Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended.
Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory:
* Banks could not cross state lines, resulting in a geographically distributed financial system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McFadden_Act : Your bank was always local.
The companies you dealt with every day were typically smaller, more local, more subject to competition, and less able to yield economic and political power, particularly at the national level.
Nowadays, power and resources seem to be far more concentrated.
> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant.
Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization. In this framing of small organizations kept small by the government the largest organization is the State. Indeed in this framing the State's job is to control other organizations. While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters, I'd be hard pressed to say that the state is sufficiently different from any other large organization. We can certainly see this now in the US in highly polarized times where the State bears opposition from half the country depending on who is in power.
I think this "anti-monopoly" framing is a bit dangerous as it smuggles a political position into a much more complicated situation. There is an overall decline in the West of small association groups. More and more of these groups happen on Discord voice chats and are divorced from the real life constraints that offer a more "grounded" character. And I think this issue has been written about much less than the "anti-monopoly" one. Even if you fervently believe that the State needs to play an aggressive role in policing private organizations, I think it's more thought-provoking to think about ways to encourage more grassroots organizing.
> While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters
This is exactly the key core distinction. The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors. It’s imperative, therefore, that it be democratic and representative. Notably, part of the instinct to break up other large organizations is to prevent them from assembling enough resources to have a supersized impact on the state - the problem with monopoly is that monopolies buy out their competition and neuter regulations, the problem with wealth disparity is the ultra wealthy are sufficiently powerful to move the state in the direction they want it to go.
I agree with you generally regarding reducing the overall size of governing bodies and I agree with Terrence about the benefits of small organizations and the drawbacks of large specifically around the investment and perceived ownership of members of those organizations, but having a small state fundamentally requires having small organizations everywhere - and anti-monopoly, antitrust, and anti-wealth concentration - because for the state to be democratic and representative, it must be the most powerful organization in the area it covers, otherwise it’s just a tool for the more powerful to use.
In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations? Or is that the worse of 2 evils?
The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth, influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.
A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The meta as a state today is to cultivate as much wealth and power as possible by encouraging super corporations
Overall national wealth and power shrink under monopoly super corporations, that is the reason it is a matter of public policy in the first place. If you go back and review the major antitrust actions of the 20th century, each one was followed by an explosion of market-creating innovation: Standard Oil, Bell Telephone, even Microsoft. Look even further back, and many national economies were organized around a few state-sponsored monopolies e.g. the East India Company. They all lost ground to economies with more numerous and competitive companies, most notably the U.S.
i think it could be argued that sure, 20 Googles would be better for US power, yes. why wouldn’t it be? it would drive more innovation which likely would only increase our influence on multiple levels.
there could be more reason to argue it would absolutely be more secure—if any of these tech giants or one of the people inside were to sell us out it could be very very bad. if one or two out of twenty were to sell us out, the damage is much much less severe.
not to mention we’re significantly stronger as a country when we have diversity of ideas leading to diversity in innovation which the dominance from a tiny few just entirely undermines.
As long as the state has power over Google (and it does, even if the media cycle presents it like they’re powerless), they can surveil billions of people, control populations, distribute propaganda.
Look how the US is able to spread it’s culture everywhere, cut off regimes, debank people it doesn’t like, all by controlling a few choke points.
Look how China uses its corporations to increase state power. The US does the same but with a few more carrots (lucrative govt contracts).
A mega corp means you can do your coercion behind closed doors rather than with sweeping regulations
> In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations?
I genuinely struggle to think of a social ill we're currently facing that isn't down in one way or another to some mega-entity acting against the public interest with no fears of reprisal because it is "too big to fail."
> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The US has demonstrated thoroughly it cannot and is not interested in preventing the ascent of a Chinese superpower, simply from the fact that, if you believe them at face value, the current ruling party and administration are absolutely ripping the walls out from the U.S. Government largely to prevent that exact phenomenon, and have utterly failed to do so. And, in their ineptitude, have in fact both made the United States a global embarrassment and left tons of soft power just sitting on the damn table for China to pick up.
> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
... but we have a lot of these supposed super-corporations. The problem is the United States, contrary to the ramblings of numerous chronically online people, does not actually use it's authority. Those corporations are in fact far more worried about accessing China's market than ours, because we don't regulate and they do, and there's far more Chinese consumers than American ones.
Add to it America's consumers are already strip-mined to the studs and China's middle class is growing... I mean. It's just full steam ahead on American irrelevance.
I think the real lesson is that when you're the big player already benefiting from global free trade in virtually every single way, laying tariffs on everything and sabotaging foreign investment in your own country is... well. Fucking stupid?
I mean it largely depends how you define that. I can think of a lot of social ills the government isn't working to solve... poverty, houselessness, poor funding of schools in general, the ongoing deterioration of social programs, but I wouldn't say they're the cause of those issues?
Fact is when you scratch even fingernail deep on any of them you find the private sector, far more often than not. The welfare state is in tatters because numerous components of it have been privatized and are operated by contracted companies who are siphoning off substantial amounts of the utter pittance we dedicate to the problem itself, which means what gets to the people who need it is even more a pittance than it started as.
The houseless issue is perpetuated in part by local governments zoning restrictions and the myriad of issues around building them here, from supplies to labor availability, and also a substantial contributor is the fact that huge amounts of homes are being purchased by investment companies and hoarded either without people in them, or are rented out in which case worker's earned income is being siphoned off to those already far wealthier than they need to be.
Poor funding of schools is often due to a whole mess of factors relating both to how we as a society prioritize education (or don't, more often) and the fact that a school's funding is heavily dependent on property taxes around where it is operating, which means under served areas have less quality schools from the off, which means less educated people with less money to spend, which means less economic activity, which means less property taxes and so on and so forth.
And in all of these and many other problems you have the elephant in the room: lobbying. Corporations spend billions to lobby the government to do even less than it does about these and a bunch of other issues, chief among them to permit said corporations to hold more money, a solid portion of which can then be spent on yet more lobbying. And certainly the government and it's politicians aren't simply helpless patsies in that arrangement, I also would hold the people making the decisions to route that money far more responsible.
> only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.
At a glance it seems this would only remain true so long as American interests and the interests of the corporation align. Which they do, up to a point.
The question then becomes where is the "triple point" between "A globally competitive USA", "Corporate oligarchy", and "Power to the people"? If such a balance can when exist
I'm actually not advocating for a reduction in the size of government bodies and I'm a bit frustrated about it. I'm not advocating anything about the size of government bodies (though naturally I have my feelings.) I'm confused why people seem to be intuiting this. I'm in fact doubly frustrated because I feel that people seem to be injecting modern political points into something that I feel predates many of our modern problems.
My point is: the social problems of disenfranchisement that come from large organizations are a property of their size. They may differ in that they're volunteer based, profit oriented, non-profit in a capitalist system, democratically organized, or several hundred or thousand more distinctions. But I'm going to feel just as disconnected from my national government as I will from the workings of Google as a small shareholder as I will from the NBA as someone that plays pick-up on a basketball court. The experience of going to a minor league baseball game is much more personal than going to a major MLB game.
To me the important issue is: the US specifically and the Anglophone West more broadly is seeing a decrease in its small institutions. This decrease predates the modern internet and social media landscape (see Bowling Alone.) I have many, many questions around this. Why is this happening? What is its effect on society? How can we reverse this? Is this something we can reverse?
It's an important issue to me because this trajectory is very different outside of the Anglophone West. Japan for example is not seeing the same decline in its small organizations as the US is, despite population reduction. If anything Japanese life is dominated much more by huge conglomerates than US life.
Hmmm... I would argue the disengagement of citizens and the lack of participation is not strictly because of organizational size. It is the fact these organizations cannot care less about their customers, citizens, or the law. These rogue organizations are typically large.
The cause of disengagement is that organizations, large or small, are not responsive to customers needs or citizens needs. In many cases, they are actively working to the detriment of their own customers and the country at large.
This is due to regulatory capture. It is that simple.
Unresponsiveness is still a factor of size.
First, there are numbers: typically only of X% of clients will have problems. As a company, you can either fix that problem or ignore it. If you ignore it, eventually the customer will churn.
Now, if the market is made of 5-6 mega-corps, as a churned customer you have only a few options for a migration. That will rise (eventually) your bar to churn out.
If the market was made of 2000 small companies, you have much more options and companies are forced to better interact with you. Also, with a smaller user base a user churning is a higher percentage of revenue loss so, they are even more interested.
That's fair. I think a lot of reactions, mine included, are because most of the time when someone discusses the downsides of a large state, they're advocating for a small one from a libertarian lens, so I think I imputed motives to your arguments.
You're right about this generally, though. I've got two different theories for why this is happening.
First, I think the US is "individually nomadic" in a way that many other countries and cultures are not - it is unusual, at least in the populous areas, for someone to spend their entire life in one area, and doubly so for an entire family or community to stay geographically colocated long enough to really build durable organizations. I think this changes a bit as people get older, but it's quite normal for someone to move every 5 years or so between the age of, say, 20 and 60. Arguably this is driven by economics - job availability, especially for professionals, is a big reason for these moves.
I think there's something self-reinforcing about the trend, as well - notably, as, say, the focus in politics concentrates on the federal government, it becomes harder for people to really see the benefit in local politics. The repeal of Roe v. Wade, for example, is a policy made at the national level with strong impacts locally; similarly the recent change in policy around both trans rights and immigration are hard for people to look past towards local politics (I think this is a mistake - large politics are built on small politics - but I think it's a factor).
I'd also suspect impatience plays a part - it's hard to build an organization, it's hard to negotiate status and relationships, it's hard to keep something viable, and we've got a lot of easier routes to dopamine than bothering to meet up with other people now.
Like rock paper scissors, there are multiple dimensions to power and the state doesn’t always possess all of them. Media being the most obvious one (fourth estate). Federal bank another. As the split of government and parliament.
The state holds the guns, and if it doesn't hold the guns, it's not the thing I'm referring to as the state - fundamentally, the power of the state is the power of violence. Other actors may possess other types of power and other types of coercion, but those either leverage or are constrained by the state power of violence.
The democratic state is less violent than the individuals as a whole (including the police), so the distinction comes from actual vs potential violence.
One could make an argument that the state does not hold a monopoly on violence. It holds a monopoly on the legitimization of violence. You're allowed to use deadly force to protect yourself from death or serious bodily harm in the majority of jurisdictions, provided it is not disproportionate. What matters is that the state declines to prosecute this, but does prosecute the person who hypothetically shoots someone on Fifth Avenue for no reason.
That's just semantics, for all intents and purposes the monopoly on violence is exactly that: the monopoly on the legitimisation of violence, only the state allows violence, you can only perform a violent act under the provisions the state allows, hence it's de facto and de jure holding the monopoly on violence.
Stating this because I'm not sure what differentiation you are trying to achieve with the semantics game, the meaning is the same for any interpretation.
I am specifically not arguing the state has a monopoly on violence - as with the GP, people are imputing arguments I’m not making. It’s the fact that the state cannot have a monopoly on violence that forces the state to be powerful enough that its threat of violence outweighs others (and, bluntly, defines what the state IS, for all practical purposes: it is the entity whose threats of violence supersede all others.)
As youtubers are getting more and more attention than the old medias, that may be an area where small groups are striving against large ones (so going against Terence's theory).
The small groups of influencers. YouTube is the new spectrum and public square. That’s why it was so harmful when Biden censored tens of thousands on it.
