Tag: highlight

On the Interests of Absolute Rulers

Aretae raises the question with respect to formalism: Doesn’t it depend on the interests of the ruler and the ruled being aligned?

The justification of democracy is that by making the rulers answerable to the population, it prevents the rulers from acting in a manner that is good for them and bad for the population — such as spending all the money on themselves.

Formalism in the true Moldbuggian sense has an answer to that: If a voter has actual influence over the government, that should be recognized alongside whatever other actual influences exist, and turned into a shareholding in the government. That makes the value of the influence more predictable, which makes everything more efficient. Every share in the government is the same as every other, so there is no more need for battle between newspapers and civil service departments, unions and universities, to make one group’s influence more than another’s. Everything runs much more smoothly, and everyone is better off.

I am not a true formalist, however. I see the joint-stock sovcorp as highly desirable but quite impossible. The enforcement of shareholder rights depends on the cryptographic protocols which link shareholdings to the ability to activate or deactivate the security force’s weapons. Without disputing the existence of protocols with the correct theoretical properties, I am utterly unable to imagine them being implemented successfully. It is amusing to contemplate control of the world’s armaments falling into the hands of Anonymous, but nobody is ever really going to risk it.

So, without formalism, what is my own response to the conflict of interest between ruler and ruled? It is to live with it. An absolute ruler will rule in his interest and not mine, and will raise money from taxes for his own use.

The ruler will be in the position of the proprietor of a firm; he is in a position to take any spare cash in the economy for himself. Like any government, he can levy taxes on anything he wants, and like any proprietor he can use the revenue raised to invest in the firm, or withdraw it from the firm as a dividend.

That brings us to the Laffer Curve. Everyone but the dimmest of left-wingers accepts that at some point, increasing a rate of tax decreases the revenue raised by the tax. However, the normal discussions of this miss a whole dimension, of time. Tax rates today affect not only the size of the tax base today, but also the size of the tax base tomorrow and into the future. The tax rate that maximises tax receipts over the next 12 months will not be the same as the tax rates that maximises receipts over the next 10 years, or the next 25 years.

In an idealised model of a proprietor of a state, with perfect foresight and perfect security, any extraction of tax that reduces economic growth would reduce the NPV of the proprietor’s interest. In more realistic situations, that would not hold; the rational proprietor would seek to diversify by taking profits out of the state and moving them into other investments, even at the cost of some impact on the profitability of the state.

My support for the idea of a secure, absolute ruler is motivated by the expectation that the cost of what the ruler takes would be smaller than the cost of the deadweight loss imposed by a government in which nobody has a significant interest in overall long-term growth, but which depends for short-term survival on appeasing large and changing interest groups — whether organised voter blocs, civil service departments, the military, or any other party on which an insecure government relies for survival.

I am much less worried about a proprietor’s extraction of profit from a country than I am about how much he will have to do to stay in power. That is the most important divergence of interest: he has an overwhelming interest in preserving his rule, whereas I am much less concerned.

All but one of Aretae’s examples of bad rulers caused damage not to gain wealth from the country, but in the course of maintaining power. The exception is King Leopold’s rule of the Belgian Congo, which was not in any sense a productive economy, but merely a pile of valuable ivory over which ran wild animals and (in the circumstances) uncivilisable natives — the experience does not extend to any country which is not a backward colony of a more advanced civilisation.

The example that is most troubling for me is not Stalin or Leopold but Kim Jong-Il. The same family has ruled there for 60 years, and secure rule in my theory should have produced good government. My assumption is that, while Kim Il-Sung and his successor have succeeded in retaining power, the power of the ruler is neither complete nor secure, and they are in a constant struggle with rivals within the regime. However, the lack of information about the internal politics of North Korea means that there is little evidence for or against this assumption.

The Royal Engagement

I hold no brief for constitutional monarchy. It has been observed that constitutional monarchies tend to work better than republics, but to the extent that is true, I would put it down to the presence of a constitutional monarch being an indication that other undemocratic elements are also present — in effect, that the regime is an “old democracy” rather than the inferior, more-democratic “young democracy”. The actual monarchy itself has no significance.

There are nonetheless reasons for welcoming the continuation of the line of the Hanoverian usurpers. First, they serve to distract democratic idealists. The centres of real undemocratic power suffer less opposition because purists allow themselves to be drawn into endless pointless arguments about the trivial cost of the Monarchy versus the sentimental value of tradition and the tangible value of the tourism industry. (Back when I believed in democracy, I eschewed republicanism for precisely that reason).

