Intelligence and radical economic attitudes
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E.g, people who knows what ararcho-syndicalism is have a mean IQ of 125. People who believe it's a good idea are a subset of this group with an IQ of 115. So it appears that the belief predicts IQ but it's actually the knowledge that it's even an option.
Additionally, IQ measures a very specific type of cognitive ability. I am not so sure that those cognitive abilities are perfectly correlated with the sort of social and emotional intelligence required to assess the likely effectiveness of a political system.
Instead, we have more general problem-solving skills that allowed us to develop things like statistics and economics and political theory. I leave it to the reader to determine how much social and emotional intelligence is required to excel at those. (As opposed to the merely analytical intelligence that IQ measures, I suppose. I have yet to see a definition of social/emotional intelligence that is coherent enough to be measured, and also actually meaningfully exists when measured.)
Nice quip, but what's your point? ;-)
> Anyhow, my lukewarm take is that no level of "social and emotional intelligence" will allow you to assess the likely effectiveness of a political system, because why in the world would the built-in intelligence for interacting with a couple of hundred people be any good at predicting the aggregate behaviour of billions of people.
I at least have a high degree of belief in the contrapositive -- if one doesn't have a high degree of social and emotional intelligence then they won't be able to assess the likely effectiveness of a political system.
We don't need to rigorously quantify the cause to notice an effect, whatever it turns out to be.
Since you seem knowledgeable in it, what would be a rigid definition of IQ? As opposed to the vague definition of social intelligence?
All online IQ tests are fake, no exception. Most "Mensa online tests" are unrelated to Mensa; they just say so, because it makes people more likely to click on them.
A serious IQ test would look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
> I can't fathom it being anything other than an indicator on how well someone can solve these matrix association problems.
Well, this is one of the interesting findings about intelligence. Turns out that how well people can solve these tests, correlates strongly with many other things.
At some moment in history, there was a competing theory of "multiple intelligences", assuming that the kind of intelligence for doing math is independent from the kind of intelligence for solving verbal problems. But when people were given different tests, it turned out that the people who score high on one kind of test are also likely to score high on the other kind of test.
So the reason why the "matrices" tests are so popular is that it doesn't matter much what kind of test you use, and the matrices are less culturally sensitive (i.e. in English verbal test, it would matter a lot whether English is your first or second language).
> what would be a rigid definition of IQ?
Approximately: That thing that allows you to do better in a wide range of problems. (As opposed to a talent or learning disability, which is that thing that allows you to do better/worse in one specific thing.)
We definitely won't be measuring it with a self report questionnaire though.
My guess is that people who score higher on "intellect" are more likely the kind of people who "take ideas seriously". That is, they tend to follow ideas to their logical conclusions.
Does that mean these high IQ people don't think IQ exists. It obviously exists. It's a real measure that people use.
It's not like midichlorian count which is a measure from Starwars. Which doesn't exist because it only exists in the movies and doesn't measure something real (the force).
lots of complaints I've heard - can't say one way or the other if there is any salt to them.
I haven't heard the complaint before that IQ is imaginary, that's a new one... I think through reading the exchange I see where the semantics shifted between people's thoughts, I doubt that's what the the poster above you meant - likely they meant a combination of the many complaints to dismiss the general usefulness of IQ tests as a predictor of intelligence.
The complaints I hear about IQ are completely opposite! People dislike standardized exams, including IQ tests, because of their standardization! That is, the need to assess everyone the same way precludes assessment specific to the individual being assessed. Detractors of IQ, insofar as they would like assessment at all, would prefer a more holistic procedure where the characteristics and capabilities of the assessee are analysed with due attention paid to the specific life history of said assessee.
In regards to income, I briefly skimmed the Wikipedia section for IQ and Income, which can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Income
"Highly correlated" would not be the choice of words I use to describe correlations between (0.23 - 0.5).
We, as people, should cherish the contributions of one's intelligence instead of obsessing over an arbitrary, qualitative value painted as a qualitative value like one's potential intelligence.
lol, this range is 0.5 to 0.7 variance explained (R squared) which is an insane value. in typical social studies a correlation of > 5% is considered a major improvement. In finance a correlation or > 1% is considered amazing.
You are either a hyper-intelectual drinking Taleb's kool-aid or simply don't know what you are talking about :D
Also 10% variance explained in social science is considered pretty good (which is depressing, but such is life).
Very far from it. I'm just an idiot with Internet access.
> drinking Taleb's kool-aid
I do agree with some of what he has said about IQ, but I am not well-versed in any of his other writings.
> simply don't know what you are talking about
Perhaps, but I am still not convinced.
If 0.23-0.5 correlation is "very high" then what is 0.7-0.9? Would r >= 0.7 be literal causation at that point for psychologist? (I'm kidding, of course)
Again, I am not saying that a correlation of 0.23-0.5 is statistically insignificant by any means. I just think I needed "very high" to be coupled with "for psychology."
Anyway, I saw an interesting theory once that suggested IQ simply measures motivation and highly motivated people will tend to do better on standardized tests as well as more generally in life.
I believe that IQ exists, but I don't believe it's an effective measure of the things people typically expect from it once you get into average or above average scores.
Leaving aside the problem of the tests themselves and how they're conducted, I suspect that even a "perfect" test wouldn't predict how well a person would manage their life, perform in their job, or contribute positively to society.
At the low end, IQ testing can identify individuals with problems that will certainly cause them difficulties, but a person with a high IQ won't necessarily outperform someone with an average IQ in tasks that aren't IQ tests.
> effective measure of the things people typically expect from it once you get into average or above average scores.
But I don't think that's what IQ is, it's just a measure of a type of assessment relative to other participants. Beyond that, there are strong correlations at various IQ levels on how people perceive certain spatial and logic questions/tasks. IQ does not measure your personality or job performance.
