MathWizard
formerly hh26
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I don't want to pretend that you don't have a point. This is in fact a point I've argued on the other side of against more radical Georgists who pretend LVT has no flaws whatsoever. It exists, it is a potential issue. And a nuanced, sophisticated version of Georgism would try to figure out a way to calculate this and either reduce the tax rate of someone based on how much of their land value was created by their own improvements, or use land tax revenue to give back directly to the people who are responsible for it (though this may be vulnerable to inaccuracies and corruption). Maybe you let large developers apply for a permit which exempts them from taxes caused by their own buildings, but you still tax them for the unearned rent on their land that is caused by other people's actions. Or maybe you make land assessment prices sticky that can't increase faster than a certain rate, so that rapid changes in land value from building things will increase its economic value immediately, without the tax price changing, which allows people to temporarily extract rent from them. But the tax rate slowly goes up towards the current value such that all of the long term value of the land caused by emergent social phenomena that no individual is responsible gets taxed and redistributed to everyone in society.
So ultimately, I think this is a niche problem which has potential solutions within the Georgist framework. Most people will still build the same as what they build now. Some people will actually build more if you remove nonland property taxes and force landlords to build to profit instead of squatting on valuable land. Only large developers relying on their own land value synergies will be disincentivized, and only if the land value tax makes no exceptions for them. It will cause some economic inefficiencies, but so do income taxes. Income taxes create tons and tons of inefficiency which are not niche. So if we're comparing system to a Georgist system, especially a nuanced Georgism which acknowledges the costs and attempts to mitigate them by having exceptions and setting tax rates below 100%, I still think it's the least bad tax.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
And ideally you would tax that too. A sophisticated version of Georgism would include pigouvian taxes on behaviors with negative externalities, or natural monopolies, intellectual property, and other economic niches with fixed supply that one person snatching up deprives others of being able to do.
It's just that land is the easiest to assess and the most high value, and the most reasonably confident that most of its value is not created by the owner. Even if say, 5% of land value is created by real estate developers on their own property, that would mean 95% is not, either inherent to the land itself or created by other people nearby. So even if land value taxes are not entirely costless (although the more zealous Georgists pretend that they are), they're still one of the least bad taxes possible (only being beaten out by pigouvian taxes which disincentivize negative behaviors like pollution)
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Unusually expensive land is created by externalities of labor and capital. If a bunch of people build businesses and and apartments and stuff in a certain place, it will cause the land value of surrounding areas to rise. People working jobs and engaging in productive behaviors capture some of the value themselves, give some of the value to their customers, and have some of it diffuse into nearby land as rents. Except in the rare case where one person owns all of the land in an area, this added rent value is captured by a different person than those who rightfully created it.
Therefore, the workers wages are already being stolen. Well, not exactly stolen, it's not as if surrounding land owners are deliberately taking it from them. It's automatically taken by the nature of economics, that's how externalities work. Taxing it and then giving it back to the surrounding community actually gives the workers more of their own value.
At the very least, even if you're some radical libertarian who believes literally all taxes are theft, you should at least recognize land value taxes as the least bad tax for economic reasons of land values being inelastic, and thus a potential compromise given that you're never going to convince the majority of the population to shut down the entire government.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
I'm not sure that's stable though, because it may inevitably slippery slope its way into progressivism. That is, this optimal state depends on universal but not-common knowledge: the utilitarian version has to actually be a secret. Because if you are publicly insisting on ignoring group memberships and everyone knows that person A is discriminating against group X in a not-secret way, then the public persona is forced to denounce them as a X-ist in order to maintain consistency. But if everyone using the utilitarian version in practice, then it's hard to keep that a secret from everyone else (who is doing the same thing). And if only the smart well-behaved rationalists who can be trusted to discriminate responsibly use the utilitarian version while everyone else uses the liberal version, then a higher fraction of smart well-behaved rationalists would be discovered and denounced as X-ist creating a stereotype against them.
Maybe it works if you restrict the secret utilitarian version to only cases where there's absolutely no conceivable way of being discovered.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Only the base land value they add is affected by this. They still retain 100% of the actual capital value of the improvement itself. A grocery store is useful for putting things in and selling them, and refrigerating them and keeping bugs out. It earns more profit than an empty parcel of land that sells groceries out in the open. The grocery store itself is valuable in its own right above and beyond the value it provides to the land around it for people who like living near grocery stores.
