Comment by martin-t
11 hours ago
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.
Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right.
No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in.
Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.
Land value tax would be a good addition to the Japanese model. Raise the tax high enough, land prices are zero, leaving behind only the value of the home. Homes, like cars, will naturally depreciate in value. No weird artificial depreciation of houses needed.
You can still have investment in real estate, but it will be a competitive market. You can't sit on land and let it appreciate without putting in the work, because appreciation of land means higher taxes.
Japan also has less social mobility - it’s a great country but it’s no paradise.
Homes get torn down all the time because they aren’t worth anything - not exactly environmentally friendly.
Even in America today you have plenty of things worth investing in that don’t have to be homes if you can’t stomach the initial investment. Idk what you envision about replacing investment in homes with “research” though certainly curious to learn more about what you envision.
Japan has relatively cheaper real estate because of their lax zoning laws and frequent earthquakes drive the long term value of construction down. Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate.
It dosen't really have anything to do with what you are saying because the Nikkei underperformed relative to FTSE or S&P 500.
Better laws/incentives could still pull people out of the housing market.
>Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate.
Isn't this because most of Asia has just copied the western capitalist housing asset monetisation scheme with Japan being the only exception?
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I think if freedom is a desired trait then your system cannot (will not) be entirely dictated by any design.
> optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
You are confusing narrative, a positive spin with actual rules of the system. In political system they are never the same.
Freedom, equal opportunity etc are not objectives of our political system, they are just the narrative.
I don't think we can. I think video game worlds (especially MMOs) have somewhat similar structures appear, where there's a portion of people that seem to become rich.
Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "expert" in any given field to spread propaganda favourable to them.
The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.
One day society will collapse and in the chaos people will come together to create a new constitution. The people who find themselves in a position to write that constitution will not have time to read up on psychology and systemantics and cryptography and voting theory and AI, etc, etc. There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
Has anyone tried to write a constitution based on all this? Not with the expectation that it will actually be used, but as a way to teach these important theories and give a good example of how they can be applied to law?
Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.
> There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
I'm not certain.
Both the US Constitution and the first French Constitution, for instance, were the produce of one century of thinking ideas through. Each successive French Constitution has been redesigned to avoid the problems that led to the fall of the previous one.
I'm less familiar with other examples.
Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.
File this under Lies Engineers Believe About Political Science.
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Are stump speeches not propaganda? I don't see why the election system should privilege candidates whose political views are most compellingly expressed in quick little text blurbs.
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I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants are the cause of all our issues and the media will be full of crimes by illegal immigrants, etc.
Being able to give a good speech is merit when the goal is to select a leader.
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> Banning campaigning would go a long way.
With tongue in cheek, that qualifies you as the "people like Stalin" category. Not a good idea.
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The problem is that whatever system we come up with in theory, will have to be built in practice out of people, and there is never any shortage of people who will happily abuse the system and fellow people out of greed or delusion. That's why an AI overlord arising and taking over is not a threat, it's our only hope /s
> 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 useful, from a (leftist) video essay:
> See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...]
> Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of the things we do in our day-to-day lives can be justified by either one, we don't often notice the contradiction between them, and it's easy to imagine whichever one tends to be our default is everyone else's default as well. [...]
> Your conservative friend thinks you're naive for thinking the system even can be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation [...] Many conservatives assume liberals [...] know The Hierarchy is eternal, that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them. [...]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs
> > that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them.
They're right... when the other is someone like them.
And they have a blind spot for an other who is not like them.
Meanwhile, what is the blind spot of the people who are not like that (i.e., who believe in equality)?
Is their blind spot that they can't imagine so many people who are trying to gain advantage, and being deceitful about it?
This analysis is highly muddled. "making things equal" != democracy. Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies. The concepts of democracy and capitalism have a far greater reach than the current US political climate where both are malfunctioning. The US is a superpower attempting to become a third world country and corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.
There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should not have it comes to have it. This is what every system so far has succumbed to. We need a truly equal system where all concentration of power is avoided unless absolutely necessary for the functioning of society to avoid an eventual collapse of the system.
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> Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies.
No, Capitalism can only reinforce hierarchies. Its core tenet is accumulation of capital, and thus power.
> corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.
Corruption is what happens when the capitalist class gets powerful enough to bend the rules. Incompetence is what happens when they figure out they can put a puppet in place and order him to bend the rules faster for them.
>that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them
That's true even in the most leftist and forcefully egalitarian regimes like communism. There are a few taking the ultimate decisions and there are some that benefit.
Our current regime lies through their teeth daily. Like obvious, completely made up lies. Every. Day. It's not a misunderstanding. One side is pushing for authoritarianism, one is not. One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence. I'm so fuckin tired of pretending there is just some kind of misunderstanding between both "sides".
No, the video makes the point that it's not really a misunderstanding, there are fundamentally different values in tension. If you believe in and value hierarchy then authoritarianism is natural and desirable, the lies are just for assuaging your less committed or more sensitive allies and befuddling your enemies.
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>One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence.
Violence like shooting political opponents for voicing their opinions?
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I don't think those at the top of the social hierarchy would condone the 'better system'.
We can at the very least tweak existing systems to be meaningfully better.
For example we could phase out all marketing and advertising. We could simplify and automate accounting and many other jobs. We could reduce the work week to 30 hours. We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job. Make moving down on a career ladder or switching careers entirely a common and non-humiliating occurrence, etc.
The most pertinent question to ask is - why haven't any of these already happened? What kinds of people prevent these changes from occurring and what should be done about it? Do you know any of these people - are some of them your family members. Are you one of them? Why does no one seem to ask these questions and seek answers? :)
> We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job.
Most of your comment I agree with but I take issue with this part.
Some time in recent history education became a means to an end: getting a decent job. This is not strictly speaking the point. Learning for the sake of learning still has tangible value that cannot be substituted by requisite training for entry level jobs.
I'm not really sure what caused this shift (but I definitely understand and respect it) but it's heavily misguided. If only we could all be so lucky as to be highly educated in a mundane job.
I don't want to live in a world where we only learn what we need to know in order to do our job. Do you?
The kinds of jobs I imagine would leave people with far more energy and time to do whatever they want - including learning, or not learning :)
>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.
That would work in MMO games,not in reality. If the system is not naturally evolving, it will produce tragedies. Look at communism. It was supposed to produce "a better" society but resulted in tens of millions of deaths, loss of freedom and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.