This is something social psychologists have authority in and not the opinions of techbros.
and if that's not convincing enough, how about Alexander Grothendieck
There is some evidence* that these value preferences are independent of experience and established quite early in life. It might be that a lot of theoretical sophistication is an elaborate rationalization of the axiomatic preferences rather than objective assessments of 'reality'.
It's also worth considering that preferential attachment and assortivity could lead to clustering of particular value systems at local, regional, or national levels. A policy which is 'natural' and 'efficient' in a society where one value system prevails might not work elsewhere, because the people there to be more competitive, or more cooperative, or more risk averse. Their aggregate economic outcomes would then be poorer because the policy is at odds with their social norms.
* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
The speculated-upon correlation with big 5 personality factors in the current paper is intriguing and worthy of further research.
The dyadic games paper is interesting, but I think you're perhaps a bit quick to dismiss banal self-interest as a very likely missing causal variable.
To what extent are extreme economic ideologies simply post-hoc intellectual justifications camouflaging basically self-interested preferences?
There is a correlation between family socioeconomic status and IQ. What if it's merely that advantaged groups:
1. have the resources to provide the early life advantages that give an IQ boost,
2. have the resources to develop and defend coherent ideological systems that justify their allotment (eg, by funding think tanks and so on), and
3. tend to pass those social interests down to the next generation either directly (family-owned businesses/assets) or indirectly via cultural knowledge and connection (eg, doctor/professor/etc. kids are more like to become doctors/professors/etc.).
In particular,
- what economic beliefs do "non-extreme" people have? Are their beliefs non-extreme, or do they simply have a consistent bucket of (perhaps quite extreme) economic beliefs which don't have a clear name? What if all we're measuring here is that the children of professors have Brookings and an army of intellectuals to give names to things, while the children of business owners have AEI and an army of other intellectuals who also give names to things?
- what happens to this result if we control for SES?
I ask the first question because most people in my orbit from lower SES describe themselves as centrists on economic issues but actually have a haphazard bucket of deeply held cultural beliefs which are not located at the center of anything in particular.
The definition of “pure rationality” in economics (and the broader social sciences)—and it's worth noting this is widely recognized as an obviously idealized and incorrect model, with controversy over whether and where it is useful even as a basic starting point or not—is that each individual:
(1) has a “utility function” mapping the state of the world to experienced utility (satisfaction, basically.)
(2) makes all decisions as if they had perfect knowledge of the outcomes that would result and how those outcomes map through their utility function, maximizing their personal experienced utility.
So, basically what you have proposed as an exception to pure rationality as an explanation for economic behavior is actually fully encompassed within the definition of pure rationality, by way of the personal utility function.
Given what I know about political infighting in the modern American academy though, I'd bet that the smart ones went to the politburo where they got to be the "who" and not the "whom" and it was the midwits at best who stuck around in the academy waiting to get shipped to the gulags for publishing something Stalin disliked.
In other words, realizing how the system actually works instead of naively believing how it's claimed to work is just another intelligence test.
And the more radical the system is, the more it mutilates reality in order to try to make it fit within the system.
what we are seeing a certain political leaning do these days would seem to very very strongly disprove this :)
If you've carried out your ideas to their logical conclusion and reached a socially inappropriate truth, well... you're forced to decide to either self-censor, or be perceived as a nut.
Or! Find a community of nuts and fit right in.
Obviously higher class individuals would score higher on their intelligence test having received better education
It should not surprise anyone that people higher up the class hierarchy have more moderate, centrist views while those that are struggling and for which radical change is an objective need because the current system is not working for them, embrace radicalism.
I think in my case, it was a realization that I'm not working harder than other people or even working things that matter more than anybody else (in fact, on the contrary) and that at least 90% of my success can be attributed to luck. So if my success is not due to my deeds but rather a randomized lottery, then there's no point in preserving the status quo.
And that's only analyzing one aspect: me. There are a lot of other reasons the world should change beyond what benefits just me.
You think my only point of observation is myself? I even said in my original comment that I compare myself to others.
> you should hold out for demonstrably better alternative
Or work toward creating a better alternative, driven by my radical ideas for how things need to change. Why wait around for everyone else to fix things (or, more likely, sit around on their asses waiting for other people to change things)?
> There are worse outcomes than randomly distributed success.
Like I said, my analysis does not stop at myself or just at "success" as the main factor to optimize for. There are other reasons for changing the overall organization of the economic system. The current system demonstrably does not scale.
I think it's more interesting that they focus on finding their one relationship (between intelligence and extremism) and don't really unpack the relative sizes to other correlations in their own studies. E.g. the link between intelligence and extremism is weaker than the link between intelligence and conservatism (though studies 2 and 3 find _opposite signs_ for this relationship) and is weaker than the link between intelligence and income. So their study is basically consistent with the possibility that some intelligent people earn higher incomes and richer people are likely to be atypically conservative.
What's the distinction you're making between household income and class?
> The hypothesis that the positive association between higher intelligence and economic extremism would be replicated was tested using a linear model with total intelligence score as the independent variable, and economic extremism as the dependent variable, controlling for age, gender, education level, and <<<household income>>>.
In the UK class is more complicated than simply having an income. It’s strongly correlated but not the same. You can have zero income, even be cash poor, but still have a title, influence, family history, contacts, favours, promises, even land (via various trusts)…
This doesn't seem right.
First, there are a lot of political systems with more than one "side", and in which coalitions are at least somewhat fluid. This is even true in the United States; if you have ever served on a board that proposes a bond issue or tax increase, you know that that coalitions are quite local and easy to fragment (need to build a new school on the south side, but the north side has lots of tax hawks? Include a new football stadium on the north side as part of the issue).