So we're not looking at a scenario where building a structure creates 10 million in land value but the owner keeps 500k with no tax, with 9.5 million being captured by nearby landowners, and we hope that the personal incentive is enough to pay for grocery stores as long as we don't tax it. We're looking at a scenario where building a structure creates 10 million in land value and 20 million in capital value, and the owner keeps 20.5 million: all of the capital and 5% of the land value, while 9.5 million is captured by nearby landowners who didn't build the building (unless we are in the niche toy town). Taxing the land will extract 33% of the value created as tax revenue, while reducing the personal incentive to build by 2.5% of its actual value, because the majority of the value is the untaxed capital.
Yes this does decrease incentives by some amount (and all my numbers are made up, so it could be the case that it turns out to be a higher proportion). But you have to get taxes from somewhere, and lands are unusually high in externalities: the majority of the value is not created by the same people who own the land, even if some is, and therefore an unusually efficient method of tax value extracted relative to personal incentive cost (from either an economic perspective or a philosophical perspective). For most other taxes, literally all of the value extracted was created by the person being taxed, and therefore is worse than a land tax in which only some was created by the person being taxed.
I think you're missing distinction between base land value and capital improvements. You don't tax the buildings themselves, or the entire property value, you set the tax rate according to the underlying value of the land itself (which can be assessed separately from the building's value, and real estate agents do this all the time). Which is entirely externalities from other nearby stuff. Whatever value a property has from invested capital improvements contained within itself is exempt from the land value tax. If done properly, the incentive to build is the same as the incentive to invest money in any other form of capital (and the same the vast majority of people have when they build in the current system): you can either extract money from it over time, (which is not taxed in a full Georgist system), or sell it for a profit, which people are willing to buy because they can then extract money from it over time. In fact, people are more incentivized to build with land value taxes, because it's becomes the only way for a landlord to earn profit. You can't just buy a piece of land and sit on it as it appreciates in value, or extract rents based on its favorable location that everyone wants to be in. You have to build and upkeep structures that create value such that people are willing to pay to live there, or useful buildings that earn profit, above and beyond the taxed land rent value.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
The whole thing is founded on mutual consent.
First, let's consider a small company started by one person, or a small group of people. They rightfully own all of the physical and intellectual property of the company, because it literally is their physical property that they pay out of their own pockets, and their labor that they use to increase it. There isn't much meaningful distinction, it's not conflation, it's literally their physical assets, they just use a technical legal ritual to officially make it a "company" for tax and liability purposes. If they hire an employee, they sign a contract with the employee that, in exchange for such and such labor and duties, the employee gets such and such wages and/or shares in the company. And the owners and employee can come up with whatever split of the profits they both find mutually agreeable. Like any purchase or sale of any other good, if one of the parties doesn't think it's fair they can opt out, the only difference is that the thing being bought is "labor".
For larger companies, not much changes, it's just that the owners are people who have purchased shares in the company, which represents a fraction of the physical and intellectual property of the company. That is, if I buy 1/1000000 of a company, then by all rights I own 1/1000000 of all of its physical assets in a moral sense as if they were my private property. There are nuances and legal distinctions, but ethically it's the same as if I bought some physical capital and hired someone to use it to produce stuff for me to sell. And the mutually consensual agreements to purchase labor are between employees and the collective shareholders who own the company assets. Yes, labor is an absolutely necessary ingredient in whatever process the company uses to convert labor into material goods, but fish is a necessary ingredient for a sushi chef to make sushi, there's no reason a priori that the corporate employee is owed anything different than what their contract states for selling their labor that the fisherman is not for selling their fish just because one is officially an "employee" of the corporation and the other is not, since the fisherman doesn't technically work for the restaurant they sell to.
Corporations are fancy coordination mechanisms that convert labor and goods into better goods that are worth more than the sum of the inputs combined. Thus the coordination mechanism itself creates value. If it weren't the case then skilled laborers would simply create the same wealth without signing an employee contract with any corporations, and thus would outcompete them by having less overhead, and could pay themselves better wages. And some people do this. But economy of scale is a thing, and investments are a thing, and they help create value. In theory, again there are a ton of exceptions and counterexamples.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
5d ago
"Destroy your opponent before they can destroy you" does not at all sound like the "reasonable answer". Especially since this won't literally destroy them, they'll still exist and be even more ravenous to seize the reins of power. It seems like the actually reasonable answer is to de-escalate and decrease the power and influence of the government so people can make their own choices about their own personal lives.
