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Something Like A Sketch of A Rationalist-Adjacent Political Program
The subculture associated with the LessWrong diaspora and forums in its sphere has a distinct political approach worth interrogating. At least since The Californian Ideology was published people have noticed "silicon valley types" tend to engage with governance in a way that puts them in a unique and honestly awkward position relative to the US status quo. A decade ago Scott said the cultural signifiers of this group were:
They might have been less reform-minded at the time, but today there is a loose set of internally coherent policies we can identify with the heirs of that scene. 'Grey Tribe' (I really wish there was a better catch-all term) tends to have three broadly identifiable commitments unified by a vision of politics as an attempt to achieve administrative efficiency, in a way they tend to imagine as post-political. Many of the policies under each category naturally overlap with one another. I have tried to keep the list to things I have seen or heard discussed in these circles. The first is a broad institutionalist critique ("Meta-Politics"), the second is an intolerance for the rent-seeking behavior commonly used as a dealmaking instrument ("Rent-Aversion") and the third includes both a select few object-level concerns - I'm particularly interested in any more of these you could identify - and an inclination to shift status quo functions off the state and on to trusted markets and experts ("Optimizability").
Meta-Politics
Rats tend to be, relative to other smart people, interested in comprehensive reform of, or imagining alternatives within, Constitutional Political Economy. Hacking at the root instead of the branches of inefficiency. Here is what I imagine they are likely to suggest on that front.
Electoral Reform: Widely popular given the perceived inefficiency of FPTP. Often comes as support for Instant-Runoff ("Ranked Choice") Voting, or the Single-Transferable Vote in the case of Proportional Representation advocates, who are ironically overrepresented. The more distinctly Rat position tends to be support for STAR over IRV/RCV, and something like Allocated Score over STV. Occasionally: Quadratic voting, Independently drawn districts, Unitary Primaries, Fusion voting.
Legislative Reform: Relatively more proportionally representative legislatures. Increased House Apportionment, e.g. the Cube Root Law. Occasionally more unique proposals like introducing secret ballots to congressional voting procedures. Paying legislators competitively with top talent, as well as doing the same for their (substantially increased) staff. Codify law on a GitHub clone, and fold the Federal Register/CFR in to the same site.
Pseudo-Futarchy: Utilizing prediction markets to generate more reliable information for agency regulators and legislative deliberation. Low hanging fruit.
Meritocracy: Re-legalize and center the use of g-loaded tests for cognitively demanding public and private employment.
State Capacity: Move towards a legible society through national identification systems, unified federal databases, and modernized technology infrastructure. Nationwide ERIC to replace Crosscheck. Hire, fire, and compensate administrative talent commensurate with their skill.
Private Governance: Of particular interest to Bay Area writers. Why try for voice when you can exit? Charter Cities Institute, Prospera, Seasteading, etc. Replace poorly aligned democratic incentives with the productive clarity of polities competing for workers and firms in a market of policy regimes. Long libertarian history of related visions - Puydt's Panarchy, Nozick's Meta-Utopia, Yarvin's Patchwork, Scott's Atomic Communitarianism all grasp at similar intuitions. Looks more like SEZs in a domestic political context.
Libertarian Paternalism: Well aligned with Grey Tribe instincts even if some specific claims fell to the replication Crisis. Use of choice architecture to encourage but not coerce prosocial action.
Adjacent: e-governance, vTaiwan, sortition assemblies
Rent-Aversion
Deliberative lawmaking between representatives of particular communities with their own interests will on some level always be about managing the distribution of gains and losses of some new condition or proposed change. Rationalist see this and, with a quasi-libertarian read of the situation, see a mess of rent-seeking carve-outs left in the wake of policymaking that is not meaningfully distinct from corruption. A lot of their policy approach concerns the abolition of (non-schumpeterian) artificial rents and the redistribution of natural rents away from private capture.
Occupational Licensing: Lift artificial caps on doctors and residency in the US. Institute licensing reciprocity with peer states like Canada. Broad abandonment of loosening of licensing regimes, especially ones simply serving as a tertiary education filter.
FDA Reform: Reciprocity with peer states for recognition of drugs. Generalize Operation Warp Speed for all applications. Prime target for comprehensive restructuring.