> The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors
I'm not sure this is a universal definition. Some of us just want a state that maintains a monopoly on violence, and otherwise does not constrain peaceful actors. An administration of peaceful coexistence rather than a mandate for cooperation. While administrating the peace does require some absolute power, it is required narrowly, to prosecute true crime, defend from outside threats, and resolve disputes.
How is an entity with a monopoly on violence not the most powerful actor in the room? And in what way is administering the peace not constraining other actors?
I'm perfectly happy for some folks to have trillion dollar net worth. I'm glad to negotiate with these folks and their organizations to provide value in exchange for a comfortable living.
> just buy the government they want
The idea of a constitution and separation of powers is to constrain the types of government that can legitimately exist. This does work to some degree. No matter how wealthy you are, you can't kill people in public. Money is to buy goods and services in a free exchange. When government agents acting in their official capacity accept money or the promise thereof in exchange for official action, this is called corruption. All human systems are corrupt, and no solution to corruption is perfect, but ours is pretty good compared to others.
> The idea of a constitution and separation of powers is to constrain the types of government that can legitimately exist.
It's ironic to read this in the context of what's been happening in the US recently. When the trillionaires and grifters (but I repeat myself) have fully captured the US government, you'll be able to complain that that government is no longer "legitimate", but that's not much consolation.
Yes, but also we've eroded state and city rights in favor of federalism and standardization in the US as well. It's arguable that many steps in that direction have been for the better, but the consequence still remains that we've eroded the power of smaller organizations as a result.
You're correct to note that this phenomenon crosses all aspects of life in the US, whether talking about churches, PTAs, book clubs, business, forums, fraternities, and politics. There is hardly a part of our lives anymore that isn't intruded on by national narratives anymore. There is a very fundamental question of why that is, why it's allowed, and who benefits from it.
> Yes, but also we've eroded state and city rights in favor of federalism and standardization in the US as well. It's arguable that many steps in that direction have been for the better, but the consequence still remains that we've eroded the power of smaller organizations as a result.
Oh, that one is easy. The original US constitution gave the federal government the right to preempt state laws in matters within its enumerated powers, but placed strict limits on what those powers are, and created a check against federal overreach by creating the US Senate, which originally had its members elected by state legislatures who would thereby send Senators disinclined to let the federal government usurp their powers.
Then populists amended the constitution to cause US Senators to be directly elected, and since US Supreme Court Justices are confirmed by the Senate, that in turn allowed them to replace the Justices with ones who would do things like read the inter-state commerce clause as covering non-commerce happening entirely within a single state.
Having eliminated any meaningful constitutional restrictions on federal power, federal officials were then captured by large corporations to enact federal regulations that only those large corporations can comply with, and to erode any federal constraints on corporate mergers while still preempting the states from imposing them either.
You can't give the central government the authority to do something and then expect them not to. If you don't want them to do something, you need something actively constraining them from doing it. Which was the US Senate until it wasn't.
I am not criticizing your historical explanation or your comment, but I would like to make a footnote:
Sometimes narratives like these which lay out a simple cause-and-effect between political decisions and modern outcomes can make people think that reverting the situation is a solution to modern outcomes, but that is rarely the case.
Everything evolves, and the solution to modern problems is to find a solution that works within modern constraints.
There is more than one possible structure to sustain an active constraint against power grabs, to be sure. But a Senate elected by the state governments was effective in doing it for as long as it was in place. There are other things that could work instead, but sometimes the old thing only stopped working because it stopped happening. And either way you would still need the something else to be used instead rather than continuing the status quo which is objectively not achieving the intended purpose.
It's an empirical fact that in all the years from the founding to the passage of the 17th Amendment the US federal government was much smaller than it quickly became in the years following its passage, so all of the available evidence is consistent with the theory.
Moreover, the mechanism of operation makes logical sense. Senators want to keep their seats and state legislators don't want to have their own regulations preempted by federal laws unnecessarily and don't want excessive federal spending because money collected in federal taxes can't be collected in state taxes and taxpayers have a threshold level of total taxation they're willing to put up with
So I'm not sure what you're asking for other than logic and evidence.
> It's an empirical fact that in all the years from the founding to the passage of the 17th Amendment the US federal government was much smaller than it quickly became in the years following its passage, so all of the available evidence is consistent with the theory.
This is appeal to history. We don't know if repealing the 17th Amendment would do anything at all like what happened 300 years ago.
> Moreover, the mechanism of operation makes logical sense. Senators want to keep their seats and state legislators don't want to have their own regulations preempted by federal laws unnecessarily and don't want excessive federal spending because money collected in federal taxes can't be collected in state taxes and taxpayers have a threshold level of total taxation they're willing to put up with
You are assuming a whole lot in that logic.
1. That state legislators wouldn't collude with the executive due to party affiliation
2. That spending more money at the federal level would require them to raise taxes
There is no logic or evidence when you get rid of the history and the wrong assumptions.
> This is appeal to history. We don't know if repealing the 17th Amendment would do anything at all like what happened 300 years ago.
We currently have evidence of what happened both before and after, but the before was ~100 (not 300) years ago. If you want evidence from modern day you would have to actually repeal it. Shall we give it a go?
> That state legislators wouldn't collude with the executive due to party affiliation
The required incentive is present even if the federal officials are in the same party as the state ones.
Suppose the banks are up to some shenanigans and the position of the party in power is to regulate them. Do the state-level officials want the federal government to do that, preempting them from doing it at the state level and letting the federal officials take the credit? No, they want to do it and get the credit themselves.
> That spending more money at the federal level would require them to raise taxes
In order to spend more money without raising taxes, they would have to borrow more or print more money.
The amount of money they print is essentially set by the Fed according to their inflation and economic targets and that isn't likely to change.
They already borrow about as much as they can get away with without causing major immediate problems; if they could borrow more instead of taxing more they would be doing it already. And borrowing isn't free money. It puts the taxpayers on the hook for both the principal and the interest, and the state legislators wouldn't want either of those coming from their taxpayers. Not only that, federal bonds compete with state government bonds for investment capital, so state legislators wouldn't want more federal debt either because it would make it harder for them to issue state debt.
None of your arguments are as logical or self-evident as you assume they are, and anyone who walks through them will figure that out. But baking them in as implicit through a historical example can get them through a lot of defenses and that is what I was warning about. That was my point.
Federalism is having power divided, so we have gone away from federalism, not towards it. And I personally believe very strongly that it has been disastrous for our nation to do so.
In US context it's somewhat ambiguous because of the historical use of the term "Federalist" to denote supporters of the new Constitution (which was more centralized than the Articles of Confederation) and "Anti-Federalist" to denote the opposition.
I would argue. This is too brought a stroke.
Federalism has been stripped away, yes, but if it had been done with some other rules in place and notifications so that smaller organizations can effectively pick up the baton, I would argue it could have worked better.
> In this framing of small organizations kept small by the government the largest organization is the State. Indeed in this framing the State's job is to control other organizations.
That isn't necessarily the case.
Suppose there was only one federal law: It's illegal for any entity to have more than 15% market share in any market. If you do you have 30 days to figure out how to break yourself up so that isn't the case, e.g. by putting half your factories into a separate company and selling it off. You get to figure out how to do it, it's just that if you have more than 15% market share on two days more than 30 days apart in the same 5 year period, you get unconditionally fined into oblivion. You don't even need government prosecutors, just make it a strict liability offense that gives customers the right to sue for 100% of revenue. Companies can start planning to break themselves up ahead of time once they're getting close to the market share threshold if they feel like they want more time to do something about it.
Then the government isn't really doing any kind of central planning, it's just a strict unconditional ban on market concentration and nothing else.
I'd agree that too much concentration of power in any single organization, public or private, without any checks or balances, is a bad idea. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Historically, the executive branch of the US federal government has been kept more or less in check by (a) the legislative and judicial branches, and (b) voters.
I find both sides of this discourse have value: the federal loss of regulatory powers WRT corporations, and getting grassroots going again. I feel like my neighborhood streets are not places anymore, they're entirely liminal. Nothing happens in these spaces, no playing or working, except as strictly necessary.
> While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters, I'd be hard pressed to say that the state is sufficiently different from any other large organization.
If the voting is not a big deal, maybe we should just get voting rights automatically to any private organization over a certain size
I really like the direction this thread is going. I've wondered if Left and Right in the US only see half the problem: one side fears corporate/wealthy/majoritarian power, the other fears government power. If you allow two assumptions:
(1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money
(2) Government and corporate/wealthy power are a revolving door (regulatory capture, pay-to-play politics, etc).
... then someone who is skeptical of abuses of power should be wary of both government and corporate/wealthy power. But that seems like an untenable position — you can't check the one without muscling up the other.
Is there a way to maintain a small, decentralized, local-oriented government that can still check the power of corporate/wealthy/majoritarian impulses and provide a social safety net?
The US actually had a working system with the McCain Feingold legislation that prohibited “dark” or unregulated money in election campaigns.
The legislation limited the power of wealth which made government more willing to police corporations bad behavior.
With the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United, we are now in a free for all. Wealth now translates to political power. We are seeing not only de-regulation but the active collusion of the current administration and favored corporations.
Don't the anarchists think they have ways to check both state and government power, while promoting human welfare? (I'm unfortunately unfamiliar with anarchist philosophy, so I don't know what their proposals are.)
I think the roadmap to the anarchist view is simple enough in theory - break up large companies, redistribute large piles of wealth, establish laws enforcing size limits, and, following that, scale government back and delegate decision-making to the affected individuals wherever practical. Ignoring the practical questions of how one breaks up, say, Amazon, the state has the guns, so if the state says Bezos loses his yacht, it is so.
The practical side is substantially harder - the anarchist-communal version of the world requires a citizenry committed to their community, phobic to bigness, and willing to assert that something that is not in the interest of the commons is not allowed to happen. Again, this ignores the practical question - balances of innovation vs unknown potential costs, etc - but the bigger practical concern is building an actual durable social contract that people will uphold and enforce over time, even when that means giving up personal glory.
This was basically the state of most societal groups in the pre-modern era - by and large, most people's day-to-day existence was within local community groups that had a lot of say over what they allowed within their sphere of influence - but the modern world creates the ability to concentrate power in ways which are harder for a smaller group of individuals to combat. A teenager with an AK-47 would've mowed through a squadron of Roman soldiers like they weren't there, and the mechanization of industry allows for more rapid consolidation of wealth than prior means, which renders the whole affair much harder to keep in hand.
I also don't know much about anarchist philosophy; would love some insight here if anyone can speak to that.
But if the US (same applies to other countries) became an anarchy today, then entities like Goldman Sachs and Constellis (formerly Blackwater) are going to fare much better than most. So a naive "burn it all down" anarchy doesn't seem an answer.
UPDATE: I remembered Noam Chomsky is sometimes called an anarcho-syndicalist but never looked up what meant. Turns out that is exactly the kind of "anarchism" that answers my question. (New concept to me, so not sure in what sense this might be called anarchism. No central government?)
Real-life anarchists aren't proposing the naïve "burn it all down" anarchy. Apparently that's just a media thing. (Some claim it's authoritarian propaganda, but I suspect it's just writers going: "we need a bad guy who wants to destroy society, but they need a reason, and we've had too many religious extremists: let's make this one an anarchist!"… though maybe this is a false dichotomy? Someone's probably written a book about it.)
> A revolution would be necessary to topple a political regime. But, if your starting point is the rejection of authority, if you don’t need “permission”, you don’t need the revolution either. Anarchy starts not with a bang, but with a whimper — not with an announcement on public television that it is the time to dismantle hierarchies, but with our collective work to slowly build something on the lack of the hierarchies themselves.
I'm not sure I understand the rest of this document, but this bit seems straightforward.