Second, the Royal Family is a contingency plan of sorts. If we are ever to escape slow strangulation by Old Democracy, then an assumption of power by the monarch is about the least unlikely mechanism. The crisis that would lead to such a change would have to be extreme, but it is only very unlikely, not unthinkable.

For instance, there is evidence of some planning of a military coup against Harold Wilson, which it is claimed would have installed Lord Mountbatten as interim prime minister. Mountbatten would have been a logical choice from one point of view, as a member of the Royal Family, a World War II General, and a former ruler (of India). It came to nothing, but there could be a next time, and a King ready to take over ultimate authority would be a large asset to such a conspiracy — particularly as we are a bit short of famous generals or colonial governors. On the other hand, it would be plainly impossible in anything resembling current circumstances, because the USA would not permit it. For any future crisis to produce an escape from democracy, the US would have to be substantially weakened or would have to move first. (The story is that CIA at least were backing the Mountbatten plot).

That story (assuming for the moment it is true) does bring home the danger of any attempt to move to non-political government. Really, Mountbatten? I am reminded that I do not support the idea of a royalist coup in the same way as a democrat supports his party to win the next election. My thought is more that if it did somehow come off well, it would be a good thing. Things would have to get a great deal worse than they are for it to be worth that kind of a risk.

The difficulty is that while the benefits of abolishing politics are real, they cannot be felt for at least a generation: the first ruling Monarch will not have inherited only his crown, not his power, and will have to work as hard to hold it as any other dictator. Charles II nearly pulled it off, and if he had a son rather than his plonker of a brother his efforts might well have been enough. But it is much easier to mess up than to get right.

So, for those thin reasons, I am celebrating the prospect of the continuation of the House of Windsor into the future. Gawd Bless ’em

Speaking of which, I think I may have resolved what I felt was a problem with my political position. I am an atheist who believes in the Divine Right of Kings. There is some hint of a logical inconsistency there. But in fact the two beliefs go together. The concrete premise of my position is that competition for power is more damaging than power misused. Therefore I want no decision to be made about who has power — since any decision will cause competition. What better way to avoid a decision than to put the deciding power into hands that do not exist? God says the King shall rule. If you disagree, do not appeal to the army, the mob, the United Nations or the electorate — take it up with God. In the meantime, the King shall rule. God save the King!

There is one detail of the Royal engagement which might be significant: the princess-to-be is a commoner — one whose parents had, at one time, to work for a living (gasp!). This is contrary to tradition — is it a problem?

The biggest danger is that by choosing a bride from within the realm, the Royal Family is opening up a competition for power among rival interests. In the long run, a monarchy where the heir to the throne tended to choose his bride from his student colleagues (rather than from a predetermined small selection of princesses) might produce hugely destructive competition between political factions to get their daughters into the right courses of the right universities. Factions would seek to control university admissions departments, influence the Royal youths’ choice of courses, possibly causing huge damage to academia in the process. That perhaps sounds far-fetched, but in fact compared to the steps taken by lobbies and interest groups today to gain indirect influence over policy, it’s quite minor. Minor it may be, but it’s not what we want.

(For an analogous line of reasoning, see my speculation about celebrities entering politics. The root issue is the same — if some activity becomes, in addition to its original purpose, a route to power, then in time it will become nothing but a route to power, and whatever useful purposes it had will be lost).

The commoner issue, then, is potentially a bad precedent in the long run. In the current circumstances, I don’t think it’s worth worrying about at all. Since, for any of the above to matter at all, we first have to take the giant, improbable step from constitutional monarchy to absolute monarchy, anything that makes that step slightly less difficult is worth considerable sacrifice. Attempting to find a suitable European princess is not something we need to be spending effort on.

So, here’s to William and Kate.

Devaluation of Significance

I referred in my last post to a lost writing of mine on the subject of abuse of statistics in economics. I’ve sort of found it – I sent it as an email in response to this blog post by Noel Campbell at Division of Labour. (Read it – it’s short).

He quoted from my response, but I can’t find the actual email I sent him. I do have a draft of it, so it would have been very much like this:

That’s a superb question, and I think the answer will surprise (and disturb) many.

Your paper will include a calculation of significance. This is essentially an estimate of the probability that a correlation as strong as the one you found would exist purely as a result of randomness in the data, even if your theory is false.

This calculation assumes the “proper” sequence of events. You have a theory, and you test the data for a correlation. Since you in fact poked around for correlations, then came up with a theory, the significance calculation is not valid. The true significance depends on the probability that, having found a randomly-caused correlation somewhere, you can then invent a theory to explain it. That probability is very difficult to estimate, but is probably much greater – meaning that the significance of the correlation is much smaller.

