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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34931 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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I finished reading Peter Turchin's new book, End Times this past week, which visits many elements of the culture war, including Trump, immigration, 99%ers, even Ukraine. I hadn't read his previous books, but apparently they included more of the data and graphs that he works with for his research. This one is branded more populist, from the name, bright red cover, and relegation of models and graphs to the final third of the book, which is all appendix. He comes across as a moderate Marxist, who's trying not to alienate American conservatives.

The basic argument is that a core part of nation ending turmoil is a cycle of what he calls the wealth pump and overproduction of elites. A society will start out an epoch with a more or less equitable share of power and money between the workers and the elites, but at some point, this is disrupted by the elites ovedrawing resources from the economy, often because they have too many children, or allow more upward mobility than downward. Then popular immiseration sets in, where the workers have decreased access to the kind of resources they need to thrive -- land, capital, opportunities -- and the elites have a "wealth pump," which seems to be his way of talking returns on capital outpacing returns on labor. Also, increased immigration to keep labor costs low, and benefit employers. The wealthy grow, the poor grow, and the middle class shrinks. Elite competition becomes more and more intense, both because there are more people competing for roughly the same number of positions, often simply because population growth outstrips the growth of important positions, and because the alternative of downward mobility looks worse and worse in comparison. So everyone with any money or influence tries extra hard to get their kids a good position at whatever their era's version of the ivy leagues are, so they can benefit from the growth of the top 10%, while desperately fearing falling into the precariat. There are a bunch of young intelligentsia without money or positions, but a lot of education and family investment, ready to become counter elites or revolutionaries. Often they wage wars until enough of them die to relieve the social pressure, and the cycle starts over.

Turchin's main prescription follows the outlines of the New Deal -- high tax rates for the rich, a growing minimum wage, labor unions, low immigration, perhaps public works projects, that kind of thing.

I found the prescription, especially, underwhelming. Turchin doesn't really go into the kinds of jobs workers do, or how that might influence things, and there's no real commentary about going from an agricultural labor base, to industrial manufacturing, to service, and the growth of a suspicion that it isn't just the aspiring elite jobs that are basically useless, but many of the "workers" are as well. A large component of the current malaise seems to be the impression not only that there are too many leaders, not enough followers, but that, increasingly, the followers are all simulated, automated, or passive consumers, not workers at all. It seems like any plan that could hope to stabilize society over the next hundred years would need to incorporate the possibility that most middle class jobs, especially, as well as a decent number of working class ones, will be automated, while higher level positions and things like garbage collection and construction continue to be necessary much longer. Sure, we could probably move to an economy where each person's job is to care for some other person's parent, child, or pet, but that doesn't seem like a great outcome. He does not mention this at all.

I think he’s discovered one part of the puzzle, but he’s like a workman with a hammer— everything must be a nail.

My hypothesis is that instability can come from any part of human society, not just economics. The problem is that it’s increasingly hard to organize in any part of society. None of the problems we have right now are unsolvable. Police reform isn’t impossible, the border isn’t unsolvable, poverty and homelessness are not unsolvable, education, you name it. What we lack isn’t the ability, but the will to pick a solution and actually do it. And this comes from us not having the coherent ideas about how to solve things.

as i wrote in an earlier blog post (https://greyenlightenment.com/2022/09/01/elite-overproduction-not-that-big-of-a-deal-yet/) , the case for elite overproduction, assuming such a thing is real, being societally destabilizing seems weak, imho. I agree society is much more competitive at the top-end compared to generations ago, such as math and coding competitions, Silicon Valley tech jobs, NYC finance jobs, high-stakes admissions, etc., but I fail to see how this is a threat per say even if it creates more anxiety among the striver-class or disillusionment. If anything, it's beneficial to have smarter people at the top, running companies, which is a tailwind for innovation and economic growth. Brain drain and capital outflows are way bigger problems than having too many elites. I would go so far as to say that elite overproduction is at the bottom of the ladder of possible things that are a problem. This is why emerging markets and most other foreign markets have done so poorly relative to the US economy and the S&P 500 since 2009 or so.,.,fewer brains, exiting capital, lack of innovation.

I find this interesting because my introduction to the idea of elite overproduction came back in 2018, and had much less to do with economics in the sense that you've analysed. To quote the author in question:

Part of that blowback came from within the working classes that took the brunt of the policies just named, and part of it came from other sectors of society that were shut out of the benefits of the bipartisan policy consensus and forced to carry a disproportionate share of the costs. Another element of it, though, unfolded from a policy that elites always embrace sooner or later: the habit of making sure that the educational system produces more people trained for managerial tasks than existing institutions can absorb.