Second, think about conflict outside of politics. There is a lot of conflict in markets, for example, but most markets do not tend toward duopoly.
I got real fond of saying, "compromise means everybody is equally unhappy with the solution" and giving them solutions that worked but often took each of them a couple extra lines of code. Helping them figure out what those lines were smoothed some feathers, but I don't think any of those people were comfortable unless at least a couple feathers were out of place. It's weird when people 10 years older than you are acting like babies. It's not like 'mature' is the first adjective people would use to describe me at that time. When you don't want to be the adult in the room, it's all the more annoying when you have to be.
Mostly true for political systems that are set up as dual parties. Turns out if you have a system that encourages a more open political ecosystem, there are more "sides" that people can end up on.
that's why starting with the "political spectrum" is bound to give you false information. it compresses too much of the complexity down into a simple model that doesn't predict the world in any meaningful way. it may aid conflict, but that's exactly the trouble: couching sociopolitical challenges purely in terms of conflict itself perpetuates, rather than helps to solve, problems.
and as others have noted, you can just as easily have multiple political coalitions coming together to solve problems without devolving into dualism. humans prefer but don't require binary political stances as you're asserting. moreover, even binary issues won't all fall neatly into a single left-right spectrum without active coercion (which is most of what we see in mediopolitical theater).
Do you (or anyone else) have any idea if this is a formal term in any discipline, or did you come upon it on your own? I notice people engaging in this all the time in arguments, and having thought about it a fair amount I think it is almost impossible to avoid doing unless one is paying extremely close attention to their word choice, as typically (~only) happens during technical discussions.
> start with a more realistic multidimensional model of political space
This seems like a good idea... But how might one go about doing it?
i think political scientists do research the multidimensionality of issues all the time. it's just that politicization (as in partisan politics) wants to collapse the problem space into memes that can lodge in people's brains without further thinking, and simpler (binary) memes are more easily remembered and propagated. in any case, the standard remedies certainly include voting reform (to lessen the incentive towards this binary collapse), parliametary systems (accommodating multiparty coalition-building), federalism (smaller governments are more responsive to the local populace), direct democracy or finer representation, etc.
The degree to which humanity runs on tautological reasoning is the part that I find interesting. And I very much agree with the "pretty common logical mistake to fall for" part - I've encountered very few even intelligent people who are highly resistant to it, at least on certain topics (generally: culture war topics, or anything from a non-deterministic problem space).
> i think political scientists do research the multidimensionality of issues all the time. it's just that politicization (as in partisan politics) wants to collapse the problem space into memes that can lodge in people's brains without further thinking, and simpler (binary) memes are more easily remembered and propagated.
Agree...
> in any case, the standard remedies certainly include voting reform (to lessen the incentive towards this binary collapse), parliametary systems (accommodating multiparty coalition-building), federalism (smaller governments are more responsive to the local populace), direct democracy or finer representation, etc.
It would be interesting to see what the world would be like if we actually ever tried these "reforms" instead of only talking about them. It is bizarre to me how no one seems to notice that we only talk about certain things, year after year, decade after decade, while simultaneously becoming angry at how suboptimal the world is....it's like "Well duh, what do you expect!!??? lol".
yah, this is the amazing part. societies are much more resilient than we might otherwise give them credit for. we can endure a lot of suboptimality and hardship, and even reasoning our way into tenacious consent, because the activation energy for change is so high and the final outcome so uncertain. perhaps this is the best we can do--find stable local optima for limited spans of time.
but regardless, being able to uncover poor rationale like tautologies is one effective tool in the toolbox for reshaping political narratives. it's a slog for sure, but you do sometimes see narratives change (covid response being a vivid example). being indenpendently-minded (skeptical) helps a lot too, as you're not personally invested identity-wise in any given narrative, and are willing to change your mind more easily as new information rolls in.
we have hugely invested interests working against such reforms, but some of these will come to pass one day for sure, just because enough people will be fed up and demand it, despite the personal cost[*].
[*]: most people are wholly unsuited for conflict (even the constructive kind) because it's so uncomfortable and risky, and in developed countries as we're constructed, the payoff seems so disporportionate (a lot of gain going to others, a little going to you, but you seemingly taking much of the personal risk).
You know, on one hand this is harmful...but then on the other hand I think it is also a bit of a silver lining. As it is, it seems to me that we are on some sort of a collision course with Mother Nature, climate change being the biggest threat but certainly not the only one (nuclear weapons, AI, etc). But if the shit was to ever really hit the fan, a "Get Out of Jail Free (maybe)" is in existence: humanity could [1] upgrade its firmware/software.
[1] Or, the option exists - whether we are able to actually take advantage of it is another matter, but even if we're not doing so good, I think a "bootsrapping" type deployment could maybe be pulled off, so we could maybe "work our way up" slowly, despite our inability to go directly to higher versions.
i'm actually not too concerned about end of the world scenarios. we, like cockroaches, will find a way to survive as a species, even if it's very suboptimal. that may sounds cynical, but it's mostly an optimistic perspective about our resilience.
and i know climate change is all the rage these days, but i'm way more concerned about pollution (literally killing millions now and for the past century+), which is what the climate change narrative tries to divert our attention away from (because it wholly fulfills our need to do something about, and our attentive capacity for, "environmentalism"). it's the same playbook used by sugar against fat, but perverted back against itself. the fossil fuel and auto lobbies seems to think they can do something about CO₂ (probably token efforts), but not all the rest of the pollutants they spew, so they're reluctantly on the climate change bandwagon as a risk mitigation and diversion strategy.
Agree...but there are two change opportunities here: change people, and change the process.
> i used to subscribe to the term "progressivism" for this process, but even that's been undermined by tribalism and political propaganda.
Anything involving humans is prone to these sorts of problems, as it currently is anyways...but people can improve, and have done so!