It is very counterintuitive that the order of your actions affects the validity of your findings, and indeed it is a close relative of the famous Monty Hall problem – the poster child for counterintuitive probability. When you reveal the correlation that you already knew of, you are revealing no information about the chance of your theory being correct, much as when the quizmaster opens the door that he already knows doesn’t have the car, he reveals no information about the chance that the door you first picked has the car. Conversely if you pick a door and find that it doesn’t have the car, that does change the probability that the first door had it, and if you had no prior knowledge of the data, the correlation does change the probability of your theory being true.

Back to science. As you say, theories aren’t formed in a vacuum, and so there is not such an clear division between the “right” way of doing it and the “wrong” way of doing it. Nobody is completely ignorant of the data when they start to theorize. That is a real problem with nearly all statistics-based results that are published today. They are all presented with significance calculations based on the assumption that the forming of the theory was independent of the data – an assumption that is very unlikely to be completely true. Therefore nearly every significance published is an overestimate.

This was much less of a problem when collecting data and analysing it was difficult and laborious. Now that large data sets fly around the internet, and every researcher has the capability of running analyses at the click of a mouse, it is a problem that has already got out of hand.

I didn’t want to be rude at the time, but I found Campbell’s response shocking. He seemed to fully accept my argument, but wasn’t bothered by the implication that pretty much all published research relying on analysing pre-existing statistics was wrong. Rather, his conclusion was that since everybody else was doing what he was doing, nobody should complain and demand “purity” (his scare quotes). That came to mind particularly reading Bruce Charlton’s discussion of the state of honesty in science.

Originality and Science

One probably-final point to come out of the Lysenkoism discussion of the previous two posts:

Yesterday I admiringly referred to Richard Feynman’s quote

I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists

As I said, that is a key part of cutting out the cascade of distrust that can occur when science becomes politically sensitive.

The problem is that that was an easy thing for Feynman to say, because Feynman was a flamboyantly insane genius, and the last thing he ever had to fear was being ignored. The situation is rather different for one graduate student or new PhD among twenty aiming for the same grant-funded research post. In that position, playing down the significance or certainty of one’s own work is a ticket to the dole queue.

And the density of competition is astonishing. There was a piece in Nature a couple of years back, on the limitations of fMRI, that pointed out that from 2007-2008 there have been eight peer-reviewed papers published involving fMRI per day – 19,000 since 1991. “About 43% of papers expore functional localization and/or cognitive anatomy associated with some cognitive task or stimulus”. Thousands upon thousands of papers, each searching for the little piece of originality that will give them importance.

However, this torrent of research demonstrates a solution as well as a problem. I wrote yesterday that “it is … impractical to replicate every experiment, confirm every observation, check every calculation”. Clearly, I was wrong. There is ample manpower in the science industry to double- and triple-check important results, but the system does not value the work highly enough for it to actually get done. Only original work actually merits funding.

That is a widespread problem in non-commercial fields, most obvious in the arts. In commercial arts, most artists make small variations or combinations of existing products, just trying to be a little more attractive and entertainment. The minority who are truly original are highly valued, because they are providing material for the rest to refine or perfect. Indeed, I can think of no other distinction between “high” and “popular” art, but that high art always seeks to be original, and popular art isn’t too bothered. In academic arts, the only valid work is to do something really new. The end result is a product that is always different, but never very good. In science, every new paper is original, but most of them are wrong.

I would assume that in the cases of both art and science, the original assumption was that the market worked well enough to perfect existing work, but that originality required help and subsidy. However, the subsidised sectors at length became isolated from the commercial, to the point that now there is no commercial sector relevant to the academic work being done, and the new stuff is being pumped out into a vacuum.

It seems obvious that it would be beneficial for science to move more slowly and carefully, but the academic system has evolved in a way that does not permit it. It would take a major shakeup to get the science establishment to start to value that caution.

Right Conduct

Politics and morality can become mired in ill-understood abstractions, so I’m re-evaluating my ideas in more concrete terms; what should be done? What should I do, what should we do, for any values of we that I can get a sensible answer with?

The two questions are separate. Taking the first, what should I do? Taking myself in isolation, there have been two coherent answers to that question: one is “whatever God says”, and the other is “Whatever I like”.

I prefer the second of those, but it can use some refinement. Doing what I want now could cause me problems in the future; I need to anticipate, and delay gratification to gain more in the long run.

There is a more subtle refinement too: I am not detached from the world; I can change the world, and in the process change myself. It can be easier to manage myself to be satisfied with what is, than to manage the world to satisfy myself. Dispassion is part of the mix as well.

