Government competence, as it's meant today, often refers to the ability of the state to address social problems, change behaviors, constrain activities. In other words, there's a tension between competent government and freedom.
I think we should recognize that there are MANY systems in which decentralized activity and social signals (the market, neighborhood building and association patterns, media activity) are at least an integral part of the picture. In most, adding the government makes things more rigid, less free, and entails unintended consequences.
It's simply a fact that while we're richer and more connected that we were 50 years ago we're also less free. The limitations on our freedom come in the guise of assistance, convenience, and support but I'd rather have the freedom.
It's important to note that it seems that women and professionals tend to incline towards the managing and paternalistic stance in government, and men/immigrants/business owners/the working class tend to oppose it a bit more. I suspect this is due partly to ideology and partly to deep psychological attributes. A free world feels like a dangerous world to many modern people.
Imagine a democracy in which everyone has some number of votes to spend on any question they want to. You can spend zero votes on a question you're not interested in, or all your votes on the one thing that matters most to you. You get more votes by proposing things to the public, or helping to do the things the public has voted that somebody should do. Some of the votes cast for those things are transferred to you, and then you can use them to vote on other things in the future. If voting is really important to you, you'll spend more time proposing and doing things the public is likely to vote for.
For some reason, instead of calling that a government, we call it a free market. But it really is just a fully-distributed form of government. So competition is not really a different species than government.
In many times and places, government has been highly distributed. I was surprised to learn that some cultures we consider highly civilized, like ancient Greek city-states, didn't always have laws against murder and rape. That wasn't considered the business of the government, but it wasn't ungoverned. They had social conventions, which are really the same as law codes, about what kind of retribution was allowable, or what payments and apologies could be accepted in lieu of retribution. People would lose face for retaliating too strongly or too weakly. These systems gave people with large and wealthy families a huge advantage, just as our expensive legal system does today. They didn't give people with powerful political connections or tribal memberships as great of an advantage as authoritarian governments do today.
America calls itself a democracy, but our first-past-the-post voting system always results in having exactly 2 real political parties, and can give complete political power to one or the other. So we don't really have a democracy; we have an unstable system which ritualizes combat between two tribes, with rights and balances of power that sometimes divide power between the tribes, and sometimes don't.
I guess I'm trying to say that we may have overly-reified the concept of "government". I think the distinction Robin makes between government and competition may be less fundamental than the divide between centralized and distributed power.
Yep. the modern concept of government/non-government is a pretty fuzzy match at best with societies far in the past.
We think of religions as non-government things in the modern world, but often they were a large part of the government in past societies. Governments now do lots of stuff that only 500 years ago religions did - eg. education, hospitals, and welfare. They even approved and officially appointed monarchs. If you count all those activities as government, then 500 years ago government wasn't so small. Religions often formed a parallel quasi-government in some ways in competition with what we would recognise as the government and other times in cooperation, and sometimes they were the government.
I don't know if the concept of government is even close to universal. People may have thought that there is the church, kings, lords, cities, and merchants, and not even thought of anything in particular there as "the government".
In plenty of times and places in the past no body could do anything that wasn't allowed by a dictator or "priestly" type person. You could easily argue in those cases that there was only government and nothing else.
I think there is a reasonable debate about whether giving complete power to one side (albeit for a limited time) is a bug or a feature. The American mindset on this was indelibly set when Jefferson served as Adams's VP, which was universally seen as a disaster.
Robin, your point about governance competence creating much larger variance in adaptability is intriguing, but I wonder if the mechanism is different than you think.
Looking at cultural change patterns - gay marriage went from impossible to inevitable in about 15 years, slavery abolition followed similar punctuated equilibrium dynamics - culture seems to operate through tipping points rather than continuous optimization.
This suggests the 'variance' you predict might be much more extreme and unpredictable than futarchy assumes. The temporal mismatch seems key: cultural transitions often take 20-80 years to become visible, while governance optimization operates much faster.
What's your take on how cultural timing affects the governance competence thesis?
In the US, 45% of the federal budget goes to social insurance programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid). Another 13% goes to defense, and another 15% goes to veterans benefits and various economic security programs.
Taken in aggregate, this 73% of the federal budget can be interpreted as mitigating worst-case life outcomes. (As a society in the case of defense, and as individuals in the case of everything else.)