Also, considering propaganda: I agree it is a very, very big problem - but two can play at that game, and at levels far higher than is currently done.
> i'm actually not too concerned about end of the world scenarios. we, like cockroaches, will find a way to survive as a species, even if it's very suboptimal. that may sounds cynical, but it's mostly an optimistic perspective about our resilience.
I worry less about the direct affects than I do the Nth order effects (mass migration, political polarization, war, etc).
> which is what the climate change narrative tries to divert our attention away from (because it wholly fulfills our need to do something about, and our attentive capacity for, "environmentalism").
I often wonder about this as well....it's been done before with great success. Sadly, any suggestion of this would likely be met with outrage by people in the movement, regardless of whether that reaction is beneficial to their cause.
> it's the same playbook used by sugar against fat, but perverted back against itself. the fossil fuel and auto lobbies seems to think they can do something about CO₂ (probably token efforts), but not all the rest of the pollutants they spew, so they're reluctantly on the climate change bandwagon as a risk mitigation and diversion strategy.
What's interesting about this to me (and the thousands of other examples like it, particularly politics): *"everyone" knows that this is how it works, but when that bell rings, Pavlov's dogs start drooling on cue.
After considering the comprehensive scenario for several years to the best of my ability, I have formed the belief that there is some sort of a fundamental problem with people, and reality itself. Call me an optimist, but I actually believe something substantial can be done about it.
it's tempting to throw out simplistic solutions like "let's skepticism!" but almost impossible to actually change people en masse like that. which then points to your second course of action, changing processes (via the systems that implement them), and that's something i truly believe in, but still find frustratingly slow.
[0]: plus the expert fallacy, which i mentioned before. i was just having this conversation last night about doctors, who know next to nothing in comparison to how complex biology is, but we still as a society feel compelled to venerate (and remunerate) doctors irrationally because they hold people's lives in their hands (understandably). but that outsized veneration (and remuneration) often leads to egos that can't admit ignorance or doubt and that leads to millions of unnecessary deaths and countless people with worse health outcomes. and that's not a condemnation of doctors, but a realistic understanding of where our collective knowledge lies relative to the long arc of evolution, but the societal distortion persists nonetheless.
But what has been tried?
> ...when special interests[0] are highly motivated to undermine truths and the general welfare time and again for personal and outsized gain
And everyone knows it (or, is in possession of knowledge about it), yet their primitive, transparent methods work every time - rather paradoxical!
> it's tempting to throw out simplistic solutions like "let's skepticism!"
Conspiracy theorists (of which I am one) being one form, although my colleagues (bless their hearts) are....* a little unrefined and sloppy, to put it nicely.
> but almost impossible to actually change people en masse* like that.
Like that: agreed.
> i was just having this conversation last night about doctors, who know next to nothing in comparison to how complex biology is, but we still as a society feel compelled to venerate (and remunerate) doctors irrationally because they hold people's lives in their hands (understandably).
That the highly educated doctors (and other The Experts) themselves typically have little awareness of their shortcomings and delusions themselves may be suggestive of something important? And don't get me started on The Scientists!!
> but that outsized veneration (and remuneration) often leads to egos that can't admit ignorance or doubt...
Implying this problem didn't exist prior to the inflation of the ego?
> ...and that leads to millions of unnecessary deaths and countless people with worse health outcomes
Sir: not to worry - see, the line on this chart is moving up and to the right. All is well, stay the course.
> and that's not a condemnation of doctors...
Maybe it should be.
> ...but a realistic understanding of where our collective knowledge lies relative to the long arc of evolution, but the societal distortion persists nonetheless
It's a tricky problem!
This is an enjoyable conversation.
i should note that i do believe in science and the scientific method but reject scientism and expertise. part of this faith is understanding that no one person can embody the truth of a field, but all of the practitioners together can tell you insightful things about it. it's still ultimately up to the discernment of the observer to reach reasonable conclusions based on that imparted knowledge though.
So: what to do? :)
for me, it boils down to keeping the brain open and helping others do the same. but that's a personal heuristic. most people don't want to pay the socioeconomic cost of being an independent thinker.
This seems like a no-brainer to me...but now you have two problems!
Is it highly unlikely that humanity might some time in the next couple hundred years look back at us and shake their heads about how simplistic and naive we are, and I include the so-called "experts" in that. Is it impossible that there's something that no one sees? Or maybe even more complex than that?
Well, it's possible a species would not find such a thing, because it never thought to look for it. Perhaps too busy looking for other things, of questionable utility.
but yes, it's highly unlikely that they could shake their heads at every instance of today's ignorance and hubris in totality.
Maybe that subset could be us!
> but yes, it's highly unlikely that they could shake their heads at every instance of today's ignorance and hubris in totality.
Why not? Can you not do this?
in any case, the hard part is not finding candidates but culling them down, analogous to the halting problem (or the bullshit asymmetry problem). is it an infinite calculation? probably.
and this thread has dropped pretty far into the archives, so i think it might be time to retire it. perhaps we can continue in a future thread.
My motto is: aim for adequacy, not perfection.
> in any case, the hard part is not finding candidates but culling them down, analogous to the halting problem (or the bullshit asymmetry problem). is it an infinite calculation? probably.
Maybe. But also: maybe not!
> and this thread has dropped pretty far into the archives, so i think it might be time to retire it. perhaps we can continue in a future thread.
Haha, not a bad idea...I enjoyed the conversation, a breath of fresh air for HN.
- the positive correlation between intelligence and income at 30 is 0.11, and highly significant, p<0.001
- the positive correlation between intelligence and income at 42 is 0.05, highly significant, p<0.001
- the positive correlation between income at 30 and income at 42 is 0.11, highly significant, p<0.001, and this was the strongest correlation of any variable with income at 42.