But that’s all viewing one person in isolation – an unrealistic approach. Humans are social, and need to form groups to succeed. As well as pursuing my personal goals, I need to gain the cooperation of my neighbours. How to do that is the larger part of what is normally thought of as the sphere of morality.

The most obvious fact is that the answer varies. What will win me cooperation in one society will have me shunned in another; what works in one century (decade, sometimes) fails in the next.

All we can say is that it is necessary for me to conform to the collective expectations of the other people I interact with – to fulfill my designated role in whatever society.

For that to make sense, I have to know what my society is. In theory that’s difficult: it’s some group of people who interact with me and share expectations of each others’ behaviour. In practice, it’s usually easier to identify, but not always. I’ll come back to that.

As in the individual case, that is not the end of the story. Some societies allow their members to achieve their goals more effectively than others do. Societies change, as individuals do, and they can fail or be replaced. We can say that each person should do what is required of them by their society, and still say that one society is better than another. It might be better in that it is more useful to its members, or it might be better in a different sense in that it is less vulnerable to shocks, more able to grow in reach and strength.

These judgments on societies matter, because, while seeking our own goals and conforming to our place in society, we still may have some power to direct society in a given direction. If we have a vision of a good society, we can aim to change our society for the better.

One practical aside – the aims of improving society and being a good member of it can come into conflict, and attempts to resolve those two competing priorities are often at the centre in dram and history. Froude’s Times of Erasmus and Luther contrasts Erasmus’s desire to be a good citizen of Christendom with Luther’s defiance of his allotted role in the cause of improving Christendom. In this case Froude comes down on the side of Luther, but the question is more important than the answer.

There’s an important point missing: We can talk about what makes a society good or bad, and how a member of society can attempt to change it, but ultimately my aim is to advance my own interests, and that might be most effectively done by changing society in a way that is not better either for the society in its own right or for its members generally.

It seems reasonable to say that societies will do better, for themselves and their members, if they somehow prevent this from happening to any significant degree. That’s not a theorem – conceivably an arrangement that permits it may bring compensating benefits that outweigh the damage sustained – but they’d better be very substantial benefits.

I’m trying to keep separate two different ways in which a society can be good – it can be good for its members, or it can be good for itself, seen as a metaphorical organism: able to survive, adapt and improve. Inasmuch as a society is a way for its members to better their own lot, the first good is primary, and the second only significant in that it supports the first.

There are a few different forms that can exist to prevent a society being wrecked by selfish interests. (Again, there are two quite distinct ways of being wrecked: the society can be weakened to the degree that it is replaced, either from without or within, by a different society, or else it can remain secure, but provide less value to its members). The first defence is rigidity. If the society is very resistant to any change at all, then it is resistant to wrecking. The problem is it is unable to develop, and unable to react to changing circumstances. Some societies in the past have been successful for their members by being stable, but the rapid changes in the world and in the capabilities of people over the past few centuries have swept all of them away.

To safely accomodate flexibility, a society must preferentially encourage its members to change it in ways that benefit the society and its members.

There is a three-way trade-off: my interests, the interests of my neighbours, and the interests of the organism of society. We rely on society to allow the first trade-off, between each other, to be resolved in an efficient and non-destructive way. The second tradeoff, between a society and its members, is more difficult.

Nothing I’ve written here is new. Never mind Carlyle and Froude, quite a lot of it can be found in Aristotle. However, it’s not a set of ideas that I’ve put together before, and includes things that I explicitly rejected when I was young and arrogant.

Also, it’s not a set of ideas that provides easy answers to difficult questions. That’s always a good sanity check1. If your calculations show you can build a perpetual motion machine, or solve NP-complete problems in linear time, you’ve probably made a mistake. This framework doesn’t usually answer difficult questions, but it at least tells you why they’re difficult.

I promised to write about patriotism, and now I have set up the scenery. Froude’s comment2 on a “distinguished philosopher” seems anti-rational; and so it is, but I am prepared to be persuaded to it.

The problem that society solves is how to cooperate with my neighbours; how to achieve more together than we could in conflict, or even more than we could independently. We cannot do this without some framework that enables us to match expectations, and that framework needs to be stable enough for us to move with confidence from one interaction to the next.

The framework can be changed, for the better or the worse. As well as enabling our cooperation, therefore, it needs to be such that I can be assured of continuing to benefit from it in future. The future, though, is uncertain, and it his hard for me to know that circumstances will not arise where my neighbour can gain by destroying the assurances that I have relied on. This is the second tradeoff above, between the members of the society and the society itself. The society exists for its members, but we need to maintain it too.