I don't even get why there are "sides". I don't care whether the meat I eat comes from a "farm" or a "lab", I just care whether it's cheap, tasty, and nutritious. Let them both try their best and we can judge them and eat them according to our own preferences. I'm on team freedom, and that means nobody gets shut down pointlessly just to "own" the other side.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
23d ago
In terms of scale it involves more people, but in terms of perceived threat and actionable measures it seems less threatening.
Like, JFK was assassinated. This is immediately violent. Believing that the government/CIA assassinated the president makes them dangerous bad guys who are willing to assassinate people they don't like, and potentially justifies violence against them in retaliation and/or self defense. 9/11 likewise killed lots of people, making the perpetrators dangerous and worth retaliating against (even ordinary non-conspiracists can get behind this, which is why there was so much support for military intervention in the middle east after 9/11).
The most likely response to threats of violence are accumulating weapons to defend oneself and possibly pre-emptively strike using violence. If someone points a gun at you, you point one back.
Vaccines and Flat Earth are about scientific lies. They say that the leading scientists and media are corrupt and in the pocket of the government or whoever is leading the conspiracy, and the things they say cannot be trusted. Nobody needs to die to cover up the truth, because they can be paid off instead. Now, maybe some of the variants of vaccine and Flat Earth conspiracy theories do involve the government murdering people to cover up, and those ones are potentially dangerous, but I have never heard a Flat Earther talking about assassinations, so I think it's uncommon.
The most likely response to media and scientists lying is to not trust them, and possibly have this mistrust bleed into other domains. If they're lying to you about X, why should you trust them about Y? Now this can lead to some harms such as people refusing to vaccinate themselves or their children, but this is significantly less dangerous than actual violence. If someone lies to your face, you lose respect for them and possibly try to avoid them, but very few people would respond with violence (except in weird edge cases, where it's probably not about the lie itself but about the underlying thing they were lying about).
MathWizard
formerly hh26
23d ago
Hence the word "relatively". All conspiracy theories carry some risk, via this sort of chaining, but the Flat Earth ones are indirect like this, while others like "the FBI is stalking me" have a much more direct path towards danger.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
Oh hey, I've been playing a bunch of Warframe and Factorio as well. I can't get enough of games with in-depth crafting systems.
Do you know of any other games with similar progression systems to Warframe? Monster Hunter is kind of similar in crafting, but I'm more interested in the mastery system: "do all the things, collect one of every single weapon/armor/companion etc, and each thing you collect adds to your exp even if you never use it."
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
It might be appropriate (or just tempting) to have some level of discussion, at least on the meta-level, regarding whether other people agree or disagree with the request or potential difficulties they anticipate arising from it or something.
Like, literally right now, you have in this post made a suggestion and we are having a meta level discussion about it, though it's about site content rather than a specific CW topic. As long as the discussions remained brief and meta level that would be fine, but when it comes to CW topics that's always a slippery slope.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
3mo ago
If you're sufficiently loose with your criteria for a scenario where reward is involved, such as a desired endgoal or outcome, then literally all rational behavior is driven by reward, because that's the definition of rationality. And not in the broad logical scale of rationalism, but in the colloquial someone acting with no goal is being purposeless and irrational. Why would you do anything at all if there wasn't some point? And then you can consider that point to be a "reward".
So unless you have a narrower definition of reward in mind, then regardless of whether learning is involved or not, the only case of behavior I can think of which is not tied to a reward is irrational behavior, and people with involuntary tics, and stuff like that.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
5mo ago
I think this still demands a distinction in different contexts, especially between respect in ones physical capabilities, and one in their mental capabilities. I respect a lion as a powerful beast and I would avoid trying to fight one in unarmed physical combat. I do not respect a lion's intellectual abilities, and would happily trounce one in a game of chess if I could play in safety from its aforementioned physical prowess. Further, I do not respect the physical abilities of lions as a whole in comparison to humans as a whole, because we have guns and missiles and they do not. They simply do not pose an existential threat to humans as a species, while we do pose such a threat if we cared to wipe them out (and maybe even if we half-heartedly try not to).
