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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   27030 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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The breaking of social covenant and the rise of selfish societies

Recently in the news, Red Lobster is reporting an 11 million dollar loss, which is forcing the company to close many restaurants and possible file for chapter 11. The problem? Their '$20 all you can eat shrimp' deal was too good. Some anecdotal evidence indicates that large tables would order one or two orders of the never-ending deal, causing huge losses as large parties would share a single plate for $20, causing significant restaurant losses.

In the past few years, NYC has seen significant increases in retail theft, with stores facing many millions of dollar losses, with the estimate of retail theft being up to 4.4 billion dollars for the state alone. The cost of thefts cause a cyclical cycle, it forces stores to raise prices to cover the loss of the theft, which in turn prices people out of purchasing goods, which again raises theft. So far, the plans the governor has been trying to put into place seems to have done little to curtail any theft.

A 2024 jobs report shows a massive shortage of manufacturing labor, with 770,000 manufacturing jobs open. Labor participation has not recovered from the COVID crisis, with participation at 63.3% just before corvid and around 62.5% from the most recent report. Labor participation was highest before the 2008 housing crisis during the Bush admin around 67%. 7.5 million men have dropped out of America's workforce, meaning that they are not job seeking and therefore wouldn't be tracked as part of unemployment in FRED data.

There's a lot of words spilled on the internet on 'high trust societies'. Places like Japan where a lost item will be much more likely returned to its owner than, say, Detroit. Or rural America, where people will pay money at an unattended farm stand for fresh fruits and/or vegetables. However, trust doesn't fully cover what's going on in the west. /u/johnfabian's post is not about trust, but rather the breaking down of the covenant between constituents and their governments that keep a society basically functions. These social functions are much more simple than trust. It's about not running a red light, not driving the wrong way down a highway, or waiting in line for a train rather than trying to crowd on regardless of capacity.

Western society flourishing was largely predicated on this tacit understood social covenant: on an individual level, each person does their best to contribute through labor - be it stocking shelves to software development to entrepreneurship. In turn, the government upholds the status quo and optimizes legislation for stability and prosperity for the working class.

However in recent times this has changed. I'm not sure if the western governments decided they can have it's cake and eat it, too, or that the only way to perpetuate power is finding a new voter base, but the recent focus on marginalized groups has significantly eroded the trust away from indigenous constituents. It doesn't take a genius to tell that demographic groups are being treated, litigated, and policed based off of completely different rule books, and this type of treatment always creates division and resentment. The covenant between government and the constituencies broke, which changed the payoff matrix. As governments pick and choose which demographics to control, people become more selfish, as the ability to create value from freer markets diminish.

This is why 'selfish societies' is a better term than 'low trust' societies. As much as people love to yell at corporations for perusing short term gains, individuals pursue selfish gains at the cost of others even more as shown from my examples alone. Trust does not fully explain how people behave in the aforementioned examples, but selfishness does. Low male employment, antiwork, and the rise of NEET-dom has nothing to do with trust, but selfishness adequately describes the motivations for the ideological positions they hold. Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint. Even the declining birthrate is a result of selfishness; people would prefer to have the increased income and enjoyment of consequence-free fornication instead of laying an effective and positive groundwork for future generations.

The question, then, is it possible for a government to regain the respect of its constituents, and can the people understand that there needs to be some amount of selflessness to create an environment to nurture the next generation?

Interestingly enough, the one author I ever link on this site recently did a series of articles talking about his interpretation of some of the same phenomena.

https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-lenocracy/

The word I came up with is “lenocracy.” The first part of that word comes from leno, the Latin term for a pimp. Yes, what the word means is a government of pimps.

Let’s unpack that phrase a little bit. If, as the saying goes, prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, then pimping must be up there in the oldest half dozen or so. What makes a pimp economically interesting is that he adds no value to the exchanges from which he profits. He doesn’t produce any goods or services himself. His role is wholly parasitic. He inserts himself into the transaction between the sex worker who provides the service and the customer who wants it, and takes a cut of the price in exchange for allowing the transaction to happen.

This kind of parasitic interaction is far from unusual in economics, but it’s not always as common as it is now. There are societies and eras in which most economic activity is mediated by pimps of various kinds, and other societies and other eras in which such arrangements are relatively rare (and often harshly penalized). Right now, in the modern industrial world, we live in an economy where nearly all exchanges are subject not just to the exactions of a single pimp but to whole regiments of pimps, each of whom has to be paid in order for the exchange to take place. Furthermore, this orgy of pimping is sponsored, controlled, and mandated by government at all levels and by the holders of political and economic power more generally. Thus, lenocracy.

I think that this is actually a separate phenomenon to high/low trust societal changes. That's definitely happening and we're seeing the impacts, but I think the idea of lenocracy provides more explanatory power in this case.

The pimp is contract enforcement in a transaction that is usually illegal so normal means can't be used.

Damage the goods or refuse to pay and the pimp steps in.

The author is making the mistake of assuming that without enforcement the transaction just happens 100% perfectly. And so the pimp is a parasite. Now 9 times out of 10 the very presence of the pimp is enough to enforce compliance, so it can look like they aren't doing anything but those positions exist for a reason. If you know an inspector might check your goods, then you are incentivized to not try and slip in shoddy merchandise.

In other words a pimp is just an unofficial judge, jury and leg breaker. And that explains why the official versions exist too, because transactions require oversight. Every society on earth creates these positions for a reason. They are crucially important to building the high trust you talk of. Someone has to enforce "good" behaviour, so that the transaction can be trusted to take place. So we mandate goods inspections, certificates of compliance, paperwork logs etc.

So its not that governments become lenocracies, its that pimps are a shadow of government. Just like gang enforcers are, they commit illegal acts yes, but in the service of maintaining a structure.

Pimping might be what contract resolution looks like in a libertarian world. The private contractor pays someone to enforce the contract if the client does not pay etc. Probably with less leg breaking, canes and hats though.

I assume the "parasite" sentiment comes from the fact that pimps don't always allow their services to be refused. Do you think it'd be a good libertarian world if enforcers showed up uninvited at your office and let you know that either you hire them for the price they set, or something might happen?

Well I am not a libertarian, but whether some pimps do that, doesn't invalidate pimping as being valuable. Anymore than the fact some cops being corrupt invalidates law enforcement entirely.

Why do you think is it called "pimping her out" as opposed to "pimping for her" or something?

Because they are basically management in this scenario. I work for my boss, but that doesn't indicate my boss doesn't bring value. Now there are plenty of bad managers who do not bring value and do exploit their workers, but that doesn't mean that management in and of itself does not bring value when it comes to organizing workers efficiently. Given sex work is generally illegal it seems likely that many pimps do indeed lean towards the exploiting end but that doesn't mean the concept of pimping is invalidated.

My recollection is that pimps do provide a service to a prostitute; primarily protection. Yes yes, I know "protection racket" seems similar, and there is definitely an aspect of that, but prostitutes also have significant threats from customers and a variety of the situations they find themselves in. To some extent, the service the pimp is providing is some measure of protection from some amount of those threats. Of course, the level of service they provide, and the price they extract, may not be part of the most functional market ever, and they may lean a bit more toward the "parasite" end than the pure and honest goods/services end, but I don't know that they're 100% parasitic. I don't know what percent it would be. Of course, society is not going to jump straight to 100% parasitic either; it gradually grows to be that way.

Yeah a prostitute without a pimp or someone similar is gonna get stiffed by customers all the time.

So to speak

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