Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: How to think Page 18 of 22

Life is a Toy, Not a Game

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On July 31, 2014

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In game development there is a distinction between toys and games.   A ball is a toy. Soccer is game.  You can do many things with a ball, which are fun, which are not games. It is when you add rules and the ability to win or lose, that a toy becomes a game.

Really life is whatever you want it to be that you can manage to create, while not dying.  Dying is not a loss state if you’re treating your life as a toy, it’s just the end of being able play with life, your toy.  Same thing if you puncture your ball such that it won’t work as a ball any more.

So with toys there are end-states, like death or even just deciding to stop playing, but there are no win states which are externally imposed or socially agreed on.  In soccer we know how we can use the ball (don’t touch it with your hands); how goals are scored, how many people plays, how you win.

If you’ve played it, think SimCity – the city simulator.  There are no win conditions.  If you want to create a huge slum filled metropolis, great.  A small utopian community with great public transit?  Great.  SimCity has no rules, it only has world simulation physics.  These physics don’t match the real world, they are an approximation and a theory, and they limit how you play, but they don’t make SimCity a game: it’s a toy, you decide what sort of city you want.  You can create your own win situation “when I create a city of 5 millions with an average income of over 50K”, but that’s not imposed by the program.  With a ball you can decide you “win” when you can reliably make free shots four times out of five.  But ultimately win conditions in a toy are arbitrary: a matter of personal choice.

Who wins life?  If  you die with the most power or money, did you win?  If you did the most good, do you win?  If you enjoyed yourself the most?  Made great art?  Raised great kids?  Went fishing as often as you wanted?

Life has its own physics, of course, you can’t fly without external aid, for example.  Objects have gravity.  Our bodies impose both abilities and limitations on us, including massive mental limitations most people are only dimly aware of.  Our senses order the play field in a way very similar to cameras in computer games.  The world you see, and smell, is very different from the world your dog sees and smells; let alone the world a bat, with echolocation, inhabits.

Humans set up games all the time.  Capitalism is a game with rules, and coercive penalties for breaking them.  Democracy is, as well.  Hang up a shingle as a doctor without getting society’s approval first and see how long it is before the cops pay you a visit.

Different societies love different games.  Much of Dark Ages and Medieval Europe loved the faith game: the people they idealized were the truly pious, especially the renunciates who kept their vows, like friars and hermits and the occasional strict monastery (they tended to prefer giving gifts to nunneries, nuns being regarded as less likely be engaged in constant drunkenness and debauchery).

For much of Chinese history much of the big game was the examination game: how well you wrote tests based on your knowledge of classic writings and their commentary.

Each game favors are certain type of person: the men and women who rise to the top of the capitalism game have almost no qualities in common with those who rise to the top of the renunciate game, and almost nothing in common with the scholar-bureaucrats who ran the Chinese empire so often.  Different qualities and different development were rewarded.

None of this alters the fact that life is a toy, like a ball or SimCity. You can add rules to it, and enforce those rules with sanctions, but ultimately each person decides their own win conditions.  One of the decisions is whether to play one of the approved games, of course, and many people don’t realize they can opt out of much of those games.

A society’s level of coercion is easily measured when thought of in these terms: how hard is it to opt out of the socially mandated games; or at least how onerous are the requirements of those games?  Will you die?  Go hungry?  Just not get as much approval? How many different games are there, and how easy is it to move between them, so that you can find a way of playing with your toy that isn’t obnoxious to you, and is at least somewhat socially approved.  It’s hard, today, for example, to be a monastic or a hermit; society in the West isn’t set up for it: people won’t feed you.  In Thailand, on the other hand, it’s pretty easy.  People not involved in the monastic or hermit life think those lives are valuable and are willing to support them.

You’re probably thinking “monasticism and hermitting produces nothing”.  First, it’s not true: it produces truths, and temples and teachers and teachings which non-monastics value.  But even if true, it would be irrelevant: the choice of what games societies support is largely non-rational, and based on esthetic, moral and ethical choices, along with pure power considerations.  Bankers in the Western world were a net negative through 00s but they had the power and were valued deeply enough by certain parts of society that they were bailed out for a cost of trillions.  Suburbs are economically unproductive, pure consumption to a degree that shames monastics and hermits, yet US society is largely set up as a giant subsidy for the suburban lifestyle, because Americans value having a house with a yard away from a lot of other people, surrounded by a bunch of other houses very similar to theirs inhabited by people very much like them, generally far from any productive activity.