Why should elites do this? For them, at least in the short term, the advantages are obvious. If you’re going to entrust the running of society to a hierarchy of flunkeys who are allowed to rise up from the underprivileged masses but are never quite allowed to join the overprivileged elite—and this, of course, is the normal condition of a complex society—you need to enforce rigid loyalty to the system and the ideas it considers acceptable. The most effective way to this is to set candidates for flunkeyhood against each other in a savage competition that most will lose.

As your prospective flunkeys climb over one another, kicking and clawing their way toward a sharply limited number of positions of wealth and influence, any weakness becomes a weapon in the hands of rivals. You thus can count on getting the best, the brightest, and—above all—those who have sedulously erased from their minds any tendency to think any thought not preapproved by the conventional wisdom. Your candidates will be earnest, idealistic, committed, ambitious, if that’s what you want them to be; ask them to be something else and you’ll get that, too, because under the smiling and well-groomed facade you’ve got a bunch of panicked conformists whose one stark terror is that they will somehow fail to please their masters.

It’s the losers in that competition who matter here, though. There are always some of them, and in modern America there are a lot of them: young men and women who got shoved aside in the stampede for those positions of wealth and influence, and didn’t even get the various consolation prizes our society offers the more successful end of the also-rans. They’re the ones who for one reason or another—lack of money, lack of talent, lack of desire—didn’t take all the right classes, do all the right extracurricular activities, pass all the right tests, think all the right thoughts, and so fell by the wayside.

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-two-in-the-shadow-of-the-cathedral/

The problem isn't that you have a lowered GDP, the problem is that you create a cohort of people who have nothing tying them to the existing system and a huge swathe of incentives to tear it down. These are the cohorts that produce people like Jean-Paul Marat and Maximilien Robespierre, and when your society is producing large numbers of Jacobins (or their equivalents) it usually portends serious problems coming down the line, even if doing so is responsible for a modest increase in GDP.

I think the problem comes from those who don’t make it, as they have time and money, and are upset or disillusioned from doing “everything right” but now living a different lifestyle than the one promised.

I would assume they become the activist class, agitating for tearing down the system and instituting Marxism.

Turchin seems to believe in, for lack of a better term, socio-economic Malthusianism, and his more formal historical work requires Rube-Goldberg-style epicycles to substantiate his grand theory (constantly zooming in and out of geographic regions and gerrymandering timescales to make data fit). But even even though his Spengleresque ambitions won't amount to anything, "elite overproduction" is an exceptional framework for explaining local conditions in varied social environments, like the American media or academia. I can't see any reason to take him more seriously than that.

it is unconvincing. it's like he's working backwards: creating a theory to justify something he wanted all along, that being bigger social safety net and a general 'blue' policy

As an aside, I find Turchin's theories to be unconvincing. His "overproduction thesis" doesn't explain why the social unrest and "woke explosion" happened in the US during the 2010s but not in, say, Denmark or much of Europe.

I think his main problem is that he's a materialist, like most Marxist intellectuals are. The core issue driving social unrest in the US is race and secondly gender (particularly the trans issue). None of those things have any direct bearing with elites per se in a material sense, but rather about identity. Marxists are notoriously bad at understanding this distinction and frankly so are many right-wingers with their naïve (but admirable) colorblind ideology.

That said, on the trans issue, the right has a much better and clearer understanding of the underlying conflict which is why they are, for once, doing quite well in the culture war in this area. Marxist materialism is simply useless here.

I think his main problem is that he's a materialist, like most Marxist intellectuals are.

It depends on what you mean by materialist. Even Karl Marx himself spent most of the 1840ies laying groundwork for his later thinking, but in 1840ies he was much more theoretical. In his books such as Economic and Philosophical Manuscript he inverts Hegelian idealism on its head. But only in so much as to claim that it is not some ultimate idea , or Geist trying to use history and dialectics, but for Marx the role of the Geist is replaced by Man, specifically Man as species being. For Marx the man recreates himself via his Work, unalienated labor that takes paramount position.

But it is this cycle where man uses Praxis of work to refine Theory, which then shapes society which in turn reshapes man in dialectical cycle. The nature of The Work itself is malleable, for Marx it was literally the manual labor of proletariat wielding literal hammers and sickles. But for modern Marxists it may also be broader work, reality is socially constructed is it not? It is our duty to socially shape reality by doing The Work to bring about better tomorrow, reshaping institutions and seizing the means of cultural production. It is at least as important as seizing the means of industrial and agricultural production, because in the end what we are sculpting is the New Soviet Man and he is product of culture broadly defined.

But race and gender would not be so salient if we could sufficiently get out of each other's faces, and that has a dry, materialist component, implicating techno-commercial and economic trends.

Tangentially, I wonder, who might be an example of a right materialist? James Manzi?

Michael Lind might count but I think he's sort of been slid into the right wing camp by default, via the left changing its tune.

The more market-oriented libertarians - as opposed to Gadsden flag-waving anti-government types - have been called the Marxists of the right, so there's that.

why the social unrest and "woke explosion" happened in the US during the 2010s but not in, say, Denmark or much of Europe.

