19 Comments

There's a false premise here in the criticism here. It is not a foregone conclusion that "common purpose" and "collective action" must be acheieved through more centralized planning. Obama's election, in fact, was a triumph of decentralized coordination through consistent communication of focal points for action. It's impossible to ignore the more centralized structure of decisionmaking within the Obama Whitehouse; but this doesn't mean that his vision of common purpose and collective action is predicated on affirmative acts of government. See, for example, the commitments to increased transparency and elimination of "waste." We'll see how things play out. But I'm still of the mind that the Obama adminstration may be go down in the books as classical liberal in the vein of J.S. Mill.

Expand full comment

What does the empirical evidence show? Are the strong economies of the world those that are highly centralized, or regionalized? Do countries with strong nationalism do better than those without?

Expand full comment

I still say most "we should do this" political speak is done to signal intelligence and loyalty to a political group. When was the last time anyone complained about politics in casual conversation and actually thought their complaints would make a significant difference?

Expand full comment

Great synthetic post.However, perhaps you shouldn't advise people not to get onto that soap box. I think the next big discussion topic for us OB types is going to be "animal spirits" -I notice a book or two coming out with that title- and getting people to engage in activity, including utilizing soap boxes, may help boost productivity, or at least, liquidity of resources (which could aid their more efficient allocation).

Expand full comment

I'm sure it's not apparent under American style psuedo-democracy, but...[h]ere in Canada...

Um... what?

As for the "resolution" of representation, on average each member of the U.S. House represents around 700,000 people. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wik....

And yes, it is easier than people think for one person to become influential, due to self-selection of the political class. Sarah Palin went to some PTA meetings and ended up as governor a few years later. This sort of story is common, from what I can tell.

Expand full comment

The world wars quite fully disprove your point. Not only nations, but groups of nations had to pull together for mutual support.

Citibank (and it's contemporaries) cannot be allowed to fail outright. They need to be nationalized and dismantled into smaller entities, and not allowed to re-metastasize.

As for politics, it's the rare individual that can impact things on a national level, but a lot more can influence their riding. I'm sure it's not apparent under American style psuedo-democracy, but I can talk to my Member of Parliament and influence her views.

What's the highest resolution in American national politics? Half a state? Here in Canada it's about 100,000 people per MP, including minors. Sure, that's well beyond a Dunbar tribe, but elections are quite often within an order of magnitude or two of Dunbar's number.

Expand full comment

a good way for people to indulge in irrational partisanship with no major adverse effects.

I can think of at least two:

1) Every moment spent enjoying mindless partisanship actively works against the development of resistance to it.2) It makes it harder to convince people that they need to develop resistance, because it's an obvious example of a highly enjoyable and seemingly harmless form of consciousness-submission.

Expand full comment

If you look at it from the point of view of evolutionary psychology, experiences with groups of larger than maybe 50-75 people would have been extremely rare in the EER.

I think you could say that people have a level of interest in politics AS IF they lived in social groups of no more than 150 people and that group regularly made personally relevant life-death decisions (as in the EER).

Expand full comment

I'm not a sports fan, but it seems to me that that is a good way for people to indulge in irrational partisanship with no major adverse effects.

Expand full comment

I think this post does not consider opposing viewpoints like Peter Senge's 5 Disciplines. It looks at government; what do these assertion mean fo private companies that nearly have organizational mission and vision statements. What do these assertions on governing say for companies? Do they say companies are doomed? All this is self-interested double-speak targeted only governments not big companies. One never hear such assertions applied to corparate governance! Why such silence. People talk all day and night about deregulation; why not start at the drug factory where the production people have to observe 2000 internal checks and balnces so that your drugs are safe and work as designed. The internal quality-control regulations in any production system can benfit from all this deregulation spin. I would hate to be the operator who has to take quality control samples so many times do statistical analysis of the results. The managers are asking for a break from regulations, why don't the lead by example and free their operations of all those internal quality and safety specifications. Let the operators be self-regulating! let the operators decide for themselves what right! Let us let loose Bart's Inner Child on the factory floors.

Expand full comment

Patri, if we are going to start having overtly political posts here at OB, let's at least start by assuming that we need to offer concrete arguments and evidence for our political claims. You shouldn't just claim "an entire nation ... is an inefficiently large group for most types of collective action" with no further evidence and then spend the rest of a 1100 word post talking about what that implies. That is exactly the hotly disputed political claim.

Expand full comment

I'm still not convinced getting exited or commenting on politics has anything to do with actually affecting politics. There seems to be many other reasons to do so, such as signaling intelligence and loyalty to a group.

What about those people who don't get worked up by crowds, speakers (even those with "charisma"), or any of that? Some of us don't get into sports, politics, or any sort of "mob passion" at all. Its never interested me in the slightest, and I've always been perplexed by what people find so attractive about it.

Doug, Krugman didn't get a Nobel prize for his blog or NYT column. Many of his popular writings have been heavily criticized.

soulless, I think its likely that Obama's rhetoric reflects the traits (consciously created or not) that got him elected. I don't think it has much to do with the actions he'll actually take as president. The selection pressures on politicians don't often seem to connect rhetoric with action.

Expand full comment

Let's face it. These dudes all claim some assertions with such forcefull authoritarian self-satisfaction but never, NEVER put forwar proof that their assertions are derived. I believe only retarded gibbons should be swept in direction or another by some self-important fols out there who think they are so eminent and influential their just let out allegations and offering unfounded and unproven assertions. IOZ has not disclosed an iota evidence or transparency of how they came up with their allegations. IOZ show you work before you try to be so. Do we have to believe things on appearances or based on the clour of the speaker. How does IOZ know what it is saying. DO they take us to be such blind-faith true-bliever idiots. Come on folks we can do do better than a cult of retrded monkeys!

Expand full comment

Torben, most of the time the ability to influence via simple advocacy is directly proportional to the existing popularity of the position (or rather, to the number of people who are familiar with it but ambivalent; highly polarized issues differ). You can help push the snowball along, but you can't get it started.

Actually getting a new or obscure idea moving at a national level is clearly possible (even bad ideas must come from somewhere), but much harder. Ironically, Eliezer almost certainly has an excellent grasp on how one would go about doing this, but is likely uninterested.

As for the issue of centralization, I think it's rather likely that Obama's approach will be better than the likely alternatives, as much as I would personally prefer various very unlikely alternatives.

Also, how much of Obama's rhetoric reflects actual intent to use collective, national-level action, and how much is a calculated attempt at memetic engineering, exploiting the biases discussed, to create an atmosphere of optimism in which people will act locally in a beneficial way?

Expand full comment

Whenever I am tempted to start writing down my thoughts about how to untangle the poorly architected mess that is a modern economy, I say to myself, "There is no point in writing about this unless Seasteading takes off, because until then, there's nowhere that my ideas could realistically be tested."

Seriously, that's what I say to myself.

Expand full comment