NEPA Abolition: Environmental protection suits have been co-opted and abused to extract rents by incumbent landowners. The more interesting question is how to structure law that can achieve some of the environmentalist goals of the original legislation.
Zoning Reform: Municipal control of land use may be the single most costly norm in US law. Ideally abolish all land use restrictions excepting designated zones for heavy industry, and simply rely on a (clear and independently drafted) building code. Pairs well with privatized governance as a single beneficiary of land policy internalizes all externalities.
Carbon Taxes: Production and consumption that releases carbon in to the atmosphere is a simple underpriced negative externality.
Land Value Taxation: Tax the full annualized market value of land, exempting all improvements and constructions on top of it. As supply is unaffected, this tax incurs no deadweight loss, improving economic efficiency when it substitutes other taxes, and arguably improving allocative efficiency of land.
Destination-based Cash Flow Taxation: Replace Corporate Income Taxation with a tax on firm profits after full expensing of new capital investment via the transfer of an equivalent tradeable tax credit, with border adjustment to simplify compliance and nullify tax haven incentives. Resulting tax falls solely on consumption owed to supernormal profit/capital rents. Lacks deadweight loss. Some capital incomes are earned, some are luck. This targets the latter.
Jones Act/1905 Dredging Act: Domestic shipping requires American ships, which acts as a distortionary subsidy to American industry. Similarly, American ports are under-dredged because a 1905 law required American ships to do the dredging, and ours are now internationally subpar at that task. These policies are something of synecdoche for relic rent-seeking behavior that we all grew up a little poorer for.
Subsidy Abolition: Oil, agriculture, sports - substantial subsidies flow arbitrarily to wielders of political attention. Subsidies have a place in industries of national security importance or industrial policy planning, like semiconductor manufacturing, but not stadiums.
Outlaw Non-competes: Non-compete agreements distort labor markets and should be banned at the federal level.
Open Access Journals: Academic journals only serve to poorly gate-keep scholarship. Make a public sci-hub alternative. Likewise, revive the original Google Books vision of full, readily accessible digitization.
IP Reform: Tax patents proportional to a self-assessed value under an option for public purchase (Harberger taxation), buy them to put them in the public domain at a price determined at public auction (Kremer Buyouts), or some other variation
School Choice: Introduce market competition and consumer preference into schools through education vouchers. Dovetails well with LVT and zoning reform as it decouples municipal property taxation from school quality.
Adjacent: Strategic litigation reform, Civil Asset Forfeiture, Real Estate/Car Dealership mandates
Optimizability
Arguably where the neoliberalism of rat politics shines through. This is a change in state outputs, as opposed to Meta-Politics' focus on inputs to functionality. The Grey Tribe prefers policy-informed approaches to achieve goals it broadly shares with liberals, as well as speculative approaches to achieve goals it often does not. Many suggestions are just particular instantiations of the guiding anti-regulatory principle of market liberalization.
Market Monetarism: Replace the inflation and unemployment mandate of central banks with NGDP Targeting (sometimes Gross Labor Income Targeting) with innovative instruments of monetary policy when at the ZLB. This has been popular on LW since the recession, and macro has slowly moved closer to that direction.
Permitting Reform: The legal ability to perform large or atypical tasks is significantly harder than it once was. The continual updating of Nuclear Plant regulatory requirements during the construction process made them de facto illegal. Likewise constrains advancements in rail, geothermal, hydrogen airships, autonomous cars, autonomous drones.
Grant Reform: Lead researchers by their own reckoning burn time and money writing individual federal grant applications. Move towards a system of cooperative, directed, institutional research funded by large block grants. Similarly, employ Romer's Self-Organizing Industry Boards for private innovation.
Direct Transfer Benefits: UBI, NIT, whatever you want to call it. Replace the myriad difficult to navigate system of state programs with an income floor ensured through direct cash transfers. Progressive income tax structures (or some substitute) recoup the transfer so it maximally targets those with no alternative income.
Organ Markets: Regulated, compensated sale of spare kidneys as we currently do for blood plasma.
Open Borders: Provided some minimal health/criminality screening, uncap immigration. American institutions and localized production act as a multiplier on labor productivity. Simply increasing available labor grows general production more than linearly with the number of added workers. Some culture transplant and golden goose concerns, but this is very popular.
