sciuru
1yr ago
I believe Putin’s awareness is underestimated. Authoritarian survival is crucially dependent on tracking any signals, threatening your position. His real problem is controls.
You (Putin) can give any orders, but the longer the hierarchical chain of command they have to travel to reach the ground – the more they will disperse through attempts at every level to spread and avoid responsibility. There is no guarantee any order would be executed. You can iterate through all possible officials and commanders to find those, which work (and we’ve seen how many military officials have been changed since the start).
But you can’t iterate much through the pillars of your domestic power and administration – elites and technocrats. Technocrats/ managers do their job well, but there is only so much they can do with their tiny but precise levers. The real issue is that one of the primary mechanisms, through which Putin has been feeding his domestic elites for decades – is government contracts and corporate shares/management. But gradually it has rotten so much as to become a device solely for cash transfers. There has been many purges of petty fraudsters during the war – across all industries, like aerospace, military complex, high tech – but you can’t purge everything. And even after purge, it takes time to rebuild Potemkin industries, especially when many of them turned out to depend heavily on imported components.
In this situation your most reliable option is to order big impactful things, with sufficiently big impact-margin to account for all efficiency lost during implementation. This include diplomatic sabre-rattling, mobilization decisions, huge geoeconomical levers like shutting pipelines, etc.
As for awareness, Putin can observe the whole internet, including western media and analytics, which he surely understands is more reliable. At the same time he can query any of his subordinates, posing whatever uncomfortable questions he likes: they would serve you the bullshit, but the manner in which they do it certainly tells a lot. He can request a phone call to officials anywhere on the ground – and figure out why the governor of Kherson is unable to reply since a week. So at the bare minimum Putin can connect all those dots and infer the situation at least at strategic – “upper operational" level, but has little to change it.
sciuru
1yr ago
Not due to. You use them to arrive at conclusion that confederates were bad. Or not bad. It's a good example, as there seems to be much less agreement across US on their legacy and how to cope with it.
Imagine a monument to "famine relief policy of the metropole", erected in one of its colonies. Arguably, metropolitan policies often rather aggravated the consequences of famines, which conveniently served to suppress resistance. If you agree with this, you would be willing to get rid of the monument as commemorating a deliberate lie. Or you might think govt policy was a genuine, but ineffective attempt to help. That's causal inference.
sciuru
1yr ago
First assumption is that he cares about his political survival and understands which domestic and foreign variables to track. Second, that he receives highlights from western media/ analysts anyway. If he doubts the quality of information, surely he can arrange a randomized controlled trial and order 10 independent analysts to report to him. Seems like a standard routine for an autocrat who is fed up with sycophants.
Agreed, our degree of uncertainty varies across cases. I admit the consensus about Soviet impact on Latvia. What I am arguing for -- is that counterfactuals matter, while people pretend they don't.
Another example (with placebo group) is when Soviet army stopped short of Warsaw at the moment of Polish uprising against Germans. Allegedly Soviets waited for Poles and Germans to destroy as much of each other before entering. When you know about Soviet-Polish mutual hate and Soviet extermination policies against Polish army, you might readily impute that motive to them. But, if there was no evidence on that particular case, would it be right to impute it? Would you erect a memorial to victims of Red army, that intentionally stopped?
Autocracies are good at mobiliziation: launching ambitious campaigns, overthrowing previous government, suppressing dissent, quick small annexations (bites). They are not good at sustained growth over controlled territories (in fact even sustained resource extraction).
Historically, most expansionist endeavors of past autocracies had failed either immediately or via slow degradation. Aside from counterfactuals, what real cases do you have in mind of successful autocracies? And of course, it depends on how we measure performance: if we consider absolute values, than autocracies might boast their mobilization spikes; but if we integrate area under the curve, they loose.
Notation: By democracy here I mean simply operation of a representative assembly, by autocracy – strong hierarchy, branching out from a single ruler. Not speaking about welfare state, universal suffrage, etc.