American white liberals feel guilty. They feel guilty over their treatment of natives and black people in a way Europeans never will. Their closest analogues are colonial victims, and those are different from American blacks in that they were never our people to begin with: did we wrong them? Sure. Now they have their own nations to fuck up (or not) and while the guilt's there, it just comes with easier solutions than black Americans do. They're more American than half the other demographics in the nation.

ditto. i don't think grand narratives can or should be dismissed outright but I think his is wrong . some narratives are better/accurate than others

I’m not going to defend Turchin, but I would point out that the emergence of the Woke/Anti-Woke dynamics would require something of an explanation simply because all of the groups involved have always existed in the USA and could get along fairly well until 2010.

They still do largely get along. The feeling they don't is a manifestation of the inescapeability and heightened new sense of memetic domination and the always-on media mindshare.

wokeism existed well before social media. people have been getting cancelled and protested long before the 2010s such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Jensen#cite_note-scarr-14

After the paper was released, large protests were held, demanding that Jensen be fired. Jensen's car tires were slashed, the university police provided him with plain-clothes bodyguards, and he and his family received threats that were considered so realistic by the police that they temporarily left their house. Jensen was spat on and was prevented from delivering lectures by disruptive protests. The editorial board of the Harvard Educational Review for a time refused to let him have reprints of his article, and said that they had not solicited the section on racial differences; Jensen later provided correspondence in which the board had requested he do so.[14][15][16]

this was 1969

Black people and most of the rest have never gotten along. We had detente, but never peace. And Jefferson was probably right -- they never will, the "ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained" will never fade.

There is no such thing as all black people and all white (or other racial groups) people getting along.

This is a quibble; we can speak meaningfully of groups "getting along" without worrying about whether it's true for "all people".

As an aside, I find Turchin's theories to be unconvincing. His "overproduction thesis" doesn't explain why the social unrest and "woke explosion" happened in the US during the 2010s but not in, say, Denmark or much of Europe.

Some hypotheses:

  1. Because the US viciously exploited black people not too long ago, on average white Americans probably feel more guilt towards black people than, say, white French people feel towards Algerians. Of course the French fought a brutal war in Algeria not long ago, but it did not practice chattel enslavement of Algerians on a massive scale. When Algerians riot in France, white French feel relatively little guilt-sympathy towards them compared to how white American feel towards black Americans. And if, say, Chechens riot in France then white French have essentially no reason to feel any guilt towards them at all.

  2. The police in the US are more heavily militarized and more able and willing to shoot people than police in Europe are. This is in part because the US has higher violent crime rates and much higher private gun ownership than Europe does, so as a reaction cops are heavily armed and jittery. And it is probably also in part because of other factors that have to do with the particular history of police forces in the US as opposed to Europe. In any case, the result is that in the US there is a constant stream of stories about cops shooting black people, mentally ill people, and members of other groups that are widely considered to be victims of oppression. This then provides evidence to buttress the woke ideology that "America is a near-fascist state that is massively oppressing black people", etc.

  3. Stronger social safety nets in Europe compared to the US make people more relaxed overall, less willing to believe that their societies are horribly oppressive, and less interested in getting into political ideologies that call for sweeping social changes.

  4. The sudden 2015 migrant crisis caused Western Europe, in reaction, to lurch on average away from wokism on at least some issues. In the US this did not happen.

Stronger social safety nets in Europe compared to the US make people more relaxed overall, less willing to believe that their societies are horribly oppressive, and less interested in getting into political ideologies that call for sweeping social changes.

European countries, which have much more generous social safety nets, far-right/left parties have actual seats in government, unlike in the US. I posit a bigger social safety net means people have less reason to compete professionally, or to get ahead at work, or be obedient for fear of being fired, so have the discretion and free time to take up fringe political causes, knowing that being fired is not a big deal compared to here. in the US a lot of people outgrow this sort of stuff because they have jobs.

less interested in getting into political ideologies that call for sweeping social changes.

That doesn't match up with the histories of Europe and the USA either today or historically. The USA like the UK and other Anglo countries have always been less prone to sweeping social movements like Communism or Fascism then their continental cousins. You can't really compare the USA to countries like France, Germany or Russia. Just look at the amount of regime change in these countries compared to the Anglos that have remained remarkably stable.

  1. Slavery ended 150 years ago. In contrast the French were beating up algerians well within living memory.

  2. This is not the anecdata usually reported by Americans who get off the beaten path in Europe, who report that police brutality is a lot more brutal there.

3 and 4 are possible, but I think the real reason is that African Americans are unambiguously American in a way that French Algerians are not unambiguously French.

As I recall, he considers Denmark and the Scandinavian countries some of the places that are following his preferred policies to reduce inequality, so would consider their lack of drama a sign that his theory is on the right track.

