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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29310 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Has problems with economics' most important question ("who live big house?") because it creates a permanent two-caste society in which one class of people who make up the vast majority of the population are eternally poor and live off the state, with no real chance of improving their situation (other than with a generally rising tide), while the other caste live off their capital and own all or most of the resources. Seems likely to fuel class conflict, perhaps successfully given traditional bulwark against socialist revolution (lower-middle class/burghers) no longer exists, nor do stratifications within working class (eg. between working class and underclass/lumpenproles). Might be social problems or dysfunction due to malaise or lack of labor in some communities.

It might be solvable with modest wealth taxes. The goal would be to gradually bring down wealth inequality. Possibly high taxes on inheritance.

It doesn't collapse to #4 IMO; market still functions as it did earlier, theoretically...

It's also hard to see what the structure of the 'elite' would be like. Would people try desperately to hold onto wealth, knowing that they'd die if they lost it? Wouldn't the huge collapse in aggregate demand caused by the withdrawal of billions of people from the market sink a lot of those rich people?

A fic mentions this problem. I already referenced it here days ago, so I'll keep the quote short this time...

The paradox of plenty had truly arrived. Factories were more productive than ever, but even at the lowest prices, the only clients with money were the increasingly opulent capital owners, the hyperclasses the newly emergent economic class that would come to define the following century. Economic production stagnated, even as potential production skyrocketed.

Government responses were mixed. Almost universally, the world’s government’s, nominally democratic or not, had degenerated into instruments of their oligarchical hyperclasses. Nations where the hyperclasses sympathized with the masses handed out basic incomes to keep them solvent. Those that didn’t handed out pittances or, often, nothing, content to rely on increasingly brutal oppression.

(...) it was only in a certain proportion of nations that it was able to mutate into true Detachment, with the hyperclass extending their beliefs to include the proposition that it was morally correct for the lower classes to be kept down, that it was morally incorrect to hand out relief food or money, and so forth. These kinds of beliefs mutated into endless variety, to a degree wearingly and horrifyingly familiar to any historian of the age.

Eventually, the world’s nations, defined by their hyperclasses, began to sort into two groups. The nations where the hyperclasses detached in this manner began to back each other in international disputes. Similarly, the nations where the hyperclasses held onto their moral compasses, implementing relief and welfare programs–though never giving up their hold on power (...) War followed shortly thereafter

Eventually, agonizingly, and cataclysmically, the FA collapsed under weight of its economic inferiority, its own ideologies rendering it incapable of effectively mobilizing its populations, or even preventing its populations from being co-opted by the other side.

like retvrning to feudalism or whatever, unlikely or unpredictable enough that they're not worth discussing in this context.

Heh, in The Full Stack Of Society: Can You Make A Whole Society Wealthier, UBI is categorized as a feudalist solution.

Working “Below the API” is the terrifying dystopian endgame vision driving the support in Silicon Valley for redistributive programs like Universal Basic Income, and Sam Altman wrote a prescient essay way back in 2013 about the political tensions of a low-growth Zero-Sum environment. The optimistic take is that “API-based” software businesses provide flexible employment, cash-on-demand-in-exchange-for-elbow-grease, and a way to provide for yourself and your family that didn't exist 10 years ago.

The pessimistic take is that working Below the API closes the path to Wealth for an entire Class of people as labor trends towards Perfect Competition, towards Zero Economic Surplus, towards a world where the serf~ peasant worker can't afford to purchase the tools she uses to work and must instead rent them from her employer at an ever-increasing-margin, i.e. pay a feu/fee, to be able to feed herself.

(...) Speaking of the Wealth-generating ability of labor, people on the internet had many different responses to my Bermuda Triangle of Wealth essay on personal Wealth-building: i) government needs to regulate healthcare costs ii) government distortions are actually what caused the cost disease and iii) government needs to limit immigration. All in response to the same essay on building Wealth for yourself.

…but there was one other kind of response that I hesitated to include

This plays as edgy irony to most people Above the API [5 favorites]

And yes, stow the pitchforks, #killingisstillbad, and yes, violence is super bad, Non-Aggression-Principle is good, and no, I definitely don’t condone any of that. But in a Feudal world, history has been pretty clear that things are Zero-Sum and there’s still only one good way to build Wealth — Take it and Tax it. Veni vidi vici etc.. If people look out the window and see nothing but Feudalism and a personal lifetime of serfdom, you can at least understand their instinctive linguistic reaching for violence (while condemning it).

Is there a non-violent solution that people living Below the API can self-effectuate, instead of having to rely on the Noblesse Oblige of Skynet those Above the API?

Perhaps. Another preachy author provides a less bloodthirsty solution that still satisfies history’s fundamental rule of Feudalism:

“When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.”

Voting is violence (by proxy), and Democracy marks a difference between the Feudalism of old and Silicon Valley’s envisioned Feudal dystopia. Each vote you cast is an implicit claim on the full force of Uncle Sam. It’s buried beneath layers of civilization, thankfully, but US voters elect Representatives who determine Tax Rates which determine IRS policies which, if you try to fuck around on, will get you violently arrested and sent to jail.

Nowadays you can Take it and Tax it at the ballot box, with the use of force suitably restrained by process and bureaucracy. Which is precisely why so many in Silicon Valley who can see the writing on the wall (eventually all those jobs “Below the API” get replaced by a robot…) are instinctively turning to Political solutions instead of Technological ones to the Wealth-building abilities of their fellow Americans.

“It’s a shame, really, but you can’t fight (technological) progress.”

My point: As long as people who feel abandoned or impoverished or crushed Beneath the API or like they have no obvious path upwards, as long as those people feel that VOTING is a valid way to “Take it and Tax it”, they can peacefully express and effectuate what otherwise must become violence or generational poverty & stagnation.

There’s no other way to build Wealth in a Feudal world — you’re either a Lord or a Serf.

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