Bringing this back then, I respect the physical threat of a jihadi in a similar way to a lion, they're extremely lethal if you face one underprepared, and I would personally try to avoid them, but I do not respect them as an existential threat to my people, we have nukes and they do not. But this is a separate consideration from the original issue of respecting their conviction. On the moral front, I do respect the specific integrity of standing up for one's beliefs, but overall do not respect their general moral character, because their beliefs are evil and selfish. Even from a classical sense, they don't exhibit honorable behaviors worth respecting. If they stood and fought against overwhelming odds and died for their beliefs, I could respect that more. But guerilla warfare, hiding behind civilians, and terrorism are incredibly dishonorable and unrespectable. If their beliefs tell them to do that, then they're just standing up for dishonorable beliefs. If you're going to respect that you might as well treat the hypocritical Christian as someone who believes in being a hypocrite and respect them for being so good at it.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
I wouldn't straight up cut someone off if they were already a friend for other reasons and that was the only thing about them I disliked. But it would be a yellow flag which would make me less comfortable around them. Because stuff like that rarely shows up in isolation. I've never actually had the issue show up, because the type of people I typically hang out with are so far from that archetype that it's not even a remote possibility.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
Are you talking about like the morning after pill? Because those are bad, but I'm referring to the ones that prevent women from ovulating during pregnancy so they don't just keep conceiving babies month after month while already pregnant. I know they make IUDs that do that, but there might be pills for it to.
I actually am not super familiar with the habits of promiscuous people and their typical birth control preferences, so "most" might not be the right phrase to use here. But if it turns out that most forms of birth control are abortive, but some aren't, that just increases the potential benefit of a pro-life promotion and subsidization of the ethical ones. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $20 for non-conceiving hormones, and they don't think fetuses are people, they're likely to take the abortion pills. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $0 for non-conceiving hormones because the government and/or pro-life charities pay the $20, then no child gets conceived in the first place, and thus none die. Assuming that the goal is actually to prevent the conception and subsequent deaths of fetuses because they die, and not just to increase the number of childbirths, this seems like a massive win to me.
Now maybe it would be healthier for society and relationships for people to just not have promiscuous sex in the first place, but that ship has sailed, pragmatically there's nothing we can do to fix that, and it seems much less of a priority to me than the millions of deaths at stake that free non-abortive birth control could prevent.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
11mo ago
I'm a moral absolutist, not a relativist. I believe that there is one actual objective morality that describes the thing we are talking about when we mean "right" and "wrong", and each action is either right or wrong in some universal sense. Moral philosophies that people come up with should be viewed as attempts at approximating this thing, not as actual competing definitions of the words "right" and "wrong", which is why when someone comes up with an edge case where a moral philosophy extrapolates to lead to some horrific result, the most common response is either denial "no it doesn't lead to that", or an attempt to patch the theory, or "that result is actually good because X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z are good in some other sense (usually utilitarian). Whereas if you had relativist morality or just definitions the response "yep, I believe that that horrific result is right, because that's how I've defined 'right'".
As a result, it's perfectly logical that properly understood and robust versions of any moral philosophy should approach each other. So I could make an equal claim that properly understood, virtue ethics approaches utilitarianism (is it virtuous to cause misery and and death to people which decreases their utility?). And if someone constructed a sufficiently robust version of virtue ethics that defined virtues in a way that massively increased utilities and covered all the weird edge cases then I would be happy to endorse it. I'm not familiar with the specific works of Yud Singer or Caplan you're referring to, but if they're arguing that utilitarianism eventually just turns into standard virtue ethics then I would disagree. If they're making a claim more similar to mine then I probably agree.
But again, I think utilitarianism isn't meaningless as a way of viewing right and wrong, because people are bad at math and need to use more of it. And I think fewer epicycles need to be added to most utilitarian constructions to fix them than would need to be added to virtue ethics or other systems, so it's more useful as a starting point.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I have no idea if these exist, but if there's a company whose sole business model is buying/managing large servers and renting out the compute, then buying shares in that company is nearly equivalent to what you're looking for. The same could be done for other physical goods like trucks and C&C machines. As long as the company specializes heavily in a single type of thing and doesn't diversify, then its shares should have approximately the same value as that thing.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
(This is probably a conversation for the culture war thread, not SQS, but whatever)
I sincerely doubt cynical men who are willing to disfigure their bodies and live a life of deception outnumber those who are sincerely dissatisfied with their lives as men and think living as women will make them happier.