That’s an esthetic choice: it’s a choice about what the good life is, “the good life is living in suburbs, therefore we will subsidize suburbs massively, because that’s how we want to live”.

That subsidy is a direct drain on all the people who look at suburbs and hate them, and don’t want to live in them.  Living in suburbs requires economic relationships, embedded in law and custom, which are coercive and unequal.

“You win if you buy a big house in the suburbs, have 2 cars and 2 kids and die comfortably”.

That’s a game statement.

Now some people have probably been offended by me calling life a toy, because we think of toys as trivial and disposable and we like to think that lives aren’t, even though we certainly very often act as if other people’s lives are disposable.  But the word communicates that life is something you decide what you’re going to do with.  Life always ends: there are no immortals—so what enjoyment or satisfaction are you going to get out of your toy before you no longer are able to play with it?

And, perhaps, what sort of society do you want to live in, so that you can get the most out of that toy?  And do you care if others are able to use their toys as they want, or not?

There’s no bedrock here, there’s no ultimate source of authority.  Unless you believe in God, there is no system of reason which can logically prove that we should be kind or cruel, want money or not want it, be hermits or epicures; or anything else.

So, what are you going to do with your life, your toy, and how are you going to help, or hinder, others in their enjoyment of their toy?

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Matters of Character

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On June 19, 2014

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Over the past year I’ve written a large number of pieces on ideology, and quite a few have been about character: how it is created by experience, and how specific types of character (like sociopathy) are selected for amongst our leadership classes.

Let’s parse this out:

1) Character (personality), determines how people act.

2) While part of character is clearly genetic, much of it forms out of our experiences. Different experiences create different types of character. As a simple thought exercise, you would be a very different person if you had been born five hundred years ago in, say, Central Africa, than you are today.

3) As children, our primary experience is of school. We are a very schooled society, with the upper classes starting school at age 5 or so, and continuing into their mid twenties. Twenty years of schooling is not uncommon.  Fifteen to sixteen is completely normal.

4) This schooling takes place when we are forming much of our character, when we are most susceptible to having our character changed.

5) In addition to this, we are influenced by media of various kinds (including books), our parents, and our peer group.

6) Different time periods form different characters, as do different nations, because people born in those times and places have different experiences. The more synchronized events are, as Newberry has noted, the stronger this is.  In a mass media society, with relatively fast technological and social change, it makes sense to speak of generations. The character of people born 20 or 30 years apart in modern societies will be different, and within cohorts similar experiences will tend to create somewhat similar patterns of character.

7) Society is nothing except people and their creations and interactions over time. Walk around an old neighbourhood one day, and look at the buildings, the road, the trees and think about all the people who made everything you see, and all the people behind those people. Read the laws, and know that people made those, and enforce those.

8 ) Because society is just people, past and present, the nature of society is formed by our character.

9) If we want a different society, we must deal with matters of character.

10) Because we should be leery of engaging in eugenics, for reasons which should be obvious, changing society involves changing character through changing our lived experiences.

11) Everyone’s character matters, but some people’s character matters more than others. The more power someone has, whether that power comes from political position, charisma, force, or money, the more their character matters.

12) Leaders inform the character of people. People tend to act up, or down, to their leadership.

13) Money is permission. The more money you have, the more you get to decide what other people do. This can be directly through hiring them, or indirectly by buying the products of other people’s time. As the market society has spread to more and more of our lives, what we do is what gets paid for.

14) Who we give money to, and be clear that what banks, government and financial institutions do is decide who gets money, and what they get to spend it on, determines much of the lived experience of adults, and indeed of children outside school, and with the rise of for-profit schooling, inside school.

15) Money positions are of three main types. Elected (taxes); officers (CEOs and so on who control a lot of money that isn’t theirs); actually rich (the money is their own).

16) In all three cases who gets that money is a social choice. Billionaires are a social choice, created by government policy including tax policy, and the entire structure of how profits are booked. Multi-millionaire CEOs are a social choice, created by tax and other laws as well as social norms. And politicians are a social choice, especially in a democracy, but even in autocracies, though in such societies few people’s active and passive consent is needed.

