Conflict vs. Mistake
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
- The effect of supply and demand on price (“trickle down economics”) is an oversimplification or outright fabrication pushed by real estate and tech interests to fool you. Those technocrats are funded by monied interests and can’t be trusted.
- We cannot depend on the market to provide something as important as housing; it must be a human right. Therefore block all market rate development. (With no follow-up policy prescription, or no concern for the feasibility, implementation details, or side effects of any housing-as-a-human-right policy prescriptions).
- We should continue to block development because YIMBYs and their backers are bad people and our class enemies who want luxury condos for themselves and don’t care about the poor.
- Even if some YIMBYs are well intentioned, it’s stupid that they want to debate supply and demand with affordable housing activists when they should be allying against their mutual enemy, rich suburban homeowners. This is most interesting because it’s a direct exhortation to abandon mistake theory and engage on conflict theory’s terms.
I like this a lot. It may be what I needed to stop arguing with these people on the internet.
Why would it cause you to stop arguing with them? It enables you to argue with them more effectively, not opt out entirely.
That's a really uncharitable reading of the Baffler piece which says that public choice theory has been used as an argument to cover policies that were racist in intent and effect.
The Baffler piece is long but this is probably the key para:
"Buchanan proposed that Virginia could finesse the question of full compliance with Brown and avoid leaving the impression that the state wished to revert to crude Jim Crow standards of race privilege. Buchanan’s innovative solution was the introduction of school vouchers, which would empower parents to send children to schools of their choice on the public dime, while also working to buttress the prerogatives of white and affluent populations in restricting broader cross-racial access to the public good of state-financed education. He contended that a voucher system was the best allocation of educational resources because it would compel schools to compete for students and resources, which would lead to educational improvement. On paper, at least, Buchanan was advocating a market-based, seemingly race-neutral policy solution. In effect, however, it allowed for the continued perpetuation of segregation. For example, Virginia’s Prince Edwards County shuttered its public schools in 1959 while doling out vouchers to students who attended private schools that only accepted white children. As a result, black children in Prince Edwards County went without formal education for more than five years."
This paragraph closes the first section of the article, and very clearly says "public choice theory pretends to be about facts about human behaviour, but really it's a racist tool of exploitation".
In our current political reality, anything that is not desirable to Republican elites will be argued against as if it were simply a technical "Mistake." No matter how many times they're out-argued, they continue arguing on a technical basis. "Tax cuts to the rich increase jobs and wealth for everyone" and "Climate change isn't being caused by human action" are probably the two most glaring examples of trash arguments that should sink under the weight of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but they may never go away. And it seems that more and more political arguments are increasingly in this camp, emboldened by the persistence of these incorrect assertions.
Politicians/elites are blatantly arguing in bad faith at least some of the time. They won't be convinced by any argument or evidence, no matter how damning. They are getting away with this because outside of hard science, nothing can be "proven" and they will surface any doubt in an argument and simply magnify it. At some level, it's a social hardship that owes to epistemology and the limits of our knowing.
Of course there are still difficult technical questions of governance as well. Policy making is not easy. But at this point, it's extremely difficult to distinguish between arguing against "mistakes" and arguing against something that is simply inconvenient to the arguer. On the surface they generally look the same - like a person in a suit making a technical argument. The trash arguments are poisoning the well, making it impossible to share a space for discussing the truly difficult questions with those who disagree.
We live in an era of noise, and we are in desperate need of better filters. How do we detect an argument made in bad faith? How do we respond once we know an argument can't be won? I don't think we have good answers to either question.
The noise isn't surprising. Certain industries are notorious for producing pollution. Mental pollution produced by bad-faith "debate" is just another instance of a general pattern.
A cure? Cui bono is a reasonable first test for bad faith. It's not infallible and can lead to paranoia, but it's better than nothing.
But I think the pattern is even more general, and transcends political positions.
Some people are inherently entitled, narcissistic, and exploitative, and they will always try to gravitate to positions of power unless there's an explicit mechanism that stops them.
A minority of these individuals are unusually inventive and productive, but most are simply resource parasites. Once in power they do incredible damage.