From theoretical perspective, every enterprise, involving collective action, will suffer from free riding and principal agent problems. In both regimes this is solved via negotiation -- first you have to arrive at agreement, then you need a commitment device to secure it. Autocrats do this in the background: build satiate (coup-proof) elites around them by reward and punishment -- but it is always a precarious personal-trust-based balance. Democracies make negotiation and commitment more sable via institutionalization. Part of the process which is open to public, is just a spectacle; the point is that by making process more formal, it's easier to track maneuvers of all actors, and quickly react by forging coalitions. Even modern autocracies nowadays use nominal, publicly visible parties as a commitment device.
Edit: China has been growing fast for only ~30 years and still haven't achieved US GDP per capita. Initial growth is a sign-up bonus for capitalistic approach, the game starts when growth saturates.
sciuru
1yr ago
Most studies I've seen have such artificial settings, it's hard to take their conclusions at face value (if at all). Do you have any persuasive studies in mind? Or even better, just data sets/ narrative reviews of human behavior in the wild, w/t models and theories?
sciuru
1yr ago
Few hypotheses (based on experience, wrapped in theory):
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Hedonic treadmill. Your rotation system might still have a low "essential" variation, so that brain can predict/remember the most salient patterns, after which new songs don't excite/surprise it. Intermittent silence helps
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Attention. When you listen as a background to other activities, it might feel much less exciting, as attention spreads among inputs. Concert, in contrast, grabs all your sensory inputs at once
No. Russian Empire displayed noticeable growth only during the short period of industrialization after 1880. P. Gregory attributes much of it to extensive measures:
During Russia’s industrialization era, the growth of national income was above average [...] On a per capita and per worker basis, Russian output growth was average relative to the industrialized countries. [...] growth was of a largely “extensive” character, that is, was caused principally by the growth of inputs rather than the growth of output per unit of input. Again, the Russian experience is similar to that o European offshots, which also grew “extensively” during that period.
As for impact of autocracy, most Russian rulers were hardcore conservatives and fiercely opposed to any innovation. Witte, the main engineer of industrialization, was fortunate enough to be tolerated by Nicholas II; Stolypin, who had more ambitious plans, wasn’t so fortunate.
The size of Russian industry at the end of the 19th century was relatively small with significant barriers to entry and widespread monopolies. Russian tsars traditionally distrusted capitalist institutions seeing them as a threat to their absolute power (Pipes, 1997). Under the Russian corporate law, the registration of any joint stock company required a special concession from the tsar who personally signed corporate charters. This stands in contrast with corporate laws of Germany, France, [etc] in the late 19 century. The reformers understood very well that Russia’s industrialization required “importation of foreign capital and technology”; however, tsars did not want to give up the control over the economy to foreigners — and kept significant barriers in place.
WWI was a proximate cause of 1917 revolution, but the meaningful cause has been pending systematically since revolution of 1905 (similarly, prompted by defeat from Japan): backward institutions and incompetent uncompromising ruler. I’d be glad to share more details, if you wish. Open to counter evidence.
Edit: formatting
sciuru
1yr ago
I don't see reliable indications
What indications would you imagine? That Peskov or some news media would mention in a passing, that Putin "recently browsed runet to gauge domestic sentiment", "Putin is actually very modern, high tech guy, he uses PC and internet regularly"? or that Putin would conspicuously tap at his smartphone during meeting or forum? You would dismiss those signals as a part of "enlightened monarch" theater (like videos you refer to). It means there is no reliable evidence to reject the hypothesis outright.
My core belief is that an autocrat would learn to filter higher level signals on which his survival depends. Higher level means he is like a mediocre CEO/ early modern ruler -- he doesn't know how stuff at lower level works, he knows how to build and manage patronage networks, play them against one another and how to discern through them any conflicting information. That's rather weak assumption on his part, much less than classic field-independent rationality with infinite computing power.