17) If we select for positions of power, whether monetary, political, or charismatic, people whose character is such that they do not insist on good outcomes for the majority of people, then those outcomes will occur only by chance, if the happenstance of technology and environment aligns in what amounts to random fashion. Having not been planned, having not been understood, any such prosperity and freedom will not last.

18) If society is just us, and is a matter of our character combined with environment and technology, then we must consciously choose what we want our character to be. If we look at how we raise children and see that it is not creating the sort of people required for a happy, free, healthy, and prosperous society, then we need to change how we rear children. This is a social decision, not an individual one: we can choose a different type of learning (not necessarily schooling), we can choose a different type of media, we can choose to encourage different types of parenting (parenting styles have changed massively over the last 100 years, more than once).

19) We can also change how we select our leaders, both political and economic, to whom we give money, and for what purpose. We already do: Who makes money is a social choice, embedded in our tax code, laws (like “IP”), and monetary system. We can make other choices and create a system where people make money because they do good, not because they do evil (see “bankers”).

20) We can change our adult experience of the world, and when we change how goods and services are distributed (note that I did not use the word “money”), we will change our experience of the world, and in so doing we will change our character.

21) We can do so even if our current character is flawed. The politicians who ended Jim Crow were themselves mostly racists. They were racists who knew that racism was wrong. It is possible to look at one’s own character and know that it is simply a product of experience: to say “I am racist and sexist but I still know that is wrong.” It is possible to be involved in corruption (Kennedy Sr., the first SEC chairman) and decide to help clean it up, to end it. It is possible to have all the accoutrements of privilege (FDR) and turn around and change society mostly for the better.

We are all products of our time and place. We are all products of our parents and our experiences; millions of small events which shaped our character, for good, for ill, for kicks.

All of us (except maybe a few enlightened sages).

The full realization of how shaped we are is one of the watersheds of any voyage worth having. If you cannot look at yourself, and see how shaped you were, then you are trapped by those experiences, an even more limited and finite being than  you need to be.

Once, however, you see the shaping, feel it, know it, and acknowledge it, then you are not free, but you have the potential to be more free, to change what you are and who you are, both individually, and as a group.

Character matters. It is destiny. Change your character, change your destiny. Change the character of nations; change their destiny.

Change the character of humanity; change our destiny.

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Choice vs. Predestination

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On May 20, 2014

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1) There is no one who can be blamed or credited for the situation humanity finds itself in, for good or bad, except humanity and nature.  If you don’t like the way the world is you can either rail against nature (our biology, limited resources, etc…) or you can rail against ourselves—what we have done with the hand nature dealt us.  (You could also blame God or Gods, but this amounts to blaming nature.)

Humans are responsible for human society

2) Some humans are more responsible than others.  Duh.  Nonetheless, as a group, we are responsible.  If the 99% rose up against the 1% tomorrow, it’d be over for the 1%.

Some Humans bear more responsibility than others.

3) Unless you posit a universe without free will (an entirely intellectually respectable position), you must allow human agency.  Technology changes the optimal strategies, but within each technological framework there are kinder and less kind options.  Looking through the vast varieties of agricultural societies, one would have far rather been alive in early Tang China or certain long stretches of Roman history, even as a member of the lower classes, than in Early Norman England.

Technology and Nature Constrict our options and set up incentives.

We choose how we respond to the incentives created by technology and nature.

4) Humans are neither innately hierarchical, nor innately egalitarian.  They can be either.  For most of human existence, the best evidence is that we lived in very egalitarian societies.  For most of agricultural history, we lived in non-egalitarian societies, with a few exceptions: but those exceptions existed.

5) Character is created by circumstances, and circumstances constrict what character types are successful but we have a great deal of control over circumstances, especially those who are most powerful.  The men and a very few women who voted to get rid of Jim Crow were almost certainly mostly racist themselves: it was virtually impossible to grow up in that society and time and not be racist.  They voted against their own racism.  You can look at your own character, find it lacking, and act in ways that are contrary to it.  I may want to beat someone to a pulp for an insult and figure I can, yet decide not to do so.  We could have decided to allow developing states to keep their agricultural sectors and food subsidies, we chose not to, for what amount to trivial gains in money which are offset by larger losses in markets in the not very long run (poor people, as has been observed, are shitty customers.)

