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The dictatorship of the articulate

florentcrivello.com

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Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#181

Post by hackerlight »

plaguepilled wrote: post #175
hackerlight wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some regulations help people, and some regulations hurt people. Regulations that usually help people: - anti-dumping and pollution regulations - regulations that mandate disclosing added sugar on packaging labels - regulations that protect workers in endogenous bargaining disputes. Regulations that usually hurt people: - single-family zoning - price ceilings Regulations are just laws that force businesses to behave a…

Yes everyone is aware that regulations are laws and can be implemented maliciously. We still need regulation despite those shortcomings. Regulations give people who have a stake in a given resource a seat at the table, even if they're not part of the regulated business' plans. The examples you gave have negative effects, but they also highlight how ill equipped the industries that have them are with dealing with some…

I see that we agree. Like you, I am a proponent of good regulations.

My issue is with extremist views on regulations, which I now see that you don't hold. I rarely see people on the populist left advocating for specific bad regulations to be repealed or even refactored, unless it happens to clash with a hot button social issue they care about such as discrimination. It's the pragmatic center-left neoliberals who are doing that job. The populist left's entire focus is on adding more regulations, and often bad ones such as price ceilings (mixed with some good ones, of course). Don't get me started on the populist right who are only interested in regulating other people's private social choices. The Texas GOP platform is effectively ancap + social conservatism. And I'm not trying to draw a moral equivalence between the populist left and the populist right in the current moment - the populist right is significantly more insane right now.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#182

Post by ghastmaster »

hef19898 wrote: post #169
ghastmaster wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was also a cost in human life. The article's first sentence, reads, "A few years ago, Silicon Valley was buzzing with the reverberations of Marc Andreessen’s epic essay, It’s Time To Build." Here's the main point of "It’s Time to Build" regarding the failures in response to the covid pandemic: "Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we did…

That trade off is deeply flawed. Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are. But argueing to sacrifice / risk lives now for the benefit of saving lives later, all you do is arguing to get of regulations holding you back right now from making personal gains. And that line if thought is just selfish, entitled and short sighted. And quite prevelant in certain, especially rich and…

> Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are.

The point of regulation(in this context) is to preserve future lives. If future lives saved is impossible to quantify and that somehow invalidates the idea of less regulation, would it not therefore invalidate the idea of regualtion as well?

> But argueing to sacrifice / risk lives now for the benefit of saving lives later, all you do is arguing to get of regulations holding you back right now from making personal gains.

There is a concept called "Regulatory Capture". The idea is that businesses argue for regulation of their own industry in order to increase the cost for their competitors. This ensures their own survival. Many regulations in fact, serve merely to increase the personal gains of corporate shareholders. I certainly am not arguing for my current personal gain, but for the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. I do not own any stock or business.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#183

Post by skywhopper »

The best example he could come up with in support of his position was Uber? Uber is certainly convenient, but it built its business by moving capital risk to its contractors and by heavily subsidizing fares for years, neither of which is sustainable. And despite that, it has changed very little about the world, other than to devastate taxi companies and further increase traffic in large cities.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#184

Post by mola »

Dogmatic Religious writing like this is always so cringy. Without regulation, kids would still be working sweatshops instead of learning the necessary skills to become builders.... For example.

The are good regulations and bad regulations. When players are selfish rational and greedy they tend to accumulate power and lobby for bad regulations. It's time to lose that selfish shortemist mentality and gain more freedoms by regulating early and softly to avoid power build up.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#185

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

gernb wrote: post #151
spoonjim wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you set it at zero you will never build anything

And further there are trade offs. I don't know the trade offs of bridge building is but the example i've heard in the past is, it's possible we could make it so no one ever dies in a plane crash. To do that with today's tech might make flights cost 2x, 3x, 4x more. Flights cost more = more people choose to drive (say SF to LA or LA to Vegas or DC to NYC). More people drive = more deaths. That isn't to say you shouldn…

You could also make commuter driving (near) zero-death now. It would be a huge one-off payment for a national - possibly international - navigation and power grid. But once built it would be a huge cost saver, because automated traffic flows could be optimised across the entire system.