Do not sweep me into "LW", that's a weird rhetorical device. Methodologically, my main issue here is to find how to evaluate likelihood of what we observe about Putin, given my or your hypotheses. Your assumptions are clearly favored by Occam's razor, being interwoven into an elegant and expressive narrative of a stupid "political animal". My assumptions rely more on historical parallels and general logic of delegation/ autocratic rule. Public image of savvy rulers of the past also didn't reflect hidden variables of their decision making.
that much we know. We can't really say more
No. That much we observe. And when we observe so little, it's your personal priors, which mainly speak, not the likelihood.
sciuru
1yr ago
I think, the real debate is about how much of a cap is justified.
From a narrow, short-term efficiency perspective, raising price above the marginal cost of production is suboptimal (and therefore "bad") only if you want to maximize total welfare (which most people probably don't). Market price is merely an aggregation (like average) of prices at which transactions actually occur. But some people implicitly imbue it with a sacred meaning of being unconditionally "efficient" and "welfare maximizing" - just by virtue of resulting from any market interactions whatsoever. From a narrow view, that's incorrect, as markets often fail to arrive at a short-term efficient price, if they try at all.
In the narrow view it's also irrelevant that consumers reveal their preference by choosing monopoly suppliers. True, in this exact moment monopoly supplier is their optimal choice. But when a robber offers you to choose between your life and money, you would also optimally choose your life. Robber imposes on you the choice (market structure), by force (market power), which pushes you toward inefficient allocation.
From a broader, more reasonable but complicated macro perspective, there must be a profit margin big enough for investment, risk premium and so on. If all producers would maximize welfare in the short term, they wouldn't grow and therefore underperform in the long run.
sciuru
1yr ago
Thanks for high effort. I enjoyed the read.
Sweden, Denmark and even Norway have seen approximately no increase in the level of GDP per capita since 2007
Haven't they? Absolute gap is persistent, as you noted, but growth rates closely track US ones. Also it might be a good thing to have certain per capita gap -- to have a room for catch-up.
Unemployment is arguably worse than poverty for utility
If we consider subjective well-being, poverty amounts to permanent survival mode with almost no access to social lifts and any fruits of civilization. I think it's incomparable to any existential sufferings of idle, but otherwise well-to-do people (moreover, lack of job doesn't preclude anyone from meaningful and even societally useful endeavors).
And methodologically, I think evolutionary stories are irrelevant until we have current evidence of what they supposedly imply. And when we have current evidence, there is no need for stories.
Now a macro, long-horizon perspective. One might argue the poor are productivity hoarders in some sense, locked in the low-productivity jobs. I agree, that unconditional redistribution erodes incentives, but conditional transfers (say, of money or education in exchange for obligation to find a job from the list) to the poor might push/nudge them toward upper levels, where they can contribute more to the growth.
Growth is appealing as it enables efficiency improvements, and inefficiency (wastefulness) is a rare thing everyone agrees to be bad. I like Rawlsian scenario of a narrow economic elite, pushing the Pareto frontier, reaping its well deserved 90% share of surplus and doling out 10%. But 10% might be suboptimal for a classic welfare maximizer, who assumes diminishing utility. The latter implies it's optimal to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom until both sides meet on the utility curve. The poor are at the steepest slope, they gain much more than wealthy ones lose by helping them.
The main question here is how much capital should we set aside for growth, and how much of wealthy capital actually causes growth.
I wouldn't actually be so epistemically arrogant as to think that utilitarian reasoning was the best way to implement a utilitarian analysis of what is good/evil
Could you elaborate on this?
sciuru
1yr ago
Overall, I agree with your assessment, except the fact that Stalin was a notable outlier wrt body counts. The following Soviet leaders impeded economic development and degraded quality of life within Soviet bloc (including USSR itself) vis-à-vis the West, but number of people they killed - throwing tanks on strikes, uprisings and demonstrations in Berlin, Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, during Prague Spring – was negligible relative to Stalin’s count. I do believe in their good will and incompetence (except for Putin).
