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Certain social policies are misguided attempts to ensure skin in the game.
Aristotle I think claimed that most vices correspond to the absence or perversion of some particular virtue. I reread Scott Alexander's review of Freddie deBoer's "The Cult of Smart" and it helped crystalize an observation that a certain kind of approaches to solving social ills is likely to be a perversion of the concept of having skin in the game.
Skin in the game is, basically, the idea that things tend to work out much better when people making decisions are also the people reaping the consequences than when they are not, because otherwise you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem and doctors doing lobotomies on the involuntarily committed and people forcing their politics on culturally different communities and the government spending taxes on catastrophically wasteful projects instead of letting people buy private services with their own money.
Now, Scott REALLY HATES public schools. Literally in CAPS LOCK. So it was kinda funny how he nodded sagely along with Freddie explaining how public schools don't really teach anything, commended his analysis that Montessori schools maybe aren't much better at teaching but at least they aren't DYSTOPIAN CHILD PRISONS, and so on and so forth, until the last part of the review where he COMPLETELY LOST HIS SHIT upon realizing that Freddie's solution is making everyone go to public schools and forbidding all alternatives.
(this was when Scott already mostly calmed down by the way)
But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game. The society is largely controlled by the rich and affluent. As long as they can escape to charter schools, catholic schools, or hire private tutors, they will do that instead of using their wealth and affluence to fix public schools, so those being horrible will remain solely poor people's problem. If we close all alternatives then it becomes everyone's problem and everyone has to solve it.
You can also see this approach in what is currently happening with the US justice system. America has a huge prison population and high rates of recidivism, which maybe could be solved by adopting the Nordic model of rehabilitative justice. But it's hard, it's much easier to lock up recidivists for decades, so that's what the system had been doing until roughly 2018, when a coordinated campaign had elected a bunch of progressive DAs in all major cities, who simply refused to prosecute a lot of crimes. Now with the crime wave affecting everyone people have no choice but to take rehabilitative justice seriously.
Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them (in addition to tolerance through familiarity I guess). As long as black people live in their own ghettoes and send their children to their own schools, rich and affluent people by and large don't care what happens there. But if you have gangs selling drugs in your kid's school and a crack den next door, you'll have to care about and fix the problem, right? Right?
Of course all such approaches range from simply not working to greatly increasing the harm they were meant to prevent plus causing other catastrophic consequences. Here's some reasons why:
Just because you incentivized someone to solve a problem doesn't mean they will be able to figure how. Some problems are very hard and you have to try to solve them purposefully instead of setting up incentives and hoping for the best.
Unless you want to live in a North Korea (and can bring it on), it's really hard to incentivize wealthy people to solve problems like that. They'll look at it, admit that they have no idea what to do about it, shrug, and move to another place. So attempting to overmilk that cow will leave you without milk at all.
You are not incentivizing the actual rich and affluent people, you're incentivizing middle class, which is not affluent enough to solve much. Or more precisely, it's the actual rich and affluent people who are doing the incentivizing and they sure weren't busing their own children to mixed schools etc.
Affluent people who end up in charge of solving social ills are usually ideologically incapable of solving them. For example, a school that has problems with drugs and discipline should punish and eventually expel troublemakers, but that's precisely the kids the progressive school board cares about the most, so it would demand that the parents solve the problem with discipline without disciplining anyone, at which point the wealthy parents will shrug and move elsewhere.
Or regarding crime: let's be real, most criminals aren't Jean Valjeans stealing a loaf of bread to feed their younger siblings, they pick $1000 worth of Gucci bags and go do drugs and have fun because it sure beats working a week at Walmart, and that's the truth. If you tell them otherwise they will laugh you in the face. If you ask them to think about the poor Gucci shareholders they will laugh you in the face. The only way to fix them is to promise them a reasonably long stint in prison, at which point our prison abolitionist decides that Gucci shareholders deserve it and secretly gives up on rehabilitation.
