“You’ll never hear the terms ‘principal-agent problem,’
‘rent-seeking,’ or ‘aligning incentives’ from socialists. That’s because
they expect ideology to solve all practical considerations of
governance.”
I literally never hear these arguments from the right either.
Practical considerations of governance are quickly hand-waved away
whenever they impede the interests of the conservative constituencies.
For example, single family zoning laws dominate 70 % of the land of
major American cities, but if you point out the detrimental impacts of
such laws on an agent-principal dimension, where mayors become wealth
managers to old homeowners rather than public servants, the right is
goes into “NANANANA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” mode immediately.
American local governance is full of agency cost issues: for example
local police is allowed to collect fines and other revenues and use them
to fund their own department and local government budgets. This is an
enormous window for corruption and graft, but such autonomy is sacred in
the conservative view of local government, so it cannot be
questioned.
Local governments are also caught up in a constant cycle of sprawl
(bringing in fee revenue from permits, which is lucrative but short
term) and then accruing massive amounts of debt caused by of all the
widespread infrastructure they have to maintain while not having enough
tax payers to make even.
Conservative politics stand in the way of both healthy urban growth
and appropriate taxation levels, leaving local governments strapped for
cash, and incapable of properly maintaining services and
infrastructure.
And guess what? Policing in the US is primarily a local service. This
means that when the inept, cash strapped local governments are doing
policing, they’re doing it badly. They suck at it just as they suck at
zoning. They underinvest in social workers and overspend on heavily
armed super-soldier cops. They take free shit— i.e. military equipment –
from the federal government with little regard for long term finances.
they ignore the huge maintenance costs that MRAPs have, just as they
ignore the long term costs of sprawl. Always short on cash, they hire
substandard cops to run their departments.
Socialists actually talk non stop about how the systematic incentives of capitalist systems constantly end up screwing people over. The motivation behind defunding the police is all about how the current structure of policing provides incentives for brutality.
probably the most common critique of socialist views I hear from non-computer-people is that socialist analyses of issues are TOO focused on material incentives and structures. of course, for the average the_motte incel to know this they'd have to actually read a book not written by a white supremacist
> And as for rent-seeking...Good Christ what do you think socialists are actively working against?!
No but you see, all of that isn't *really* rent-seeking, and is in fact good and healthy for the economy. The *bad* rent seeking is when uhhhh poor women have more kids to get more welfare money, which is definitely a real thing that happens all the time.
And so to solve this very realistic problem that really happens in reality, the best thing is to make life incredibly hard for single moms and poor parents in general. Without the incentive of a better life, they’ll just not work hard (which obviously any parent isn’t working very hard). Additionally there really isn’t any cost to under feeding and under educating an entire generation. We don’t know that IQ depends on access to calories when young, and we don’t know that early childhood education even does anything.
So with that out of the way, poor moms of the world, please enjoy these $50 a week food stamps for your family of 6, and don’t forget that comes with a 55 hour/week work requirement. It’s really for your benefit. After all we also don’t know that parents spending time with their children is important for their mental, social, and emotional development.
Socialism is literally the only major ideology based off a boring economics treatise, and who's original predictions keep coming true centuries later. You'd think they'd love this stuff.
I’m just imagining trying to write a history or social science book
using mistake theory:
Bread and Conflicts: How the Gracchi Misunderstood the
Aristocracy
The Great Mistake: The Error of Gavrilo Princip and World War I
The Wages of Erroneousness: How Whites Mistook Non-Whites for
Subhumans
My Mistake: A Biography of Adolf Hitler
Gaffes and Gulags: The Soviet Union Under Stalin
The Boston Blunder: A Reassessment of the American Revolution
Edit: Seems like the original thread is more jerking it to how
conflict theorists ruined everything and now we too must become conflict
theorists to stop the conflict theorists.