I don't think that the latter category is necessarily excluded from "white males trying to become a marginalized group". That is, cynical exploitation of the system is sufficient but not necessary for this to be a factor. Some men are sincerely dissatisfied with their lives, and have been convinced that men are privileged oppressive patriarchs who oppress everyone else, and viscerally reject that identity because they don't feel privileged or oppressive and don't want to be. Instead, they are bullied and socially outcast and don't fit in with more masculine men, and thus feel that they must be part of an oppressed group. They are being oppressed by other white men (the bullies/normies), so they must be something other than a white man, hence trans.
Or something like that. I am not a clinical psychologist, I don't purport to know exactly what goes through the mind of someone in this situation (I was a weird social outcast, sort of, but very much not woke so I coped in completely different ways). And each individual is different so will have different responses to this situation. But it seems very plausible to me that social outcasts will look for reasons and excuses as to why they are different from everyone else, and why the people who pick on them are inherently evil in a morally objective way that makes them truly the bad guys. Taking on an oppressed identity makes your bullies into bigots and allows you to unite allies against them, even if they were previously bullying you for reasons unrelated to your identity. And, importantly, you don't need to be a cynical opportunist or a sleaze trying to sexually assault women, just be hurt and confused and subject to the same mental biases that everyone has that let us justify beliefs that are beneficial to ourselves.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
There are strong deontological and libertarian arguments that if somebody earns money, or creates something which is valued via money, via legitimate means, then they can do whatever they want with their own money no matter how wasteful you deem it, even if starving people elsewhere could use that money, because it's the owner's choice to do what they will with their own property.
I'm going to put those arguments aside, and argue from a utilitarian perspective. After all, what are they doing with their money if not spending it on themselves? If it sits in a bank vault as cash forever then it might as well not exist as far as the economy goes and thus helps counter inflation, at least until they die and a lot of it goes into death taxes and heirs. If they donate it to charity then hey, it's doing exactly what you want. If they're investing it to earn even more money, then it is being invested, not sitting around being useless. Again, if we're restricting our view to ethical billionaires who earn money by creating wealth, then they invest by giving money to ethical companies which create wealth, and then they extract some of that wealth as dividends while the rest disperses into the economy in the form of cheaper goods, more valuable goods, wages, and more buying/selling in interactions between their company and others.
So there are a number of reasons, from a utilitarian perspective, why billionaires might sometimes be good:
1: Charity
Scott makes a strong post arguing that billionaire charity is good because it can pick up blind spots that government charity misses: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire-philanthropy/ Bill Gates in particular has devastated malaria, which was previously being underfunded relative to its value, because governments have systematic biases in what they do and do not fund. Such cases are not one person hoarding wealth that they can't possibly use on themselves, it's individuals choosing where to donate their own money that they created instead of the government appropriating it and then deciding for them. And they earn this right be creating the wealth in the first place.
2: Capital Allocation
I read a good argument (I forget where, maybe Paul Graham?) comparing investors to a natural selection process for determining what projects should be invested in. That is, people who are systematically good at telling the difference between promising companies and doomed failures can repeatedly invest in good companies that others underestimate, earn a profit, and have even more money. And then they repeat the process but more and bigger because they have more money to utilize. People who are bad at doing this will end up with less money and eventually be forced to do something else with their time. Therefore, smart investors will end up with more money, which they have demonstrated their ability to use wisely. And again, if they are investing in ethical companies then the more money they earn is a fraction of the wealth generated by the companies they finance, the rest going to grow the economy. Importantly, this process is brutal and unbiased. A bureaucrat trying to decide where to allocate public funding is going to have personal biases, conflicts of interest, and legibility concerns that they have to justify to others. A wealthy investor can chase hunches, whims, make their own plans based on their own industry knowledge, or just be unreasonably biased in favor of some industry that happens to be a good idea but nobody knows why yet. Evolution doesn't need to understand why the things it does works, it just has to kill the things that don't work and let the ones that do multiply, and eventually you have good things that work.
This second point demonstrates that how a billionaire spends their money is not necessarily decoupled from how they earned it. If they're spending it on making more money, and if they're investing in an ethical way (a big if) then they are creating even more wealth. And any limits or disincentives, soft or hard, will disincentivize this behavior and make some of them not try so hard. What genius business creator is going to super hard for a 10% chance of turning their 10 million dollar company into a billion dollar company, if you're going to cap them at 20 million dollars and they can just sell it now for a guaranteed 10 million? What $999 million dollar banker is going to risk $10 million dollars in a startup with a 2% chance of earning them another billion if you've capped them at $1 billion?