Is it possible to force people to have skin in the game in a way that works? Yes, you have to make sure that you're forcing the right people and they can't wiggle out of it. So regarding prison reform again: first we go to the nearest KKK Grand Dragon and ask him if he's willing to pay $30k in taxes to have an innocent black man imprisoned for a year. Having thus established that the vast majority of the society doesn't have real incentives against rehabilitative justice, we greenlight anyone who wants to test their theories about how to rehabilitate criminals--more particularly, we ask the same George Soros fund that elected progressive DAs to bankroll and vet these initiatives, to make sure that the obvious grifters are excluded.
The most important part is that we also pass relatively strict laws against recidivism, say, doubling the term every time. This really incentivizes the anti-prison activists to do their best job trying to rehabilitate their charges. That doesn't mean that they will succeed--that any of them will meaningfully succeed--but they will try their best, and what more can we ask for?
This way instead of making the society hostage to criminals and hoping that someone figures out how to rehabilitate them, we take the criminals hostage and incentivize them and their rehabilitators to succeed.
First punishing recividism more seems silly. Because a lot of people do age out of crime. Though we should do more small and frequent busts.
The bigger issue is Democracy. I have solutions to these problems. It’s probably something like making POTUS the head of the Mormon church. Requiring daily mass attendance or you I guess go to jail. I’d probably put homosexuals in jail. And of course trans wouldn’t exists. I’d ban birth control and abortion. And yes I think enforcing this strict cultural package from our past would solve a lot of these issues. While still keeping modern capitalism.
It does seem to me that religious societies don’t have the social ills you speak of so it seems to work. But I’m fairly certain I am not going to be allowed to do it. But yes I no longer think liberalism works for people who aren’t in the higher IQ parts of society and most would benefit for earlier cultural packages.
If we are talking about rehabilitative justice then it’s probably too late. Just give people a cultural package from the start they can succeed with.
But like I said Democracy. I don’t think I have any chance at enacting this. My theocracy i believe would work. DeBoer seems to be advocating for a statism I think would be awful. But it seems the key thing both have is forcing their plan on others. And I’m willing to give up my plan if I don’t have to risks their plan.
Why Mormon theocracy? It seems as worthwhile as Jewish theocracy for all the US would accept it.
I don’t know. Jewish advantage seems to be higher group IQ from centuries of only breeding with each other. And hence being an ethnicity. Mormonism seems to work for whoever joins.
Though I’m not sure one is better than the other. We just have a better example of it happening in Utah.
And Utah is pretty much the only state which wouldn't rebel against an establishment of the Mormon church. It may as well be establishment of Zorastrianism.
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That’s only more reason to punish recidivists harshly: if you identify someone as a recidivist type, you want to hold them in jail until they age out of crime. Third criminal conviction at 24, we keep you in jail until 40 (of course, for three felonies we keep the life sentence).
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Yeah, what you have looks a little bit like Italian Fascism. I suppose it might work, for certain values of "work"; I've heard China called the world's first mature Fascist state.
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What the fuck?
I can’t tell if you’re making a modest proposal as a roundabout argument for democracy. If so, sure, I’ll play along.
Your proposed theocracy is, to me, morally abhorrent. That’s not surprising, but I don’t think it’s particularly stable, either. Liberalism has a pretty good track record of defusing tensions. Especially the kind which would arise from, say, jailing all your dissidents and trying to build a culture from the top down. It didn’t work for the Soviets, and it wouldn’t work for your Mormon caliphate.
For what it’s worth, I also think you’re overlooking the important community ties underpinning LDS. The service and mission requirements can’t be instilled merely by mandating butts-on-pews. And I don’t think they can displace Western atomism, no matter how many troops you deploy. But that’s kind of beside the point.
Stick with liberal democracy, it’s safer for all of us.
I’m not in favor of theocracy, but I will say that democracy has many problems of its own that are baked in.
It cannot reign in the unelected deep state. We have dozens of autonomous agencies that the official government has little power over, and they pass regulations that define how we interact, what businesses can and cannot do, and what documentation needs to be kept (thus creating the need for administration jobs to make sure that the business can prove to regulators that it’s compliant.