I.e. what you earn when you're 42 is more tied to what you made more than a decade ago than it is to how smart you are. The strength of that link between income over time is the same strength as the influence of intelligence on income at 30.
I'm surprised this correlation is so low, most people have already started their main career at 30, do people really change career that much between 30 and 42? Only reason I see it can be that low is that they have women who quit work or something, otherwise I'd expect high earners to continue to be high earners at that age and vice versa.
Women is a really good guess. 30 is sort of a terrible age to choose for this sort of thing...
Another possibility: lots of high earners are "done but not retired" by 40. They have a big enough nest egg to step off the corporate ladder, but not enough of a nest egg to stop working entirely. So they have part-time income from teaching university courses or consulting, but it's nowhere near their highest-earning years (which wouldn't been in their 30s).
The more you're confident in your own ability to figure things out, the less you need to seek out an established consensus to follow.
Sometimes it'll work, sometimes it won't, but hopefully on net it works more than it doesn't.
E.g. in the intro it mentioned “malicious envy” as a motive accounting for 50% of people’s desires to redistribute wealth. But could not “malicious envy” be caused/increased by outside forces? Is that stable over time and across countries, for example? (I doubt it is.)
These are precisely the kinds of fallacies or at best partial explanations that founders of sociology like Durkheim so clearly cut through. And yet here we are > 100 years later.
I mean, I’d rather have science that sacrificed its significant p-value for a little perspective and philosophy. What good is a correlation with no idea of the causation or overall perspective? For us humans this kind of result is at best a conversation starter (doesn’t really show us anything).
For example, you have r/neoliberal on Reddit. There users are overwhelmingly in favor of YIMBY policies (zoning reform, banning single family zoning, focusing on high density coupled with public transit), getting rid of the Jones act, pro free trade, automating ports, pro carbon tax, etc. while also being very liberal/progressive (imo) on most social issues.
So, while not necessarily extreme left or right, they have views that would be relatively extreme compared to the average voter, namely views on housing and trade.
Historically liberalism can be very extreme and radical, considering groups like the Jacobins.
Communal ownership is not free market, hence the tragedy of the commons is not a failure of the free market.
> ability of a large participant to drop prices to eliminate competition then raise prices,
Has never happened successfully.
> inability of market forces to handle extreme tail risk like major natural disasters.
The free market does very well at rushing supplies into disaster areas. At least until the government put a stop to that with anti-gouging laws. So now, disaster victims have to wait around until the government gets its act together, which takes a lot longer.
Ah yes so in this free-market utopia shall we purchase bottled air from Nestle for our breathing needs?
Shall all aerospace companies pay a toll to the estate of Yuri Gagarin whenever they launch a rocket? He was the first in space so must have the most logical claim to the ownership rights. His estate could then help us avoid Kessler syndrome.
As for space, the orbits are full of dangerous space junk. A classic tragedy of the commons.
I'd be much more concerned with issues like groundwater contamination, seeping gasses, and toxic waste dumping.
Are all not allowed in a free market. A free market does not condone damaging other people or their property.
BTW, US military bases are on some of the most polluted ground because they polluted it.
Can factories actually exist without 'damaging' the air or water runoff to other people's property?
> Has never happened successfully.
I thought ISPs were notorious for temporarily dropping prices whenever a competitor tries to build out? Or at least I keep hearing anecdotes from people who think they've watched it happen.
Socialism fails because it relies on altruistic behavior, which is in short supply in humans.
So when accusations of price gouging arise (say in the aftermath of a disaster), you're saying that it's the government interfering while the people in the disaster area area are eager to pay top dollar for suddenly-rare commodities like water or hand sanitizer? If I see regular-seeming people complaining about prices, should I assume they're covert government agents?
In the long run, high profits during a shortage also mean that suppliers in general will be incentivized to keep a larger stockpile of goods that have a good shelf-life since they know they will be able to make good money the next time there is a shortage (more than the storage costs). (Or the potential for high profits will incentivize spending money to be more flexible in production in case demand increases for a short time.)
If you are going to literally make it illegal to try this, then you better have a government be willing to spend its tax dollars on creating a stockpile - when the pandemic started we saw that all the talk of the national stockpile the federal government supposedly had was greatly exaggerated.
Do the higher prices mean some people won't get any water? Yes! But if you artificially suppress prices, there will also be some people who don't get water, because other people will hoard it.
> But if you artificially suppress prices, there will also be some people who don't get water, because other people will hoard it.
Rationing the volume available for purchase by individual customers is the obvious solution, and seems to have worked out just fine in practice during things like the great toilet paper panic of 2020.
I'm asking Walter how he explains the fact of people complaining about high prices in such a context, given his claim that it's government spoiling the price theory party. Why are the opinions of people who are priced out discounted?
If hoarding fetches higher prices, that creates tremendous incentive to increase the supply (and/or find alternatives).
If hoarding is illegal, and gouging is illegal, the result is shortages. Every time, since there is zero incentive to produce more.
Rationing has other problems. It is based on the idea that everyone has the exact same need for the product. Of course, this is absurd. The result is misallocation, as some get more than they need, others get less. If reselling is made illegal (as it usually is in rationing setups), then the person with extra just throws it away, and the person who doesn't get enough has to do without.
How is that better?
Again, I'm still wondering why you cite government as the opponents of free market pricing, when the objections often originate with people who are mad about the idea of paying $75 for a bottle of hand sanitizer: https://www.today.com/news/brothers-who-hoarded-17-700-bottl...
> government as the opponents of free market pricing, when the objections often originate with people who are mad
The government does what the people demand. The people demand the government outlaw gouging, the government outlaws it.
Some Americans*, and far fewer than those that have some of the lowest standards of living in the world. And the US has greater wealth disparity than many other countries with living standards many would argue are at least equal.
