the center/right of the American political spectrum) strikes me as misguided at best and disingenuously self-serving at worst.
Persuasion seems to me a massive over-reaction to the minor injustice that is "cancel culture" wrapped in some self-important and grandiose rhetoric.
Yeah cuz the fortune 500 list is dominated by land-owners such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Google. Wealth inequality arises from capital concentration, of which land is just one of several forms of concentration. But the ability of large, powerful companies to protect intellectual property and harness network effects to derive large, reliable recurring revenues, which are passed on to shareholders, are other contributing factors. Tyler is a smart guy but is he like a fire hydrant at time that spews out things that are wrong or incomplete.
Big Tech companies are not a real estate business. To believe that they are indicates extreme confusion about what a company like Netflix does. To shoehorn them into culpability for rent seeking in the housing market is to substantially miss the point.
The weird part is that if we assume that land owners are the only ones with the inequality, this is a self reinforcing cycle that keeps growing stronger to take over the entire country but yet somehow balances itself to keep interest rates and inflation low. They somehow control the entire economy and yet they don't have any effect on it at the same time.
If land owners are taking over the economy how come corporations were increasing their savings since 2000? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B057RC1Q027SBEA
No. Wealth inequality is capital concentration. What you're saying is that rain causes rain. In actuality what causes wealth inequality is corruption. The financial sector has been extracting wealth from the people since the 70s. That's what causes wealth inequality.
It's a little ironic to use that as an example, because rain actually does cause rain. Falling water droplets induce a down draft which causes other water droplets to fall out of the sky as well. This is why water precipitates rather suddenly rather than as a constant gradual drip.