Free IVF: Polygenic screening during IVF allows health, including likely cognitive performance, to be estimated in fertilized embryos before implantation. The multiplier on this intervention is likely well above costs even at this early stage, and should be free and subsidized.
Pragmatic Criminal Justice Reform: Anti-social violence is concentrated in young men with high risk tolerance, low intelligence, and high time preference. The intentionally slow, abstracted process of criminal prosecution fails to disincentivize this cohort. Consequences can be lower so long as they are swift and expectable.
Factory Farm Ban: Current law forbids the recording of industrial livestock processing. These laws should be lifted and their contents infoblasted to the public until reform is inevitable. Likewise, ban octopus farming and shrimp eyestalk ablation
Adjacent: Free GLP-1 agonists, Drug decriminalization, Geoengineering
Sometimes people say this scene's politics are identifiable in the Progress Studies publications, or in the Neoliberal orgs, or esoterically in Bostrom papers about singletons. I think, while conversant with all of those, it has its own MO. It is now mature and active enough that its originating, 'post-political' self-conception is in tension with its desire to effect change. I kept this in mind particularly with how slow the relevant orgs were to get any serious lobbying presence on the Hill for AI.
Regardless, this seems like a fitting technocratic vision for a group that sees itself as cosmopolitan, longtermist, and high-decoupling. Improve the function of the state as if agnostic to its ends, socialize rent-claims when they must exist and abolish them everywhere else, lean into the innately productive forces of well structured, well priced markets. If anything what stands out in this sketch is what is missing.
I think this broadly captures the political proposals I've seen discussed in those circles, and how they relate. Interested if there's any substantial disagreement, missing pieces or elements of rationalist political thought that should be explained, or policy proposals you think also fit. Also interested in blind spots, or how you imagining something like this list changing in 10, 20 years if the people in question continue to become more organized or active.
I'm surprised to see this one in here alongside all the others. On the one hand, I agree that on the first-order a non-compete will distort labor markets, but on the other hand an absence of non-compete distorts incentives for training, trade secrets, and customer sharing. A company doesn't want to hire someone, spend time and resources teach them all the best techniques for doing a job effectively, and then have that person immediately leave and take all that training somewhere else or strike out on their own. Similarly, a company doesn't want to give someone a bunch of infrastructure and marketing and accumulate a bunch of clients and then spin off into a private business, carrying those clients with them.
Now, I don't think we have an obligation to do things just because they make companies happy, not at all. But the incentive structure means that if companies can't curtail these behaviors via non-competes they will curtail them in other ways. Companies will guard their secrets more carefully, will shuffle customers around so they can't get too attached to any one employee, and do other inefficient things that create economic friction.
Simple line to draw: non competes can't be enforced unless the employees total average compensation over two of the preceding 3 years (or the entirety of the employment period if less) is greater than 10x the federal poverty line for a household of two. That puts it for 2024 at 200k. Beyond that simply enforcing existing common law restrictions on geographic and temporal scope will be sufficient.
I don't really have a problem with non competes for executives, managers, major salesmen, top engineers. Make them spend six months or a year on vacation, no big deal.
But I once took what amounted to a retail job and they wanted me to sign an unlimited non compete. For a job where I made $50k! That's awful. No working man should face that kind of restriction on earning a livelihood.
That's a reasonable take. My gut response was "well if the terms are bad just don't sign it", but for working class people that's not really an option, especially if this becomes the norm and people get used to signing it. And this allows companies to have their noncompetes if it's important, but they have to pay for it so won't do it just because they can.
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There’s surely another easier way to prevent the “train an employee at great cost, then they get poached by a competitor for slightly higher pay”, namely very high signing bonuses that only fully vest after several years. So sure, you can jump after your year of training, but then you need to pay back the $100,000 (or whatever amount acts as enough of an incentive) we gave you when you joined.
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I could be wrong, this is just guessing, but I strongly suspect the social benefits of banning noncompetes are much higher than the social benefits of allowing them. Thinking first in the case of high human capital occupations, no noncompetes allows employees to freely move on to better-paying (and thus more productive) occupations, take knowledge with them, and start their own companies. These are the exact things that are critical to the existence of competitive markets - being able to choose a job that pays better and start new companies in niches that would be profitable is exactly what pushes prices down to efficient levels. And 'a new startup' is such a risky thing to do that having a noncompete hanging over your head could disrupt a lot of innovation. California, notably, has banned noncompetes for a long time, and also contains Silicon Valley. Some argue that was important to SV's growth - idk.