Altruism isnt necessary, education is. Education teaches people that the best way to prevent the most harmful acts in society is to make sure peoples needs are met, which capitalism and the free market routinely fails at. This is why US has worse crime than other developed nations even accounting for population, you fail to meet your citizens needs within the system so they do it themselves outside of it.
Americans have the highest standard of living in the world. That's why the poor from everywhere are trying to get into the US. Do you watch the news about all those migrants pouring over the border?
Every single point you make completely lacks consistency, truth, and reality. You just regurgitate shit you don't understand.
Mr Bright said:
"Americans have the highest standard of living in the world. That's why the poor from everywhere are trying to get into the US. Do you watch the news about all those migrants pouring over the border"
and you said:
"it just makes Walter's well thought, rational arguments even stronger. reply"
His reply is neither well thought[out], rational or strong whatsoever. His reiteration of Americans having the highest global standard of living does NOTHING to address any of the issues I raised with this statement in my previous comment, he literally just repeat his assertion.
Which is also untrue, SOME Americans have the highest living standards, many many many times more do NOT.
You will see neither my comment never mentions crime whatsoever. Mr Bright inserts the topic of crime, drug addiction, criminal enforcement and theft as though criminals and addicts are the only Americans who live in poverty and the only metric for establishing living standards is crime. This is clearly illogical and irrational.
Many of the people suffering at the hands of US capitalism simply got cancer, were in a car accident, were born with disability, got hurt at work, too old to work but no retirement fund, etc.
Frankly, I dont care about "helping my position" or if the language I use upsets you! Anyone with the faintest whiff of logical integrity can clearly see that Walther Not-So Bright is espousing bullshit that he believes, not that has any rational basis.
You're right next to him at the bottom of the intellectual barrel.
Thank you! I feel quite honored to be considered next to Walter Bright.
Likely because you know you're wrong and dumb.
Communists tried so hard to educate us into the "New Man". For the betterment of all mankind, of course.
Of course, ignoring human nature tuned the whole "experiment" into a huge, predictable failure.
But this assumes that there are good choices, and that there are bad choices. Reality, unfortunately, is often not so kind, and instead leaves us to choose only between bad choices and horrible ones. And so emphasizing the flaws of one choice, says very little about the desirability of an alternative.
In some ways I think game theory is most appropriate for chaotic systems. The goal is not to pick the system that works the best, under some ideal set of criteria, but the one that works the least-worst under the most hostile set of criteria.
Allowing market participants to discharge toxins into the local water supply is not in society's interests but is quite possible in a purely free-market system.
There's now a good amount of evidence that a hybrid system: mostly free-market, with some regulation, and some kind of social safety net is the least-bad choice.
A pure free market system would not allow people to pollute other peoples' property.
Edit: moreover how is "the free market" going to defend the property rights of others in these cases? I assume via civil litigation. But what if my victims can't afford prolonged litigation or I decide that the potential cost of a settlement is less than the cost of disposing of pollutants properly?
You're polluting other peoples' property.
> how is "the free market" going to defend the property rights of others in these cases?
That's the proper role of government.
> But what if my victims can't afford prolonged litigation or I decide that the potential cost of a settlement is less than the cost of disposing of pollutants properly?
Such issues are true of any economic system I can think of.
That has to do with diffusion of responsibility for communal property. What does that have to do with markets.
> ability of a large participant to drop prices to eliminate competition then raise prices
I think the market has ways to adapt to such behavior. Regulatory capture in a non-free market seems like a much more likely, and more persistent, risk.
> inability of market forces to handle extreme tail risk like major natural disasters.
I just don't think that's supported by the evidence.
You can start any business you like. People do it all the time.
There is a massive list of things one cannot start a business doing in the US. Why would you say such nonsense?
The moment people talk and think about money, they consider the mere concept of a negative return as some kind of monstrosity going against nature itself, despite the fact that money is a claim on labor and labor spoils just like an apple. The saver expects a reward for idleness, while the laborer without a job is getting punished by his enforced idleness. Money without negative return obligates men to become golden statues that never age, a world view that is obviously in dissonance with nature and reality.
Whenever the economy isn't growing, people will prefer an asset that bears a 0% return at no risk over any real investment.
In other words, there is no such thing as a free market without a monetary reform that allows negative interest rates or simply allows money to expire, the same way people age.
Here is another problem, eternal private landownership has the same problem. Let's assume you have a perpetuity that returns you $1 per year. At a zero interest rate its value is infinite and no, that isn't a problem with the concept of zero interest, the obvious problem is that a perpetuity cannot exist, even the planet itself has a finite lifespan, meaning the value of a single plot of land will only amount to billions of dollars. What's worth more? Money that works according to supply or demand or land that doesn't? Of course people are going to pick land. If landownership was eternal, then owning all of the land on the planet is equivalent to turning everyone else into illegal aliens that merely have been granted permission to exist on the planet and whose permission can be withdrawn at any time.
In the face of these two forces there cannot be something like a free market. It would always be a coercive market in one form or another.
The second seems to think that all value derives from land (never mind that the value of FAANG companies has nothing to do with land value). But hey let's run with that for a minute. Suppose one person owned all the land. In order to get any value from it, he's going to have to rent it out to people who do use it productively.
Hmm, where do we have such a system. I know! The government owns all the land, and rents it out (property taxes) to people who use it. The free market hasn't collapsed because of this.
If you don't eat it, yes.
>then it is only natural that the return on a spoiling apple is negative.
my return on the regular apple is 95 kcal. If I sell it, my return is what I sold it for. Why would I compare it to a golden apple that never spoils?
>The moment people talk and think about money, they consider the mere concept of a negative return as some kind of monstrosity going against nature itself
Can you point to some economists who hold this poition?