Speaking of glorified imperialism. Here’s the case of Britain:
the culpability of the British in each famine varies wildly, and most scholarship analyzing British rule as a catalyst of famine tends to focus on famines within the Raj period, specifically the Great Famine of 1876-78, 1896-1902 famine, and the Bengal famine of 1943. Notably, Purkait et al, when enumerating famines under British rule, identify "British policies" as catalysts only in these three instances. If we take this analysis at face value and rely on mortality estimates from Purkait et al, this produces a figure of 13.6-23.3 million famine deaths for which British rule bore partial responsibility.
These are broad estimates, feel free to provide better ones. Odd Arne gives a rough estimate of at least 10 million killed plus 3 million from Ukraine famines – for the whole period of Stalin’s reign (with 23 million imprisoned and deported, I don't if this overlaps).
Now, when I fixed my evaluation of Soviet policy, what do you think of this one? Are there any relevant factors at all for you, and how do account for them w/t causal reasoning?
sciuru
1yr ago
Dunbar himself is still kicking, btw. Moreover, he's producing papers at an insane rate (number of Dunbar's articles about Dunbar's number). Here's the paper from 2016 on Facebook and Twitter, but they used rather old datasets -- 2009 and 2012 resp -- which reflected social media interface at that time.
Social brain hypothesis, which he's been studying, is about existence of several layers of contacts within any social communities. 150 is a size of one of the layers. After clustering social media data he found similar layered structure:
Quite remarkably, the mean rates of contact in each layer are extremely close, especially for the Facebook datasets, to those found in (and, indeed, used to define: Dunbar and Spoors, 1995) the different layers in egocentric offline personal social networks (Sutcliffe et al., 2012). This suggests that the online environments may be mapping quite closely onto everyday offline networks, or that individuals who inhabit online environments on a regular basis begin to include individuals that they have met online into their general personal social network, treating the different modes of communication as essentially the same.
I read about this experiment from another author, who said similar results were obtained in online game communities. But he was rather skeptical, saying that the data is limited and there are many built-in artificial structures, forcing certain clusters. Those clusters might be stretched to fit the hypothesis.
sciuru
1yr ago
Annexation might be the most outrageous way to disrupt equilibrium, but if done bloodlessly, it might cause less suffering in the long run, than toppling/installing governments w/t outward annexation. For some reason civilized world strongly prefers smouldering conflicts with violence and suffering spread -- and therefore, perceptually discounted -- across space and time thinly enough to look almost "natural".
Wikipedia on Syrian civil war: 15 March 2011 – present (11 years, 6 months and 3 days); aside from combatant casualties at least 306,887 civilians killed, estimated 6.7 million internally displaced & 6.6 million refugees.
For Iraq estimates and methodologies range wildly.
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Costs of war project: 268,000 - 295,000 people were killed in violence in the Iraq war from March 2003 - Oct. 2018, including 182,272 - 204,575 civilians
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The PLOS Medicine study's figure of approximately 460,000 excess deaths through the end of June 2011 is based on household survey data including more than 60% of deaths directly attributable to violence.
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The Lancet study's figure of 654,965 excess deaths through the end of June 2006 is based on household survey data. The estimate is for all excess violent and nonviolent deaths. That also includes those due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poorer healthcare, etc.
Is that burning slow enough?
This is not to justify any other conflicts. The whole framing of "justification" is hilarious, as it presumes innocence of any geopolitical act, unless you can't make up any excuses at all.
sciuru
1yr ago
Thank you!
Unexpectedly, very few studies met our inclusion criteria, despite the fact that we included both “self-incentive” and “self-reward” as search terms.