My youngest brother is 15 now and he has been bitching me out for 11 years
I’ve only recently gained an advantage: he’s hormonal, I’m lifelong bitter. My bitterness always wins the argument because he’s too frustrated to get in the finisher. He had to learn bitter frustration in puberty, I was *molded* by the bitterness, the pampered little shit.
I like the theory that he literally snapped late into the Revolution from the stress of management and from consistently having Cassandra syndrome for the first couple years of the movement.
He wanted to [abolish the death penalty](https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/%C5%92uvres_de_Robespierre/Sur_l%E2%80%99abolition_de_la_peine_de_mort) for fuck's sake, most of the deaths were ordered by Danton et al. anyway. He also abolished slavery and implemented radical economic reforms for the common people. Look into your heart, you know this guy is your friend.
These people's journey to rationalism started either in a YouTube comments section or a Harry Potter fanfiction. The top 3 or 4 percent of them will actually pick up some Kahneman or Dawes or other decision-making literature and of those half of them will leave the movement in embarrassment shortly after.
I’m about to faint with desire imagining a Sartre book review by Scott Alexander
>Thanks to comments on the racism subreddit with which I am absolutely not associated, I recently decided to finally get to grips with French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who apparently had a feminist wife or something I dunno. So I looked him up on the SEP (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, I know about this site because I’m smarter than you are), but it was awfully complicated and had references to weird things like “phenomenology”, which sounds dumb to a psychiatrist like me (did I tell you I’m trained as a psychiatrist yet?), and apparently he was influenced by Martin Heidegger (a poor imitation of a psychiatrist, apparently, and also a Nazi, neither of which am I). Anyway because I’m making lots of money on my day job so I bought the Very Short Introduction to Existentialism, and he sounds dumb and also apparently he was a Marxist so I wrote the whole thing off.
I literally never hear these arguments from the right either. Practical considerations of governance are quickly hand-waved away whenever they impede the interests of the conservative constituencies. For example, single family zoning laws dominate 70 % of the land of major American cities, but if you point out the detrimental impacts of such laws on an agent-principal dimension, where mayors become wealth managers to old homeowners rather than public servants, the right is goes into “NANANANA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” mode immediately.
American local governance is full of agency cost issues: for example local police is allowed to collect fines and other revenues and use them to fund their own department and local government budgets. This is an enormous window for corruption and graft, but such autonomy is sacred in the conservative view of local government, so it cannot be questioned.
Local governments are also caught up in a constant cycle of sprawl (bringing in fee revenue from permits, which is lucrative but short term) and then accruing massive amounts of debt caused by of all the widespread infrastructure they have to maintain while not having enough tax payers to make even.
Conservative politics stand in the way of both healthy urban growth and appropriate taxation levels, leaving local governments strapped for cash, and incapable of properly maintaining services and infrastructure.
And guess what? Policing in the US is primarily a local service. This means that when the inept, cash strapped local governments are doing policing, they’re doing it badly. They suck at it just as they suck at zoning. They underinvest in social workers and overspend on heavily armed super-soldier cops. They take free shit— i.e. military equipment – from the federal government with little regard for long term finances. they ignore the huge maintenance costs that MRAPs have, just as they ignore the long term costs of sprawl. Always short on cash, they hire substandard cops to run their departments.
I’m just imagining trying to write a history or social science book using mistake theory:
Bread and Conflicts: How the Gracchi Misunderstood the Aristocracy
The Great Mistake: The Error of Gavrilo Princip and World War I
The Wages of Erroneousness: How Whites Mistook Non-Whites for Subhumans
My Mistake: A Biography of Adolf Hitler
Gaffes and Gulags: The Soviet Union Under Stalin
The Boston Blunder: A Reassessment of the American Revolution
Edit: Seems like the original thread is more jerking it to how conflict theorists ruined everything and now we too must become conflict theorists to stop the conflict theorists.
Yeah man, that whole “let’s just do reason” thing really worked out well during The Terror
It’s like none of these folks read Sartre at any point in their journey to “rationalism”.