>despite the fact that money is a claim on labor and labor spoils just like an apple
Money can be a claim on labor. It can also be a claim on something else, but aside from that, it seems like you are comparing the negative return from the apple comapred to the golden apple to labor which gives an absolute negative return.
>The saver expects a reward for idleness
(I assume by "saver" you mean investor) Do you mean "expect" from a moral or economic perspective? either way it isn't true. An investor does not nessesarily expect a return on his investment. Either way what the saver expects does not matter.
>while the laborer without a job is getting punished by his enforced idleness.
If the saver instead was in some way obligated to reward the laborer despite providing a negative return then it would reduce the efficency of the total output. The number of laborers rewarded for providing a negative return would increase until there would be a total negative return. whether or not the laborer has no job depends on the ability of the laborer to provide a function that he is paid for. His idleness is forced by not returning any value. Even if he was rewarded for providing a negative return he would still be idle in an economic sense.
>Money without negative return obligates men to become golden statues that never age, a world view that is obviously in dissonance with nature and reality.
Fortunatly money itself can bring a negative return, both by faulty investment and by the devaluation of the money itself comlared to other assets (including other money)
>Whenever the economy isn't growing, people will prefer an asset that bears a 0% return at no risk over any real investment.
False, even when the economy isn't geowing, there is still money to be made by investment at an idividual level
>In other words, there is no such thing as a free market without a monetary reform that allows negative interest rates or simply allows money to expire, the same way people age
This conclusion does not follow your statements above. But money can already expire only not idividual notes but the entire value shrinks such that some of it has expired. For example, if the economy has 1,000 eggs and 1,000 jars of milk, and 1,000,000 dollars and 10 eggs spoil then the value of the 1,000,000 dollars has shrunk by 10 eggs worth.
>Here is another problem, eternal private landownership has the same problem
can you site any examples of land that has been held privatley from the time it was first held until now?
>At a zero interest rate its value is infinite
it isn't infinite because that land takes an infinite amount of time to return an infinite value which is not possible. (compared to investing many other ventures it produces a negative return. Like the apple case except it does not expire).
>What's worth more? Money that works according to supply or demand or land that doesn't? Of course people are going to pick land
Real estate acounts for a large percentage of GDP in the US. But money is a liquid asset, land is not. Banks do not to forclose on houses from the first moment they can because then they have to sell them. But if they wait until the borrower gives them money they don't need to sell anything.
>If landownership was eternal, then owning all of the land on the planet is equivalent to turning everyone else into illegal aliens that merely have been granted permission to exist on the planet and whose permission can be withdrawn at any time.
Can you expound on this point?
>In the face of these two forces there cannot be something like a free market. It would always be a coercive market in one form or another.
There can never be a completly free market but there can be something like a free market.
>It would always be a coercive market in one form or another.
coercive in the sense that people will do things they don't want to such as working.
99.9% of the time regulation is unnecessary. Over-regulation is a huge problem and one that only an actual theoretical free market could address. I see people on HN complaining about last mile politics often. Yet people seem hard pressed to look to the free market for a solution. I'd rather deal with a corrupt CEO whose power will end when their life does, rather than a politician whose power will continue for centuries until someone with a few more brain folds steps in and stops it.
This is an example of the article - libertarianism requires people to replace how things actually work with brief inaccurate summaries of how it works they fit in their heads, and the smarter you are the more incorrect information you can fit in your head and the more wrong you are.
And yet nearly all electronics standards arose through voluntary cooperation. Ever notice the USB socket on your computer? The audio jack? The HDMI port? etc. Did you know that Edison standardized the Edison lightbulb socket, not the government?
> uncontrolled RF emissions,
Again, the free market does not allow one to interfere with other peoples' property.
> and want to pay you in private bank currencies you can’t spend.
Banks solved that problem long ago. The free banking system worked. BTW, we still mostly use PRIVATE BANK CURRENCIES all the time! Amazing, but true. They're called credit cards, bank checks, paypal, venmo, wire transfers, money orders, cashier's checks, etc. Even store coupons are private currency.
> libertarianism requires people to replace how things actually work with brief inaccurate summaries of how it works they fit in their heads, and the smarter you are the more incorrect information you can fit in your head and the more wrong you are.
Have fun debating with me. Good luck!
To reiterate this point the current US dollar is a private dollar issued by a private bank and funded (essentially) by congress and the treasury. The last time the US had a public dollar was prior to the American revolution.
A lot of people make the mistake of conflating The Fed with the government but it is federal in name only. It is owned by private shareholders no different than any other corporation.
LOL. The Federal Reserve System is a sham "private" bank used to get around the Constitution that does not empower the government to print money.
You should check to see who appoints the people that run the Fed.
How do you know the USB shaped sockets on your chargers are actually implementing USB, and not something that either doesn't work or burns your house down? It's partly private enforcement and partly customs blocking imports of things found to be dangerous, but you didn't ask customs to do that.
> Again, the free market does not allow one to interfere with other peoples' property.
This seems like a posthoc principle but isn't proven to be one you could actually build a working government on. ie you're saying "private standards are fine" and "this principle can replace FCC radio regulation", but a government only implementing the NAP is just as capable of banning your "private standards" by declaring them harmful. USB is a kind of cartel after all, it's just one we happen to like.
> BTW, we still mostly use PRIVATE BANK CURRENCIES all the time! Amazing, but true. They're called credit cards, bank checks, paypal, venmo, wire transfers, money orders, cashier's checks, etc. Even store coupons are private currency.
Yes, and why isn't that a problem? Because all those private dollars magically have 1:1 exchange rates to other kinds of dollars. That doesn't happen on its own.
(There are other currencies in the world, and currently a bunch of private ones like stablecoins, and you can read in Matt Levine about how they're constantly blowing up and losing investors' life savings and the inventors are on the run from Interpol.)