Poor people matter, it would probably help them in the short term if you snatched all of their billionaires wealth and just gave it to poor people, but you don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. There's a teach a man to fish versus feed a man a fish sort of thing going on here. Capitalism is a strange alien beast which, when carefully tuned, can/is/will lift billions of poor people out of poverty. And billionaires are mostly a side effect of that process, but in some cases a direct contributor.
There's a large extent to which all of this is just a rephrasing of trickle down economics, which is 90% bullshit. But it's 10% not, and I would argue that to the reason it mostly doesn't work is largely because a significant fraction of wealth people and companies aren't actually behaving ethically. There is a lot of rentseeking and exploitation and imbalance in bargaining power between labor and capital, which means that many companies create wealth and then keep 90%+ of it as profit for themselves rather than a more fair ~50%, and some companies actually destroy wealth via externalities but manage to extract profits that they didn't legitimately create.
But also, from a brutal utilitarian perspective, maybe 10% is good enough. Like, if a group of rich people have $1 trillion dollars, we could snatch that and give it to the poor, and then the rich people and all the economic potential they represent is gone, the goose is dead. Or maybe we take 10% today, so the poor people only have $100 billion and a bunch suffer in poverty (though not literally starving). And then the remaining 900 billion the rich people invest grows to 1.8 trillion, and then we take another 10% giving $180 billion to the poor. And then the remainder doubles again and then we take another 10%. And wealth inequality continues to grow as the rich get richer and richer and richer, and yet pretty soon the amount we've extracted for the poor has exceeded what even existed in the first place, and they're not so poor. Maybe in a hundred years we'll have billions of "poor" people living in luxury apartments with all of what we would today consider modern luxuries, while the uber rich fly to pluto for vacation in gigantic space castles that the poor could never hope to afford. And if the alternative is to snatch the trillion now and hope that it feeds enough people for long enough before the money runs out and they go back to how they were before, then maybe it's better to let them stay poor until the economy grows enough to lift them out organically via wealth creation.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I think so. It's been a while since I learned about this so I don't remember all the details or studies off the top of my head. But I'm pretty sure there were many such studies and probably at least some controlled correctly. I'm not completely certain though.
However I don't think it would even be appropriate to control for money/wealth/family-income directly, because part of the value of a two-parent household is the increased income. And even if you look at income per parent that's not necessarily appropriate because being a single parent forces them to juggle career and child rearing which would lead to less opportunities to take on high paying but demanding jobs. You'd have to control for socio-economic status of the families the parents came from (ie the grandchildren of the kids) or something complicated like that which controls for potential earning power rather than actual earnings.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
In the context of voters deciding who to vote for, Gc is probably the most relevant, though Gf may play a smaller but nontrivial role. You need knowledge of stuff like what problems does society face that are amenable to political solutions? Which solutions are viable or not, what similar circumstances have been faced historically, what solutions were tried then and what were the results? Which promises that politicians make are plausible and which are blatantly unrealistic? When one politician promises criminal justice reform to protect oppressed people from police and the other attacks counters that this is soft on crime and will increase murder rates, Gc is going to be more useful for comparing the truth value of each side. It doesn't really matter if the voter has high Gf can think up a clever and creative solution to the problem that addresses both issues, because they're not the one running for office and the politicians aren't going to listen to them. It might help a little, but it will help less than Gc. And Gc is also more likely to increase with age as someone goes through the education system and their brain matures, so it correlates more strongly with age.
Again, I wouldn't advocate an actual hard test for Gc as a requirement to vote, since that permanently disenfranchizes people who fall below it. But a mostly fair system which correlates with Gc is preferential to a fair system which doesn't.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
And is that not the world we live in? In the existing system, with primaries, the electorate all decide which among their party is the most popular, and then the chosen candidates of those parties go against each other. In the delegation system the electorate all choose their favorite candidates, and then candidates within each party pool their votes together towards the most popular one. It's the same steps just in different orders, and the forces towards and away from extremism seem pretty much the same to me. In the world where it's D/mR/tR = 45/35/25, the moderate would have won the Primary in the current system and become the Republican party candidate instead of Trump.
There are small technical differences, such that you can come up with very niche scenarios where the outcome will differ. But I think the general pattern of having two monolithic parties with extreme candidates are the same in both systems for the same reasons, and in almost every circumstance they will lead to identical incentives and outcomes.
I don't see why that would always be true. I would expect red-leaning judges to be biased towards the red states, while blue-leaning judges would be biased towards the blue states.
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