One of the reasons I am willing to hear Turchin out, despite some obvious flaws, is because it seems like it would be better to consider the race and LGBT+ drama in America as inter-elite, since it seems to mostly be that top 10% vying for position and showing off how unusually tolerant, good, special, and thus deserving they are, unconnected to the challenges of the black working class, or the underclass who could, if circumstanced improved, be working class. This has been discussed to death here already.

His "overproduction thesis" doesn't explain why the social unrest and "woke explosion" happened in the US during the 2010s but not in, say, Denmark or much of Europe.

Because US had a headstart on the whole whining begets winning. And in EU the whole blood and soil thing still holds stronger.

Marxism has been tried, over and over again. Always it produces shortages, usually it produces skulls. Why do we have to keep doing it?

Sure, Marxism mostly fails to create good economies. However, the part of Marxism where you drag rich people out of their homes in the middle of the night, shoot them in the back of the head, and toss their still-warm bodies into a ditch is appealing to many people. So what if everything goes to shit afterwards? You still got your revenge on the previous elites, and nothing can ever take that away from you.

The other thing is, command economies are pretty effective if you want to speed-run a society's development from mostly agricultural to mostly industrial and if you want to introduce stuff like public education and women's rights on a mass scale. Many people die in the process, but a few decades later the survivors look back and see that they went from having no prospects except subsistence farming when they were children to now working as factory professionals or bureaucrats.

Can capitalist economies accomplish the same thing? Sure, and probably with less death on average. US-aligned dictatorships murdered over a million civilians during the Cold War, whereas the failures and repressions of communist regimes led to probably an order of magnitude more deaths in communist-controlled countries during the same period. However, this is a rather subtle point and the difference is not so obviously glaring as to immediately cause the average person to throw out Marxism as a clear failure. For most of the history of the competition between capitalism and communism, in most of the world, the average person's choice has not been between modern-style US liberal democracy and communism, it has been between non-communist dictatorship and communist dictatorship.

However, the part of Marxism where you drag rich people out of their homes in the middle of the night, shoot them in the back of the head, and toss their still-warm bodies into a ditch is appealing to many people.

It's appealing to all people with some absolutely minor editing. Lefties aren't uniquely bloodthirsty and the layer of civilization on people is paper-thin.

What's unique is the acceptance. Someone proposes gassing Jews and they're properly viewed with horror. Someone proposes shooting kulaks and they're given professorships, important positions on NGOs and government advisory committees, and occasionally made Secretary of Labor.

Weren't you the one who was ready to collect commies skulls just yesterday? In self defense assumably, but as they're as evil as Nazis then being given some actual power - are you sure you wouldn't be happy to shoot them just for being evil commies or after something from them will trigger that ancient "it's now you or me" instinct?

Weren't you the one who was ready to collect commies skulls just yesterday? In self defense assumably, but as they're as evil as Nazis then being given some actual power - are you sure you wouldn't be happy to shoot them just for being evil commies or after something from them will trigger that ancient "it's now you or me" instinct?

There's no "but". Self-defense is different from shooting the kulaks. (And yes, I realize communists and Nazis both will sometimes phrase their murders in the form of self-defense, but at some point you have to get down to the object level and note that they're just lying or at the very best deluded)

So if you're sure that the enemy will kill you if they have an opportunity, will you wait for them to start shooting first?

I understand your point but you're wrong. You're claiming that commies have uniquely wicked METHODS for some reason, and you would never use their wicked methods (killing their enemies), just in self defense. While the methods you would use are exactly the same if you're as convinced in you being right as they are(or just if you're being rational organizing your "self defense", it's very rational to shoot first when you're past some point). It's not the methods which differ you from them, it's the content of your ideology. Methods are the same. You're not more or less bloodthirsty and not more or less "accepting of violence" than commies, look in the mirror.

Not interested in giving you an opening to make the villain speech ("We are alike, you and I"...)

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The other thing is, command economies are pretty effective if you want to speed-run a society's development from mostly agricultural to mostly industrial and if you want to introduce stuff like public education and women's rights on a mass scale. Many people die in the process, but a few decades later the survivors look back and see that they went from having no prospects except subsistence farming when they were children to now working as factory professionals or bureaucrats.

What do you mean by speed run? China tried all this and floundered hopelessly. It wasn't until they liberalized that they started to industrialize. Russia was already quite heavily industrialized before the revolution and it's not clear that central planning helped at all in the process. Other more liberalized countries like Germany were and continued to be more industrialized.

Countries can develop under central planning sure. The question is does it do better than the alternative and every natural experiment we have shows it doesn't. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are richer than China. South Korea richer than North Korea. West Germany even now is richer than East Germany.

Technological growth made everyone better off and assigning this boon to the totalitarian state that happened to take power while the rising tide lifted all boats is an easy mistake to make, but a mistake all the same.

Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are richer than China.

This is not good comparison, esp. the latter two. These cities are population sinks, compare them say, to Shanghai, low TFR higher GDP per capita, in constrast to more inland regions in mainland China.

For most of the history of the competition between capitalism and communism, in most of the world, the average person's choice has not been between modern-style US liberal democracy and communism, it has been between non-communist dictatorship and communist dictatorship.

Granting that this is true, Park Chung Hee was a much better ruler than Kim Il Sung. Pinochet was a much better ruler than Allende. Etc, etc.

Park Chung Hee was a much better ruler than Kim Il Sung.

Both killed many people but yeah, I imagine that Kim Il Sung probably killed an order of magnitude more people.

Pinochet was a much better ruler than Allende.

Not sure about this. I have never heard of Allende being responsible for killing anyone, although being a politician he probably was. Pinochet, on the other hand, clearly was responsible for killing many people.

Allende completely cratered the economy of Chile though. If we're talking what's better for the average citizen I would take a good economy plus a medium sized purge over permanent economic ruin under socialism.

I have never heard of Allende being responsible for killing anyone

In large part this is because Allende was overthrown before he could transition to actual communism. So perhaps my statement should have been "a much better ruler than Allende would have been".

Allende is set to opposed the threat of a good example. But now Pinochet exists as an example of a bad capitalist.

I have a friend from Chile who is absolutely opposed to the woke (and to a somewhat lesser degree the broader left) but wants to vomit when you bring up Pinochet. His family personally suffered.

I'm going to take a page out of the tankie playbook and say that if your friend's family suffered, it must mean they were commie bastards who deserved it.

What is this comment supposed to achieve? Are you being ironic? Are you literally saying someone whose family personally suffered deserved it? Speak plainly and less inflammatorily.

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Cycle of violence my friend. I'm going to assume with a comment like that that your family ought to be Roman-offed.

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However, the part of Marxism where you drag rich people out of their homes in the middle of the night, shoot them in the back of the head, and toss their still-warm bodies into a ditch is appealing to many people.

Indeed. So practicing Marxists should be treated approximately similarly to those practicing Nazism, and those merely preaching it should be considered evil by the mere fact of doing so

I wonder what "practicing" Marxists means here. Most of them are just people with an opinion.

Funny how you didn't wonder what "practicing" means in relation to Nazis.

I know it's hilarious right. But yes that too, sure.

Turchin's opinion of Stalin seemed somewhere between neutral and "he got the job done," and seems basically neutral about piles of skulls in general. Sure, he would prefer not to be shot in a purge, but he's also something of a Tolstoyan -- things happen as they must, because of the forces of history, and sometimes all the cliodynamics professors are sent to the hard labor camps for world historical reasons. He's very Slavic, and not much of an optimist about this.

He seems to like the New Deal era partly because, unlike the Civil War, it did not result in piles of skulls. He also speaks well about British colonialism, because at least it wasn't their empire that was falling apart at the time.

The progress should "progress" somewhere, right. So what's more obvious way to progress than to make everything more fair? The urge to try something "fairer" is quite understandable i think. I do agree with you that it's not the right way, but it's hard to propose any actual alternative to that. "The universe is inherently unfair so no point trying" isn't convincing many. Stupid dysfunctional species cornered themselves into playing god and constantly failing, obviously.

This is, as usual, only a very modern, liberal and materialist view on the matter.

I submit to you that the universe is perfect, that everyone gets their just desserts, and that attempts at improving on God's design by Man are doomed to the failures all our ancestral tales chronicle for they are nothing but sinful hubris.

There's no alternative to this world, there's choosing life, and choosing death.

Are you forgetting about Plato and his work The Republic where he lays out a rational plan for how an ideal state should be run. Or the religious reforms of Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Mani, Mohmmed, et al. They tend to present themselves as bringing back old wisdom, but they clearly believe that God's designs have gone astray and it is up to humans to change them.

There is definitely an alternative to this world in Buddhism and Christianity. Nirvana through enlightenment in Buddhism; or, the Kingdom of Heaven through Christ in Christianity.

You are confusing the views of a few ancient and medieval sources with what people believed in general. Hell you sound more like you are parroting the views of the early modern philosopher Leibniz then any ancient or medieval person.

Oh I'm not forgetting Plato. I'm accusing people of forgetting Aristotle.

Those enlightened thoughts aren't convincing everyone as well, "weirdly" enough.

"Fair" is just an applause light. Marxism doesn't result in "fair". It results in "poor". Try something else.

The urge of the majority of marxism supporters, at least the idealistic ones, is to make the reality more fair. That's why they're trying and trying and will keep trying. You don't need to convince me, but can't you really see how any random fact of perceived unfairness brings people towards trying to make things more "fair" the way the understand it?