A hundred years ago we lived with much lower levels of spending – or no spending at all – in each of these areas. So the "why large governance" question nets out to: Why are we so much less risk-tolerant today than we were in the past? Is this risk-aversion a natural outcome of achieving a certain level of median lifestyle?
I think it probably is partly that. But I see crazy risk intolerance in other aspects of life, like parents in absurdly safe neighborhoods like mine still not letting their kids play outside by themselves, or walk into town, or Trick-or-Treat after dark.
Is it a result of being averse to risks for ourselves, for our kids, or for others? And is it aversion to risk, or the tremendous increase in the belief that a society should be judged not by the life of the average person, but of the very worst life in that society?
> Places where this governance is directed toward maladaptive goals would become more maladaptive even faster, while places where this new power is directed toward adaptive goals could become far more adaptive, reversing the decay of prior cultural drift.
This has shades of the Orthogonality Thesis, and so, to contemplate the counter-argument, why would effective governance not form a preference unto itself?
You seem to talk about "adaptiveness" like it's a fixed property of habits/behaviors/cultural norms, applicable in any circumstance, then separately say that we live in a "faster changing world". It's almost certain that much of what was adaptive two centuries ago no longer is today, due to those fast changes. To me, the heart of the matter of "cultural drift" is determining what's obsolete and to be discarded, and developing appropriate replacements. Unfortunately, the civilization seems very far from ready to even grasp this problem, let alone start productively dealing with it...
I talk a lot about how what is adaptive has been changing, because our context has been changing. Part of drift is failing to track changes in what is adaptive.
There's a way, however, that people want different level of competence in different areas of government. You want a super competent post office that delivers every single piece of mail but you don't want a police regime that arrests everyone for every single speeding violation or rolling stop at a stop sign in the middle of the night when nobody's around
Government competence, as it's meant today, often refers to the ability of the state to address social problems, change behaviors, constrain activities. In other words, there's a tension between competent government and freedom.
I think we should recognize that there are MANY systems in which decentralized activity and social signals (the market, neighborhood building and association patterns, media activity) are at least an integral part of the picture. In most, adding the government makes things more rigid, less free, and entails unintended consequences.
It's simply a fact that while we're richer and more connected that we were 50 years ago we're also less free. The limitations on our freedom come in the guise of assistance, convenience, and support but I'd rather have the freedom.
It's important to note that it seems that women and professionals tend to incline towards the managing and paternalistic stance in government, and men/immigrants/business owners/the working class tend to oppose it a bit more. I suspect this is due partly to ideology and partly to deep psychological attributes. A free world feels like a dangerous world to many modern people.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/leviathan
A preference for "freedom" is part of the preference mode of evaluation I mentioned. We vary individual and communally in such preferences.
Imagine a democracy in which everyone has some number of votes to spend on any question they want to. You can spend zero votes on a question you're not interested in, or all your votes on the one thing that matters most to you. You get more votes by proposing things to the public, or helping to do the things the public has voted that somebody should do. Some of the votes cast for those things are transferred to you, and then you can use them to vote on other things in the future. If voting is really important to you, you'll spend more time proposing and doing things the public is likely to vote for.
For some reason, instead of calling that a government, we call it a free market. But it really is just a fully-distributed form of government. So competition is not really a different species than government.
In many times and places, government has been highly distributed. I was surprised to learn that some cultures we consider highly civilized, like ancient Greek city-states, didn't always have laws against murder and rape. That wasn't considered the business of the government, but it wasn't ungoverned. They had social conventions, which are really the same as law codes, about what kind of retribution was allowable, or what payments and apologies could be accepted in lieu of retribution. People would lose face for retaliating too strongly or too weakly. These systems gave people with large and wealthy families a huge advantage, just as our expensive legal system does today. They didn't give people with powerful political connections or tribal memberships as great of an advantage as authoritarian governments do today.
America calls itself a democracy, but our first-past-the-post voting system always results in having exactly 2 real political parties, and can give complete political power to one or the other. So we don't really have a democracy; we have an unstable system which ritualizes combat between two tribes, with rights and balances of power that sometimes divide power between the tribes, and sometimes don't.
I guess I'm trying to say that we may have overly-reified the concept of "government". I think the distinction Robin makes between government and competition may be less fundamental than the divide between centralized and distributed power.