On the other hand, it’s incapable of long term thinking itself. No elected official can afford to really think about the distant future. If his proposal causes near term pain, he’s out, even if it would be enormously beneficial long term. For that matter, a program that doesn’t work fast isn’t good for an elected official either — he might not win, then his opponent gets credit. In a related fashion, democracy promotes flashy new projects and initiatives over boring projects or maintenance projects. If you build a new highway, or a new school, or even a new wing of a school, you get to put your name on it. If you take the same money and fix roads and schools and subways, it’s invisible, and thus “waste”, even if it’s actually more efficient than building something new.
There are also issues of culture. Democracy by nature will embrace deviance however it’s defined. There are potential new voting blocs in legalization of forbidden behavior, in wealth transfers to people who engage in bad behavior, and in forcing acceptance of previously deviant behaviors. This isn’t long term good. Things like drug use are high risk behavior, often imposing hefty social and economic costs on the rest of society. Heroin addicts cannot hold productive jobs and need expensive interventions to allow them to continue. Less obvious are things like generous welfare payments that allow large segments of society to simply suckle the government teat without providing value, or student loan forgiveness that enable students to study useless things and provide little value to the rest of us for the trouble.
I don't think this is a feature of democracy per se, I think it's a feature of what happens when you restrict democracy in a deliberate way. There's plenty of evidence from pre-1910s time frame that democracy can exercise control over the state apparatus. It's just that we got rid of the spoils system and deliberately shielded the bureaucracy from executive controle. Once upon a time, these jobs were handed out to political supporters as a reward for their support. In such a system, you virtually guarantee democratic control of the bureaucracy by virtue of everyone from the postmaster on up directly owing their livelihood to the current President.
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Are Democracies incapable of long term planning? The USA and England did plenty of long term planning in the 19th and early 20th century and emerged as the pre-eminent powers of the later half of the 20th century. The Russian Czars and German Kaisers used all their alleged long term planning abilities to allow their countries to be torn apart in the aftermath of WW1. The dictators Mussolini and Hitler also destroyed their own nations for no gain. They had long term plans that were destined for failure. I guess Stalin made Russia strong enough to defeat Germany; with ample help from the democratic USA, but Mao wrecked his nation and only Deng taking a 180 degree turn has allowed them to come back into prominence.
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Those criticisms are decidedly non-unique, though. What system is really free of bureaucrats? Of regulation? Of short-term thinking?
The best I can think of is minarchist libertarianism, at least for the regulatory regime. But it doesn’t incentivize long-term thinking, either, and throws its independent hands up at coordination problems.
Easy enough to say about hard drugs. A little harder to bite the bullet for all forms of wasteful entertainment. Much harder for the myriad other ways that humans fail to optimize their potential. At the extreme, you can tell a story where industrialization is a high risk behavior, coal mining requires ever more expensive interventions, and in the meantime, our sky gets uglier every day. You and I can avoid going full Kacynzski by observing the actual, material value which the Industrial Revolution provided. But we disagree on how much value to assign to other forms of “deviance.” That’s okay, because we get to let democracy sort it out.
Monarchy? I guess the bureaucrats and regulation are on par with democracy but by virtue of the king doing whatever he damned pleases he very much could curtail the excessive bureaucratization of society.
I don't want to start shilling for Hans-Herman Hoppe here but he's right on the money. You need the ruler(kings in this case) to care about the well being of his domain, instead of having a revolving door of politicians who are only in the game to get theirs and get out.
In the best case, the Platonic ideal, maybe. But then we should be comparing to a best case for democracy, something like a republic of highly-engaged, highly-informed voters. They have all the same reasons as the monarch to care about their domain. What’s stopping them from voting to curtail the bureaucracy?
Well, the bureaucrats,, naturally. Whoever was benefiting from their entrenchment might also object. And it’s even possible that the bureaucrats actually were providing more value than they skimmed.