We Can Act Good Even if Not Good.

We can change the circumstances people grow up, changing the character of the people.

The argument of free will versus pre-determination is ever-ongoing.  To deny the effect of circumstances is to be inhumane: to be the type of fool who blames poor blacks for being poor blacks and not pulling themselves, en-masse, out of poverty thru sheer willpower.  It is to blame Bangladeshis for being born in Bangladesh, stupid people for being born stupid or getting inadequte nutrition as children; many psychotic adults for being sexually assaulted as children.

There are injuries and circumstances which most of us will never rise above.

But to assume predestination is all is to deny any hope of improvement that is not determined by what amounts to blind fate: it is to deny human agency.  It is to say that if we invent a weapon (like effective ground combat robots – about 10 years out) which tilts the playing field towards a small elite oligarchy (or does it?) then there is nothing we can do about it.  It is to say that because monopolies and oligopolies naturally form, there is nothing we can do.  It is to say that we can’t choose to create the circumstances in which racism, neo-imperialism, and sexism don’t harm billions.

If most of us assume predestination, assume, in effect, that we can’t make things better, then it is a self-fulfilling prophecy for those people.

Either we are responsible, or we aren’t.  If we aren’t, then we admit, in effect, the impossibility of any change which wasn’t already predetermined; wasn’t already going to happen.

In some ways that’s a comforting world to live in. It allows us to say “not my problem” and go about our lives–building our McMansion, trying to snag the Homecoming King or Queen as our mate; doting on our children, and ignoring the world beyond the reach of our arms.

The choice, really, belongs to each of us.  As the years go by, more and more I am inclined to shrug.  People complain, but are unwilling to do what it takes to live in a different world, a kinder world.  That might be predestination, that might be choice, but either way it is what it is.

The rule for living in a better world is simple enough, and virtually every sage has told us what it is: to love others as we love ourselves, or at least act like it even if we don’t.

We might start by feeding the hungry, since we throw away far more than enough food to do so, and then go on to house the homeless, since we have more empty homes than homeless people.  But you know, and I know, that we won’t do either of those things.

Predestination?  Choice?  Some of both?

It doesn’t matter to the people who are starving and dying of exposure; it doesn’t matter to the men and women being systematically raped in the Congo; it doesn’t matter to all the children in Iraq being born with birth defects due to American weapons, nor to their despairing parents.

Predestination?  Choice?

Shit either way.

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Doing Well by Doing Good

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On May 16, 2014

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A simple formulation of how to create good society is summarized as “doing well, by doing good.”

When someone gets money for doing something, it sends a message: do more of this.

This is the fundamental money feedback loop. If  your feedback loop is telling people to do things that are bad, rather than good, the world will get progressively worse.

If you want a better world, you’d best be making sure that the people being told “do more of this” and the people being told “do something new” are being told “do good”.

It’s really that simple (and that complex.)

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Human Nature for Ideology

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On May 7, 2014

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All ideologies, including all economic ideologies like the modern discipline of economics, are theories of human nature in drag. If you believe that humans are innately selfish and greedy, for example, you will believe that monetary incentives are the best way to allocate resources and permission to do things in an economy. If you want more of something, you’ll arrange for people who do it to have more money.

If you believe that greed leads to the best outcomes, that the invisible hand takes selfishness and turns it into public good, then  you will argue that most of what people do because of greed is good, and should not be disallowed, but, indeed, encouraged.

To a remarkable extent, this is how we run out economic affairs, and it is not an ideology that most of humanity, for most of history, would have agreed with. Even if they thought that humans were greedy and selfish, they would have thought that greed and selfishness should be restrained, not rewarded.

Human nature is tricky to discuss because the specifics of human nature are remarkably twisty. All humans don’t want almost anything: to live, to procreate, to be rich, to be admired, even to be safe. Whatever you think all humans want, all humans don’t.

You can fall back on “the vast majority of humans,” and use the standard trick of economics “as if”—humans aren’t all greedy, but you can act as if they are and your models will work.