There is a smaller-scale, easier parallel to this situation, which I wrote about before. When two people become a family, each is threatened by the possibility that the other will destroy or abandon what has been created. Reassurance is at hand, however, through the irrational attachments that people in that position have been bred to form towards each other, which discourages them from breaking the bonds even if it becomes objectively convenient for them to do so. The irrationa
lity is an advantage to the individual, as it enables him to make somewhat binding commitments in the absence of any external enforcement mechanism, and thereby reach more advantageous social arrangements.

My neighbours’ love of our country is what enables me to tolerate their freedom, as my wife’s love is what enables me to tolerate hers.

It is a threat to the tradeoffs if the society can be changed by individuals who are not dependent on it either practically or emotionally. That is why it is important to know who is in and who is out. This is often looked on as some kind of prehistoric handicap, but it is not. I’ve been talking about “societies”, not countries, so I have not yet closed the loop to say anything about patriotism. I admitted above that we need to identify which individuals are the ones we care about, from the point of view of succeeding personally by fulfilling our expected role in society. There are two answers, on two levels. First, those who we expect to interact with in future. Second, those who can change the expectations that we have towards the first group, and that the first group has towards us. If someone will be dealing socially with me, I need him to be within the social framework. If someone can affect the social framework itself, I want him to be constrained not to damage its effectiveness or longevity.

That’s still, on the face of it, rather imprecise. However, for most people, through most of history, it’s been very easy to work out. There’s a good reason for that: if you don’t know who is in your society and who isn’t, you are in a lot of trouble – at least your society is, and that means that, in the long run, you are too. With personal love comes jealousy, and with the patriotism that gives a society its longevity comes a certain chauvinism. That’s a necessary feature, not a bug. If someone isn’t a member of your society, they need to be kept away from it, or at least made powerless over it, lest they damage it.

Tribes work as societies on that basis. We had nation-states for a few centuries, and they worked too, more or less. Now we do not have a society where it is clear who is in and who is out, and where the members are bound to preserve and improve it. We have many compensations, and I haven’t proved we’re worse off in net, but I’ve at least shown how we could be, how, other things being equal, patriotism is a virtue.

In the end, we may go back to tribes, or as John Robb has it, to some new kind of tribe.

Footnotes:

1 “My own conviction with respect to all great social and religious convulsions is the extremely commonplace one that much is to be said on both sides” – Froude, The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character

2 “I once asked a distinguished philosopher what he thought of patriotism. He said he thought it was a compound of vanity and superstition; a bad kind of prejudice, which would die out with the growth of reason. My friend believed in the progress of humanity–he could not narrow his sympathies to so small a thing as his own country. I could but say to myself, ‘Thank God, then, we are not yet a nation of philosophers.’

“A man who takes up with philosophy like that, may write fine books, and review articles and such like, but at the bottom of him he is a poor caitiff, and there is no more to be said about him.” – Froude, Times of Erasmus and Luther

Agatha Christie in the 21st Century

Thanks to the cornucopia that is ITV3, and the regular addition to my living room of an elderly relative, I now find myself many an evening watching that staple of entertainment, the mystery drama. Taggart and Lewis make frequent appearances, but more evenings than not, of course, there is a television adaptation of the books of the best-selling author of all time, Agatha Christie.
Television has been adapting Agatha Christie for almost as long as there has been television. I first saw them played for laughs, in films with Margaret Rutherford or Peter Ustinov. Next, they was played very straight, in the early Joan Hickson Marples. The emphasis moved in the 1990s towards making them primarily period dramas, with a focus on costumes, cars, and architecture, particularly in the David Suchet Poirots with the strong Art Deco theme.
Recently, in the later Suchet Poirots and the Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie Marples, the producers have turned their attention to social commentary, and to showing off their own cleverness, rejecting the purist faithful-to-the-books approach that was dominant in the 1990s.The new spirit shows itself most crudely and obviously in the Russell-Daviesesque spicing of every story with a piquant extra sprinkle of gay sex. What’s more interesting is the adjusting of the social environment of the stories to be more like the programme makers’ (or the audience’s) impressions of the period, rather than those of Agatha Christie, who, after all, only lived in it.

A good example is the recent Five Little Pigs. In this, Poirot (David Suchet) investigates the cold case of the murder of a celebrated painter, at the request of his daughter, who learned only on coming of age that her mother had been convicted of poisoning her father.