Yep. the modern concept of government/non-government is a pretty fuzzy match at best with societies far in the past.
We think of religions as non-government things in the modern world, but often they were a large part of the government in past societies. Governments now do lots of stuff that only 500 years ago religions did - eg. education, hospitals, and welfare. They even approved and officially appointed monarchs. If you count all those activities as government, then 500 years ago government wasn't so small. Religions often formed a parallel quasi-government in some ways in competition with what we would recognise as the government and other times in cooperation, and sometimes they were the government.
I don't know if the concept of government is even close to universal. People may have thought that there is the church, kings, lords, cities, and merchants, and not even thought of anything in particular there as "the government".
In plenty of times and places in the past no body could do anything that wasn't allowed by a dictator or "priestly" type person. You could easily argue in those cases that there was only government and nothing else.
I think there is a reasonable debate about whether giving complete power to one side (albeit for a limited time) is a bug or a feature. The American mindset on this was indelibly set when Jefferson served as Adams's VP, which was universally seen as a disaster.
Good point. Although I wouldn't say indelibly; I'd bet not one person in a hundred remembers that today.
To be fully analogous, you need to be able to inherit large amounts of votes.
if it's a drift *to* forager values, maybe it's actually a sail 🤔
Robin, your point about governance competence creating much larger variance in adaptability is intriguing, but I wonder if the mechanism is different than you think.
Looking at cultural change patterns - gay marriage went from impossible to inevitable in about 15 years, slavery abolition followed similar punctuated equilibrium dynamics - culture seems to operate through tipping points rather than continuous optimization.
This suggests the 'variance' you predict might be much more extreme and unpredictable than futarchy assumes. The temporal mismatch seems key: cultural transitions often take 20-80 years to become visible, while governance optimization operates much faster.
What's your take on how cultural timing affects the governance competence thesis?
In the US, 45% of the federal budget goes to social insurance programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid). Another 13% goes to defense, and another 15% goes to veterans benefits and various economic security programs.
Taken in aggregate, this 73% of the federal budget can be interpreted as mitigating worst-case life outcomes. (As a society in the case of defense, and as individuals in the case of everything else.)
A hundred years ago we lived with much lower levels of spending – or no spending at all – in each of these areas. So the "why large governance" question nets out to: Why are we so much less risk-tolerant today than we were in the past? Is this risk-aversion a natural outcome of achieving a certain level of median lifestyle?
I think it probably is partly that. But I see crazy risk intolerance in other aspects of life, like parents in absurdly safe neighborhoods like mine still not letting their kids play outside by themselves, or walk into town, or Trick-or-Treat after dark.
Is it a result of being averse to risks for ourselves, for our kids, or for others? And is it aversion to risk, or the tremendous increase in the belief that a society should be judged not by the life of the average person, but of the very worst life in that society?
> Places where this governance is directed toward maladaptive goals would become more maladaptive even faster, while places where this new power is directed toward adaptive goals could become far more adaptive, reversing the decay of prior cultural drift.
This has shades of the Orthogonality Thesis, and so, to contemplate the counter-argument, why would effective governance not form a preference unto itself?
"effective governance … form a preference unto itself" huh?
s/that prior/than prior
(More) link is isn't a link (I'd like to follow that one)
"Governance" can be interpreted as management of large private organizations. (vs. "government")
Even if futarchy works as you expect, what's to prevent a world government (by definition one without competition) from corrupting the mechanisms?
You seem to talk about "adaptiveness" like it's a fixed property of habits/behaviors/cultural norms, applicable in any circumstance, then separately say that we live in a "faster changing world". It's almost certain that much of what was adaptive two centuries ago no longer is today, due to those fast changes. To me, the heart of the matter of "cultural drift" is determining what's obsolete and to be discarded, and developing appropriate replacements. Unfortunately, the civilization seems very far from ready to even grasp this problem, let alone start productively dealing with it...
I talk a lot about how what is adaptive has been changing, because our context has been changing. Part of drift is failing to track changes in what is adaptive.
There's a way, however, that people want different level of competence in different areas of government. You want a super competent post office that delivers every single piece of mail but you don't want a police regime that arrests everyone for every single speeding violation or rolling stop at a stop sign in the middle of the night when nobody's around
A competent police regime can be told what % of crimes to catch of what types, and it will do that.