Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters This is exactly the key core distinction. The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors. It’s imperative, therefore, that it be democratic and representative. Notably, part of the instinct to break up other large organizations is to prevent them f…
In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations? Or is that the worse of 2 evils? The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth, influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporatio…
Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
511–520 of 592 posts
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but who decides how those resources are deployed The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate. > We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massi…
"Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your description. The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the political power to do more of the same.
I never claimed it was a perfect system and I am more than willing to admit rent extraction, scams, and monopoly power are massive issues with capitalism. It still hasn't been shown that replacing that with government is better.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your description. The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the political power to do more of the same.
It is classic circular reasoning. Why should they have all money? Well because they are the best ones at allocating the resources. How do we know they are best at allocating resources? Because they have all the money.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
The state holds the guns, and if it doesn't hold the guns, it's not the thing I'm referring to as the state - fundamentally, the power of the state is the power of violence. Other actors may possess other types of power and other types of coercion, but those either leverage or are constrained by the state power of violence.
The democratic state is less violent than the individuals as a whole (including the police), so the distinction comes from actual vs potential violence.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year The fact that schools can go "out of business" is incredible. The more I get in contact with everything American, the more left I lean.
Preschool is just daycare with structure, so it costs more. Optional, privately owned. Nice to do 2-3 days a week for young kids to give them more social and learning opportunites. But it’s not public school, it’s usually just a small locally owned business.
My wife served as treasurer for the penultimate year, saw the writing on the wall, and then turned the position over to someone else to actually wind down the school. The model just doesn't work where we live: it requires a large number of single-income families so that one parent can be full-time involved in the kids' upbringing, and housing prices are such that single-income families cannot afford homes in the area. As a result, their market just evaporated. People just can't do it anymore.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is classic circular reasoning. Why should they have all money? Well because they are the best ones at allocating the resources. How do we know they are best at allocating resources? Because they have all the money.
This is a lazy strawman.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d imagine the death of volunteering and civic life has a lot to do with two income households becoming the default. A family that works forty or fifty hours a week has a lot more time to give than one that works eighty to one hundred (don’t forget commuting!)
Additionally, children are expected and virtually required to be supervised 24/7 for the first 14-ish years. Kicking kids out to play like Just William while Mrs Brown goes to the Women's Institute all afternoon is now called neglect and child abuse.
There's cars everywhere, cities are optimised for them. There's nowhere to kick the kids out to play without the risk of them being run over by a car.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#518Tribe is a fantastic book that goes into this, fundamentally most humans exist best when they have some form of status in their community. This could be as simple as a small community club where your assigned a role like treasurer or something, my grandmother did this when she was young. People actually know you and care about your problems . For various reasons, these groups just aren't as significant anymore. There…
There was an explosion of these little groups in the US after the 1st edition of Robert's Rules of Order was published, which incidentally was also heavily adopted by churches (and women's suffrage groups, who helped him with the Newly Revised.) I'd say this fulmination culminated in FDR and strong unions, aspects of both made illegal afterwards - term limits to limit democracy, striking made into a kabuki ritual by…
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#519Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended. Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory: * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local. * Banks cou…