As I said "fair" is just an applause light. Brought to the concrete level it just seems to mean they want more for them and theirs and (very important for many Marxists) less for not-them and theirs, which is a common desire but lacks the high-mindedness of "fair". There's always going to be perceived unfairness, and Marxism is always going to be one of the worst ways to attempt to alleviate it.

There's always going to be perceived unfairness

Sure, so there always will be the way to "progress" things towards. Look, you've asked a very simple question - "Why do we have to keep doing it?", i've explained why. Are you arguing because you think people keep trying marxism for other reasons? Or are you arguing because you think the reason i say is correct, you just don't agree with it?

It's not my fault that young people find marxism or any of it's many versions convincing enough to make the world a more fairer place. There's very little alternative ideas which can in simple words address that "fairness" urge directly. The others are mostly sidestepping the problem - oh, the unfairness is always and eternal, we're in hell and nothing you can do about it, be a good boy and clean your room(sure! thinks 15yo boy whos mother killing herself every day on the heavy job and he sees that, while watching western celebrities on TV), ah, the world is already perfectly fair and harmonious, don't you see? (yup! thinks the father whos son just returned without half of his head from a war over someones bank account) and so on.

Look, you've asked a very simple question - "Why do we have to keep doing it?", i've explained why.

Your explanation amounts to the Politician's Fallacy -- "We must do something (to alleviate unfairness). This (Marxism) is something. Therefore we must do it."

We don't have to take Marxism at its word that it makes the world more fair, not when the actual results have been demonstrated over and over again. Nor is it necessary to have an alternate solution in order to reject Marxism.

Arnold Kling has a saying, a sort of right wing spin on this, that, "Markets are unfair. Use markets."

It has the same He Giveth and He Taketh Away result.

I'm sorry, i have a stupid habit of editing my message a lot, so if you care enough to look at it again - i think i'm trying to explain there that it's not just that the marxism is "something", therefore we must do that. But it's trying to address the problem(real or not, but it's very common perceived problem in our world full of terrors) directly, and it's doing it convincingly enough for many. And the lack of simple enough alternative way towards is helping marxism greatly.

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I don’t see a new deal working. The elephant in the room is AI which can easily replace the bulk of the workforce in most industries. We simply don’t need the people anymore and unless we can grow ourselves into needing the tens of thousands of new college graduates on top of the displaced workers also looking for the same jobs. I would expect the demand for white collar workers to decline by half within a generation. We’re going to be shedding those jobs at the same time we’re training people to be essentially useless because we’re training them for a job that won’t exist.

What we really need is a worker sink. One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position. If you had too many kids, you could highly encourage one or two to become monks or nuns or something else. Another thing that would work is space colonization, which would provide a sink for the surplus population, jobs, and people to work out the logistics of managing a space colony. There would be need for construction as well, as you’d be building the New New World. This would be something like what happened in Europe. The extra people went to America, Australia, or some colonial conquest elsewhere thus giving the elites fairly secure positions.

Another thing that would work is space colonization, which would provide a sink for the surplus population, jobs, and people to work out the logistics of managing a space colony.

If anything, space colonization is a sphere extremely amendable to automatization. Extreme temperatures, pressures, lack of gravity — robots will perform any work in those conditions better than any man in a space suit. Then all the food, amenities for colonists — they weight a lot, and take a lot of space. No, I think if mass scale space exploration will happen — it will be through Von Neumann probes.

What we really need is a worker sink.

What we have now suffices. More prolonged and more useless "education" and "training", more sinecures and bullshit jobs, more generous disability, more early retirement, in extremis even universal basic income. No need for upturning whole society.

One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position.

When this was the case, priests and monastics were tiny part of population, recruited from elite classes, not from losers and rejects.

Classic article

The Clerical Population of Medieval England

If the total population was about 2,200,000 in 1377, the combined numbers of the

religious (10,600) and seculars (24,900) should have been about 35,500 or 1.6 per

cent of the total population. Omitting the nuns, the total is about 33,500 men

or about three per cent of the male population.

...

Another thing that would work is space colonization, which would provide a sink for the surplus population, jobs, and people to work out the logistics of managing a space colony.

This will provide jobs for few highly skilled and well paid professionals, equivalents of today deep sea divers and offshore oil platform workers.

You do not want on space station someone who was fired from minimum wage McDonald job because robot can flip burgers cheaper and better.

One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position. If you had too many kids, you could highly encourage one or two to become monks or nuns or something else.

This more or less describes the conditions among traditionalist Catholics today, and they have not really ironed out the kinks. Particularly already-difficult courting norms find it difficult to cope with the gender imbalance from girls being more status conscious, and the norms surrounding entrance to a monastery or seminary result in a large fraction of the most talented young men doing... more or less nothing because they're trying to decide whether to go to a monastery as a full time job(that is, deciding as a full time job. Obviously being a monk is a full time commitment.).