"On the other hand - an absence of non-compete distorts incentives for training, trade secrets, and customer sharing". In the specific case of programmers, I don't see noncompetes significantly reducing the extent to which people are trained. In the course of doing your job, you need to learn about what you're doing and what the rest of the company is doing, and you learn by doing. "Trade secrets" - having a high quality team and existing features and customers is more than enough moat to be profitable for a while, and anything more than that (compare to, like, stronger software IP) would, intuitively, reduce surplus by reducing competition. And empirically, tech seem to innovate a ton despite the existing California noncompete bans. "Customer sharing" - for most jobs, this isn't a big issue. It is for some - and for those, you could imagine a noncompete ban that carved those out - but even then, isn't 'an employee taking customers with them' the exact kind of thing that enables those customers to switch to a better product?
At a high level, the issue is that, despite the theory that anything that two parties agree to will be beneficial to both of them and efficient, rational agents and all - in practice employers have tremendous power in negotiations with employees for a whole host of reasons, and can use this power to insert clauses like noncompetes that employees just accept because 'everyone does that'. This is (one of) the reasons why there's a lot of regulation around the employer-employee relationship.
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Then they should pay the workers a wage that keeps them happily working there. Or at the very least non-competes should pay out severance/salaries for the duration they're kept out of the market.
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The market already has solutions to this problem, they're just normally used for highly skilled staff like programmers. One very common structure is to issue stock options that only vesting after a certain period (like 4 years), which strongly incentives workers to stay with the current firm until vesting. Another common structure in the academic market is that university's will purchase a house for a professor with a 0 interest rate loan that gets forgiven over the period of 10-20 years. But if the employee leaves early, then the loan reverts to a standard (or even much higher than standard) interest rate.
The problem with this is that the employee doesn't just get screwed if he leaves for better pay, he also gets screwed if he leaves for reasons such as being mistreated by his employer. Remember owing your life to the company store?
I don't currently have it at hand, but I read something at some point saying that mining towns, etc. were actually not that bad. They couldn't be too exploitative or you have unhappy workers and a bad reputation, and you can't hire people.
That assumes that the worker has options for jobs other than to go to work for the company. Company towns didn't have a lot of competition for jobs
But they can move. And they'd have to attract workers from somewhere to start the company town.
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I mean I think there’s room for reform here. There are jobs where you do have substantial access to proprietary information, client data, and strategic planning. These jobs I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have non-compete clauses for. And along the same time if your job is to be the public facing representative of your company, I think it reasonable to expect that they keep their public profiles business friendly. But in both cases I think it should be on the business to show that the person’s role is one that requires restrictions. If they can’t show that the job has significant reach into proprietary or strategic information that would cause harm if it became widely known, then they shouldn’t get to restrict the employee. If the person isn’t the public face of the company, the company shouldn’t be able to restrict free expression of legal ideas online. To me, the issue is a balancing act between the rights of the employees to live as they please and to seek opportunities in the market against the company’s need to protect its data and strategic interests.
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Doesn't this happen with tech visas when the employee returns to his or her native country where it the NDA cannot even be enforced?
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That argument is fully general. It's also true that if companies can't commit fraud they will do inefficient things that create economic friction. However, it's still worthwhile to make fraud illegal.
Well the possibility arises in all scenarios, but the outcome differs as a matter of weighing the two sides. Which causes more economic harm, the inefficiencies caused by fraud or the inefficiencies caused by behaviors in the absence of fraud? My understanding is that fraud is way worse than the work-arounds, so it should be banned.
Which causes more economic harm, the inefficiencies caused by non-competes, or the inefficiencies caused by the work-arounds? In genuinely don't know, I'm by no means an expert, so maybe it is the case that non-competes are worse than the work-arounds. But I don't think the magnitude of the inefficiencies caused by non-competes are anywhere near the inefficiences caused by fraud, so I don't think it tips the balance away from the default of legality.
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