The link between anarchists and 'burn everything down' comes from the fact that in reality, many anarchists have very much taken the 'shoot first' and then hopefully build something better later path.
Those anarchists who didn't do that, were just never politically or socially relevant. So they can write nice pamphlets all they like about what 'real anarchism' actually is.
> we need a bad guy who wants to destroy society
Anarchist and Communists very much wanted a fundamentally different society, one so different that its essentially impossible to get there without destroying the existing one first.
Well, no… Anarchism can be achieved via parallel construction, provided that the existing society doesn't fight back. For example, mutual aid networks (as described by Peter Kropotkin). And an anarchist society could transition to a communist society (or pretty much any other society) – but even Friedrich Engels' "withering away of the state" route to communism (attributed to Karl Marx, but Wikipedia disputes that it was actually his idea) does not require the destruction of the existing society to precede communism.
I only have a superficial understanding of these ideas; but it seems to me that a good idea, whatever the ideology behind it, is worth implementing. And "we should make sure everyone gets fed by looking after each other" is a pretty good idea, so it shouldn't matter that it's technically "anarchy".
Sure and if I claim that you should do a 1-handed handstand and say 'communism' three times in a row, it will surely create communism right? I can even write it down on a piece of paper and call it a 'manifesto'. But in the actual real world writing stuff down doesn't make it true at all, even if the person that wrote it is famous.
> For example, mutual aid networks
That in reality have never even come close to achieving much more then mutual aid. That such action could be wide ranging enough to replace the state is nothing more then fantasy.
The closest thing to that is Muslim Brotherhood doing aid, but that is with a clear component of military power as well.
> but even Friedrich Engels
Why would you say 'even'. Engles is not in any way shape or form qualified to make such statements. In his times non of these ideas had been tested. And said different things at different times for different people. Engels specifically publicly called out mass death would happen.
In the real world it has never happened and there is no indication that it would ever happen.
Proponents of mutual aid networks aren't trying to "replace the state". I'm not sure which anarchist ideas are supposed to accomplish that (if any): as I understand, different philosophies have different views on that. "Provided the existing society doesn't fight back" was a reference to the repeated criminalisation of Food Not Bombs.
I say "even" because afaik Marxists don't seek to destroy the state: they believe the destruction of the state is inevitable (dialectics!), and seek instead to win battles in the class war – my "even" applied to the "withering away of the state" idea, not to Friedrich Engels himself. (I'm not familiar with all of his ideas.) Marxism–Leninism is the "the Bolsheviks were right all along" belief system, but is quite different to classic Marxism.
In the real world I don't think we'll ever have a group, region, or territory governed by any pure ideology, so I agree that a state of anarchy, or a classic communist society, would never happen in real life. That doesn't mean it's worthless to think about the ideas, any more than it's worthless to talk about uniform point masses on a frictionless inclined plane.
There are historical as well as contemporary examples of societies built on anarchist principles. They are few and fairly marginal, mostly because they tend to be crushed by the surrounding (centralized) cultures, but even so it's not all just hypothetical.
The most prominent contemporary example is the Zapatista territories. To a lesser extent, arguably also Rojava, although "libertarian market socialism" would probably be a more accurate label for that.
> Anarchist and Communists very much wanted a fundamentally different society,
They still want it.
> one so different that its essentially impossible to get there without destroying the existing one first.
Everything else they say is demagogy, in the end, all they are good for is fomenting strife and wars. After the bloodshed, these fools and their fantasies are quickly disposed of, the little tools they are.
Most anarchist tendencies would tear Goldman Sachs to shreds.
Even Rothbard wrote a pamphlet, I think he later disendorsed, justifying the breakup of any entity that contributes to war or state violence. I dont need to look up Goldman Sachs but I reckon I could justify them being in that box.
>anarchism
Anarchy the leftist tendency is the removal of Hierarchy. It can be debated into how you categorise that, but ultimately they all want corporations gone.
Its the right wing anarchists that are solely focused on the government
Yes, you could have a corporation that does not have an internal hierarchy. But (in a left anarchist view) you cant have a corporation without private property and corporate limitation of liability. Both of those are (in their view) hierarchical.
The problem from a left anarchist standpoint isn't (just) "CEO is boss, having boss bad" its that there's a group of people with special treatment everyone else is not subject to.
You might disagree with that view, and probably do. I am just familiar enough with their ideas to relay and explain them.
Anarchism is a spectrum so there's considerable disagreement over how the desirable state of affairs looks like, exactly. All anarchists would agree that you want to get rid of any kind of hierarchical power arrangements where possible, but the vast majority would also agree that it is not always possible, and so the realistic goal is the one where they are minimized. But that invites the question of what such a viable minimum state of organization might be, and different people have different answers to that.
I'd say that the most well-developed concrete platform in this sense is Murray Bookchin's "libertarian municipalism", although that is arguably too organized to be properly referred to as anarchism (Bookchin himself, although he used to be an anarchist, dropped the label eventually). But, even so, it's much closer to an anarchist utopia than any state-centric model. And it actually has some practical successes on the ground in Rojava, although the jury is still out on whether it can hold long term.
> (1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money
At least when applied to Government in the form of "Representative Democracies" I think this overly simplistic view is not useful to analyze what's happening in the real world.
The assumption behind electing representatives is precisely that they will advocate and advance agendas on behalf of the majority - no matter their social status. However, for this to work it requires a populace that is sufficiently informed, educated, and intelligent to understand what sensible solutions look like.
Unfortunately, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant and many others were wrong and even after 300 years of putting young homo sapiens through 10 years of public education and teaching them rational thinking this assumption turns out to be false.
> Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization
True, though (at least in principle) a democratic government is a very special organization because it (again, in principle) exists only because it's the people's will.
I think when we think about our social fabric and the empowerment that individuals feel, that this is more of a theoretical rather than practical argument. All of the disenfranchisement, the feeling that your individual participation doesn't matter, the inability to steer the goals of the organization around your individual opinions, these are all just as present in a large state.
Sure a democratic government derives its legitimacy from the people's will but not from your will, and that is the role of the small community organization.
This is more propaganda than reality, though. Most democratic societies today have evolved out of very non-democratic ones gradually, in a process where the elite had given up some of its privileges to prevent losing all. One of the tricks involved in that process was the notion of a "popular mandate" - not that this isn't a thing, but genuine cases of it are far less common than politicians using the fact that more people voted for them as some kind of argument in support for some specific policy of theirs.
In practice the difference between a democratic and a non-democratic society is more quantitative. In a non-democratic society, people still have a check on the government - they can revolt, and, being far more numerous than any security apparatus that can be maintained over a long time, the rulers therefore cannot simultaneously piss off too many people at the same time. So the bar is pretty high, but not entirely insurmountable. In a democratic society, the people also get an option of protest voting, which provides a safety valve that bleeds off a lot of effort that would have otherwise gone into potential violence, but at the price of making this kind of "voter revolt" less costly to participants and thus more likely. However, representative democracy is still pretty bad at accurately reflecting population preferences - it still takes a lot of abuse before protest voting becomes prevalent enough to alter election results. And then, of course, new mechanisms were developed to "manage" democracy - more efficient propaganda, mostly.
Thus, in practice, governments can indeed be treated mostly similarly to other organizations in this regard.
> Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization.
The comment you're responding to specifically indicates private organizations. Public organizations are publicly accountable.
> While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters
Accountability, not legitimacy, is what's at stake here. If the local mining company is polluting the river, there's nothing you do anything about it. What, are you going to take hostile action & organize a global aluminum boycott? No. But if the local government is polluting the river, you can vote them out, at least in theory. Not every democracy is healthy, and failed democratic states are certainly little better than private organizations. But a healthy democracy is substantially different from any other institutional framework, and democratic governance is the only real alternative to private oligarchy.
- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b?
- Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development?
- Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all?
There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades later. The same could be said for all the tech that came out of Bell Labs or PARC. Advocating for smaller businesses is advocating for shorttermism to some degree; even startups today are funded based on the premise that they could potentially capture an entire market in a few years.
Large projects need resources, but who decides how those resources are deployed, to what end, and who benefits from them is the important part.
All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society.
We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc.
Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project and the societal benefit would be broader and not tied to a single company's market dominance.
> but who decides how those resources are deployed
The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.
> We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects
And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?
Since when has throwing money at systems that haven't shown success worked? And you are suggesting that we take money from others to throw it at a system that doesn't work.
"Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your description. The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the political power to do more of the same.
It is classic circular reasoning. Why should they have all money? Well because they are the best ones at allocating the resources. How do we know they are best at allocating resources? Because they have all the money.
"To him that hath, more shall be given
and to him that hath not, more shall be taken away"
I suppose it was more popular in seemingly simpler times when the playing field was more even and the players more evenly matched and distributed. But here we are in the future, and that game seems to have been concluded.
I myself rather preferred the view from the shoulders of giants than the undersides of their feet.
There is a agent simulation paradigm where a large amount ofagents engage in one-on-one transactions and wealth is transferred. I haven't followed but decades ago there was a simulation where with rather simpler rules, in the end all the wealth concentrated to one agent.
In this model, it's the rules of the game, not the morality of the players that causes the effects.
It seems you're implying that since being a billionaire is not 100% heritable, it must be a result of individual merit (leap 1) which is purely synonymous with skillfully allocating resources (leap 2) more than any other type of person (leap 3) rather than any other explanation for how they got there, say, sociopathy, right place right time, etc.
> It seems you're implying that since being a billionaire is not 100% heritable, it must be a result of individual merit
Nope, another strawman, I never claimed it was 100% merit. You claimed that wealth is purely heritable which is easily proven false by observing reality.
> sociopathy
So your claim is that sociopathy is more important for getting rich than skill?
> right place right time
Choosing the right business to build given the state of the world is a skill. Business requires luck the same way poker requires luck, and let me tell you, if you play poker vs a skilled player you will lose a lot of money.
Yes exactly. Also, we should stop pretending that the money supply is fixed and that everyone exists on the same monetary playing field.
Arguments about efficient allocation are laughable when you consider that someone who is socially 6 steps removed from an institutional 'money printer' lives in a monetary environment where money is 10 times more scarce than it is at the source (due to taxation between each hop). Few people are so far removed in practice but the effects are still very powerful even with less distance. Taxation brings all economic activities closer to the government and banking sector.
In competitive industries were profits are paper thin, monetary asymmetry can fully determine business outcomes. The company receiving government contracts on the side has a massive upper hand over its competitors during a monetary contraction. Same can be said about companies which operate in environments where their customers have access to large amounts of credit by virtue of their highly valued collateral. Their success has little to do with optimal allocation and a lot to do with socio-economic positioning and monetary system design.
> The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction
I never claimed it was a perfect system and I am more than willing to admit rent extraction, scams, and monopoly power are massive issues with capitalism. It still hasn't been shown that replacing that with government is better.
> You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?
There are no modern examples in the USA precisely because there is no political will to fund them. That political will is undermined because private companies are large and strong enough that they can influence politicians and prevent projects they they would have to compete with.
Your argument has the implication the wrong way around.
Meanwhile, look at China. The vast majority of China's cometlike economic success can be directly attributed to state funding, and many of its successful projects are directly state-run. That's because China still plays industrial politics that are concerned with economic growth and public welfare instead of rent-seeking.
> The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.
The current system selected people that have maximized shareholder value and financially engineered it into other financial assets that provide power under the capitalist system. This includes private equity services that have simply squeezed money out of consumers for no increase in quality of life, or companies that managed to avoid the consequences of the externalities of their economic activity.
> And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?