But they won’t.  Humans aren’t rational, they aren’t utility seekers except in the most metaphysical of terms (because nobody can give a definition of utility which applies to everyone except “whatever people do/revealed preferences,” which isn’t a definition.)

Humans have a biology: We have bodies that are much alike, brains that are much alike, and if we wish to continue living, some needs that are much alike (food, water, and internal homeostasis.)

But humans are less defined by their biology than any other animal of which I am aware: We have culture, and our culture adapts and changes far faster than our biology does.

So, if you’re creating an ideology, you’ve got a problem; Humans are so plastic that anything you say about them will be wrong for some of them.

The solution, first, is to make this part of your definition of human nature.

Most humans are malleable. Change the circumstances in which people live, change the way they are raised, change their education, change their technology, change the means of production and what people believe and how they act will change. We become what we do and what we believe and we interpret everyday activity through a lens of belief, language, and ideology.

Humans are neither good nor bad, ethical nor unethical, moral nor immoral. They are, instead, easily led. Peer groups and authority figures can get humans to do almost anything: rape, mass-murder, torture. Feed the hungry, heal the wounded, work together to build great projects of which no small group could even conceive.

Humans have drives. Humans want to eat, to have sex, to belong, to feel safe, to be respected, to have meaning in their lives, and so on. But there are many many different ways to feed oneself, feel safe, get sex, and be respected. The Maslovian hierarchy is a good guide to people’s drives.  But—

Not everyone has the same drives to the same extent. Some will starve or die for honor. Others will die rather than kill. Some will dedicate their lives to saving other humans or even non-humans. The Maslovian hierarchy is not a hierarchy for individuals, only for large numbers of people. People will go without food to self-actualize, for example, as the many ascetic traditions of the world should attest.

A few people are rigid. There are some people who you can’t get to torture, no matter what. There are some people who will never kill; and so on. There are people whose moral codes are so strong they cannot be coerced into breaking them. Even those people are products of their culture, but once set, they are stone.

Kindness is as innate as cruelty. Empathy is a function of the brain. When we say “I feel your pain,” we are talking literally, as mirror neurons dance the same dance as the person suffering. Humans have died trying to save drowning animals, other humans they don’t know, and so on. We see someone suffering, and if we’re neurotypical, that suffering hurts us.

Cruelty is innate, too. Some people really get off on cruelty, on hurting other people. As with the rigid moralists, there is a core of people who are like this pretty much no matter what, but in most people it is a question of circumstance and conditioning; treat someone cruelly and they will become cruel. Virtually every abuser was abused. Those to whom evil is done, do it to someone else entirely.

Humans are band-based: We are wired to live in bands of about 150 people. Those people are the people we are likely to treat well, whose concerns concern us. While we may be kind to those outside the band, we are far more likely not to be, and the first job of any leader who wants war and cruelty to the outsider is to convince the band “they aren’t like us.”

We can expand the band: Ideology of various types can expand the band. All Christians are brothers, all members of the same nation; all sports fans of the same team, all people who believe in Democracy, Human Rights, or Communism. Everyone who has the same totem animal. We expand the bonds of the band outwards: “This person is like me and deserves my help and sympathy”.

Humans are malleable, twisty, and strange, wildly adaptable, and able to believe almost anything. That malleability has often been a matter of despair, and we have lamented how easy it is for leaders to take us to war and to convince us to commit atrocities.

But it is also a matter for hope: We can change, and just as cruelty begets cruelty, so kindness begets kindness.  Both are self-reinforcing cycles, and in that lies hope. As easy as it is to lead most of us to evil, so too most of us can come to do good. Expand the band, create a universalist ideology which rests in kindness, and an allowance for multiple paths to the same end, and human nature can just as easily work for us as against us.

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The problems of social sciences

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On April 21, 2014

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Are far harder problems than most of the problems of the hard sciences.  Why people do what they do, under what circumstances is a problem of vast complexity, and we don’t have the necessary models.  The models we do have (such as evolotunary psychology, and our abysmal knowledge of neuroscience), while powerful, are incomplete, and overly simplistic at capturing emergent behaviour, especially in groups, let alone the effect of culture.

