In general we don't have a good system design thinking around politics and organizing society.
We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society
31–40 of 115 posts
Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society
#32[flagged]
being successful is a liability?
no, being a failure and a loser is a liability
Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society
#33China seems to do a decent job of it. Why can't we?
a) survivorship bias, and b) long-termism.
Many nations have tried to plan their economy. Most perform badly and end up as footnotes in the history of the Democratic Republic of Tinpotonia. It takes a lot of skill to plan an economy.
The star performer in living memory was South Korea: best dictatorship! But it completed its succession plan and pivoted to free markets, so the example is forgotten.
Mao kicked off by outlawing sparrows, causing famine. His rule survived that, but it could have gone very differently.
Xi, and Wu before him, are probably just good at it. Even so: the demographic problem.
I would say that democracy has inherent problems: electability is a poor proxy for leadership quality; election cycles nullify the long-term view; electorates are incompetent and vacillating. I expect a committee to choose better rulers than hoi polloi, except in the dimension of accountability to the populace.
Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society
#34China seems to do a decent job of it. Why can't we?
Does it? There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. There are plenty of failed projects. The west in general used to be a lot more efficient. IMO the main cause is exactly the problem the Soviet Union used to have, and China still does: centralisation.
>Does it? There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies.
"In the last 70 years" does a lot of work in your argument, as it includes a full blown revolution, counter-revolution, eras of political turmoil etc. How about the last 20-30 or so years after things stabilized there?
Also, isn't the point of the parent that it's OK to have "plenty of failed projects", as the question that starts this thread is about our inability to run political experiments. Obviously some of them will fail - that's what experiments are made to test, not guaranteed success.
Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society
#35I think back to the first covid lockdowns. All of society was reorganized in a matter of weeks! Oil is worth negative money if they don't make us consume it! Work from home became mainstream, it turns out all those people with anxiety disorders or pain management issues could in fact participate in society! Generous payments were made for people who couldn't work, with no concern about who will pay for it!
The harsh reality is that all governments could solve most problems easily, they just couldn't be bothered.
Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society
#36Governments do run experiments sometimes, quite a lot of experiments on UBI have been run for example and we have good knowledge on whether its introduction would improve society. But I don't feel like leadership particularly cares about evidence and the right thing, they are far more idealogical than that and tend to gravitate towards policy based evidence from thinktanks and other powerful sources that produce bad science but the results they want to see.
The populace doesn't have much in the way of alternative choices for politicians that would follow the results of actual experiments nor fund them, its not really an option being offered, I think partly because its a tough sell compared to "we will do X". "We will test a variety of options and then do the best" requires more trust and its a low trust environment.
Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it? There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. There are plenty of failed projects. The west in general used to be a lot more efficient. IMO the main cause is exactly the problem the Soviet Union used to have, and China still does: centralisation.
Centralization is an information problem. You can't make good centralized decisions if you don't have good information to base this on. China still has this problem; the data coming up the pipeline is often much more rosy than reality. But it has the problem to a much lesser degree than the USSR, because surveillance technology and data management are improving.
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Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it? There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. There are plenty of failed projects. The west in general used to be a lot more efficient. IMO the main cause is exactly the problem the Soviet Union used to have, and China still does: centralisation.
That is exactly the point, though. Centralization starts to offer real advantages because the cost of complexity has increased significantly in decentralized Western societies. Yes, centralization can be inefficient, but it also makes decision-making much easier. Public opinion in Western societies has become far more fragmented and heterogeneous, largely because of the internet. There is much more internal disagreem…
I think the repeated failure of centrally planned economies proves it generally does more harm than good, and IMO complexity makes central planning less workable not more.
The problem the EU has are when decisions are centralised (its an EU decision rather than a member state decision) but require agreement by multiple member states with different interests. In the US, AFAIK, the federal government makes decisions about things that apply to the whole of the US without requiring the agreement of states. The EU's problem is not lack of centralisation, its a mismatch between who makes decisions and where they apply. You could also solve the problem by delegating more powers back to member states (or by letting the Commission and Parliament make all EU wide decisions without requiring the agreement of member states).
Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. I mean compared to 70 years ago. Its not really a question. The difference in living standard now compared to 70 years ago it gigantic. Even to 40 years ago. This is just objectively true for the waste, waste majority of the population.
These improvements include installing suicide nets at factories making products for foreigners using overworked labour living in dormitories, imprisoning two million people for a decade because they are the wrong kind of religious, suppressing democracy protests, essentially criminalising the use of pictures of Winnie The Pooh for political satire, and burying forever the true scale of how many people died in the epi…
Yeah and 70 years ago they were living in socialist utopia where honey flowed from trees. Do you have any notion what China used to be like?
You need to get a grip and get some perspective on what China is like for most people.
You can be critical of current day China without losing your brain.
Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society
#40"Society" (i.e. northern European and Anglophone) doesn't want to be improved.
Normally "improvements" penalize group A to favour group B; if group A is the majority, they will outvote the "improvement" in any democratic process.