Regulatory capture and lobbying that attempts to force a profit motive behind every large government initiative when the profit motive substracts value away from society at large.
To be concrete, I guess in a different time and society someone like Sam Altman would have been a successful politician or perhaps like Hyman Rickover or Marcel Boiteux working within the government to cause colossal steps in progress.
> We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc.
So you prefer nation-state nations over nation-state private companies. :-)
Is that a bad thing? Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Their power structures aren't dictatorial, like in a company, and can be steered and course-corrected. Private companies are accountable to no one, their only motivator and reason for existence is profit. If they're allowed to run our society, the outcome that we're seemingly inching towards, there will be nothing to stop their inevitable abuse for the sake of value extraction.
It seems to me none of this is as clear cut as it seems. Government entities may hold shares in private companies, companies may act on voter's demands by accepting government grants. For some companies, government contracts are actually a main revenue stream - shareholders can jump up and down, if their supporters are voted out they will falter.
Corporations are still subject to law and ultimately under the control of the government. The current set of rules just gives them a fair amount of freedom to operate.
This only makes sense in a spherical-cow-in-vacuum world where government and business are somehow barred from communicating with one another. In reality, the "current set of rules" in many countries is a result of companies relentlessly trying to and succeeding in finding ways of influencing government. Political advertisements, campaign funding, lobbying, corruption, underhanded favoritism, countless other methods that are an amazing RoI for any business large enough to engage in it. Large enough corporations are resembling governments more and more in terms of value and power, and they use all of that power to endlessly try to bend the rest of society into serving their profit motive.
1. Not all companies are publicly traded, and they don't have to be
2. The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also completely dependent on money. The value of your 'vote' is proportional to how much money you have. This isn't a democracy or some sort of equal system that will converge on serving people, it will converge on serving money. I'm genuinely baffled at how "you get one vote per person" and "your value and voting power is directly tied to your net worth" are in any way comparable. You and I have zero effective power over them, and always will.
> The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also completely dependent on money.
It is not, eg. Zuck didn't control Facebook because he was a priori rich, he became rich because he controlled Facebook in a successful way. He gained those shares and that control with his skill and labor (and maybe one symbolic dollar or something).
The unit of power in stock corporations is dollars, while in democracies it is personhood. In the former, one person can acquire multiple units, while in the latter they cannot. There is an obvious difference.
No, a corp is only accountable to their board and the LARGEST shareholder. A single person can control an otherwise publicly traded company. Zuckerberg, for example. And not everyone can afford to spend their earnings owning companies. So what you get with a democracy is that power is spread out by default rather than concentrated in a single element. Default enfranchisement rather than the polar opposite. One at least nods politely at the idea of upward social mobility in passing while the other eschews all pretense as to the status of its party invitation.
Corporations only have any accountability in so far as the law of the nation-state they're incorporated in grants it.
Corporations only exist as a legal construct of other entities. Absent government, they wouldn't be corporations since there'd be no law to create them.
The problem is, when the majority is held by pension funds, ETFs and Blackrock... there isn't much governance in practice, particularly from the low-fee purely passive ETFs. And since government run pension schemes are on their way to the gutter in favor of stonk market private pensions, the share of such dumb passive capital will only grow.
If there is one thing that we learned from the 20th century it is that societies that gave more private control over how resources were used did better than those that had more state control over how resources were used. Perhaps in the 21st century that has changed, but for me that falls under the "extraordinary claims" category with the corresponding evidence requirements.
The structure of giant corporations today is like those centralized societies that were so inefficient in your example. The mandates to put AI in everything are one example of out of touch leadership throwing money and effort blindly towards things of dubious value. The sycophantic managers, afraid that they will be eliminated for insufficient fervor for the board’s latest fascination, will seize upon anything to prove themselves loyal and useful to those above them.
By moving the locus of control, whether it be considered the ceo or shareholders, so far from the actual business and implementing mandates based on whatever the current fancy is and meaningless targets of growth on such a giant scale you get the same sort of excesses.
The current system is marked by irrationality and uninformed and ill considered decision making. With smaller organizations and actual business competition they would be held to account by their competitors or just by running out of money before something catastrophic for the greater economy happened.
This is an excellent point. Thank you for posting it.
Large monopolistic mega-corporations do tend to have the same issues that one would see in the old 20th century planned economies like the Soviet Union.
Not sure why this obvious fact is being down-voted. The comments above don't mention that the killer feature of private orgs is the ease of exit, and therefore, the enormous risk of failure. This remains the dominant feature of private orgs, even if we can argue about certain orgs on the margin. For every example of "users are locked into either the Apple or the Android phone platform", I can think of several crappy Google and Apple products which failed and were withdrawn from the market (e.g. Google Wave).
It is much easier to exit from or steer a private org. For example, it is very possible to run a company which caters to 10 percent of a consumer base by providing niche products which may be slightly more expensive. Those 10 percent will simply consume less of some other good. It is very difficult to do an analogous thing at the state level, because we generally don't get individual "ticket books" which we can "spend" on more of one state service vs. another. The democratic model is that you first get 50+ percent support and then your coalition decides how resources are allocated for almost everyone.
> If there is one thing that we learned from the 20th century it is that societies that gave more private control over how resources were used did better than those that had more state control over how resources were used.
In some metrics (such as GDP), yes. And in other metrics (such as wealth inequality and health care), the answer is less clear-cut.
The West encompasses a wide gradient of private vs. state control over resources, and there are states which aren't typically considered Soviet or Western (e.g. Nordic states.)
I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.)
On this note, I've lived in a couple states with ballot initiative processes and while they are not perfect, I think they are absolutely necessary for citizens to truly be able to hold their elected representatives accountable (i.e. override them) and I wish we had them at a federal level.
You also have a "vote" as a consumer. The market could be much more responsive than a "democratic" system.
For instance, say you think pesticides are a bad thing. You can get 49% of the population to vote to the ban them and what do you accomplish? Nothing
No wonder people look at politics with despair.
If you can get 5% of the population to eat organic food on the other hand, you've reduced pesticide use by 5%. You create trade associations, the idea of organic food spreads more widely and maybe someday you get enough support that you can change the law.
>
You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.
In a democratic country, only the people who have citizenship are allowed to vote. In a shareholders meeting, only the shareholders are allowed to vote.
You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting.
Even if you think there's no qualitative difference between the 2 (which I think is a deeply immature idea, but whatever), there's an obvious quantitative difference: In practice democratic voting power is much more socioeconomically spread and shared than shareholder voting power.
> Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying power. Citizens get a single vote.
Historically, there did exist experiments that not each person has the same voting power (for example the Prussian "Dreiklassenwahlrecht" [three-class franchise]):
Depending on the amount of taxes you paid, you were assigned to one of three classes. The sizes of each of these classes were chosen so that each class paid 1/3 of the whole tax volume. The votes in each class elected representants for this class.
The idea is obvious: those who pay a lot more taxes should have more influence.
Thus: each citizen has the same voting power is just the "currently fashionable" implementation of democracy.
I think California's system is a mess. It's been overrun with private interests bankrolling ballot initiatives and steamrolling them through. Add to that the Government itself sponsoring ballet initiatives that sale bonds to finance things that people don't understand really loans and it turns into a mess. I do like the ability to remove politicians from office via ballot though.
One idea that I think is reasonable is to use some kind of actual meetings.
Dividing people into groups of 50 or 100. Initiatives are voted on in these groups, if they are passed they go to the next level, 1000 people.
Sort of like that idea in the Yes, Minister episode about 'genuinely democratic local government'. The idea here is the tree structure is to prevent people to push initiatives other than as individuals.
I think that's unavoidable, but also not a bad thing. If we were to undertake any similar large scale public projects today, it would also have significant private sector participation. But, that drives job creation and positive effects on the economy (i.e., new deal).
The main difference is, ideally, the project was voted on by the public, and is being steered as such. A public-private collaboration, with the public driving it rather than it being entirely the domain of a single private entity for their own profit.
Might I note that we're building down nation states at a rapid rate at least in the west trough migration. The vast majority of my capital is not comprised of belgian ethnicities for example and the same will start to hold trough for a number of the other biggest cities.
"All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society."
Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'.
"We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc."
Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this.
Even big pharma supplies the world. The rest of the world with socialized medicine create knock-offs at a fraction of the cost, because they didn't have to spend decades going through testing and billions of dollars developing it.
> Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'.
The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated. Governments do invest in projects for the greater good - you yourself note "big pharma" research, and in fact historically the US gov provided more than half the funding of all basic research nationally.
> Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this.
Shinkansen.
Anyways, governments across the world are driven by incentives that do recognize long-term economic/strategic interests. You can see it with AI, with climate change, even with the broad desire to create a "homegrown" Silicon Valley.
> The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated
You've got the cart before the horse; the government would not have a budget at all if people were not individually motivated to generate taxable events.
Profit is the practice of accumulating more resources than you immediately need in the anticipation of their future use and enjoyment. Without a government, a profit makes the bearer a target for anyone who can overpower you. So the essential purpose of a government is the preservation of profit by opposing the forces that would destroy or carry it off: criminals, scammers, foreign militaries.
Governments did not command the invention of penicillin, powered flight, electric light, transistors, the blue LED, or the majority of software products that are essential to society today. But it protected individuals to invent with the knowledge that their work could be rewarded on some timeframe rather than being immediately destroyed by an interloper.
Maybe not government, but much public resource was not driven by profit.
The entire software industry relies on a foundation of free and open source software. The profit model wouldn't even exist without the work of people who do it purely for passion.
Penicillin was university research and given away freely.
The Wright brothers weren't trying to start an airline, that just wanted to fly.
ironically, tho not recently government, the majority of your examples were not discovered/created in the pursuit of profits.
Adam Smith points out that it doesn't matter if things are done for the greater good or not. Them existing will improve lives for everybody either way.
The problem with government funded large project is that they often monopolize. In the Soviet Union to much investment was flowing into the wrong stuff. And small scale innovation didn't get the resources to grow.
While mistakes on a high level lead to total stagnation. For example NASA building the Shuttle crowed out almost everything else, and because the Shuttle was the wrong way to go the US has spent 50 years doubling down on that.
If a large company makes a really, really big bet on something, they can pay a very large cost if they are wrong. And this has been historically the case, large projects that don't get anywhere are canceled. Governments can double down almost forever.
So I think we do need everything, innovation from maverick individuals, innovation from smaller companies, large innovation form big companies, innovation from government project, innovation from private/government funded universities.
There is no perfect 'this is the way to get innovation' that we have yet discovered.
Greater Good of All is a bit nebulous, and quite often translates into rather concentrated good of a few well-connected players.
When you mention the space race, you should also add that once the Moon landing was over, the government-supported part of space activity got mostly bogged down in cost-plus boondoggles (see: Space Launch System, also called Senate Launch System), and without a vibrant private sector with deep pockets, the US would be launching maybe some twenty rockets a year now, more likely twelve, each at an extreme cost and without much technological progress. And American capability of supporting human spaceflight would be tenuous at best, or possibly nonexistent.
(NASA is not at fault here. The politicians which command it, though... they seem to love giving Boeing et al. expensive projects.)
Major weapons development (or dual use) programs — especially for weapons of mass destruction — probably have to be government run due to national security concerns. But the notion that governments can effectively manage technology R&D projects is ludicrous. Look at what happened when Japan's MITI tried to run a Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project: total failure and waste of tax money.
In general, economic central planning is a dead end. People keep trying to claim that it would be more efficient or benefit society but it just doesn't work. Bureaucrats and politicians can't be trusted with resource allocation decisions.
