site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

15
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Alternative to UBI:

Each person receives a resource allocation block (representing some bundle of ownership of society's stuff and thus resulting rents). When they have a kid, their personal block is split with their kid after a period of time.

When someone dies, their block is distributed evenly to all other living citizens.

This technique was designed to deal with monopolization problems with pseudo-immortality, but it also has the effect of punishing natalism when the overall birthrate exceeds the growth of society's resources. The practical effect is that the impact of natalism hits early, hits hard, and hits those most involved in pushing the world towards Malthusian suffering. On the other hand, if no one else is having children, your kids will get a larger total share of the resources as the others die in boating accidents, landslides, etc. (Children of extreme natalists have to work for a living, but that's the future the natalists would choose for everyone else, so it's just arriving early for them.)

In this scenario, nothing prevents someone from renting their allocation to someone else. That's the capitalist angle - you can live at a higher standard of living by renting additional stuff by providing value to others, but you can't accumulate ownership of whatever the resource allocation block is composed of.

That proposal reminds me a bit of John Roemer's A Future for Socialism. From Cosma's review:

There is no central planning board, like the Soviet Gosplan, commanding factories to produce so many million tons of steel and size 12 leather boots. Instead, all goods, including labor (land, oddly, is not mentioned) are allocated by markets; there are many banks, making loans at interest to competing firms, who pay dividends to those who own stock in them, and are, quite cold-heartedly, allowed to go bankrupt when bad luck or stupidity force them to it. There is international trade, free in goods, somewhat restricted in capital. Market forces impel firms to efficiency and innovation, at least as much as they do today.

Clearly, a rather old-fashioned marriage, with markets as the bread-winner. Where, then, do we find the socialist better half of the union? Not in the welfare-state provisions (though there is a full set of them, like china), but in the stock market. Stock prices are quoted not in currency but in coupons, issued to citizens on attaining their majority, not convertible to cash, and reverting to the treasury at death. The price of a firm's stock in coupons will, presumably, reflect both the current value of its dividends and expectations about its future performance. Citizens can buy and sell shares in firms directly, or, more plausibly, invest in mutual funds.

In a steady state society (no productivity growth; pseudo-immortality; the marginal birth results in decreased average productivity since existing labor is already deployed to the most productive uses), your proposal seems like a decent approach. I'd prefer something like purchasing a birth license: to have a child, a parent must purchase the right to one with a portion of their allocation, roughly equal to the amount that every person is entitled to at birth. That would require substantial reproductive coercion, but this avoids punishing children for their parents' social irresponsibility. Particularly, the entire point of having a roughly equitable distribution of resources is to avoid immiseration; over time, though, those who have children will become more and more impoverished, and it will pass down through generations. Ultimately you'd end up with a two class society, between the Methuselahs (those who received a significant initial resource allocation block and have grown by countless death dividends) and the Children (those who start out with a zero or minimal block and have received fewer death dividends than the Meths). I'm not convinced the disincentive of causing suffering to their children would prevent those who want them from having children.

Yeah that's the whole bit there - it's specifically designed to avoid direct reproductive coercion like that. Instead it just feeds people the environment limits early.

The other trick is that because whatever you didn't split with your kids/heirs while you were alive (+ x years for early deaths) gets redistributed, you're basically encouraged to have a kid/heir at some point.