Capitalist ≠ Voluntary
Time for a status update on cultural drift. I’ve been pondering solutions, and now see at best only three weakly promising options. The other possible approaches seem to me at best only modest supplements to these three best solutions.
The first solution is for some rather large polity to adopt a very competent form of governance (e.g. futarchy) tied to an ex post measurable sacred goal correlated greatly with the capacity of our main world civ over the next few centuries. Citizens should see this goal as sacred so that they are proud to sacrifice for it, and ashamed to abandon it. Polls suggest some possible goals: the date when a million people live in space, or when we achieve physical immortality. This approach requires that that we find, prove, and adopt a competent form of governance, tie it to such a sacred goal, and do so for polity so large that its actions have a substantial influence on the overall chance of our main world civ achieving this goal. Yes, this seems a long shot. Futarchy to help firm cultures seems a good training ground.
The second solution requires groups where members somehow become strongly attached to the goal of group adaption itself, even though few today feel much attachment to it, or see it as remotely sacred. Yes, that seems harder, especially given the modern taboo on “social Darwinism”, but an advantage of this approach is it that can work for much smaller groups. We’d create a way to measure ex post group adaptive success in a few centuries, make market estimates today of those future measures, and then reward/punish group leaders as those estimates rise/fall. This requires substantially competent governance, and could fail if the world too strongly shares many maladaptive global norms and status markers. Yes this also seems a long shot.
While I have separate posts on the above two approaches, this is my first post on the third solution: more capitalism. Which, yes, also seems a long shot. The parts of our world that are driven by capitalism today, such as tech and commerce, seem to have healthy cultural evolution, even though they are subject to many maladaptive global norms. So the idea here is to get more parts of our world to be more driven by capitalism.
Yes, many other parts of our world, such as marriage, parenting, sex, friendship, and art, are mostly “voluntary”, but that’s not “capitalism” for my purposes here. Just as kings of old who “owned” nations were also not very “capitalist”. The issue here isn’t what choices are voluntary, or who owns what, but which behaviors are strongly directed by for-profit ventures who use the powerful tricks we’ve learned over recent centuries to manage such orgs. Tricks like as stock price signals, hostile takeovers, boards of directors, CEOs with stock options, clear performance metrics for employees, standardized job roles, and so on. These tricks, added to basic capitalist freedoms and incentives, are what let capitalism be so powerful today at enforcing and evolving adaptive behaviors.
Some examples of how capitalism might drive more behaviors:
We might pay lots to parents. For example, we could give them a transferable right to a percentage of the future tax revenue that those kids pay as adults. While parents might try to manage this by themselves, investors and for profit ventures such as boarding schools seem likely to get involved to advice, shape, and manage parenting in big ways.
We could have capitalist governance of towns, cities, or larger sized government units. This could induce much stronger adaptive incentives re policies that governments set or influence. For example, they might make citizenship transferable.
We could change bequest and charity laws to let organizations that pay low tax rates primarily hold assets and reinvest their returns. If allowed to persist for generations, such orgs would accumulate most of the world’s capital. As a result, the world would have far more capital, investment rates of return would fall to econ growth rates, and capitalism would care lot more about the long term future.
Making hostile takeovers of firms much easier would greatly increase competitive pressures to make firms efficient.
Heath and life insurers, merged together, could let people buy only cost-effective medicine.
Crime vouchers could help clients be cost-effective at avoiding committing crimes, and at punishing them if they do commit crime.
Tax career agents could help guide key life choices, such as re education, careers, or even marriages.
Note that, like the second approach above, this approach could also fail if the world too strongly shares maladaptive global norms and status markers.
While this third “capitalist” approach seems more “libertarian” than the other two, I fear it doesn’t seem libertarian enough to excite most self-identified libertarians, who likely prefer the current artisanal non-capitalist ways that we manage marriage, parenting, sex, friendship, art, etc.
What about the other approaches I’ve discussed before? AI/ems would strengthen selection pressures, but not directly address other drift issues. Spreading across stars would induce variety at the largest scales but not address within system drift. Nationalism, recently risen and now falling, seems too weak to drive sufficient competition. Deep multiculturalism seems very hard, unpopular, and only addresses the variation issue. These can at best supplement the main three approaches.
Added 15Feb: A poll finds this approach to be most favored:
Let me emphasize that all these approaches require a group or polity using them be sufficiently insular re a wider world culture’s norms and status markers.
Much, if not most, of the problems we have today are not due to the lack of reining in those who are successful. The primary problem is not holding people accountable for their failures. Look at all the fraud perpetuated through government. Not one of the leaders will be held accountable. Or look at any of the many “well-intentioned” government programs that have created more harm, welfare, DEI.
As Thomas Sowell said, “"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong".
Capitalism works wonders precisely because those who make poor decisions pay the consequences. Capitalism fails when decision makers are not personally held accountable.
Human history suggests a fourth option: Collapse leading to a decentralization of power. We see many, many cycles through history of the center collapsing and bringing back inter-civ competition. E.g. post-Roman Europe. Eventually the winners win and power centralizes again – and the cycle repeats. Maybe we're due for another reset.
I like the *idea* of cleverly engineering our way out of a painful reset. But I think the success prospects are dim. So painful reset it is.