> for the greater good of all or advancement of society
I'm not sure we agree enough on the definitions of these things to justify a democratic redistribution of resources towards them. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny after all. The nice part about private enterprise is that it's hard to argue they didn't earn their money. Google, Apple, et al provided some value to some folks who volunteered to pay for it in a free exchange. Their claim to use their earned wealth as they see fit is much easier to substantiate than a government intervention which is neither voluntary nor obviously providing value to the people who pay for it.
> or being controlled, by nation-state private companies
You don't need to publicly fund something to "control" it. You can pass laws about it, you're the government!
I always find this kind of rhetoric from Western socialists strange, it's like they've forgotten they aren't libertarians.
The other issue being that they've forgotten there are downsides to owning something, because you don't always want to own all the risk. eg if you're a tech employee and paid in your employers' shares, you own some of your means of production. But you /shouldn't/, it's way too risky! You should sell it as soon as you get it and put it in an index fund.
> Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project
You really think so? All of the examples you gave are military technology during wartime, which the government does tend to be able to do since the existential risk motivates the organization to root out graft and free riding.
I could see some kind of alternate reality future government funded Waymo being spun out of drone tank tech from WWIII but we wouldn't have it today.
Wait, could you remind me what war was going on when NASA took us to the moon?
Could you remind me what war was going on when the CDC eradicated malaria from the United States?
Could you remind me what war was going on when FDR build our basic social safety nets?
Broadly speaking, people have 3 ways to organize large groups: business, government, and (organized) religion. Each has strengths and weakness. To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch.
The whole thing is worth a read too, it explains all the other military use tech that will arise from the self driving car ecosystem, further justifying the investment.
You cannot be serious, the whole thing was called the space race for a reason. Space tech has always always been primarily a military venture, and it remains so to this day.
> Malaria
Glad you asked, chloroquine was developed during WW2 for soldiers, and chloroquine resistance of soldiers in Vietnam drove the creation of mefloquine and artemisinin.
> Social safety nets
Not a science breakthrough
> To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch
I 100% agree. It's not "everything ever created was because of war". It is rather that "a lot of difficult amazingly unimaginable things i.e 'root node science' would have never been created had it not been for war, and this is what unlocked an exponential number of amazing things we have today". We would certainly have scientific advancement even without war, just exponentially less.
Also, we need to count derivative works of these works as primarily existing because of war reasons too.
This is not an American specific or 20th century specific phenomenon either. Science and war have always been friends, and to my point, with reciprocal benefits, not just war benefiting from science. For example, Fourier was part of napoleons egypt expedition. Euler worked for the Russian Navy, and even has a direct book "Neue Grundsätze der Artillerie" (“New Principles of Artillery”) (1745). Lagrange similar: a lot of his projectile analyses arose out of problems posed by the Turin artillery school.
Most crucially, Euler and Lagrange and many other household names were entirely funded by the military complex. Ecole polytechnique which employed Lagrange was a military engineering school[1], and St. petersburg academy which employed euler[2] was heavily supported by the navy and army.
That said, there are also examples of people creating science for purely fun -- most of gauss' work, galileo's work and a lot of 1300-1600 era indian mathematics arose purely out of astronomy studies, and, I suppose, rolling random crap down a slope for the funsies(galileo) and visions from a goddess (ramanujan). I'm sure there are a gajillion other examples too, of "root node" science being created for non-war reasons. But it's also true that a massively larger number of insanely cool things we have today only ever existed because of war.
[1] and it remains under the French defense ministry [whatever it's called] to this day!
[2] fun story, he was employed by both Frederick the great in berlin and by Catherine I in St. petersburg at different points in his life. He was even accused of espionage.
Multiple edits: looked through my notes and edited some inaccuracies.
To add to your examples, Neil Tyson wrote a book entitled “Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessory_to_War)
> The book chronicles war and the use of space as a weapon going as far back as before the Ancient Greeks. [It] includes examples such as Christopher Columbus' use of his knowledge of a lunar eclipse, and the use of satellite intelligence by the United States during the Gulf War.
Much more science than people tend to realize is military-funded.
automating logistics lines does have military potential -- a waymo doesn't have to be holding bob and sara on the way to mcdonalds, it could also be long-hauling thousands of pounds of troop equipment and logistics needs.
the lack of public funding towards automated cars isn't due to a lack of potential, it's due to a lack of focus and lower-hanging-fruit.
After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007 I naively thought that commercial self driving urban vehicles were about 5 years away. It actually took until 2020 for Waymo to offer services to the public, and just in one city to start:
That's a long timeline from "tech demo" to usable technology. I don't know how to maintain government funding for that long in a democratic system. No president, senator, or representative goes that long without fighting for re-election. Any technology that still isn't working after 12 years is likely to be considered a dead end and canceled. The big impressive government projects of the 20th century delivered results faster; there were only 7 years between Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech and NASA actually landing on the moon.
Companies with large resources can behave more like "planned economies" that aren't subject to short term whims of the electorate. Of course they can also exhibit even more short-term orientation -- the notorious "next quarter's earnings report" planning horizon.
* TSMC: Wouldn't we all be better off if the entire world weren't so dependent on a single company, located in a such a geopolitically sensitive territory?
* 10B-param LLMs: Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance? I'd add that the model that launched the deep learning craze (AlexNet) and the model that launched the LLM craze and (the Transformer) were developed by tiny teams on the cheap.
> Waymo: EVs were repeatedly killed by corporations
Not to detract from your point, but Waymo's happen to use electric iPace Jaguar cars in several cities that they serve, but their original self driving taxi service used gasoline minivans at beginning in Phoenix, AZ. EV vs ICE is orthogonal to Waymo's self-driving car technology. Waymo was a pure R&D self driving project for 15 or so years that Google/Alphabet dumped insane amounts of money into before a car ride was ever sold to the public. The are a few competitors to Waymo, at various stages, so market forces likely still would have resulted in self driving car technology eventually arriving, but as its competitors are also well funded, so it seems like it still takes a large org to turn university prototypes into a real live product.
"Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance?"
Notice how it was massive private spending that uncovered the power of scale in the first place. Would've been hard to say, get a federal grant for that. Would've probably happened gradually, with some gains from moderate scale justifying slightly larger grants for successively larger scale.
As for TSMC, the counterfactual assumes such technology would've happened regardless. Just because technology seems to happen inevitably, doesn't make it so. We have evidence of one approach (private) giving incredible results. And also some examples of public (in wartime) giving incredible results. I don't know the evidence for peacetime public incredible results. Maybe warpspeed?
The cost of developing GPT-2 and GPT-3 was on the order of millions of dollars, well within the budget of most tech organizations. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 for the total compute invested in them. OpenAI had raised only a few tens of millions in donations at the time, as a non-profit organization.
The increase in performance of computation has been happening for so many decades now that it's been given names like "Moore's Law." People like Hans Moravec predicted way back in the 1980's that the cost of compute would continue to decline and become cheap enough for AGI by the 2020's or 2030's. That's half a century ago!
Fair point, the first few gens weren't that expensive. And like I said I'm certain the scaling would've been discovered soon with some time lag. But the transformer paper was 2017, right? Just from a benefit -to- society perspective, assuming LLMs are a net positive in terms of productivity, perhaps reducing time to drug approval or improving government efficiency (1).. Isn't getting there just one year earlier worth it, if the gains really are that big? We could be talking lives saved via faster approvals or more efficient spending. My point is that a private company made it happen faster, as evidenced by them doing it first. A good thing sooner is valuable.
(1) I'm convinced at the very least LLMs can feasibly speed up paperwork.
I believe that LLMs are detrimental to government efficiency, because they distract from solving the underlying problems (such as porkishly complex laws or a lack of unique identifiers).
The reason the world is so dependent on a single company is because it costs country-breaking amounts of money to keep-up with the semiconductor manufacturing technology. You can only have cheap semiconductors if there are very few entites building them.
Before WWII, middle-class married women were strongly discouraged from working for pay outside the home. If their husbands could provide, "respectable" women were expected to stay home as homemakers.
One could argue the opposite: that the mass entry of women into the paid workforce expanded the labor supply, contributing to wage stagnation and, eventually, the erosion of the middle class. But that wasn’t the only cause. Globalization, declining unions, automation, and regressive taxes were also factors.
> As for the middle class, most of the reason for the decline is people moving into the upper class.
Thats not what I get from the source you provided.
It shows that middle (and lower class) are massively losing income share:
Ine 1971, you have 88% of population in middle class or below, with 72% of total income.
81% of population remain in that bracket, but now they only get 51% of total income. That is massive, and also bad for the economy as a trend because rich people spend less of their income.
The conclusion I draw from this is that middle-class (and below) is in decline because the rich "upper-class" is soaking up much of their income.
Also worth mentioning that in that time period the rest of the world was recovering from devastation. Either the devastation of two world wars or the devastation of imperialism.
Following your argument we should just outright reject progress because, for the most part, humanity has been really really shitty. Also, how much thought did you put into it before writing that this type of society isn't sustainable? Can't the things that happened since (mostly, a massive wealth consolidation) be undone? Why?
>
And equal rights for minorities, sexual or not, were achieved in a handful of countries for the past 40 years.
> Surely you're not suggesting...
Indeed I see the evidence on the side that these ideas were some temporary fads that might get out of fashion in the foreseeable future. This is clearly not a suggestion, I just see the signs on the horizon that this is indeed plausibly to happen.
And it wasn't as good as it's often mythologised to be. Back in the 60s (in Australia) people weren't going on holidays overseas, they lived in houses under half the size of modern builds, they had worse healthcare and lived 13 years less, they had relatively monotonous diets (growing up, my mother's staple food was bread with dripping), they weren't buying new clothes, furniture, knickknacks all the time.
And my grandfather, as a farmer, was up early in the morning and worked all day, never got weekends off. My grandmother was also working all the time - cooking, cleaning, sewing things, gardening. She wasn't employed but that didn't mean she was idle. The kids had to work when they were old enough too.
That was also a pretty decent income for time as well, there were a lot of urban poor living in tiny, crowded little houses.
It's not to say that it's never going to be possible for the mythical postwar boomer lifestyle of leisure (with modern standards of living) to actually available to the bulk of the population but it's going to need a lot more automation and productivity increases (like AI and self-driving cars) to get there, there's no "just tax the billionaires" one-simple-trick or policy that will immediately bring it in.
While rose-tinted glasses are a huge factor, I feel like a big part of what people dream of when looking back on the last century is not just leisure, but stability and dignity.
Stability in that you had jobs that lasted a lifetime and paid a pension once you retired, not layoffs every couple years. Dignity in that anyone could get a real, important, meaningful (and very rough, once you take off said rose-tinted glasses) job as a factory worker, farmer, coal miner, whatever, instead of what, working at Walmart or 7-11?
I do agree with you though, especially your last paragraph.
Coal used to power entire countries, and it still runs our steel mills. American industrial might and American quality of life was only possible because of our coal miners. A Walmart stocker puts cheap Chinese stuff on shelves.
The typical romanticized coal miner is a masculine figure, a breadwinner, the representative of an industry that might have been core to the family and town for generations. A Walmart stocker is a guy in a T-shirt. Walmart itself is famous for... pricing out local businesses whenever it comes to a small town.
I'm not at all denying that it's a culture and glorification thing. I just think this is a factor people sometimes miss when looking at how a lot of the country is nostalgic for the 20th century economy, and why people keep wanting (mostly via vibes) to reindustrialize America.
That's the wrong question. The competition is a family with one earner vs the counterfactual /same/ family with two earners.
The second one will have more money in the modern context so they're better off. At some times in the past, they wouldn't have been better off because their expenses would increase more than their income. Basically it's about cost of childcare.