One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position.

That worked well for grain-farming civilizations; I don't know if there was a celibate class of priests/shamans/full-time religious people in pastoral societies. Space colonization could work, but conditions up there are a good deal more hostile than Antarctica and as such it's going to be expensive as all hell. Not like you can load a boat with a bunch of convicts and send it over to Australia or something.

Being expensive and difficult might be a good thing. It would thus require more minds working to make it successful and efficient.

I s'pose you could have a bunch of high-status maybe-celibate people working on the space program as support staff for the space colonists? But that too is expensive as hell. Monasteries used to be at least theoretically self-supporting; the monks brewed beer or made cheese or whatever. Can that space mining program pay for itself by bringing back a bunch of gold or something?

Yes.

There's incredible mineral wealth floating around up there. A bit hard to get it down though.

Yeah, the space mining has to turn a profit. And not become a victim of its own success by crashing the price of gold or whatever it is they're mining.

I'd argue that we already have a large priesthood in government (15% of all jobs in the U.S.) and non-profits (10% of all jobs – nearly all of which have been created since 1970).

I have no doubt these categories of work will continue to mushroom.

But I'm not sure a larger priesthood will solve the problem. For one, look how many people have bullshit jobs who still have sucky lives. They are overwhelmed with pointless meetings and have a great deal of stress about their "job" which if it ceased to exist no one would even notice. And of course, no matter how many bullshit jobs are created, there will still only be a finite amount of status to go around.

When it comes to space, I'm not sure that gets us where we need to go either. When space exploration does happen, it will be the machines to do it. Sending bags of meat into space is incredibly difficult and expensive, so it's not likely to solve our problem of having too many bags of meat.

Status is zero sum. But is it really? I agree that you can't make say, 10 more "POTUS" positions. Being the leader of a global superpower isn't something you can print, and neither are many other relative positions.

But you can split large ponds into small ponds. You can get people to be happy with being treated as high status by their peers instead of needing to be treated as high status by their underlings. There will always be that guy who has a million followers when someone else has only a hundred, but there's no reason the guy with only a hundred has to actually feel less self worth. It seems largely psychological to me.

I do agree that- more bullshit jobs alone wouldn't be the solution here. Since I'm describing a more cultural and perceptive shift.

Ever since the ACX guest review of two Jane Jacobs books, I haven’t been able to get the idea out of my head.

Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines.

Jacobs focuses on this “import replacement” as the force of actual quality-of-life improvement. Replacing imports means capital investments pay back into your own city. Otherwise you’re just getting wealth siphoned off to someone else. Someone with a cooler city.

Here we have our analogy to Turchin’s wealth pump. Elites concentrated in the most effective city. A precariat born of those lower-class, fortunate enough to occupy the city regions, who transition to a service economy. And proles populating the rest of the country, unable to share in the proverbial rising tide.

So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. …

Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline.

Her three categories are military production, specific types of unbalanced trade, and…oh. Welfare. Turchin’s prescription cannot make more successful, growing city regions. It just delays the descent of flyover country into open rebellion. (Wait, now I want to read an application of this theory to the National Socialists.) Jacobs’ outlook is quite grim, and the closest thing she gives to a solution is secession. I guess that beats the mass die-offs hypothesized by Turchin?

There might be a third way. Jacobs notes the importance of “city regions,” hinterlands surrounding a productive city core. These sort of reap the benefits of that city investment, engaging in some form of import replacement. They’re explicitly much better off than the periphery of her model. Can we incentivize development of these regions wherever past nations, with worse transportation and less surplus, might have sucked them dry?

Turchin seems to say—it doesn’t matter. Fill a nation with productive, import-replacing regions, and you’re just going to overproduce elites faster. Human nature ensures the rest. I am very uncomfortable with this conclusion! I don’t want the future to converge on separatist social Darwinism, nations doomed to collapse or fission. Neither does Turchin, I suppose. Maybe he can keep the intelligentsia busy until we work something out.

I would use the detroit example to go the exact opposite direction. There actually is a very strong signal to detroit when their trade balance is off. If detroit is consuming more than it's producing then on net dollars are flowing out of detroit and very quickly the citizens will run out of money and be forced to either start making detroit more productive or move somewhere else where they can be productive. The only way a city in decline can be sustained long term would be if somehow dollars were continually being injected into the local economy in a way that was completely disconnected from production. Oh wait, that's exactly what's happening. So now the prescription is clear, end the entitlements and redistribution and the city will be forced to come back to a trade balance.

The thing is, though, that Detroit's trade balance isn't really off. The city itself is bad but the more accurate indicator is the metro. For all the talk about how the city has become a ghost town, the metro population has been stable since 1970, and is higher than it was at any time prior to that. This would be pretty meaningless if everyone left were poor, but that isn't the case either; the metro GDP per capita ranks 92nd out of 382 metros in the US. It's not great, but it's higher than a lot of trendy Sun Belt metros like Phoenix, Tampa, Hampton Roads, Las Vegas, Orlando, and Jacksonville.

