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We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

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Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#51

Post by JuniperMesos »

lukan wrote: post #41
swiftcoder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is not lack of experiments the problem is lack of political will to implemented known good solutions. Indeed. We have extensive and widely repeated evidence that walkable streets, cheap mass transit, free healthcare, decriminalisation of drugs, and a 4-day workweek are all strict improvements over our current societies. And yet somehow all of those are viewed as radical reforms.

I like all of that, but is there really a scientific consensus about those things? I don't think so. Most seems to be disputed.

Also, do you trust the scientists? Or the scientific establishment that decides what practitioners rise to the level of being trustworthy?

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#52

Post by mlsu »

swiftcoder wrote: post #23
panick21_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many things don't really need 'experiments'. You can just do them. Like run good buses. The US already does run experiments thanks to the states, and we run many simply by having many countries. The problem is not lack of experiments the problem is lack of political will to implemented known good solutions.

> The problem is not lack of experiments the problem is lack of political will to implemented known good solutions. Indeed. We have extensive and widely repeated evidence that walkable streets, cheap mass transit, free healthcare, decriminalisation of drugs, and a 4-day workweek are all strict improvements over our current societies. And yet somehow all of those are viewed as radical reforms.

Man you guys are so close.

"Somehow." Indeed, it is a mystery. 0.01% of the population has direct control over something like 50% of society's resources. Society moves to enrich them, at everyone else’s expense. Curious that.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#53

Post by psd1 »

graemep wrote: post #3
xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #2

China 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.

I think "centralisation" is accurate but imprecise. Specifically, the professional class of financiers managed to capture government under Reagan, meaning that, in practical terms, we are largely governed by Jamie Dimon and his cohorts.

More precisely, our elected governments are governed by the financial class.

I am not suggesting that capital markets should not exist or that they should behave as governments compel them to; I just want the people who operate capital markets to be accountable to the people through the proxy of law and regulation. It should be an administrative profession, like accountancy.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#54

Post by Bratmon »

It's weird that this article doesn't even attempt to grapple with the reason why governments can't run big policies as experiments and cancel them if they fail:

Every time the government hires a group of people to do X, that automatically creates a class of people who:

1. Depend on the government continuing to do X for their livelihoods

2. Are experts in X and know far more about it than any government official

This creates an automatic constituency that will fight tooth and nail to keep X going no matter what. And step one of that fighting will be to make sure that the official report answering the original research question "Did X work?" will never be a clear "No."

And God help any politician that ignores the official report and cancels X anyway. Now the problem that X was intended to solve is entirely their fault, and there's an army of X experts running to every media outlet in the country making sure the general public knows it!

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#55

Post by inglor_cz »

graemep wrote: post #38
aswegs8 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

The huge problem with centralization is that it allows you to make huge mistakes, up to literally continent-scaled ones. This is what ends empires, sometimes.

The US was able to bomb Iran and Russia was able to attack Ukraine because basically a single important person said so. Personally, I consider the War Powers Act to be one of the worst laws that your Congress ever voted in.

The EU cannot do such things before obtaining consensus of multiple nations and I am happy for that, as we have had a lot of disastrous decisions in our past already.

My favorite tidbit is the First World War. The Germans in Austria were gung-ho about attacking Serbia, but the Hungarians were not, and they had the power of veto. If István Tisza held firm, the war might have been avoided, maybe just for a few years, maybe indefinitely, or maybe at least Central Europe could have stayed out of it, leaving it to the German Empire and the British to duke it out between themselves.

But in a more federal Austria-Hungary, where the Czechs and the Poles would have their own vetos, that particular war of 1914 would definitely have been off the table. Neither of those nations was interested in a pseudo-colonial war of conquest in the Balkans against another Slavic nation.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#56

Post by dofm »

panick21_ wrote: post #39
dofm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could be considerably less rude.

> Do you have any notion what China used to be like?

Try not to be so patronising.

My observation, simply, is that in fixing the old centrally-imposed cruelties, they've created new ones. The current improved situation is predicated on the new cruelties. It is on any philosophical level incorrect to suggest things are better for everyone when they have become deliberately and systematically worse (actually quite recently) for particular underclasses. It is not, in fact, better for the majority if society mistreats the minority; it is an indication of a sickness in "progress" if it invents a new minority to mistreat because progress is predicated on new centrally-managed fears.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#57

Post by deepsummer »

The thing is, there is no hive mind called "society". Everybody works in their own interest. Always, and in every "society".

Individual workers work on failing initiatives as long as they get paid. The outcome of the initiative may be bad for "society". But was it good for the individuals working on it? Maybe they got paid well. Maybe they enjoyed the work? Maybe the work was easy because they knew that it would fail anyway, so they didn't have to put much effort into it?

Maybe it was also good for the management or politicians? Maybe it was a step up in their career. And maybe, if they could jump ship before the failure became obvious, they could climb up the ladder to get to an even better position? You can always blame your successors for ruining the project.

And maybe it was good for whoever ordered it? If it's a local project, maybe they got subsidies from federal government bodies, and they don't even care whether it succeeds, as long as it created employment and the illusion of progress? Or if it's a private project, maybe they just tried a moon shot that, if it fails, was useful as a tax write-off?

In real life, there are so many layers to a 'failed' project. It can be a failure for some and a success for others. And those for whom it is a success will defend it, maybe even deceive to keep it running.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#58

Post by JuniperMesos »

Devasta wrote: post #35

I 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…

A lot of people got extremely angry at the covid lockdowns; and extremely angry at the inflation caused by the transfer payments to (some) people (in ways that often had little to do with whether or not they could work); and extremely angry at the widespread fraud in applying for covid-related benefits; and extremely angry at (and increasingly distrustful of) the state/medical establishment's disease-related guidelines.

What one person thinks improves society, another person thinks makes society worse. In a democracy, they both can vote; in a non-democratic system, the one whose desires are constantly thwarted by the non-democratically-accountable governance officials might revolt.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#59

Post by cultofmetatron »

inglor_cz wrote: post #48
cultofmetatron wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. one thing I've come to respect about the Chinese is that while they make huge decisions that sometimes have disastrous consequences, they don't make the same mistakes twice. At this point they have fed information from their environmental impacts into reforesting entire mountains and improving air quality. They went in on…

"they don't make the same mistakes twice." But they do. Even if we limit ourselves to post-1949 China. Once Mao died, the Party decided to never allow a single leader to arise again, and switched to an oligarchic model. But Xi was able to break that system and once again you have a sort of cult of personality with One Dear Leader at the top, although we have to admit that Xi is a lot saner than Mao ever was. But the…

> worship of a single person, personal loyalty triumphing over competence, and the Chinese economic machine, subject to whims of a single person, seems to be slowing down.

The whole world is swinging in that direction. its not like the US is any better in that respect in our current political climate.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#60

Post by kuerbel »

lukan wrote: post #41
swiftcoder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is not lack of experiments the problem is lack of political will to implemented known good solutions. Indeed. We have extensive and widely repeated evidence that walkable streets, cheap mass transit, free healthcare, decriminalisation of drugs, and a 4-day workweek are all strict improvements over our current societies. And yet somehow all of those are viewed as radical reforms.

I like all of that, but is there really a scientific consensus about those things? I don't think so. Most seems to be disputed.

Hmm what do you mean by disputed?

There is mixed but often promising evidence depending on context. For example there is quite a bit of urban planning evidence that shows that walkable environments improve physical activity and health outcomes and other outcomes. And so on for the other topics.

It’s also worth noting that current systems are not the result of a unified scientific optimization process. So even incremental changes that are supported by good evidence seem worth seriously exploring.

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