They say that, but when you point out that they could have that if they accept a lower standard of living they lose interest (and if possiple downvote or otherwise try to shout you down)
They want a trad farming lifestyle without technology but they get mad when you tell them that they have to work 4am-10pm in the summer and one child dies per winter
A secure lifestyle and a good lifestyle are not mutually exclusive. We have the tech to enable something which at least somewhat approximates, and even if we didn’t, it’s easy to imagine a world in which the trillions of dollars spent on wasteful garbage like surveillance, ads, engagement-farming, etc were instead redirected towards research and development of technology which enables a secure _and_ good lifestyle.
What you really need to live, and the luxury you want can be very different. I've lived in a one bathroom house, I'm willing to pay for more. I can eat "beans and rice", but I want more (not just meat, there are vegetables that are more expensive). Most people are not willing to live without a lot of luxury and honestly would choose both parents working a full time job to get more luxury.
This (socalled "luxury space communism") is impossible insofar as a good lifestyle includes positional goods and social status. Demand is infinite, even your own demand, and you have to be able to outrun it.
The best technology I know for this is Ozempic. If there was a way to ban yourself from getting loans that would also help, but you wouldn't like it.
I think the problem is that you are proposing a false dichotomy: that if they do not want one consequence of the current system, they should eschew the entire system.
But in actuality, I like some parts of how society is organized, and dislike some other parts. I don't want to leave society - I want society to be better.
>They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids
If society also wants women to be able to have the same income earning opportunities as men and hence have financial freedom.
Animals compete and compare themselves to others, and so everywhere, dual earning households will outcompete single earning households, and so most market participants will be incentivized to be dual earning households.
No? An easy comparison would be a world where the both partners work 20hrs/wk each, for a total of 40hrs, with the rest devoted towards, eg, childcare.
That addresses the reason for working (eg, pursuit of interests outside family-raising), while also eschewing the need for full time childcare.
You're basically talking about the shift system. A works for 20hrs a week, B works for 20hrs a week. A spends more time with spouse(A), who does the same at their workplace, and B spends more time with spouse(B), who does the same at their workplace. Sounds great.
But, it falls apart to the same logic GP proposed, that the reason you have dual income households is that they are richer than single income ones. Households where people both work 40hrs = 80hrs will be ahead of those that work only 40hrs total. So everyone will descend to working 80hrs too.
Of course, taking mine and GPs logic to it's conclusion is silly - people will have a point where they stop comparing with others and tradeoff less money for less hours. But looking at reality, it seems like that limit is very high! And it only happens at an already very high salary. A 40hrs/week SWE might not go to a high finance 70hrs/week job, because they're already comfortably paid. However these two are top 1% jobs in the world, and the quality of life is probably not too different. But if you go down to the lower rungs, people are more inclined to compare themselves with peers and tradeoff double hours for the next rung, which entails a much better quality of life (as a % increase)
> But looking at reality, it seems like that limit is very high!
Is it? 40hrs is quite low by historical standards. 100 hours per week was the norm in the pre-industrial era, and 60+ hours per week was still typical during the Industrial Revolution.
Labour advocacy groups were promoting 40hrs, much like the four day workweek is today, for a long time, but 40hrs didn't actually became the norm until the Great Depression, where capping hours was a tool used to try and spread the work out amongst more workers to try and resolve the high unemployment problem.
> But if you go down to the lower rungs, people are more inclined to compare themselves with peers and tradeoff double hours for the next rung
While that certainly happens, it seems most people in the lower rungs are quite content to work 40 hours per week, even though working more would put them in a much better position. I dare say you even alluded to that when you chose 40 hours in your example.
It is not like 40hrs is the perfect tradeoff or something. As mentioned before, labour advocacy groups have already decided that 32hrs is even better. I expect many people end up working 40 hours just because "that's what you do" and never give it another thought.
> the reason you have dual income households is that they are richer than single income ones.
If we assume both participants work 40 hours per week then it is true that the same household would have less income if one party stopped accruing an income and all else remained equal. But that doesn't necessarily hold true once you start playing with other variables. A higher income party, for example, may enable the household to have a higher income if they work 60 hours per week while the other party takes care of other life responsibilities to enable those longer hours.
A dual income household isn't necessarily the most fruitful option. In fact, marriage — which, while declining, is still the case in most non-single households — assumes that a single income is the ideal option. It seems that "that's what you do" without any further thought is still the primary driving force.
Lower rungs are definitely not content working 40 hours a week. They work crazy amounts (multiple jobs even!) just to get to the upper rungs of society.
I support the labour laws limiting an employer to 40hrs a week of a man's labour. This is important for people who really just want some employment and don't want to die. But the vast majority of people work two such jobs and try to get into the higher rungs of the financial ladder. Heck, even SDE3s in software companies work off-hours to become IC's and such, and I'm sure it's similar once you go down the executive route.
> "That's what you do"
That is definitely true, a lot of social fabric erodes when providing labour is turned into a psychotic thing. I'm not entirely convinced the labour laws we have today are enough to prevent this. My opinion is that we need to also have policies on the other side of the coin - i.e encourage family/extended family/communal/what have you living. Not "one child policy" level forced policies, but instead in the form of a good complement to strong labour laws.
> They work crazy amounts (multiple jobs even!) just to get to the upper rungs of society.
It does happen, as recognized before, but what suggests this is any kind of norm?
1. The median worker in the USA doesn't even make it to 40 hours of work in a week, only 34. What you say certainly doesn't hold true when dividing the latter in half.
2. Only 21% of the workforce normally puts in more than 40 hours per week. That could represent the lowest rungs, I suppose, but...
3. The data also suggests that those working long hours are more likely to be highly educated, high-wage, salaried, and older men. Does that really fit the profile of someone in the lower runs? Stereotypically, that is who most of us imagine is in the highest rung.
4. The upward mobility of which you speak is not typical. Most people will either stay on the same rung or find themselves heading lower.
First of all, I don't know where this specific example is coming from or how it relates to what I said exactly.
Secondly, when you look at the distribution of wealth in the US, and realize that the top 50% of Americans own 97.5% of the wealth, or that the top 1% owns over 30% of the country's wealth, or read a headline about Elon Musk's $1T pay package, conversations about "dual-earning families" versus "single-earning families" look kind of inconsequential.
The whole thread is about people who want to have a single wage earner lifestyle. That is where this all comes from, and how it relates. You too can live a single wage earner lifestyle in the US, but it will mean significant compromises to your standard of living.
Thanks, I missed the second part of this sentence:
> Quite a lot of people don't want TSMC, Waymo and LLMs. They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids.
I stand by what I wrote above. I agree with you that it is possible today at a reduced QoL and I also would like to see society distribute wealth more equitably, which might also achieve the goal at a higher QoL.
It’s naive either in the way you put it or at the very least in your eyes. There is a lot to be said about the narcissism of innovators radically rethinking anything and everything traditional just because we think we can do better by our current metrics.
If things continue to be advanced haphazardly just because these companies have budget capacity what’s to say that in a hundred years the bulk of humanity will have lost capacity for independent critical thought? Is that really the world you want to create?
It’s not just a “ChatGPT will replace you”. Our humanity is potentially at stake if we don’t deliberately evolve this tech.
Our humanity is at stake no matter how we evolve this tech, because the tech evolves our humanity. It's not a one-way street. Culture, not genetics, is the dominant human evolutionary force today:
No I haven’t and you raise a good point. I mean I don’t know what else to do. The alternatives are to build it and not think about anything beyond the tech itself or to not build it out of an abundance of caution.
And I’m not really as concerned about the super intelligence. I’m more concerned about the impact on our culture as humans.
You ask your questions rhetorically as though the answer would be bad if they didn't. None of those really have had a profound good impact on the population at large and it's not clear that they're all that truly impactful in a good way to the population at large. I think we wouldn't notice or care by and large, and it's just because some nerd somewhere is excited for next product is not a good reason for centraliZation.
Self-driving EVs are not a solution to most of the externalities of personal automobiles. No means of transport is that requires twenty square meters of space and 2000 kg of matter to move 1.4 persons at a time on average.
It’s not even clear as of now whether they have a net positive effect on the society, even if they ever become viable in climates that aren’t always sunny.
> Self-driving EVs are not a solution to most of the externalities of personal automobiles.
Why do you think self-driving cars are meant to solve automobile externalities? I don't view them in that way. I view them as solving personal problems with driving - attention, safety, comfort, utilization rate, cost, etc..
> It’s not even clear as of now whether they have a net positive effect on the society
Why not? Personal automobiles have a utilization rate of around 5%. If Waymo can get that to even 40% that means you can reduce the number of vehicles by 8x (let's be conservative and say 4x to account for potentially higher use of them a la Jevon's Paradox). They're also infinitely safer and it's likely that they'll get to the point where there are no automobile related deaths. They'll replace the likes of Uber and taxis which have been known to be sources of assaults and other crimes. They'll unlock other opportunities too but regardless of how conservative you want to be with their effects, if they roll out to the point where one can forgo buying a personal automobile, it's very very hard to argue it won't be a huge net positive to society.
I bet your reason against it is that you believe something like trains and metros and bikes are better. And to an extent they are, I live in a city and prefer to ride the metro when I can. But it's pure hopium thinking they can ever fully obviate cars.
Reading your first three bullet points I thought you were dreaming about how much better the world could have been.
But your main paragraph following them reads to me like you want Waymo, a powerful TSMC, and huge LLMs.
If there is one thing concentrating power and wealth does it is preferring shorttermism. Growth in the next quarter trumps anything else. Humanity’s ecological niche is suffering long term. Civilization suffers as wealth inequality increases (which concentration of power makes happen).
I would gladly accept a bit of a slow down on progress if it meant my contributions to society were more meaningful. Additionally, I strongly believe this continuous dwindling of small organizations has resulted in an overall loss of community and a sense of belonging. In my opinion, this is what's causing the overall decline in health that we're seeing in developed nations.
For many, life seems aimless. Your future is to simply contribute what you're told to some faceless multinational for which after 20 years your only recognition will be a small piece of canvas with a mass produced screen printed design.
I think the key problem with this idea is taught in basic Microeconomics. A competitive market should have zero profit.
The choice of the government to allow a non competitive market is a choice to transfer consumer surplus to producers, which is effectively a tax-by-regulatory choice. So the counter argument to “what about Bell Labs” would be that the democratically elected government (in theory) can more efficiently gather that tax and pay for research.
Recognizing counter arguments about effective allocation of resources to useful research. But also recognizing that much R&D goes to future profits for the company rather than just societal benefit.
That's sort of the problem, right? Large organizations have become dominant precisely because of reasons like this, and there are indeed huge benefits. But if the hypothesis is correct that the crowding out of smaller organizations is fraying the fabric of society, that's a pretty significant drawback.
All those things could still happen if private enterprises pooled their resources and did R&D together. This is already routinely happening in the car industry, where companies band together to develop new engines, to make the R&D expense hurt less.
You're talking about large-scale hyperexpensive infrastructure research projects with uncertain payouts, which is something that the state already excels at. Public grants are responsible for bankrolling an enormous amount of the research that gets done, and infrastructure projects are money-sinks with a very long timescale. I don't really see how this is an argument functions in favour of big corporations and against big government.
Not a single one of those projects is preferable to a more equitable society. Maybe self driving, yes, but the impact of AI is highly dubious and uncertain at this point in time.
Self Driving cars are very much unproven, and without google people would still be working on them. And so far its not clear that this investment was worth it.
TSMC had many costumers willing to buy new chips.
But I agree, sometimes, larger companies very much do make sense.
