In Defense of Anagorism

political economy in the non-market, non-state sector

Tag: science

  • Chaotic good, high fructose corn syrup and large organizations

    Jason Lewis writes of the plight of the Chaotic Good, especially when trapped in a large organization. Apparently these are D&D alignments. The most concise explanations of these that I have found are in the form of memes, of which there are many to choose. In case that doesn’t clarify the matter, the good neutral folkx at Max Planck Institute offer an alignment quiz. From the post:

    I’ve seen myself as “chaotic good” long before this series of posts, or before I ever thought of applying the D&D alignment categories to roles at work. It fits with my politics (anarchist-communist), with my gneral M.O. of getting things done (open source is always bettter, and it’s always easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission). It also fits with my general attitude toward work: if you want something brilliant, tell me what you want and get the fuck out of my way. If you want a mess, keep letting middle managers stick their fingers in the pie of my creative process.

    Church makes an excellent point, though, that the “technocrat” disposition, and the alignments it tends to entail (chaotic good to chaotic neutral) tend to be notoriously difficlut to manage. The only thing I think is missing from the series he’s been doing on this issue is that if you’re a programmer, you weren’t meant to have a boss.

    The article by Paul Graham on why programmers aren’t meant to have a boss is also a good read, and Paul Graham has been mentioned in the present blog before. Graham has reached the conclusion that (for a programmer, at least) nothing good can result from working for a large organization. Nothing at all. Paul Graham says that instead people (even entry level people) should be founding startups.

    It’s interesting how we get from anarcho-communism (which I’m all for) to going into business for oneself (which terrifies me a lot and repulses me at least a little). Addressing the employment problem with self employment is the textbook example of “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” For better or for Worse, I’m not emotionally ready to let go of the desire to beat them. If a programmer isn’t meant to have a boss, that would logically imply that a programmer isn’t meant to be their own boss. As Paul Graham says:

    The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind of conservative.

    No arguing with that. But from my unique and twisted perspective, the people who start businesses also seem kind of conservative. More often that not, VERY conservative. I know part of this is my belief that libertarianism is a subset of conservatism, but even if we assume (for the sake of argument) that not all libertarians are conservatives, can founders of startups be communists?

  • Quotebag #92

    “If you accept that market economies have no tendency to full employment equilibrium, then it follows logically that large-scale automation is most likely to cause serious structural unemployment and a chronic aggregate demand shortfall.”—Lord Keynes

    “From my point of view, there is simply no way to posit any sort of god (a creature by definition more powerful than mere mortals, if only in the way comic book superheroes are more powerful, by possessing a hypertrophied attribute which allows this god a greater chance of winning feats of strength, or contests of wit) who interacts with humans and doesn’t come out of the relationship having harmed the human person.”—Jack Crow

    “One could make the case that the right to not have a boss is actually the hardest won of modern freedoms: should it really trouble us if more people in a rich society end up exercising it?”—Ross Douthat, h/t Jack Saturday

    “This corporatism talking point is yet another attempt to rebrand capitalism so that it doesn’t seem so evil, antidemocratic and corrupt. It’s capitalism.”—Matt Meister (on Facebook)

    “A proper forecasting mechanism would weigh each individual’s opinion by the precision of his or her knowledge. A market tends on the contrary to weigh each individual’s opinion by his or her wealth.”—Brad DeLong

    “Competition is an ideology.”—Jack Crow

  • Successful society of atheists or mostly areligious people?

    Cliff Arroyo informs us:

    I usually describe myself as incapable of religious faith (that part of my brain/mind/soul/whatever is just plain missing). But I do have an attraction to a lot of religious imagery and/or practice.

    I also respect religion and religious belief and it’s clear that human societies function best when some religion is present for the majority. It’s easy for the religious authorities or dogma to become too powerful which is awful but in the other direction there’s no record of any successful society of athiests or mostly areligious people.

    I see no record of any set of cultural templates succeeding indefinitely. As far as any successful society of atheists or mostly areligious people, such a society (if it even exists) is something fairly new under the sun. Atheist literature, for all practical purposes, only goes back a couple of centuries or so. I’ve always wondered what explains this. I don’t think it’s a matter of atheism being a recent invention. I used to think it was simply a reflection of how persecuted, and therefore deeply closeted, atheists were prior to the Enlightenment, combined with the destruction of whatever writings might have existed in spite of that. This doesn’t quite fit, as we know a fair amount about other heresies such as albigensians, etc. I suspect that it may be that people living in a pre-scientific time and place are as incapable of contemplating non-divine explanations of phenomena as Cliff Arroyo is of religious faith. If that is the case (or if the recent arrival of atheism in the marketplace of ideas is due more to persecution) then atheism as a cultural norm is very young compared to rival systems, and it would be premature to dismiss it as patently non-viable. At any rate, secularity’s place in the present-day marketplace of ideas, including ideas about how to “run a society,” is one in which the other side has had a millenia-long head start.