Preventing fraud is a proper function of a free market government.
> Because all those private dollars magically have 1:1 exchange rates to other kinds of dollars
No, they don't. Credit cards have a 3% fee tacked on. Paypal does, too. Money orders do. Travelers' checks do. Wired money does. All of them do.
> losing investors' life savings
The government's job in a free market is to protect people from fraud. I've said this a dozen times in this thread. You can stop now bringing up more cases of fraud, as it won't help your case.
My wire transfers costs $0.85 for any domestic transfer. Credit card is a %, but more importantly it doesn't /change/ like foreign transactions do.
> The government's job in a free market is to protect people from fraud. I've said this a dozen times in this thread. You can stop now bringing up more cases of fraud, as it won't help your case.
But can you base a government on that legal principle without the government then inventing all that other stuff you don't like? Libertarians don't really like consumer protection agencies like CFPB I don't think.
Of course the highest office held by a libertarian in California is a Redondo Beach city council member NIMBY who's trying to prevent people from using their property rights (https://mobile.twitter.com/mnolangray/status/156626436981758...). So who knows what that party believes.
This isn't true at all. You basically backed this entire point up with "company store money is bad" which is true. But The Fed issues "Company Store" money that just so happens to be accepted widely. We don't have a public currency. Without a private corporation (The Fed) we would have no money because congress relinquished it's power several hundred years ago, and in 191x they sealed the deal with the Aldrich Bill. If you want to have a truly regulated socialist utopia you're going to need to go back about 200 years to stop the banksters.
"No regulations" does not mean "no standards". The difference is the onus is on the agreement between the company and user. In a theoretical free market (just like your theoretical land where regulation works) companies would cooperate for base goods like sockets, because by standardizing along sockets, other companies would be able to sell more products. Then they can sell more sockets, and the cycle continues. In fact regulation doesn't guide standardization except in the most surface-level sense.
Uncontrolled RF emissions is another strawman. The free market doesn't mean that BigCo. can drop a 5G tower in my backyard. Again, killing people is STILL bad in the libertarian world and exposing people to danger is similarly bad. As a counter-example, EPA regulations have done very little to stop chemical spills. EPA is an "after-the-fact" regulatory agency and companies have incentive to either buy them out (DuPont) or only fix exactly what they say (BP). There's no indication regulation fixed anything. In fact all regulatory agencies can only act after-the-fact. This makes them fundamentally useless towards protecting people before danger strikes. Do you know what spurs regulatory agencies into action? Wide, large scale, protests. These would also work in a free market. If BigCo's towers are microwaving birds the people have a responsibility to stop them. In the current over-regulated environment BigCo simply defers to the agency, which then drags it's feet for 10 years, and then comes up with a half-baked solution that the company finds another end-around for.
You are conflating "regulation" with "standardization" in order to make a point about how libertarians are smooth brained pseudointellectuals but you ended up hurting yourself in the process.
What bothers me even more is the way they arbitrarily divided the top and bottom halves of their data set into two separate data sets. This is highly unusual. Doesn’t the way you draw the line introduce some kind of bias?
I think you cannot draw any concrete conclusions from this data.
I would say that in the past... the average IQ for programmers was higher.
Tech literate maybe, but if we judge from the deplorable quality content of the front page the past 1.5 year...
Unless editorialized titles and 2500-word essays on CRUD are what high cognitive ability people are into now!
I am aware there are exceptions to this, which is the reason I joined the site, but I've become disappointed over time to see that they are indeed a minority.
Maybe none of these are indicative of intelligence. It would be neat if our collective political opinions becoming more extreme was because we are really are just so much smarter, but I don't actually see a reason why there should be any relation between the two. Whether it's more intelligent to take a conservative stance or a liberal stance, whether it's more intelligent to take an extreme stance or a moderate stance-- I think really depends on the situation. If anything it would seem to me that the more unintelligent view might be to too heavily identify with any single point of view.
Like him, I consider myself part of the radical center, which is the opposite of moderate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_middle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Hartmann#Political_views
So I have strong liberal and conservative views which form a self-consistent graph of evidence in my mind. Unfortunately it can be kind of lonely sometimes, because nearly all corporate news plays propaganda in opposition to some of my most fundamental values. That can lead to acute feelings of isolation, especially considering the increasingly partisan politics that have played out over the last 20 years, starting around 9/11, but going all the way back to my earliest memories of Carter, George H.W. Bush and Reagan talking past one another about such obviously logically inconsistent topics as trickle-down economics.
What it all comes down to is that I view our present reality as contrived and based on false pretenses. If people knew what was really going on, there'd be no way they could stay moderate. Which is why vast sums of money are spent to keep people in the dark and/or disenfranchised to keep supermajorities in political districts (or whole states like mine) so the parties can maintain the status quo.
But stuff like student loan forgiveness is the first time in my entire life where I've seen signs that the political tides might be turning. It's worth considering why ideas like that are so controversial. Controversy means that a debate is 50/50. If half the country believes something that strongly, then it can't be dismissed out of hand. We could see some real progress on a number of fronts play out rather quickly.
The way I see it:
1. Intelligence is how fast you can go
2. Knowledge is where you start from
3. Wisdom (or "perspective" as Alan Kay would say) is the direction you are going.
If we think of intellectual activity as searching on the terrain of ideas for truth, knowledge and intelligence can both help you get to the truth faster, but ultimately what matters most is whether you are pointed in the right direction.
[1]: http://jjcweb.jjay.cuny.edu/awinson/public_html/eng100-act/e...
Holy smokes, half? I'll admit this is something that appeals to my biases, but that seems like a rather significant finding (if true)
> Conservative economic attitudes have been theorized as symptoms of low cognitive ability.
This has to be the most formalized way of saying "only dumb people could be conservatives".