The story is set in the 1930s. We all know murderers were hanged back then, so the 2003 TV production shows us the execution of Caroline Crale, complete with kicking feet, all the better for us to understand the inhumanity of all eras before the 1960s enlightenment. Agatha Christie, with no such agenda, had the sentence commuted, though the wrongly-convicted murderess dies of natural causes a few years later in order to keep her out of the way of Poirot’s investigation.The daughter, in the book, is concerned to reassure her fiance that she will not inherit insane or murderous tendencies. Such a concept is too far-fetched for the 21st century, much more so than the usual intricate coincidences of a whodunnit. The ITV girl is more interested in justice and vengance, and by pulling a gun on the real murderess, displays the very attributes that her literary counterpart was most anxious to disclaim.An even more interesting plot variation was in the 2009 Geraldine McEwan version of Nemesis, which I saw last week. This was the last Miss Marple novel written, published in 1971 – closer to our own time than to the long-gone world of The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Like Christie’s other late novels, it expresses the culture shock to her generation caused by the demolition of class barriers and the other changes of the 1960s.

The setting for the denoument of the novel is a house occupied by three sisters, living (like Miss Marple herself) on a small inherited income. Such rentiers were frequent characters in the Christie oeuvre, but they do not exist in the modern world, and are almost too alien to be understood by modern audiences. They were eliminated from Britain deliberately, as a matter of explicit government policy. (Indeed, their appearance in the late Christie novels is quite possibly an anachronism).

The reason for eliminating the rentier class was that it was seen as parasitic and unjust. Why should some people be allowed to live while contributing nothing at all to society, when the vast majority have to work for a living? As taxes and inflation rose, the prospect of living long-term from capital alone was restricted to the super-rich.That certainly made sense at the time, and if we now lived in a society without a non-working parasite class, I think we could all look back at the destruction of the rentier and applaud. But in the context of the much larger class of parasites who live more richly than the Miss Marples of the world ever did, not from their own jealously preserved capital but on the taxes of the shrinking proportion of working people, envy of the spinster with her few hundred a year in 2½% consols seems as quaint as the air of suspicion and fear that surrounded Christie’s occasional homosexual characters.

The rentiers cannot return, however. With a house and 25k a year in investment income, one could live and even raise a family. At current house prices and bond yields, that represents a capital of less than a million pounds – probably within reach of 1 or 2 percent of the population. It doesn’t happen, though. Inflation always threatens to wipe out any low-yielding investment, and after-tax inflation-adjusted returns are generally negative. The normal expectation of the better off is to build up a private pension and convert it to an annuity on retirement, but handing on a living income to the next generation is an impossibility.

And indeed, even if it were possible to live from capital without consuming it, it would be stupid. Why attempt to preserve a windfall for the future, watching most of it leak away in taxes and inflation, when one can get full value for it today as a holiday, a car and a new TV, and the welfare state will fill up any gap in the future?The rentiers were raised to look down on working for a living — an attitude that cannot be said to be socially beneficial. But the partners of that attitude were thrift and independence, and it does not seem that those virtues can survive without the offer of a life of ease as a reward.

And the destruction of inherited wealth has not even had much impact on inequality. The society that no longer accords status to those who preserve capital, instead gives it to the “wealth-creators” who make incomes a hundred times the average and burn through it in orgies of consumption, since it makes no more sense for them to save than it does for the successors of the rentiers. Is the executive who works 70 hours a week for his seven-figure package, most of which goes on supercars, jets, and designer clothes, really any better for the rest of us than the gentleman who dabbles in business while keeping his patrimony safe? Possibly a little, but not, I fear, enough to compensate for the example that is set for the rest of us.All that might seem a vast tangent from ITV3, but the questions I asked (and didn’t answer) are the ones that viewers will not be asking themselves, because Nemesis in the 2009 version strikes not in the now-mysterious surroundings of the last of the rentiers, but instead among the licensed weirdness of a religious order, whose sinister initates are, all regular ITV3 viewers know, capable of any crime.

Proof of the Impossibility of Democracy

There’s nothing new here, but I think I can put it more simply and clearly than I’ve managed to do before.

Obviously many “democratic” governments exist, and when we normally talk about democracies, these are what we mean. What I’m talking about here is the theoretical idea of democracy, where policy is controlled by the voters. This is the distinction I made previously in Two kinds of democracy.

Political systems can be changed, either by invasion, overthrow from within the territory but outside the government, or subversion from within the structure of the government itself.

All governments devote a large part of their effort and resources to protecting themselves against being changed. It can be assumed that any governments which do not do so, get changed.

To protect the political system, the government needs to correctly identify the threats that exist to it, and devote sufficient resources and attention to resisting them. The chief premiss on which I base my argument here is that this is hard.

If those inside the government structures do not have the freedom of policy to protect the system, they will be unable to do so and the system will be changed. Most commonly, it is subverted from within, until those within the system do have the ability to hold onto power.

