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Robin Hanson wrote an article recently on how his politics have drifted. For those not familiar with his he was one of the early rationalist adjacent that likely filters a lot of people here. As a GMU professor he blogged like the rest of their Econ department and marginal revolution which was much bigger for leading people to SSC. Also early intellectual promoter of prediction markets like in the ‘90s and use to co-blog with Hal Finney.
A few highlights: “ While it is okay to fiercely resist the immediate decline of a cherished value today, like say democracy or gender-equality, 3 top LLMs agree that is now taboo to explicitly work to help your culture persist, reproduce, and have continued influence centuries into the future.”
“ I’m not especially into liberty, democracy, legal due-process, or immigration, beyond their instrumental values in achieving other things.”
A lot of comments on cultural drift and risks with that. The second comment strikes me because I feel like I’ve been thinking about those issues a lot lately. And I feel like I too am moving to a political philosophy of common goodism and the other ideas are just means to achieve the good. Perhaps this is just the standard libertarian to fascism pipeline but I do think a lot of people are questioning whether America is still on a workable path. It’s easy to be a liberal-libertarian when society is broadly good/stable but in harder times more pragmatic ideas emerge.
Then he just comments on things everyone else has noticed - parasitic classes in big cities (often unions) just crushing QOL for the non-rich.
I use to read Hanson a lot, but I only read him a few times a year now. Some of his early insights turned out coming true. It’s interesting to me how minds that shared a lot of common thinking patterns end up developing similar conclusions today. Democracy, Liberty, due-process, and immigration were likely things I viewed as very positive a decade ago. Now I would likely consider them unimportant.
Hanson
The devil is always in the details. Democracy, freedom, and due process are abstract concepts, ending them won’t intrinsically cause any issues. But what concretely do you (or Hanson) propose to replace them, and how? For me, just what is enough for now, because I haven’t heard a good proposal yet.
Personally, I still hold “democracy is the
bestworst government except for all others that have been tried”. I’m not against dictatorship, if the dictator is competent and has a good successor strategy. But who does, and how do you get this person in charge and ensure they’re not overthrown?Likewise, the problem with taking away citizens’ freedom is that what’s done instead isn’t better. Communist governments were ultimately less productive and lost to capitalist ones. We already don’t have total freedom (because that’s impossible), and maybe we need more laws restricting more freedom, for example drug use and being a nuisance in public or to service workers. But what kind of restrictions are you really talking about? Criticizing leaders? Free speech? Then what do we do when leaders start making bad opinions and decisions (since, like everyone, they’re not perfect), going further and further astray like a stalling plane (with no one to correct them, how would they avoid this)?
You may argue we’re already going astray; but there are forums like these, my argument is if opposition was illegal things would degrade faster (and I’m optimistic there will eventually be a course correction in either scenario, but only the latter requires a revolution). You may point to China; but before today’s government, China suffered the “Great Leap Forward” which caused more proportional death than any democratically-caused disaster (at least that I’m aware of); it’s still suffering from centrally-planned failures like its housing; and what do you think will happen when Xi Jinping dies? I think Singapore is the strongest counter-argument; but seeing the War on Drugs and vast difference in culture, I don’t believe America (individualist and expressive) can reach their (collectivist and routine) stable equilibrium, nor any European nation for nation-specific reasons.
Lastly, the illusion of autonomy is important: it makes people happy and complicit, and permits extreme outliers which may be vital. For example, instead of explicitly limiting peoples’ calorie consumption, it would probably be better to just provide free GLP-1s and encourage them via propaganda (in this case outliers probably wouldn’t be vital, but they’d be few enough they’d negligibly affect public resources like healthcare, while appealing to fat enthusiasts). More generally, instead of officially eliminating basic values like democracy to massive resistance, enabling extreme failure modes, why not just manipulate people and use procedural tricks to achieve the same outcomes? I mean, most nations already do that today…
In fact, I speculate a reason people are disillusioned and ironically proposing authoritarian measures is because we live in unofficial creeping authoritarianism. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but especially without a good proposal, it hints that we shouldn’t accelerate into that path.
What if, instead, we propose and start implementing ways to restore unofficial liberty, democracy, and due process? (I threw myself into the immigration storm last week; I won’t suggest what to do here except not deport massive numbers of integrated citizens or decades-long immigrants, because explained in that thread, I doubt it can happen in a democracy with free press that remains a democracy with free press).
You replace them with what they replaced: republicanism. That means layers of representation, and it means not everyone gets to vote.
