23 Comments

I'd like to add that even if we don't actually implement something like this kind of futurarchy I think it presents a very compelling framework for eliciting what socialists actually want to achieve and exposing internal tensions within their views.

My sense is that most socialists do not really want individuals to have a large degree of influence over society. Rather, what's going on is a strong paternalist impulse plus the deep conviction that surely other people will agree with me about what's the best society once they see it so they'll feel a huge degree of control since what they want will obtain (if everyone wants the same outcome we can all get what we want). Disregarding the fact that the very things which make them feel they lack control (large corporations who set terms without consultation etc..) are the very things that might give those who are talented in business etc.. a sense of control and ability to have an impact. However, these issues are too easily glossed over in the usual conversations.

However, your suggestion of cashing out success in terms of a very operational metric is a great way to elicit more clarity and bring out internal tensions even if it's just a thought experiment. For instance, I hadn't thought about the tradeoff between ensuring that each person can have large effects on the overall system (your xor trees) and the ability of large majorities to target particular outcomes and ensure they attain before you phrased it in these terms. More generally, I think asking people to opine on specific measures of socialist goodness/quality is a great way to reveal internal tensions in their views. For instance, if they identify a metric that maximizes the influence an individual can have on society that makes it far easier to point out that one of most effective ways you can have an impact is to simply go out and use weapons to kill people so that metric might favor a gun totting anarchist society.

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Maybe I didn't understand the proposal correctly but I guess I don't understand the big xor trees objection.

I mean sure, if you select a random individual and task them with simply producing *some* large change in society then sure that makes sense. But I presume that the idea is to demand they try and achieve a particular outcome and big xor trees would actually be antithetical to that right?

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The link doesn't work. What are you trying to say with that quote though? Chavez is describing socialism as something that will emerge in the future, so that further confirms my point.

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Even if much better outcomes might result without the socialism constraint? Socialists' zeal is admittedly powerful. But whether or not this is intended as a foot-in-the door approach to the dissemination of futarchy (which could be a very big deal generally), it seems better to push for applications less likely to produce highly suboptimal outcomes.

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Sorry. Here's a measure of control:https://imgur.com/ffHudpr

Or https://i.imgur.com/ffHudpr...

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I asked about control, and your long comment said nothing about that.

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There appear to be many people who don't just want a society with more average and more equal consumption; they also want "socialism". I was trying to figure out how to get that for them.

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Two unrelated comments:1) Your emphasis on the importance of institutional learning reminded me of a recent TED talk by physicist David Deutsch, who sees this as of paramount importance in political system design. (In fact, Deutsch favored Brexit for just this reason. He thinks the British system's first-past-the-post voting (among other things) enables bad outcomes to be more easily traced to the policies/people responsible than does the muddled EU governance system).2) .I'm not getting why, if you're interested in maximizing social welfare, you're confining this pitch to advocates of socialism, given a) its dismal track record, b) your comment "If you constrain [futarchy] to choose among central plans then it will do so, but those might produce much worse outcomes," which seems no less true if one replaces "central plans" with "socialist systems").

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Extreme poverty will be gone next year and everyone will have a home, a job, plenty of food, education, safe streets, health and old age care.

By then, Chinese mothers and infants will be less likely than ours to die in childbirth, their children will graduate from high school three years ahead of ours and live longer, healthier lives, and we will have more drug addicts, suicides and executions, more homeless, poor, hungry and imprisoned people than China.

All thanks to socialist planning.

J. M. Keynes[1] said, “Planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share your own moral position. Moderate planning will be safe if those carrying it out are rightly orientated in their minds and hearts to the moral issue.”

When Confucius talked about enriching the people he used the word collectively to describe a stage he called xiaokang, or ‘moderate prosperity.’ In 1978 Deng Xiaoping called on the Party to achieve xiaokang by June 1, 2021, the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party.

In 2011 Premier Wen Jiabao defined xiaokang as ‘a society in which no one is poor and everyone receives an education, has paid employment, more than enough food and clothing, access to medical services, old-age support, a home and a comfortable life.’ They will reach xiaokang on time and on budget.

Confucius' second goal is far more ambitious. When he said ‘education,’ he meant emancipation from egoic bondage by communal effort (all Chinese goals, including liberation, are collective) into a state he called dàtóng.

Mao loved and often quoted a definition of dàtóng from Kang Youwei’s Commentary on Liyun, Liyun Zhu:

Now to have states, families, and selves is to allow each individual to maintain a sphere of selfishness. This infracts utterly the Universal Principle, gongli, and impedes progress...Therefore, not only states should be abolished, so that there would be no more struggle between the strong and the weak; families should also be done away with, so that there would no longer be inequality of love and affection among men; and, finally, selfishness itself should be banished, so that goods and services would not be used for private ends. ... The only true way is sharing the world in common by all, tienxia weigong... To share in common is to treat each and every one alike. There should be no distinction between high and low, no discrepancy between rich and poor, no segregation of human races, no inequality between sexes...All should be educated and supported with the common property; none should depend on private possession...This is the way of the Great Community, dàtóng, which prevailed in the Age of Universal Peace.

Hoping that China could achieve dàtóng in one generation, Mao initiated the Great Leap Forward and was dropped from the leadership after it failed.

In his public apology he said, “We rushed into a great catastrophe. The communes were organized too quickly. The Great Leap has been a partial failure for which we have paid a high price. The chaos was on a grand scale and I take responsibility for it..The transition to a dàtóng society might take longer than I had envisaged, perhaps as many as twenty Five Year Plans, but the drive to attain it should never be abandoned.”

Every leader has reiterated Mao's dàtóng pledge (as does Taiwan's national anthem) and, though the Party has not set a deadline, President Xi set two intermediate goals:

1. Between 2021-2035, China will focus on becoming more egalitarian–in both wealth and income–than Finland, the current world leader. Since Xi began promoting provincial officials based on their GINI statistics in 2012, progress has been rapid and the 2035 goal seems realistic.

2. By 2049, “China will be a great, modern socialist country, prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful, and have built a world without conflicts, with equal development opportunities for everyone and with all peoples blessed with happiness.”

These shared goals, which constitute the Chinese Dream, explain much of the difference between their politics and ours: why they have no ‘opposition parties’ for example. Everyone knows where they're going, everyone wants to get there and everyone knows that, by definition, no-one will be there until everyone’s there. Since the current leaders are making satisfactory progress towards them, opposition is only wasteful.

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How well would China score on a measure of perceived personal control? If low, China is example of large state, but not necessarily of much socialism.

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Though the Chinese are widely derided (or praised) for their embrace (or abandonment) of socialism theirs, with Chinese characteristics, is still the one to watch.

Share of public wealth as a percentage of GDP is already 30%, by far the highest on earth and will increase steadily between now and 2035.

Constant polling ensures 95% policy support and the world's highest government responsiveness.

Not bad for 1.4 billion people.

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It seems to me quite feasible to extract random people, and to keep their responses private.

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Such regimes are going to either rig that pool of random people, or make it very clear that if such people criticize their institutions their life will be more difficult when they leave the interview. Restricting the pool to those not subject to retaliation--eg, those leaving the system--is also a biased sample.

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Which is why I suggested having whole families leave together on foreign visits.

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"We have to re-invent socialism. It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition." https://en.wikiquote.org/wi...ávez

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"I don't see any way to create an unbiased and efficient estimator of social welfare in any socialist enterprise" That's generic; I made a specific proposal based on random people extracted to a foreign land.

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