If the system is truly democratic, office-holders within the system do not have freedom of policy. Policy is dictated by voters. This is the line I am drawing: I am not attacking some straw-man “perfect” democracy, but any in which the voters can overrule the elite on matters of policy. If they cannot, then it is an “old democracy” and potentially stable.

Voters do not have sufficient inside knowledge of the political situation to choose the policies that will preserve their democratic power. Further, they do not have sufficient interest in doing so – the value of having a vote is in being able to influence policy according to one’s preferences, and that is always likely to take priority over preserving the present system.

There are many examples of democracies voting to get rid of democracy – 1930s Germany and Italy being the best known. What I say is that democracies always vote to get rid of democracy, if not directly, then by not voting to prevent the system being subverted from within. That produces the “old democracy” I wrote about previously, in which the influence of voters is minor, and real power lies in institutions which are capable of perpetuating themselves

There could be an important exception to all this. If the franchise is limited in some way to a distinct minority of the population, then the chief threat to the system is from the disenfranchised. The voters will be well aware of this, and will have a clear and obvious interest in preserving the system which keeps power for their class. Such a system will be more stable than a true democracy with a universal or near-universal franchise.

This breaks down if there is no clear distinction between the ruling class and the disenfranchised. In that case, one faction or other within the ruling class can always benefit by a small extension of the franchise. The result is a ratchet causing the restricted franchise to eventually become universal.

Thus classical and 19th-century democracies were somewhat more stable than new democracies created today. The voters were aware that the current system was what kept them in a privileged position, and were very aware of threats to the system. From the point of view of a voter in a universal-suffrage “young” democracy, democracy just isn’t worth voting to defend.

This doesn’t mean that the fact of there being elections doesn’t have an effect – just that the actual opinions of the voters don’t.

The End

I’ve been on holiday for a couple of weeks, and I expected to write quite a lot here in that time.
The reason I didn’t is that my political thinking has pretty much come to a conclusion. I don’t like it at all, but it’s a conclusion for all that.

When Adam Smith was writing, there were many theories, public and private, about what a business ought to do. Smith pointed out, [drawing from Darwin and Malthus] (edit, yes I really wrote that, oops), that whatever theory they believed, the businesses that survived would be those which aimed at maximising profit, or those that, by coincidence, behaved as if that was what they aimed at.
The situation in politics is that, while there are many theories about what politicians should do, those politicians will succeed that behave as if their aim is to achieve power at any cost. Perhaps historically many politicians had other aims, and the successful ones were those who happened to act as a pure power-seeker would, but now there is sufficient understanding of what path will gain and hold power that those who consciously diverge from the path least will be those who win.
To be clear, I’m not simply talking about electoral politics here. I’m talking about all politics, in non-democratic systems, in the electoral process, and in the wider and more important politics beyond elections, where power lives in media, civil service, educational, trade union and other centres outside the formal government.
The trivial fact – that power will go to those that want it – is reinforced by the more effective co-operation that pure power-seekers can achieve than ideologues. A large number of power-seekers, although rivals, will co-operate on the basis of exchanges of power. The result is a market in power, and that is the most effective basis for large-scale collective action. Those attempting to achieve specific, different but related aims will find it much more difficult to organise and co-operate on the same scale.