All of these pitfalls obviously apply to autocracies, too! Emperors aren’t immune to the pressure, political or social, to avoid upending the apple cart. Today’s monarchies have plenty of short-term strategy, lavish spending on public image, and bureaucratization.
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I mean to steelman the current system, this problem is exactly what these 'deep state' federal programs were meant to fix. You can argue, and I'd agree, that they aren't very effective at fixing this problem, but your argument clearly contradicts itself here.
This is also absolutely not true. Maybe secular liberal democracy founded in a nation full of deviants, but plenty of democratic societies have been able to avoid celebrating deviance. Look at Finland. Hell, look at ancient Athens. It's certainly possible, but perhaps not with freely open voting to every person in a society.
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I not infrequently see this framing but it strikes me as being off, and fails to address the root of the problem.
While the things many students study are useless, the loans enable the University to teach useless disciplines. The University has no skin in the game. Like mortgage brokers, they've originated the loan, but don't hold or fund the debt. While being incentivised to originate as many as possible, here the barrier of lack of human capital able to engage in useful disciplines, may go someway to explain the expansion of uselessness.
Students may want to study useless things, they're young and mostly don't know any better. It should be the responsibility of the University to ensure uselessness is minimized and human capital is deployed efficiently in useful disciplines.
The problem being that the current proposed solution would essentially incentivize make the problem much much worse. The colleges are still guaranteed to get their pay even if the students learn absolutely nothing of value. The students won’t care because the government will forgive the debt so why not study the philosophy of Harry Potter?
My thing is that loan forgiveness is basically about the schools through the students. If the government chose to fix the 2008 mortgage crisis by paying back the loans to the bank then there’s no incentive to be more careful about who you loan to, how much you loan them, and whether or not the house is worth anything near that cost. Borrowers would have little reason to economize on their homes or worry about resale value.
I agree that loan forgiveness is not a solution, for anyone other than the students that would have their debt burden lifted.
I'd like to see underwriting standards for student loans that look at the human capital of the borrower and the proposed program of study. Only these conforming loans would be eligible for government guarantees, etc.
The issue is that only by removing the government from the loan business would you have any need for underwriting of any sort. As it stands, no matter what happens after the prospective student signs the loan, the college and the financial institutions are guaranteed the money. If I take out a loan to attend the university of Virginia, everyone involved at present is guaranteed the money even if I never attend class or do anything related. Until that changes there’s no reason to vet anything. It doesn’t protect them because they get the money provided I sign a loan and sign up for class. Forgiveness doesn’t change that, it simply changes the payer from the students to the government.
If there were a risk, there’d be reason to vet students. If they admit unserious or unprepared students, they potentially lose money when those students don’t get jobs after college. If they teach poorly enough that employers don’t want that schools graduates, they lose as well. If they admit lots of students who study trivial things, they’re out the money.
That would be the whole point of underwriting. To not fund high risk borrowers / disciplines / institutions. The remaining confirming loans could be sold off to a GSE to service after a period.
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Honestly was doing both.
And I’m not sure the god not god part is the key thing. Though having a dictator in the sky who would punish or reward you for living a certain way helps people to do it.
But as a cultural package spending 20 min a week talking about morality and good behavior (don’t do drugs/drink excessively, don’t get random chicks pregnant, pick a person and commit to them, don’t steal or hurt people), then 20 min doing a bunch of rituals with your neighbors (helps to get to know your neighbors, makes you feel a part of a group), a bunch of community events (sports leagues/fish fries - more community connections). For the average person and perhaps even more for the lower class it’s a package of stuff that works better than modern liberalism which doesn’t have rules anymore and doesn’t seem to produce communities.
But yes I wanted to contrast it with Deboers forced socialism of fixing the schools. Which wouldn’t have the forced morality. Both have a bit of hostage taking to them. His forced public schooling was my forced church going. I’d guess 20-30% of America would agree with my plan which might even be more than his plans. Both would have widespread pushback.
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