I would compare "larger businesses" with "socialistic planning system" while "smaller businesses" with "free market economy". There are examples when centralized planning got good results - NASA's Apollo project is an example. There are also examples when market economy - eventually, in the long term, not short - prevailed: the Cold War is an example here.
It's also quite possible the analogy is flawed though.
It is also very hard to separate “socialist planning system” from “Russian Empire”. It isn’t like things were going swimmingly in Tsarist Russia and then they reentered a golden age in the 90s.
If anything this socialist system brought them to the height of their power and influence.
Much of that was due to foreign aid and lend-lease from the US.
Of course, we also destroyed Russia and made it an oligarchy by giving them bad advice ("shock therapy") after it collapsed. Like basically everything else (including the existence of Facebook) this is Larry Summers' fault.
"Socialist planning system" can also be - approximately, of course - compared to modern, 2020-s Russia, and modern China (PRC, not Taiwan). The renaissance of economy by the end of 1990-s was significantly assisted by moving towards "free market economy".
I would argue that "socialist planning system" had its successes, but in the long run didn't survive the competition, at least in the case of the USSR.
> - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development?
TSMC would have had other customers. And if not them, then e.g. Samsung or Intel would have something to offer.
Sure, without this investment the pace of development wouldn't be as fast, but are chips from e.g. a decade ago already utterly useless? Of course not. Life would be largely the same, only somewhat slower.
Perhaps without hardware updates we would finally start thinking long and hard about performance optimisations?
All of the things you mentioned serve the primary purpose of making the rich and powerful more rich and powerful, not improving the lives of the majority.
We could live without self-driving cars, and most of the world still does; faster chips are nice but not revolutionary when we’re using them to waste away watching six hours of ten seconds disinformation videos a day; LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue, convincing people to kill themselves, making cocky ignorant assholes more sure of themselves, and increasing the spread of lies and misinformation.
Humanity would probably benefit from moving slower, not faster.
I very much is not. That logic could be used to justify just about anything, from slavery to littering.
You don’t live in a world populated by just yourself, there are people around you affected by your actions. Be respectful and mindful that what you do affects others. And yourself as well, even if you don’t immediately see it.
The reason governments no longer fight huge corporations or even clear monopolies is also due to heavy globalization. If one government destroys a monopoly (a global mega-corporation) in its country, it may strengthen the monopoly (and the global mega-corporation) in another country. So the line of thinking is, "We don't like this nasty monopoly, but at least it's our monopoly."
I don't really buy this. The government still has the ability to just ban or tax the foreign monopoly. And seemingly the EU has the ability to fine foreign businesses for being monopolies too.
China being a good example. Google being a monopoly in the rest of the world doesn't really impact them much since they just block the foreign products.
> the EU has the ability to fine foreign businesses for being monopolies too.
Specifically, the EU has no ability to fight foreign monopolies. Though, it has an ability to fine them and extort some pocket money from them. However, this hasn't had a tangible effect on creating more competition in those markets.
Then people accuse you of being "protectionist" or "mercantilist". Your companies aren't internationally competitive. This cripples your exports unless you can convince other countries to also block the goods that are undercutting you.
We must be working from different definitions of efficient.
Yes, the CCP can say jump and expect their corporations to do so, but when everyone in a modern economy jumps at the same time, massive oversupply is the result. More market-based economies are also prone to similar overproduction when everyone gets caught up in the same mania (see AI datacenters), but investors will eventually stop lighting their money on fire when it becomes clear that the returns aren't there. Chinese companies, on the other hand, will just keep jumping until the CCP decides that they are done jumping.
Our feedback loop is geared towards only doing things that provide a return on investment. Their feedback loop has things like social stability and global competitiveness as competing goals to actually doing productive work.
Yes, they are able to accomplish a tremendous amount when they set their minds to it, but doing a tremendous amount more of something than there is actual demand is waste, the opposite of efficiency.
When I say they prioritize social stability, I mean that they won't stop producing cars regardless of how little economic sense it makes because they need to keep people employed to stave of massive civil unrest. And global competitiveness counts for little when the countries they want to export to implement anti-dumping policies to protect their own industries from government-subsidized Chinese exports.
China is efficient but largely because they don't actually have to obey the State. They are capitalist; they compete in the global market and follow market signals.
The CCP does put a heavy thumb on some scales, but so does every country. Perfect efficiency is not optimal when circumstances change, so states always enforce some redundancy.
There are many differences, of course, but just don't get the idea that China consists of monopolies in a command economy. They call it "capitalism with Chinese characteristics."
Any source for this? My hunch is that there is so much money sloshing around that government interests are easily swayed and conflicts of interest are relatively common now.
What would be an acceptable source for you? Which was the last US mega-corporation that the US government broke up? It certainly wasn't Microsoft or Google. Allowing huge companies to grow even bigger gives them more competitive power in the global market. This wasn't as important before we had super-globalized economies.
I don't think the question is whether monopolies are being allowed to exist, my question is what is the source as to WHY you think it is happening. A source would be any kind of proof that having a monopoly in one country is a strategic advantage over other countries. Data, publications, etc...
I cannot give you proof for the line of political thinking. :)
> ...having a monopoly in one country is a strategic advantage over other countries.
Having a large, unified domestic market is a strategic advantage because it enables companies to grow to a size that makes them formidable global competitors [0]. The United States and China are examples of this phenomenon. The point isn't whether it's advantageous to allow such companies to become monopolies. Once these companies reach a certain size, politicians are reluctant to break them up because they don't want other global companies to take their place.
My argument is that the point is whether its advantageous to allow companies to continue to grow because whether a company has a monopoly or anticompetitive edge is the central argument behind breaking them up. By allowing companies to become monopolies or near monopolies, you disturb the very unified domestic market that you initially mentioned, which hamstrings growth in the future.
I believe companies aren't broken up because they are now so big, it is a logistical nightmare to do so, therefore those companies lobby the crap out of politicians to kick the can down the road. NVIDIA is nearly 3x the market cap of the next non-US firm...is that really the global competition you're looking for?
> The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network
For the record, this system where AT&T was broken up between long distance and regional local companies (called the Regional Bell Operating Companies or RBOCs) was a terrible solution to anticompetitive behavior and is one of many examples (some of which you also quote) about how the US is terrible at breaking up monopolies.
The problem is the RBOCs simply became regional monopolies and regional monopolies aren't really any better than national monopolies. By the 90s the RBOCs could become long distance providers by meeting certain criteria and of course the whole system was gamed.
What needed to happen is the exact same thing that needs to happen with national ISPs today: municipalities need to own, maintain and build last-mile infrastructure.
> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant.
They seem to do the opposite now because small businesses can expect little support from the government (and surely no big subsidies like the large players are getting in for example the Stargate joint venture). Especially COVID was seen by many small business owners are extremely tough since larger stores were allowed to stay open while the small businesses were not.
small businesses get a lot of exemptions from various regulations, and small business owners/proprietors tend to be very vocal and effective politically
of course big systemic things are usually not great for them (such as technological change helping bigger businesses to be run more efficiently, thus eroding their edge)
I remembered incorrectly. They are getting "emergency declarations" support:
> Donald Trump called it "the largest AI infrastructure project in history", and he indicated that he would use emergency declarations to expedite the project's development, particularly regarding energy infrastructure.
So it might not be strictly a subsidy, but it surely is taxpayer-support.
It's the natural result of tech gaining value, and a lot of it staying closed source: Once you are scaling, scaling very high isn't that difficult once you have the best offering, and when you are big you can do optimizations that would be seen as wasteful at a small scale. streaming service that has wide reach isn't that different when it is dealing with 10 million or 100 million subscribers, but dedicating a guy for 3 months to save 2% of your costs through some arcane fiddling is much more profitable when you have 100 million, and then your costs per subscriber can be lower.
We also have plenty of problems that are natural monopolies. Take, for instance, credit card fraud detection. High level detection involves giving a risk score to a transaction. I sure can give a better fraud score if I see almost every transaction this card makes, and I have a very high percentage of visibility of all transactions in the world, than if I had to do the calculation by just knowing what, say, my boardgaming website has seen. The smaller contender has to be so much better algorithmically to be able to compete with a massive advantage in data quantity and quality.
And that's the real problem we have with monopolies right now: The bigger company often doesn't have a huge advantage because they are making extra shady deals, or they have to compete less, but because being bigger makes them more efficient in some ways that are completely above board.
This is also just a consequence of globalization. A small company cannot compete globally, which means less power for the US government abroad. So it's not in the interest of the US government to break up Apple or Google or Microsoft. Look at how both the US and China can just bully Europe.
Agreed, and that is why big countries should also be broken up. No more countries over 50m citizens. Many people in Europe don’t want the EU, but there’s really no alternative when competing with large countries like China and US.
You are the best kind of correct since "many" can refer to some large number that is also insignificant. The pro-European sentiment is vastly dominant, though, and that's what matters.
This is the classic tradeoff. (it's similar to the bias variance tradeoff, or fox and hedgehog analogy)
Monolithic systems are scalable and efficient when well-governed, but brittle under errors or bad leadership (e.g. China closing its ports in the 14th century had centuries-long repercussions).
Distributed systems are less efficient but more resilient to errors and poor governance.
It’s not always one or the other though. American founding fathers found a right set of tradeoffs in designing checks and balances (like separation of powers) and federalism structures that harden the system against bad governance (though this is under strain today).
Antitrust and competition law certainly play an important role, but the examples you cite have not impacted the ability of what we have since the 1970s called "startups" to enter the market in competition with monopolies. The more recent attempts to block "predatory acquisitions" might be an example of antitrust/competition policy that is aimed at achieving the balance between small and large that Terry has in mind here, but I believe it's worth asking: Was the ability for groups to form startups to compete with the incumbents ever really harmed by these so-called "predatory acquisitions"?
Personally, I see the economic efficiency argument for having a relatively small number (say 2 or 3) large organizations that maintain key "distribution platforms". We don't need twenty different social media websites. Antitrust/competition law can play an important role in ensuring that everybody gets access to these platforms on the same basic terms — no favoritism. But I don't know that we need to prevent acquisitions of new apps that can then be bundled into services offered by one or more of those platforms -- at least not to achieve the balance between "small" and "large" that Terry seems to have in mind here.
Rather, I think what we need to aggressively protect is the incentive that small groups have to form and fund startups. In general, I think we're doing fine on the economic side right now. An exception might be the recent acquisitions of founders independent of their coworkers — this presents a profound threat to the startup ecosystem. But by and large the system seems to be working fine.
But is that true of political "startups" — i.e., new interest groups that form to pursue specific policy agendas, which might then be able to syndicate eventually even into new political parties? Of that I'm less certain. It sure seems like the last year or two have been trending toward less political freedom.
> The FCC's 7-7-7 rule was a 1953 regulation that limited a single entity from owning no more than seven AM radio stations, seven FM radio stations, and seven television stations nationwide to promote broadcast diversity. This rule was a response to concerns about media consolidation and was eventually eased, then replaced by the 12-12-12 rule in 1984 and later abolished by the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
If you're wondering how we got to the universe where every piece of mass media that's blasted at you is owned by <5 entities, look no further.
So much for diversity of speech or a marketplace of opinions. Speech is actively being funneled into a single box, and the box is owned and operated by a monoculture of media billionaires.
This forum in particular wails and gnashes its teeth anytime that big tech exercises control over publishing, while turning a blind eye to this rot in trad-media - which is a thousand times worse.