They took very narrow inclusion criteria. It might genuinely reflect their narrow research interest, but there is a vast overlapping terminological mess research on behavioral change and goal pursuit, which uses other notions: intrinsic/extrinsic motivation, self-control / effortless control / impulse control, reward processing/ neural economics, etc. After brief unsuccessful attempts to "get the whole picture", I now read mostly about specific techniques, which are easier to test empirically, and that seem to work for me. Are you researching out of scholarly interest or to enhance personal performance?
sciuru
1yr ago
Could I ask your view on late Russian Empire? Although lagging behind, it seemed to be more in touch with European states (than its own people, ironically), industrialized at impressive rates, and eventually yielded to some democratic changes. If Russian whites were as successful as Finnish ones during their civil war, I believe - in the hindsight - they could steer toward better trajectory, than the Soviet one.
Any ideology, however polished, serves as a device for rationalization and coordination within tribes. Is your point that sj is so consolidated as to be called an ideology -- but a flawed, contradictory one? Or that sj is just a spontaneous result of signaling games, and not ideology at all. I wouldn't dismiss any views, overlapping with its umbrella.
Edit: for prospective downvoters. Ever care to engage? or my view is too idiotic for you to descend to?
sciuru
1yr ago
I don’t know of archival evidence, showing that Soviets planned to destroy Polish home army through deliberate timing of operation. I’ve read only a few AH posts, which usually have careful summaries (cc @Botond173). My sense is that Stalin was clearly hostile and antagonistic; Soviets and Poles hated each other and were almost in the state of war of its own; Soviet army at that direction exhausted its offensive momentum, but they seem to be able to act anyway; in the event there was no coordination.
My point was that this data leaves some open space, which everyone would tend to fill in as he likes. Even my whole presentation is biased in ways I don't see. Does it seem wrong to you? If you have a better account, I’d appreciate you sharing it.
sciuru
1yr ago
After he survived writing a book "10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less", I assume he is immortal. In the preface to that book he mentioned one especially persistent person, who several times mailed his university department and called police to check him. Jones finished preface by dedicating the book to that guy.
Great paper, thank you! It provides much more detailed and up-to-date view of the imperial industry, than the book I cited (by Paul Gregory, who is a renowned scholar and doesn’t belong to an early-soviet tradition of downplaying tzarist achievements).
We find that Russia’s labour productivity, calculated based on net output data and net
output weights, was at 81.9 per cent of the U.K. level, […] on a par with France’s and significantly superior to Italy’s.
What helped Russia achieve this erformance was the highly productive and large alcohol industry. Without the alcohol sector, Russia’s productivity would have been 74.8 per cent of the British level. [...] the government had made large investments in it, leading to a strong comparative advantage.
That’s it. Vodka has always been a Russian superpower. It also accounted for a huge share of tax revenues (around 30% !) in both imperial and soviet govts.
High labour productivity is a surprise to me. That said, the article shows that productivity varied a lot across industries, and ~70% of population was still employed in a much more backward agriculture, which spoils per capita figures.
Despite these successes, Russian enterprises operated with substantial friction in the production process and the labour market. […] According to Cheremukhin et al. (2017), high barriers to entry and widespread monopolies were the most important factors that slowed down Russia’s industrialisation; although these factors were also widespread in other industrialised countries
They support the evidence for monopolies (which I attribute to state policy and more directly to the tzar and his cronies), but also note it wasn’t a distinct issue (if issue at all) of autocracy. This also downplays my argument.
All that data however doesn’t elucidate the connection between autocrat and his economic policy. The growth was absent before 1880, and I believe afterwards it was only impeded by autocrats. Railroad construction – a major industrialization booster – was initiated and done almost solely by Witte – a savvy technocrat, whom Nicholas despised and eventually pushed into resignation. Stolypin, who tried to modernize agriculture, faced fierce resistance from status-quo factions. Arms industry during WWI was also dominated by Romanovs' cronies, with other factories almost staying idle, when they could contribute.