That’s not to say we don’t know a lot, I’m hardly a great expert and I could teach many years worth of courses just with what I know, but we do not have the level of predictability the hard sciences have.  It also hard to falsify social science due to problems setting up the experiments, and when you use real world data, it’s hard to isolate variables.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that social sciences — and many humanities, are ideological enterprises which have an effect on the real world distribution of goods: who gets what.  They are used to justify distribution of goods: of the things people want.  When “hard” sciences, like biology, are used in this way, they too cross over into the ideological social science bucket and generally cease to be hard sciences.

This is because the “ought” is, so far, impossible to separate out of the humanities and social sciences. Ethics and morality are always lurking, and efforts like Skinnerian behaviouralism have all, so far, failed.  Humans are cussed, and complex, and reductionism only works in the most broad based and caveated sense, again, largely because of the effect of culture.  Say that all people are greedy, or selfish, or kind, or altruistic, or driven to pass on their genes, and the cultural anthropologist, or the pyschologist, will find you exceptions.  Humans biology imposes drives on humans, but the ways in which we satisfy those drives, or subliminate them, or even fight and deny them, is, if not infinite in theoretical terms, then infinite in practical ones.

All of this makes the problems of the social sciences vastly difficult, and far less progress has been made than most think.  Even neuroscience, which is not a social science, has teased out only a few mechanisms and has little understanding of how they mesh together.  In practical macro-terms, when dealing with problems of social organization that are province of sociology, economics, political science and mass psychology, we are not much more wise than the Ancient Greeks, and on certain issues, perhaps less so.

One should be wary of the experts.  It was not so long ago that pyschiatrists were mass lobotomizing people and treating them for homosexuality.  It is today that they are vastly overprescribing psychoactive prescription drugs to young children (and everyone else, especially upper middle class women.)  Following neo-liberal economists prescriptions has led to 40 years of stagnation, a financial crisis and a long depression for the developed world (yes, that’s what we’re in.)

The social sciences are still in the dark ages.  As with medicine in the dark ages, occasionally a gifted, wise or brilliant practitioner (usually applying souped up folk medicine) could do more good than harm.  You must look, carefully, at each individual social scientist, and decide if you trust him or her, because the degree and the discipline means little.  It is how the practitioner combines  the knowledge that matters, the knowledge is not currently in reliable, formulaic form, nor is there even a reliable method for creating formulas in the most cases (case studies and regression statistics have utility, but it is limited.)

So, ye who would enter the social sciences: know that you will be responsible for making it work, it doesn’t work as it’s given to  you.

And you who would consume it, be even more wary, for this is the dark age of social science, in which we pretend it is science, when it is still art.

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You want a good internet economy with lots of jobs? Here’s How.

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On April 18, 2014

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I’ve been blogging for a long time, and I was managing editor of both the Agonist, and FDL.  While at both jobs, advertising income wasn’t my responsibility, except indirectly (I was responsible for traffic), I kept an oar in and an eye out.

Here’s the deal: advertising revenue collapsed.  In particular it collapsed in 2007/8, and it kept collapsing.  The reason it collapsed is that in the old days you sold your ads direct, or through brokers who offered good deals.  As time went by, however, the percentage offered dropped and dropped and dropped.  The brokers consolidated, and one broker took the lion’s share of the market: Google.

The reasons are simple enough: Google can offer the widest portfolio of websites to advertise on, and for all but the best branded websites, it determines more traffic than any single other factor.  For people with no brand, it determines almost all the traffic.

Google takes the value because Google takes the value of websites: content creators don’t matter for squat because without Google they don’t get read, or watched.  Oh, there are some exceptions, websites with a large enough community to provide their own traffic and push (Facebook, YouTube, etc…), but for the long tail and even the lower part of the fat end, Google is it.

I bring this up because of the extraordinary open letter from a German publisher about Google. 

“We are afraid of Google,” Dopfner wrote. “I must say this so clearly and honestly since scarcely one of my colleagues dares to do this publicly. And as the biggest of the small fry, we must perhaps be the first to speak plainly in this debate.

“The discussion about Google’s power is not a conspiracy theory propagated by people mired in yesteryear,” he added, noting that Springer is making a big digital play and now reaps 62 percent of its profits from digital business.

