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Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

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Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#181
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still less work hands would mean change of balance between the capital and the labour. The changes in real estate pricing, which is one of the main expenses for labour, would be massive.

It doesn't really mean that because there isn't a forever fixed amount of labor being bidded on by the workforce. That side of the market is also dynamic. As population ages and then shrinks, labor demand will also shrink. If supply and demand shrink in tandem, wages don't increase.

Real estate bubble would pop for simple reason that were would be significantly less people overall.

And much lower real estate prices could amortize a lot of wages shrinking, from labour perspective.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#182
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really mean that because there isn't a forever fixed amount of labor being bidded on by the workforce. That side of the market is also dynamic. As population ages and then shrinks, labor demand will also shrink. If supply and demand shrink in tandem, wages don't increase.

Real estate bubble would pop for simple reason that were would be significantly less people overall. And much lower real estate prices could amortize a lot of wages shrinking, from labour perspective.

Real estate bubble won't pop with a shrinking population, because shrinking populations retreat to city centers. Spain, Italy, Japan, and Korea are full of $10,000 houses and all of them are overpriced. Meanwhile, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo, and Seoul are, without hyperbole, more expensive than they've ever been.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#183
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have details. It'd need to be based on direct democracy, but for now we don't have any way to make good decisions efficiently with it. I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.

>I don't have details. No way. I'm shocked. >Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes. And how is 'equal outcomes for everyone' as the end goal, different than communism? Even if you think it's not communism, the results will still be the same: poverty and famine for everyone but the elites since, news flash for you, people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures just like our…

> No way. I'm shocked.

Please don't do this. Criticizing and thinking about the outlines of new solutions is a necessary first step. Details can be figured out after people agree on what the problems with the current systems are. Obviously I'm aware of the problems of previously attempted systems and don't wish to repeat them. If we can't figure out better details than those tried before, then of course I would prefer the current system.

> people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures

Sure, humans have many kinds of needs and wants, and climbing the social hierarchy is just one of them. Why should we base our governance and our economic system on that need instead of something less destructive? There can still be hierarchies, just not the kind of hierarchies that give people power over others. An olympic gold medalist is at the top of a hierarchy, but doesn't have much power to control other people. Hierarchies like that could still remain to satisfy the people who have a strong need for such a thing.

Also, as I've said in other comments, I do believe there might be a need for some level of differences in rewards, as not all jobs are such that enough people would want to do them purely from intrinsic motivation. In such cases there should first be attempts to find rewards that don't provide control over other people, and if that is not enough, then we should figure out if the job is absolutely necessary and increase the rewards little by little until we have enough people doing it. Not all power differential can or should be avoided, but creating them should be the last resort and they should be as small as possible.

> You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels.

Maybe not entirely, but we could do much much better than what is happening now. It's important that we have a system where people are encouraged to use their abilities to improve society, but the huge differences in the resources people get is surely not the only way to achieve that. A lot of scientists do science not because the pay is great, but because they're interested in the topic and there's fame and knowledge to be had. Also the rewards that people expect are relative. In a society where someone gets paid 300 times more than others the most skilled people won't want to do the work for less than that, but in a society where the highest reward is 5 times more than others the most skilled people would still gravitate towards that work. Maybe personal interests would have a larger part in deciding what a person chooses to work on, but I don't think that would be a bad thing.

> try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.

But this will eventually lead to the winners taking more and more, we end up with a system similar to what the soviet union was and we will crash. The direction we are heading in is plainly visible. The capitalist system is better than the soviet one, as it's slower to centralize power, but eventually the power differentials and resulting corruption will be large enough that the system no longer functions, and we are very close to it I think.

We can continue this way and crash and reset every few hundred years, or we can acknowledge that it is the centralization of power that causes these issues and try to build a system that avoids it as much as possible.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#184
post #175
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money How do you allocate that? Surely you can't give anyone who asks the same amount. So you favour parties which are already entrenched. Of course that has quite a few upsides but it doesn't seem like an inherently democratic system. In worst (of course not unavoidable) you also might end up with indirect equivalent of what your re trying to ban, e.g. private media…

By allowing uncapped funding, you’re just giving a lot of power to big money. Which is not exactly democratical either.

I guess having parties funded entirely by small private donations or maybe a way to optionally allocate some share of the taxes you pay yourself and banning all direct funding from government and corporations could be the least bad option.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#185
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or complete stagnation and entrenchment of current political class and their networks. Not that its necessarily not the case anyway but it would be very heard for anyone outside the system to break in.