Is it not possible, then, to have significant influence, not by competing directly with politicians but by competing with the media/educational branches of the establishment by promoting ideas? The metacontext, as the folks at Samizdata say. It is indeed possible to influence politics by doing that, and that is what libertarians have done for the last half century or so. But I’m not sure it’s possible to have good influence. Certainly some good things have happened because libertarians have changed the metacontext to the point where the things have appealed to power-seekers. But some bad things have happened that way too. The fact is that while the “background” beliefs of the electorate and other participants in politics does have an effect, there is no reason to assume that correct background beliefs cause better policies than incorrect background beliefs.
One of the most depressing aspects of activism is that on the very few occasions when you get someone onto your side, either by persuading them or just finding them, more often than not they’re still wrong. They’re persuaded by bad arguments rather than good arguments. Activism would appeal to me on the idea that I will win out in the end because my arguments are good, but in fact not only do my good arguments not win against my opponents’ bad arguments, my good arguments do not even win against my allies’ bad arguments. The idea that truth is a secret weapon that is destined to win out once assorted exceptional obstacles have been overcome is an utter fantasy.
As a result, even if you do achieve marginal influence by working for policies or ideas that would be widely beneficial, your success is likely to backfire. The other players in the game are working for the narrow interest of identifiable groups and, as such, are able to mobilise far greater resources. They also are willing to trade with other power seekers, which improves their effectiveness further. The idealist is not able to do that, because the idealist obtains only the particular powers he wants to keep, whereas the politician grabs whatever power he can, even if it is of no use to him, and that which is of no use to him, he trades. The only way to do that is to get whatever power you can, which is my definition of a politician.
It still feels like there is something noble in working for better government, even if the project appears doomed. But there isn’t. After all, most utopians from anarchist to fascist to Marxist are working for better government, but we oppose them because their utopias are unachievable and their attempts to get there are harmful. Your ideas don’t work because they’re flawed, my ideas don’t work because politics is flawed. Hmmm. Why are my ideas better than yours, again?
And that is the final straw. In truth, I have never been an activist. I have neither appetite or aptitude for practical politics, which after all is basically a people business, but I used to believe it was interesting to look in isolation at the question of what those with political power ought to do with it, so as to make the government as good as possible, in a vaguely utilitarian way. What brings my political efforts to an end is the realisation that that is meaningless. A political theory based on the assumption that a government will act in the general interest once it understands how to do so is as useful as a theory based on the assumption that the world is flat and carried by elephants. Politics has given me some entertainment over the years, but not as much as Terry Pratchett has.
If I am going to assume that governments work in the general interest, once they understand how to do it, I might just as well assume that industrialists work in the general interest, in which case all my clever arguments about the value of private property rights for resolving opposing private interests are completely irrelevant.
It’s amusing that of all the posts on this blog, one of the most important turns out to be one that I thought at the time was unimportant: this one, originally driven by my musings on Newcombe’s Paradox.
Almost all significant propositions are, implicitly or explicitly, of the form IF {some hypothetical state of the world} THEN {something will result}. In politics, the hypothetical frequently involves some person making some decision. The proposition therefore needs to take into account whatever is necessary for that person to actually make that decision – and the other effects of those necessary conditions may well be more significant than the stated result.
I came very close to making all the connections back then, even raising the significance of my facetious “if I were Führer” form of putting political propositions. I am not Führer, and never will be, and neither will anyone like me, and all my political logic collapses on that just like any other proof premised on a falsehood.
Where does that leave me? I am no longer a libertarian – I find libertarian arguments just as correct as I always did, but they are of no relevance to the real world. I could continue to comment here on the stupidities that people accept from various politicians, but I would be doing it in the same spirit as if I were judging the team selection of a football club – in full awareness of my own impotence and irrelevance. Maybe I will. It would make more sense to take up something useful, like gardening.
I can also attempt to benefit humanity by encouraging others to detach from politics as I am doing. Someone has to have power, and if you think you can get it and you would be good at it, by all means go for it. If not, then leave well alone. Be one of the ruled, and pursue whatever aims you choose without the illusion that you have the right, the duty or the capability to change the policies of the rulers. Embrace passivism.

Political Passivism

For two years now I have been hanging on the words of Mencius Moldbug, who’s analysis of the politics of our time (Unqualified Reservations) I find almost completely persuasive.

Having advanced a vision of government by for-profit corporations, MM has at last started to lay out the path by which we can get from democracy to responsible, effective, secure government.

His answer so far validates both my high estimate of his understanding, and my pessimism. The logic is completely sound.

The problem with government is politics – the fact that no government can aim primarily at the welfare of the population, or for that matter even at its own profit, when it is constrained most of all by politics to do whatever is necessary to hold off rivals for power.

Anyone who attempts to improve the government, in any aspect, by any method, is committing politics and is therefore part of the problem. MM gives us a steel rule – that in order to become worthy to hold power, the first requirement is “absolute renunciation of official power”.

Will this approach – passivism – work? It doesn’t seem likely. But, it doesn’t seem likely that activism will work either. I’ve said before, long shots are all we’ve got

Passivism appeals to me. I even put forward my own version when I refused to sign a petition calling for Gordon Brown to resign. But I have not completely abandoned activism, albeit in the form of half-hearted engagement with the least effective activist movement imaginable.

Since passivism is the prerequisite to step 1 of the procedure for reaction, and since 9a implies at least a 9b, there may be something I can do to bring about a better government. When I find out, I will consider it here.

Politics is a spectator sport

More evidence for my claim that the main value of politics to ordinary people is as a spectator sport:

The Monkey Cage writes:

the actual audience for news wants to hear more about strategy. Why? Probably because they already know what candidate or, in this case, policy they favor — at least in broad terms (e.g., yea or nay on health care reform) — and so they want to know whether their preferred policy is “winning.” That’s what strategy coverage provides them.

via TGGP

(By the way, I’ve been quiet lately because I’m working on something that will revolutionalise the state of the art of zombie population modelling).