—

Attacking what Schmidt had characterized as Google’s willingness to compromise with the European Commission over a 4-year-old complaint about its practices, Dopfner declared: “This is not a compromise. This is the introduction, sanctioned by an E.U. authority, of that kind of business practice which in less honorable circles is called extortion.”

Google is remarkably similar in important ways to Walmart.  If it doesn’t carry your goods, or sticks them in a lousy place on the shelves, you aren’t going to sell much.  The information problem in economics has absolutely not been solved, people cannot find what they would actually want to read or buy, but only what a few key companies show them (see Apple’s App Store for another example, or Steam, both of which take 30% in exchange for giving people a lottery ticket to make some money.)

This is pure rent-seeking, pure skimming off of other people’s work, and while it makes a few companies obscenely profitable (Apple doesn’t even know what to do with all the money it’s sitting on) it destroys businesses. If you have to pay 30% to someone simply as the price of getting your product before consumers in theory (often not in practice), a lot of businesses simply become unviable, and the jobs at Apple or Facebook or Google do not make up for all the jobs they kill.  If Google doesn’t serve your website in the first few pages, it’s not going to be read.  You will make a deal with Google (if you’re big enough for them to care) and you will create your content to pander to Google’s preferences as embodied by their algorithms, or you won’t get traffic, and even if you do get traffic, well your ads don’t pay squat, because Google takes almost all the profit.

Companies like Google, the key App stores, Walmart and so on must be heavily regulated, and the amount of commission they can take must be fixed by law.  If it isn’t, well, you get to read all sorts of articles wondering where the tech jobs are, asking why Instagram has so few employees, while Kodak had tons.  The reason is that tons of people are providing value to Instagram, or Google, or Apple, or Facebook, and they either aren’t getting paid, or are getting peanuts: they create content, that content has value, but because someone stands between them and the people who pay, they aren’t rewarded for the value they create.

You want a good economy again?  You want an internet economy that lives up to the early hype and which provides even more jobs than the old economy?  Break or regulate Google, Apple, Facebook and all the other gatekeepers, scrapers and information brokers.

(Oh, and reduce patents to only a few years, and enforce mandatory licensing, and a million (ok hundreds) of cell phone companies will blossom, driving smartphone prices down to a tenth of what they are today, or more.  It’s called a competitive market, and it doesn’t work in a strict protected works world.)

You can have an economy that works, or you can have a few oligopolist companies which make obscene profits and create oligarchs: your choice.

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Democracy and Size? Can a populous democracy work?

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On April 15, 2014

Comments

I, and others, have noted a number of times that the only nation which handled the financial crisis correctly was Iceland: they bailed out ordinary people, let the banks go bankrupt, and jailed bankers who had broken the law.

The only one.

Iceland’s population is tiny, but it isn’t size, exactly, that matters, what matters is that politicians and bankers can’t live in a bubble in Iceland.

You live in a bubble when you don’t have to deal with ordinary people: you take a helicopter everywhere; fly on a private jet, your kids go to private school, you stay in hotels ordinary people can’t afford, and you live in enclaves far away from the hoi polloi. You are surrounded at all times by people who work for you or someone who is dependent on you: your daily interaction is with other people like you, or with retainers.

Iceland is too small for the bubble to work.  Politicians in Iceland could not avoid the Icelanders they would have been impoverishing if they bailed out bankers, and let ordinary people go bankrupt.  The people who taught their kids, prepared their food, whom they say on the street every day would be people they had fucked over.  Their lives would be living hell, even without violence (Iceland being a very peaceful society), they would have been social pariahs.  Everyone knew them, and given the population size, would recognize them, and in that small a country, would probably eventually see them and be able to treat them as they deserved.

Now in Iceland’s case this is related to population size, but in larger countries it is related to the absolute rule for prosperous and egalitarian societies: elites must not be able to opt out of their own society.  They must go to the same schools, eat the same food, travel on the same planes, buses and roads, and so on.  If the economy does badly, they too much suffer.

Under no circumstances, in a democratic society which wishes to not turn into an oligarchy, can a bubble be allowed to form.  Under no circumstances can elites be allowed to prosper if the rest of the population is not.

This does not guarantee a wonderful society: if the mass of the population are bigots or racists or unpleasant, that will be reflected in public policies and government.  The government will be no better than the people, but it won’t be a lot worse, either.

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