The city itself, on the other hand, lost half of its population since 1970, and that's its biggest problem—it's underpopulated. The infrastructure was built for double the population, and combine that with the fact that the only people left living there are those without the resources to move to the suburbs, and the tax base erodes further, making it even harder to maintain all that infrastructure, making it even more desirable to leave, etc. Meanwhile, all the people from the good old days who got nice municipal pensions are retiring, and, you get the idea. Then again, the same thing happened in Pittsburgh except people left the area entirely and it never got nearly as bad as Detroit and is now one of the better-regarded cities in the country so you're mileage may vary.

The issue isn't that there isn't a signal, the issue is that prices and wages are sticky. This is just basic Monetarist/New Keynesianism macroeconomics. Foreign exchange markets are extremely price flexible they change every second. Wages from union contracts are not. Their is a whole literature on optimal currency areas that covers this.

This is also why I think Jane Jacobs is severely overrated. She seems like someone who wants to opine on macroeconomics without even having an undergraduates understanding of the topic. If you don't even try to deal with and refute the ideas they teach in an undergraduate course how can you even say you are making a serious intellectual contribution? There are ideas like Paul Krugman's new trade theory and the agglomeration effects that deal with these things that could make your ideas work, but you don't understand them; or, even macroeconomics 101 stuff like price stickiness.

Isn't her quote above basically about nominal price rigidity and optimal currency areas? She's saying that if Detroit, hypothetically, had its own currency, it would depreciate and the real prices and wages would decrease, but this isn't possible because its currency is shared with the entire US.

That can't explain the long run growth of countries overtime; unless, you also allow for something like agglomeration effects. Detroit having it's own currency prevents a short run recession, but doesn't prevent the auto industry moving to other areas and depressing the economy in the long run. Once again, assuming agglomeration effects like those Paul Krugman talked about in his work.

That was a good review.

It's plausible that more city region autonomy could help both Jacob's problem, and Turchin's, since part of the problem of elite overproduction is that influential positions don't scale with population. When the US population increases by 100 million people, we don't automatically get more Ivy League universities, legislators, states, or even newspapers. He likens this to a game of musical chairs, where instead of removing a chair each round, you keep the same number of chairs, but add more contestants and higher stakes.

If a region grows a mid-sided city like Phoenix, maybe some power should be encouraged to build there, even if it's kind of an ugly city in the middle of a desert, and not a cool, hip, popular coastal city. Maybe it wouldn't be so ugly if there were a mechanism for people to gain status from improving it. Perhaps there should be things for aspiring elites to do there, and a currency to keep track of how well they're doing at it, so that there's some status to be had out of managing it well. Maybe it was a bad idea to concentrate all the most capable young people at a few colleges on the East Coast and perhaps a couple in California. It's not so bad even now. Sure, Phoenix isn't cool, but it's sort of competently run, and its university is sort of acceptable, with a few good programs, its state legislature occasionally makes useful decisions, so things aren't completely failing to work, but it does seem like there's a lot of room to improve without millions of people dying as in most of the examples. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be too many cases of this happening without societal breakdown.

I also liked the review, but I feel like this is too pessimistic:

Jacobs’ outlook is quite grim, and the closest thing she gives to a solution is secession. I guess that beats the mass die-offs hypothesized by Turchin?

IIRC, the main issue was that there isn't a feedback mechanism for cities to realize when they aren't gaining from trade, since they don't have their own currency. Jacobs recommends secession because if there are a bunch of city states, they can all have their own currency, and the value of that currency compared to other cities will give them a very accurate and up to date feedback mechanism of their local surplus.

Now let me think... isn't there a bunch of stuff going on with some sort of... digital currency...? Could it be that this is actually a real problem solvable with crypto?!

Jokes aside, I really do believe that if you buy into Jacobs' import replacement hypothesis, city based or city + hinterland based cryptocurrencies are the solution. Many smaller countries and places like Miami have already experimented with it. While it hasn't exactly gone well, I think the better explanation to the failure of these projects is that the traditional finance system essentially tried to sabotage crypto for over a decade, before declaring outright war.

If we could bring in crypto protocols and clear, fast, transparent exchange rates to merge with the traditional finance system, I don't see why over time we couldn't build a state that gives each city its unique currency, without the risks and impossibilities of secession in the modern world.

What is the advantage of cryptocurrency here as compared to conventional digital currencies, or indeed conventional currencies?

Utah has a state level currency called the Goldback. No one uses it.

It seems like adoption issues are the main obstacle to local currencies.

If Turchin is a Marxist, then that conclusion follows.

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