Although in fact remote work would be even better, for those jobs that support it.

Meanwhile jobs have become poverty traps, so they're not enough on their own to avoid poverty and death.

Ultimately it's not about building things or the cost of highly visible prestige projects. It's about systemic rather than fragmented thinking. Capitalism tends to the latter, because an airy wave of the invisible hand is supposed to somehow optimise everything.

This is magical fantasy. If you want intelligent culture-wide systems you have to get your best people to design and build them. And they have to consider long-term systemic outcomes as much as short-term goals and projects.

This culture is very, very bad at that. But it's also unrealistically convinced it's very good at it.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#186

Post by kranke155 »

hahaxdxd123 wrote: post #109

The same Marc Andreesen who complained that there shouldn't be housing built near him because it would lower his property prices? How can someone who has read Why Nations Fail miss the point? We don't build for the same reasons that we didn't from the year -2000 to the Enlightenment. Because it's now better and easier in so many cases to just rent seek. Why bother constructing housing when you can just have other peo…

Pretty much. It’s amazing the author does not realise he is just doing the work for the extractive institutions when he asks for less voices at the table. And that in fact a lot of what passes for regulation is just those same extractive institutions protecting themselves.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#187

Post by jzellis »

"It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones."

Man, you almost got it here. Let me rephrase this:

"It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one with the most immediate ROI, and that the fields that got worse are the ones that are absolutely crucial to society - and therefore heavily regulated - but aren't 1000x unicorns that get their investors on the cover of Fast Company and their CEOs the subject of Hulu docudramas."

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#188

Post by rocgf »

fleddr wrote: post #176

https://florentcrivello.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/image... The chart in the article is nice fuel for the little conspiracy theory I've been internalizing for most of my adult life. Isn't it suspicious, this hard divide between our wants and our needs? Our wants (optional goods, luxuries) have gotten dramatically cheaper over time, an explosion of choice, high speed of innovation, accessible and affordable to a g…

This is not really the case everywhere. Healthcare and education are not drastically more expensive everywhere in the Western world. In Europe, these things have not increased in price to the same degree as the US and they are definitely more regulated than in the USA.

Housing is probably a special case because it's an investment, and house owners vote and make decisions based on this.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#189

Post by badpun »

I'm really suspicious of the arguments that compare the cost to build the Golden Gate bridge in 1930s vs costs of building similar structure today. I mean, the GG was cheap to build because, back in the day, construction was done by people living in squalor (certainly by today's standards) and done in insaney dangerous working conditions. Do we really long for these days?

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#190

Post by rich_sasha »

Looking at the graph of price changes, it looks mostly like things that are cheaper come from abroad. Things that got more expensive are strictly domestic / unoffshorable.

I guess this says a few things even before you get to regulation:

- America outsourced a lot of engineering jobs of all sorts, leading to a lower supply of skilled labour at home. The places that received the outsourced jobs got better at it and do it cheaply. Though also, they provided these services at deflated prices, for a human cost, to make this happen. These eye-wateringly expensive projects in the US, how much would they cost if the lowest bidder from Asia was allowed to do it in an open tender?

- As the US got wealthier, people want to be paid better. Where in the past there were plenty of poor people happy to work in childcare for very little money, now there are less, and they need to be paid better.

- I wonder if a lot if things were cheaper because there was more immigrant labour happy to do it cheaply.

I think an interesting comparison is Switzerland, a wealthy country where everything is eye-wateringly expensive, yet also the Swiss can afford it and have more disposable income, even PPP, than peers. Stuff get built, for massive prices, on budget, on schedule, and in good time.

It is both a very well ran country, and with a huge immigrant population. Also pretty bureaucratic still, suggesting this alone is not the root issue in the US.

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