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Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

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Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#511
post #273

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…

Overall national wealth and power shrink under monopoly super corporations, that is the reason it is a matter of public policy in the first place. If you go back and review the major antitrust actions of the 20th century, each one was followed by an explosion of market-creating innovation: Standard Oil, Bell Telephone, even Microsoft. Look even further back, and many national economies were organized around a few state-sponsored monopolies e.g. the East India Company. They all lost ground to economies with more numerous and competitive companies, most notably the U.S.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#512
post #184
post #156

Earlier 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.

> The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction

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

#513
post #184

Earlier 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.

This is a lazy strawman.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#514
post #490

Earlier 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.

I'm assuming you don't count holding people in cages against their will under pain of extreme violence as violence?

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#515

Earlier 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.

And this was a co-op preschool, which is a special variety of private preschool (usually non-profit) where the parents are usually involved in classes with the kids and much of the maintenance of the school itself is handled through volunteerism of member families.

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

#516
post #513

Earlier 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.

It's an accurate summary.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#517

Earlier 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.

> Kicking kids out to play

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

#518

Tribe 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…

Now do the right.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#519
post #21

Great 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…

Recently I realized that US are very close to a centrally planned economy. Meta wasted 50B on metaverse, which like how much Texas spends on healthcare. Now the "AI" investments seems dubious. You could fund 1000+ projects with this kinds of money. This is not an effective capital allocation.
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