And they are very adaptive. They will operate successfully in every traditional political system you can imagine. And they will use conflict and mistake rhetoric, as suits their needs.
Are you saying this is another way in which the Elites stays in control ? Good way to 'increase passion' :)
Supply side effects are real. Certainly it's reasonable to say that their impact has been drastically overstated in the political arena, but dismissing the entire concept as a trash argument misrepresents reality.
We place faith in effective political and social institutions and aggressively defend them from those that attack them or bypass them.
Nobody could reasonably argue that the organisation of workers into unions involved no cooperation, yet we become labelled as conspiracy theorists, stereotyped and dismissed completely if we refuse to believe that events, which were incredibly convenient for the moneyed few, involved no cooperation in the face of evidence to the contrary.
The problem with past events is that they are always subject to some interpretation. There are events in distant history that are still a matter of contention and which scholars, with no political preference for a particular individual, can agree upon. With the deep politicisation of much of the international events of the last 100 years and the amount that remains to gain by exploiting them, it may well be that the dust never settles.
A mistake theorist is the kind of person who always cooperates (because it's best move for everybody!) and a conflict theorist is the kind of person who always defects (because you'll get ruthlessly exploited otherwise!)
A synthesis of the two views might be: "this entire setup is doomed to failure because it's vulnerable to exploitation. We need to change the rules of the game."
Conflict theory is for people who like to fight. People who like to fight will always find a fight.
While the above example is made up, and satire. There definitely is a portion of people that love to fight the powers that be. In the US you can see these people in both parties.
From a conflict theorist's point of view, this is similar to the issue of People who vote "against their own interests" because they were brainwashed by the Elite. The perception and framing of it is different, but the issue is the same.
What this guy's analysis fails to account for is that power matters, smart people coming up with solutions for "mistakes" (whether "hard" or "easy") is necessary, but not sufficient. The question is, and has only ever been, which is to be master -- who has the power?
My instinct is also to characterise the theories in a similar way. I'd describe it as how things ought to be (mistake theory) vs how to achieve that (conflict theory), but I guess that's kind of the same thing you're saying.
However, I'm not sure you can entirely separate these theories though. A mistake can be creating a society which encourages power imbalances, and a consequence of power imbalances can be societies that are less able to notice certain mistakes.
Jacobite – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of Jacobin – summarizes their article Under-Theorizing Government as “You’ll never hear the terms ‘principal-agent problem,’ ‘rent-seeking,’ or ‘aligning incentives’ from socialists. That’s because they expect ideology to solve all practical considerations of governance.”
Jacobite has nothing to do with Jacobin. Jacobitism (/ˈdʒækəbaɪˌtɪzm/ JAK-ə-by-tiz-əm;[1][2] Scottish Gaelic: Seumasachas [ˈʃeːməs̪əxəs̪], Irish: Seacaibíteachas, Séamusachas) was a political movement in Great Britain and Ireland that aimed to restore the Roman Catholic Stuart King James II of England and Ireland (as James VII in Scotland) and his heirs to the thrones of England, Scotland, France and Ireland. The movement took its name from Jacobus, the Renaissance Latin form of Iacomus, which in turn comes from the original Latin form of James, "Iacobus." Adherents rebelled against the British government on several occasions between 1688 and 1746.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobitism
The Jacobins on the other hand were a French political movement/party:
The Society of the Friends of the Constitution (French: Société des amis de la Constitution), after 1792 renamed Society of the Jacobins, Friends of Freedom and Equality (Société des Jacobins, amis de la liberté et de l'égalité), commonly known as the Jacobin Club (Club des Jacobins) or simply the Jacobins (English: /ˈdʒæ.kə.bɪnz/; French: [ʒa.kɔ.bɛ̃]), was the most influential political club during the French Revolution. Initially founded in 1789 by anti-Royalist deputies from Brittany, the Club grew into a nationwide republican movement, with a membership estimated at a half million or more.[1] The Jacobin Club was heterogeneous and included both prominent parliamentary factions of the early 1790s, the Mountain and the Girondins.
In 1792–93, the Girondins were more prominent in leading France, the period when war was declared on Austria and Prussia, the monarchy was overthrown and the Republic created.
It's just the way he writes.