    I have done a little informal public opinion research on the whole question of whether civic religiosity is a prerequisite for civilization. One of the items in my questionnaire was:

    Without widespread belief in the truth of some religion, life would be very unsafe.

    Of course the pattern of responses to this survey item demonstrates a heavy bias indicating the sorts of people with whom I tend to be in contact. The correlation between answers to this item and answers to others raises some questions. If some kind of Fear of God is one of the major strategies for dissuading some types of conduct that are not conducive to civilization, what sorts of baggage might that bring with it? Is there truly no way out of this trap, which has deeply authoritarian implications?

  • Exploring, as always, possible end-runs around market omniscience

    Maybe “letting go and letting the Invisible Hand” is more or less guaranteed to result in an allocation that lies at rather than within the production possibility frontier (PPF), but maybe no point on the present PPF represents the best of all possible worlds. Ideally, the road to there will involve some non-market activity on someone’s part. It’s hard to imagine the best of all currently possible worlds not being on the PPF, but that leaves open certain other questions: Does the pursuit of a better-than-currently-possible world necessarily involve pushing outward the envelope that is the PPF, or are there other avenues? I’ll admit that growth as a prerequisite for everything that is good (human rights, poverty alleviation, a smarter humanity, etc.) is a doctrine I find particularly depressing. It almost implies that to be poor is to be part of the problem, or at least precludes the poor from being part of the solution. Contrast this with sustainability principles, steady-state economics and the kind of thinking around “affluenza,” which actually honor the lean life rather than the mean life. This tonal contrast has played a big role in shaping my tribal and ideological allegiances, and is also why I am rooting for the affirmative in the global warming debate.

    Maybe the ability of the Invisible Hand to solve the calculation problem is definitively superlative when it comes to local optima, but discovery of non-local (but maybe preferable) attractors can be effected by shocks to the system from other-than-market forces.

  • Quotebag #81

    “Frankly, best theory? We exist in a cheap holodeck in 2043 on quarters that had been dropped in by a ninety year old George W Bush who wanted to live his chain of fantasy dream jobs. Fighter pilot! Oilman! Baseball team owner! Guv uf Texas! Pres-e-dent!… and he got fatigue[d?] before he could appoint himself astronaut. How likely that we’d ACTUALLY be stupid enough for Culture War? ”—David Brin

    “When you say I need to find a job. You are essentially saying: Who wants to control me with money?”—Greg Sidelnikov

    “I’ll give you an example I like to use. Say I’m walking down the street and I see this store and I am thinking, ‘They have Kettle Korn? Wow, I love this stuff. Let me get some.’ The problem: the owner of the store wants no black people inside. That’s his policy. This isn’t a government policy since discrimination based on race or ethnicity is illegal in the United States. But, this business owner doesn’t want blacks in his store. So when I enter, he tells me to leave because I am violating his store’s ‘liberty.’ I would argue that my individual liberty trumps his business liberty. A corporatist would say that the business owner can do as he pleases.”—Yves Smith

    “Many libertarians speak as if it were possible to come up with a clean way to separate voluntary transactions from involuntary transactions. Once you have defined a transactions between parties A and B as voluntary, then you have a presumption that party C should stay out of it. What I am suggesting is that defining voluntary exchange may not be quite so simple.”—Arnold Kling

    “A ‘strike’ that the boss gives you permission to take part in isn’t really a strike.”—Nestor Makhno, of the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project

    “Maybe the determining aspects that really exists in our lives are: Physical usage, direct or mutual cooperative manifestations, and self-will. Yet somehow we insert money, government, and laws which actually work against the flow of the former REAL functions.”—afunctionalworld

    “Capitalism has always been an exploitative system, which had emerged from a feudal system.. It doesn’t matter the definition you give to it! Trying to mix it with anarchy is suicide.. almost the same for communism which is a more broader [sic] concept.. you always fail trying to recover anarchism for a specific economic system, because you cannot predict what each person will choice [sic] in different moments.. unless you believe in a kind of misantrope [sic] scientific libertarianism..”—happyzero