If I were made king for a day, the first thing I'd do would be to break up these conglomerates. You'd either be allowed to be a media conglomerate with the GDP of a small country and a reach of a hundred million people running an agnostic platform, or you're allowed to exercise editorial control. Pick one, I don't care which, but you have to pick one.
(That this isn't a popular position among people seeking to maximize speech and diversity of ideas is perhaps revealing of their real values - the promotion of the monoculture pushed by trad-media.)
This. I mean thats just one sector, but its spread across the whole: the whole of modern economic theory is one of competition that causes efficient markets. But when you look into the theory even a little bit, you realise it needs hundreds, even thousands of market players to reach an equilibrium thats worthwhile, and the existence of a large player even at like 10% market size can distort everything beyond usefulness. We're so far removed from that ideal in pretty much every dang sector that anyone preaching or believing in efficient markets is just foolish.
I would point out that, regardless of the US federal government's stance on monopolies, any legislation or civil action toward that end would be far less applicable today, because of globalization.
If your country prevents any domestic tech companies from becoming trillion-dollar behemoths, but such things are still permitted in at least one other country with a similarly-sized economy to yours, then that just means that all your smaller domestic tech companies are going to be outcompeted by the foreign trillion-dollar behemoth selling into your domestic market.
there are two possibilities, either the big behemoth provides something for cheap (let's say because there's competition or because the buyers form an efficient price negotiation bloc), in which case the buyers benefit from buying from the behemoth (trade! comparative advantage!), or the big behemoth is bad, in which case it makes sense to try to start a company that has similar offerings.
and if domestic companies cannot outcompete the behemoth then it means whatever the behemoth is selling hard to replicate (which is really really .... reeeeaallly rare in software tech, and only non-software companies like ASML/TSMC come to mind, which are more like joint companies funded by and providing to a whole industry) in which case there's unfortunately not much to do anyway - the behemoth's offer might be "unfair", but then by definition it's not competing with domestic companies, it's offering completely different.
(sure, transactions costs matter, subscribers are sticky, etc.)
I dunno. It's not at all clear what "small organizations, whose role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly" even means, over what time, and in what society. The post itself, as a piece of thinking, seems, charitably, a vague sentiment that might later turn into something that could be analyzed.
In general terms, in the US, in living memory, I'm not sure that large organizations occupy more space in people's day to day lives than smaller ones.
In the US, since say the 1990s, the percentage of people, say, working in small businesses are roughly the same. The number of local non-profits has exploded since over that time. The trend towards media consolidation that had occurred over the prior century would begin to be unwound, and tech consolidation would only partially reverse this. We have far more access to diverse points of view than most people did for most of the 20th century.
If there is there is shift, I suspect, it's not about where people work or interact, it seems mostly that businesses, small and large, feel free to dominate people, in a way that was considered in bad form prior to Reagan/Thatcher and the fall of communism as an alternative to the West that would be appealing to post-colonial societies.
But that's just a notion as vague as the original post.
And the reasons for this are increasingly clear. In a globalized world, you need large-scale organizations to compete. Smaller nations are increasingly forced to become highly specialized in a few specific industries, often where companies are sold to major firms from allied countries (large parts of europe or israel, singapore), or you end up with individual companies constituting a significant portion of the national GDP (korea).
The way in which the US is able to weld such power on the world stage, especially with the rise of China is we don't constantly break up every rising business.
These actions were a direct consequence of the situation at the end of the 19th century. People here often forget that the Sherman act was a regulation against trusts, large integrated companies, and not monopolies.
We knew from the start that large companies were bad for democracy and the civil society. The issue is just that the elite decided in the 80s that their economic interests trumped the public interested and the democrat kept doing what Reagan started.
When you put it that way, the US constitution itself is about limiting the power of the federal government against the states (and individuals, in the bill of rights)
Nevertheless, state-level power, for a state government or business, is still far above the kind of sub-Dunbar number (~120 people) organisations that Tao is talking about, where everyone might know each other and the network can be organised by reputation and trust rather than through state-level laws or contracts (and the attendant forms of impersonal bureaucratic enforcement that come with those).
Edit: I don't mean to object to the general theme of your comment which is that power has become increasingly concentrated and unchecked, just to point out that even if those limitations that you mention had been retained it would still represent a society where the role of immediate trust-based relationships is diminished or eroded relative to the previous situation where these were the primary aspects of people's livelihoods and security
Recently I realized that US are very close to a centrally planned economy. Meta wasted 50B on metaverse, which like how much Texas spends on healthcare. Now the "AI" investments seems dubious.
You could fund 1000+ projects with this kinds of money. This is not an effective capital allocation.
how would you pick those 1000 projects? this is the problem with NIH grants too, for example - lots of appeal to authority, lot of noise, not a lot of signal.
AI might be a bubble, but at least there are people (who value their reputation) who decided on the investments, and in the end if (when?) things don't work out with these insane bets they will be the ones looking stupid, not some faceless committee.
and sometimes we feel that feedback cycles are too short (managers only think in quarters) but here we have a pretty long cycle for this moonshot, and yes, this leads to bonkers numbers (and real systemic risks, which need to be managed - and alas neither laws and regulations nor the lawmakers and the regulators are even remotely capable and ready for managing this)
Bell really really wanted this: It also proposed that it be freed from a 1956 antitrust consent decree, then administered by Judge Vincent P. Biunno in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, that barred it from participating in the general sale of computers
I was so used to my American bank not actively selling me snake oil that I stupidly bought a very expensive snake-oil subscription from my German bank when I was living there. Ended up with a warehouse full of snake oil (metaphorically speaking) and a sunk-cost fallacy before I finally figured out they just had a strategic partnership with Snake Oil GmbH so my account representative got a commission on my stupidity.
Banks being only local was utterly horrible for the economy. You had many small banks completely depended on one region and a local supply shock would kill all the local banks as well.
This regulation didn't happen to prevent monopolies, it was done to create monopolies. Banks didn't want other banks from other regions to compete against their costumers.
Canada had larger branch banks that were much more stable.
> * Monopolies and oligopolies were routinely busted, resulting in less concentration in many industries:
Yes and often what was defined as a monopoly and what an oligopoly and what was defined as 'to large' was determined by what industry had a competitor that they couldn't defeat and also had friends in high places.
The original state level anti-trust actually came out of butchers that wanted protection from centralized butchers that could use special railcars to transport frozen meat, instead of doing localized butchering.
So a lot of the history that many idolize is just a different form of companies using state power against each other.
The Bell breakup was stupid. If you have some competing companies, but they meet up, and agree to divide the country into regions,
and then choose to not compete with each other, that's not at all free market capitalism. Capitalism requires competition in the market in order for market forces to actually work! Cars is another example where, in the modern framing, the dealership model is bullshit and manufacturers should be able to sell direct to consumers. And it does make a certain amount of sense. But if the argument is for smaller organizations, the fact is that local dealerships are smaller than, say, Ford, and so if the argument is that the dealership model sucks because the car dealerships have too much power and are abusing it, taking power away from them and ceeding it to an even bigger organization doesn't make a lick of sense.
That doesn't mean those regulations or structures were intended to be a permanent fixture. Similarly, Bretton Woods was not intended to maintain gold at $35 per ounce.
The world is a place where some development requires large amounts of capitalization. That is also a competitive advantage. No-one cares about any of those previous bullet points if they are generally happy in their lives.
When the SEC brought their first large scale financial fraud indictment, no-one cared. (Investors Overseas Service (IOS), $224 million and International Controls Corporation (ICC)). It was pursued because someone stole money from the wealthy. However, many years later, one of the two fraudsters was revealed to be a notorious Russian agent that worked for the Office of Strategic Services in London during WW2. He would walk files of Ukrainian sources out of the OSS office (obtained from MI6!) and down the street to the Russian embassy. Those Ukrainian sources later disappeared.
The world is a sketchy/dodgy/evil place. Partitioning it into chunks may provide some temporary benefit, but the real world does not evolve that way. Look at Carlos Slim, Mexican Cartels, Russian oligarchs, META is on track for $80 billion net profit this year ...
Oh also, two of the Bretton Woods principal architects, also Russian agents. One had their US passport revoked and US citizenship revoked in 1954. He was the chief economic advisor to Franklin Roosevelt. No-one cared about him either, and he essentially envisioned the world of monetary policies that we have today. He lived out the remainder of his life very well off, advising Colombia on their monetary policy. In 1995, he was revealed to be a prolific Russian agent from KGB archives researchers and authors.
I feel point 1 is a more specific example of point 4. Point 3 makes sense because banks are handling peoples money, I don't know enough about point 2.
However point 1 & 4 is more about market power than anything else, point 3 is more about ensuring confidence in basic financial services aren't undermined by risk taking which feels like a separate point.
Sometimes for reasons other than foul play or a poorly design regulatory system, there's value in an organisation being large as it has increasing returns to scale, it can produce more output with the same input compared to smaller organisations. It's also unfortunately one way how monopolies form, easiest example being utility companies because there's also a case not to break them up as well as they can provide the service at a cheaper cost, but will they? Which makes the problem harder to solve then just breaking these firms up.
In NSW Australia (New South Wales the state Sydney is based in), the problem was approached by creating an institution called IPART which basically determines prices/rates for both public and private monopolies. In Sydney there are private motor ways and tunnels, IPART determines the rates, and the water company (Sydney Water) largely has its rates also decided by IPART, same goes for council rates (tax on land/properties, etc). IPART is far from perfect, it answers to the Premier (the Governor) so there's a risk of it becoming an instrument of popularism, but this means Sydney water is chronically underfunded (and water rates aren't even that high), this has second order effects like Sydney Water dragging its feet on committing to providing infrastructure. There are massive fixed costs with starting a water utility firm so it impacts stuff like residential construction reducing overall house supply, which is a problem in Sydney when housing is so expensive.
Sometimes these larger entities form as a result of government created entry barriers, in America it's easier to get small business funding than it is in Australia. Also in Australia we have laws about prohibiting pharmacies opening too close to each other, which is incredibly dumb. There's a very strong Pharmacy lobby, not big pharma but instead drug stores which might be a uniquely Australian phenomena. But it means there's no drug store near my local train station in an area that was recently redeveloped, or a single Pharmacy in areas like Sydney Olympic Park, but 10 in a smaller older area such Granville.
In Australia we have 2-3 large grocery stores (Coles, Woolworths and to a lesser extent IGA), a 4th exists to an even lesser extent but has struggled to grow and has been struggling in part due to the land planning regulatory framework. Most cities in the US have something similar, but in NSW it's in overdrive plays a big part in why housing is so unaffordable as it largely determines how much floor space is allowed on each lot and how tall buildings can be. But back to groceries, it's very difficult for ALDI to get permission to build as many grocery stores to compete due to energy barriers imposed by the planning system. If you own the land, you need to first get a planning proposal in to rezoned and planning controls updated, then you need to make a seperate development applicaition which can easily take 5 years.
I believe parking minimums in the USA can have a similar effect, as many cities require different levels of free parking for different land use.
Sometimes over regulating things can result in a lack competition, and it's not always a result of a lack of government intervention. And sometimes there's value in allowing organisations to be large. And when it is a problem sometimes the solution isn't always break them up.
Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory:
* The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local.
* Banks could not cross state lines, resulting in a geographically distributed financial system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McFadden_Act : Your bank was always local.
* Banks were prohibited from entering riskier businesses, resulting in a compartmentalized system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legisla... : Your bank did not try to sell you investments.
* Monopolies and oligopolies were routinely busted, resulting in less concentration in many industries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_... .
The companies you dealt with every day were typically smaller, more local, more subject to competition, and less able to yield economic and political power, particularly at the national level.
Nowadays, power and resources seem to be far more concentrated.