The amendments 14-19+24+26, where 14/15/19/24/26 all expand voters indiscriminately, and 16/18 are centralizing authority and control, with a special place in hell for 17 which allowed the fedgov to fully control the states.
The people who vote need to have a stake before they are allowed to vote, other wise they will just vote themselves other people's money, and in the case of immigrants, all of their cousins be allowed to become voters, too, so the whole clan can vote themselves other people's money.
Democracy is not the solution, it is the problem. If you have a solution to the problem of voting yourself other people's money, then I'm glad to hear it, but it's the obvious consequence of expanding the franchise in misguided worship of Demos.
Then the problem becomes, who gets to vote and how do you decide?
Non-citizen immigrants already shouldn’t be voting. Children of immigrants, maybe if they have ties to their origin country, but otherwise they have no less of a stake in their host country than anyone else.
The median voter will vote for themselves to have other people’s money, unless the selection process is very careful and has a way to prevent corruption (which seems unlikely because the selfless voters will be taken advantage of by definition; it must prevent their selflessness from being misallocated to parasites). Even when voters benefit someone else, they’re still benefiting themselves, just next prioritizing who they prefer over who they don’t: e.g. when high-ranking Democrats support immigrants over ordinary citizens, they still put themselves first. I think it’s more important to figure out why the under-prioritized group (ordinary citizens)’s votes aren’t working to keep their money and fix that; if you only deprive a different group of votes, they may still be under-prioritized (e.g. Democrats may redirect money from immigrants to citizens they think will vote Democrat, but they’ll give no more to citizens they think will vote Republican).
Also, how do you divide the layers? In the US gerrymandering (and FPTP) have locked Congress from doing anything and entrenched ideologically extreme candidates. But I think this easier and something simple would be good enough like: (pick n) 1 candidate for n-2n people and each candidate has vote power proportional to how many they represent.
This becomes an easier problem to solve if you permit multiple votes per person. Then you could, e.g., divide the total income tax collected by the number of registered voters, and give each voter a number of votes equal to their shares of taxes paid, rounding up, with a minimum of one and a maximum of, say, 10. Rough figures put that share at about $15,000, so for every $15,000 of federal income taxes paid, you get an extra vote, up to 10, which would correspond to an income of around $500K. This would weight the franchise in favor of those with skin in the game without giving wildly disproportionate power to the ultra-wealthy. (This would also have the side benefit of incentivizing cleaning up voter roles, to decrease the denominator of the income contribution and raise the price of additional votes for the wealthy).
There are issues with this.
And even if you just count taxes paid and don't count services received, many of ther issues still apply; for instance, the government can make you pay the equivalent of taxes by forcing you to spend the money yourself, or forcing a company to spend it (and then the company passes along the cost to you). Or the government can manipulate "who pays the taxes" through accounting tricks (like whether a stay at home spouse files jointly).
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I think this system makes a underclass strike or revolution more likely, but maybe not, looking at the current system where everyone’s vote counts only in a weak official sense.
The bigger problem with it is that the ruling party can entrench themselves by making it easier for supporters and harder for opposers to earn money. How would you prevent that?
Adding +1 vote for each child under 18 would also create good incentives and add balancing power to those who choose family over income. I think the problem you describe isn't too large a problem, as market forces would be constantly fighting against it.
Would they? The government controls the market. They don’t have to completely disenfranchise the opposition to maintain a supermajority: just tip the scales so for example the bottom 25% in income (unexceptional) supporter is much richer than the top 25% (unexceptional) opposer.
I think this is a great idea even today, because governments aren’t prioritizing young people enough, it appeals to both sides (conservatives = more children, liberals = empowering women), and has a decent-sounding justification (the baby deserves representation, and the mother usually cares about them, so she’ll vote in their interest).
But I doubt it would offset the imbalance from giving richer people more votes: most people prefer income over votes since it benefits them more directly, so those having more children would be the rich people (with enough income to raise them in living conditions they consider decent, like today).
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There is no utopia. There will always be problems. I would rather have those problems you described than the ones we have today.
They absolutely have less stake in the host country, it's absurd to say otherwise. The very fact of having a backup means you have less at stake.
Virginia decides who cotes in Virginia. Texas decides who votes in Texas. And so on in that fashion.
In multiple generations they won’t have a backup, few countries permit great-grandchildren to remigrate.
But even immigrants themselves, if their origin country hates them or is a true shithole, and they can prove this (e.g. they’re an activist), they have no backup, and credible reason to have negative allegiance towards it.
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