That's why term limits exist. Currently, they are only used for some positions like presidency, are usually 2 terms and don't apply to other positions. IMO: 1) We should get rid of presidents and other single-person positions altogether and replace them with groups of at least 5. Power concentrated in the hands of one individual attracts the worst individuals. 2) Term limits should apply to many more positions. 3) I…

Its tricky, though. There might be people who are doing a perfectly good job and kicking them arbitrarily might be suboptimal.

Then there is room for quite a lot of direct or indirect corruption. e.g. if you know you won't have a job in 4-8 years major corporations and other organizations offering you a cushy job if you do the "right things" might become quite a bit more appealing.

But yes, having a distinct class of career politicians has some significant downsides as well..

> The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town)

Might work fine or there might be a lot of gatekeeping if you just want to get on the first step since that will likely be controlled quite tightly by the established parties/cliques.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#186
post #168
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you're talking about. What kind of civic participation do you see in North Korea?

I don't, you don't either, quite a few people in North Korea might view it differently. My point is what methods do you use to "instil civic virtue"? How do you define it? And most importantly how do you prevent people from diverging from them? Historically totalitarian societies were often quite good at instilling any kind of "virtue" you wanted. Free and democratic societies generally tend to struggle with the "ins…

Education, and the fostering of independent civil society, which is something you don't see in authoritarian societies. The virtues you want to instill in a democratic society, contrasted with authoritarian ones, are truth vs. propaganda, accountability vs. loyalty, and courage vs. obedience.

I think you are leaning too hard into moral relativism. The differences between free- and authoritarian societies are plain to see.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#187
post #76
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that over a long enough period of time it's unavoidable that a selfish person will use the power to gain more. Selfish people are more likely to seek positions of power, so even if most people are altruistic, the people that seek power are more likely to be selfish.

I’ve come to basically the same conclusion. Attempts to engineer perfect political systems that are immune to this sort of infiltration is like trying to build a structure that will never need to be repaired—you can expend a lot of resources and effort on it upfront, but on a long enough timeline there will be failure modes you didn’t foresee.

Then how do you explain that all attempts at communism ended in dictatorships, except (perhaps) Israel, whereas the list of capitalist republics that ended in dictatorship is pretty short?

Oh and how do you intend to solve that most "communists" leaders were fake and intended to become dictators from the very start. There's many cases of various dictators, from anarchist, to just self-interested people, fascists, religious lunatics, ... pretending to be communists to grab power. In many cases, communists supported these awful people with extremely bad results. Examples: Russia, Afghanistan, Iran, Poland, Venezuela, ... all are cases of communists supporting would-be dictators that had ZERO intention of ever making those societies equal or tolerant or democratic.

In fact there's plenty of people who got support by pretending to be communists, even going so far as committing terrorist attacks on behalf of communism, to turn around and become capitalist "leaders", like ... well, most of the members of the EU commission for example. Jose Manuel Barosso, for example, was part of communist protests that lynched people. He was also the EU commission president that pushed Greece into debt servitude.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#188
post #186
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't, you don't either, quite a few people in North Korea might view it differently. My point is what methods do you use to "instil civic virtue"? How do you define it? And most importantly how do you prevent people from diverging from them? Historically totalitarian societies were often quite good at instilling any kind of "virtue" you wanted. Free and democratic societies generally tend to struggle with the "ins…

Education, and the fostering of independent civil society, which is something you don't see in authoritarian societies. The virtues you want to instill in a democratic society, contrasted with authoritarian ones, are truth vs. propaganda, accountability vs. loyalty, and courage vs. obedience. I think you are leaning too hard into moral relativism. The differences between free- and authoritarian societies are plain to…

Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not equating the values themselves, as you said they are the polar opposite. And to be honest I'm certainly not a fan of moral relativism in the direct sense.

The methods seem more concerning. First you have to give someone the right to define what these virtues mean in practice. Then you need to somehow impose them on the wider population. This is a rather dangerous tool and I think actual examples of such a top down approach working in democratic societies are quite rare.

It works if the consensus already exists in the society. Clearly these days that's not the case in quite a few places.

What do you then? Force children of people who have a radically different understanding of what these civil virtues are to attend schools which teach them against their will? Take them away if the parents refuse? Well that's what totalitarian states do...

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#190
post #19
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives. I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.

> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity. I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics. There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found u…

There used to be a name for this. "Everyone is different." How people have forgotten this basic fact is beyond me.
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