As for 1905, defeat from Japan fueled public sentiment, but it wasn’t decisive at all. The general strike of 1905 was precipitated by many decades of struggle: Bloody Sunday, local worker strikes, peasant arsons, socialist revolutionary activities, etc. The public opinion had been formed long ago, and refined into various (unofficial) parties. Their proclamations and complaints were focused on the tzar’s incompetence and intransigence. It’s a long story, but this summary is close to my perception
If the last paragraph appears too handwaving, I can bring examples from the book (in a separate message)
sciuru
1yr ago
The methods the CCP uses to coordinate are more centralized and straight forward
In theory, I agree that hierarchical top-down control propagates signals better. As for practice, I can provide examples from the Soviet history, which illustrate the following problems:
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Signal from the top might be initially poor (unrealistic), and all subordinate levels would have to cope with it
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Interest groups and factions, which you acknowledged, erode control and create corruption. Democracy has those too, but I’d argue it has less overall corruption due to formal influence channels, like lobbying, donation campaigns, etc. Hidden corruption in autocracy might remain unaccountable for a long time.
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Struggle between US parties is more transparent, with a lot of stuff exposed by journalists. Publicity reduces space for maneuver (you can’t make things up randomly or keep denying everything). In autocracy outcomes of conflicts often depend on personal connections and ability to maneuver; there is no way for outsiders (even within same circle) to get the signal, as the eventual purge would be advertised as generic treason or whatever
Factions in America are much stronger and the country is much more divided
American failures are more exposed, but whether they are more numerous/deleterious is a purely empirical question. I’d be glad to know evidence on China.
extremely impressive
Agreed. My point is that China and US are facing different slopes of the same S-curve at the moment (economically, and historically, as you noted), so direct comparison of growth rates is not meaningful.
sciuru
1yr ago
Since the beginning of war I've seen rather high levels of bureaucratic activity: officials fired and reshuffled, legislative trappings expanded, corporations merged and shuffled. I take this as evidence, that at least some information trickles down to Putin's mind.
The point is not that he is personally fond of gadgets or internet. To survive in his vipers nest, he needs a lot of information, from various sources/services, competing and being played against one another. I doubt it's as simple as "everyone just serves him rosy reports": when one official over-serves his rosy vision, his rival might undercut him by serving something closer to reality, with more details. It's more effective to compete down toward ground truth, gradually adding more details, than to race up - into more and more delirious and vague positive reports.
sciuru
1yr ago
"Bad" gouging is about raising prices beyond compensation for (1) risk and delivery costs, and (2) demand increase. Legality of price gouging increases incentive for profit seekers, yes. But if they are profit seekers, why not cooperate and arrange high cartel prices for this short period of time?
only if you pretend that the larger market has ceased to exist
Why pretend that market never fail? Especially during disruption and uncertainty of a disaster, when there might be not so many arbitragers rushing to close all price differentials.
natural method of limiting overuse of scarce goods
Could you provide a brief example of this method?
sciuru
1yr ago
Could you elaborate on what exactly isn't right in that sentence? I don't see how your example contradicts what I said. When the marginal cost or demand increases, producer would adjust its price up, naturally. But when producer compensated all his expenses and still raises price -- it benefits producer at a cost of consumers (this raise is not a Pareto improvement).
Everyone in replies has stressed how this decision has nothing to do with alternative histories. It clearly does. When you denounce Soviets in the hindsight, you explicitly deal with counterfactuals, assuming that Soviets could have avoided their excesses (presumably like other European states or US), but had chosen not to. And that this choice – of pursuing aggressive political agendas, by brutal means – might be attributed to the barbaric attitudes of their leaders (and probably people).
Isn’t this a purely causal interpretation? If instead you could have attributed Soviet policies to other factors, partially beyond their control – like geopolitical prisoner-dilemma-like situations, or mere incompetence of the leaders – you wouldn’t denounce them.
This counterfactual reasoning is at the heart of most cultural wars, and it has nothing to do with "rewriting" the past. It has to do with imputing motives and hidden geopolitical variables, in the hindsight.
I would be glad to hear counter-arguments, as it seems many commenters disagree.
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