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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

I hope more people will pick up on the danger of this slippery slope.

Part of the problem though is that we seem to have a tendency towards polar vortices of worldviews that suck in various issues that aren't even necessarily strongly connected, just to make them more effective in opposing the other side in an excessively concentrated way.

So there is this tendency of social activists towards conformance and centralization in the direction of authoritarianism. But on the other side, total denial of any systemic social problems that results in increasing inequality leaving more and more people fighting for scraps as monopoly powers increase.

I think you need a philosophy and system that embraces both the need for holism on some level, but also the importance of independence and evolution.

Typical human organizations may have a lot of trouble pursuing these goals simultaneously. But I think that the right technologies may be able to make it feasible.

But the first challenge would be for the left to acknowledge the need for freedom and the right to acknowledge the need for average people to exist without fighting for scraps.

It seems the war between camps means that anyone trying to promote a more subtle or intricate message is shunned or ignored by both sides. Leading anyone in the middle to just hide or more likely migrate to a camp and conform.

So I have to conclude that this is not just a left problem.

View on HN

Well, 'slippery slope' is a logical fallacy. The issue here, more precisely, is that without something to push against the US is inculcating ideas into the next generation of leaders that make ex-Soviets think "wait a second, this looks like home!".

It isn't a slope, this is literally rebuilding the dangerous parts of authoritarian bureaucracy - people who can't think and are then given unearned and easily abusable power over others by an objectively dumb system. The US is already there (as I like to point out, about half the US economy is government spending these days - that isn't a free market, it is some sort of mixed open-command economy); it is only a question of how far the ripples reach.

Slippery slope is only a fallacy if you assume a certain form of certainty or determinism. Otherwise it is just an older term referring to Bayesian updating of priors.

I support your railing against bureaucracy, but question your assertion that a specific quantity of public spending is bad.

Firstly, government spending does not imply greater bureaucracy; compare and contrast healthcare in America with pretty much anywhere else.

Secondly, fiscal policy should be dynamic and reactive to economic conditions. I don't pretend to understand Keynes, but I believe he established that principle beyond question. The Austrian school may have challenged it, but their axioms did not survive the light of day.

Keynes has been discredited in recent years, it's odd that you think he's established anything. The Austrians were proven right and recent monetary policy reflects their view - you don't see much discussion of Keynes anymore. If you don't understand Keynes maybe that's why you don't realise that?

To recap Keynes: his core idea was countercyclical monetary policy, i.e. to issue debt (print money) when times are bad and pay down debt (recall money) when times are good.

It sounds good but the Austrians pointed out that there would be two problems in practice:

1. Give governments a nice sounding justification for money printing and they will do it to excess, creating inflation. The Austrians were right: governments cited Keynes when printing money in a recession, and then the "emergency measures" would conveniently never end. The part where you pay down the debt in good times by running a primary surplus would never be respected.

2. Keynes misunderstood the nature and cause of recessions.

Recessions occur when there has been widespread misallocation of resources, usually due to some collective delusion or state mismanagement. The groupthink breaks and people realize that their investments are duds. Credit is withdrawn, investments cease and there's a giant sucking sound as people lose their jobs whilst those who still have money try to figure out what to do next.

Keynes posited that recessions are quasi-natural disasters that just inexplicably happen, and that the fix is for the government to spend money to balance them out. But this isn't the case and so his fix just makes things worse. It may appear to end the recession if all you look at is a handful statistics, but the underlying misallocation still occurred and when governments step in desperate to create employment - any employment - they misallocate resources still further. Like someone taking stimulants to try and delay the end of the party, it works for a while but they get more and more messed up. There's lots of activity but not much is actually useful. Governments don't care though, because all they're trying to do is keep people digging proverbial holes and filling them back up again.

You can drown the signals of a recession by misallocating resources still further, but it's not a good idea.

Keynesianism has worked out in the past 15 years exactly as the Austrians always said it would, and now Austrian economics is back in vogue. The 2008 recession led to the ZIRP years of easy money that never ended, even when the economy was booming. Government debt climbed endlessly. Inflation span out of control and now interest rates have been hiked repeatedly even though the economy was trashed by lockdowns - exactly the moment Keynes said to do the opposite.

I've been lurking on HN for years, and I just created an account to thank you for this post.

I always had this gut feeling that the Keynesianism in the aftermath of 2008 was a really bad idea but economics isn't my space and I don't care to argue with politicos about economics. This explains it really well.

So... now what?

If so, you need to adjust your critical thinking skills. Deeply unnuanced posts about highly debated topics - like the one you replied to - should set off alarm bells. Unless you think that a random HN user (with a very dodgy comment history) can just "set the record straight" after a few decades of debate.

You're welcome!

What now? Well, economics isn't really that complex.

Rule 1. Don't print money - it distorts the natural flow of information and incentives through the market, leading to misallocations.

Rule 2. Get rid of fractional reserve banking. It's an unnatural privilege that other companies would be forbidden from engaging in (it's considered fraud if you don't have a banking license). This forces all interest bearing investment to take place through funds that expose their actual risks and liquidity constraints to investors.

When it's possible to save money risk free because banks can't loan it out and there's no monetary inflation, the moral hazard evaporates and you can allow funds to collapse if they make persistently bad investments. There is no longer any need for bank bailouts.

Recessions can still happen in such a world, because mass hysteria and utopian thinking is a part of human nature. There's no law you can pass to stop people getting over-excited about dotComs or AI startups. You just have to let people work out the true value of these things themselves.

I like your analysis elsewhere. But you can’t avoid misallocations always. Some risk has to be taken by everyone. Even the private markets miscalculate roi.

You also can’t avoid debt (printing money). At the simplest, you can tell yourself you will postpone your own retirement to take the risk of misallocating resources yourself, for a gamble.

That's true, but market misallocations do eventually correct (recessions). Government mandated misallocations can go on for decades without anything to naturally check them.

I'm not sure what you mean in your second paragraph. Keeping the monetary base stable is eminently possible.

You can owe yourself (your future self) money. You can keep energy in reserve or burn at a greater than sustainable rate (give a 110% in nba speak).

You’re gonna love this https://youtu.be/d0nERTFo-Sk

And this

https://youtu.be/GTQnarzmTOc

:-)

Thanks. My door is always open to Cunningham. If you're in a pedagogical mood, may I submit further misconceptions?

I've always linked Keynes with the concept of national debt as a lever to pull, so I'm surprised that you mention printing money. AIUI, the Keynesian approach to the 2008 crisis would have been to issue debt in order to finance public spending, and that spending should be on social security and infrastructure projects. The former stimulates the economy at the roots, the latter generates immediate employment and long-term wealth.

I accept your counters, except that we hope to do better than digging holes and filling them in again. That may be peculiar to America.

I grant that public spending doesn't address the cause of 2008. But sandbags are still useful when the river floods, no? Is gate-shutting the only permissible response to bolted horses, or are we allowed to also engage in horse-fetching?

My weak understanding of the Austrian school is summarised as: small government, laissez-faire, and caveat emptor. I understand them to say of 2008: "you're broke, that's because you took part in an economy where Goldman Sachs pulled a fast one and shat in your pension fund. You should have selected a DESOLBA fund (Doesn't Eat Shit Out of a Lying Bastard's Arse). Now cry."

I observe that our rulers selected a stimulus program that big corp used for stock buyback, and conclude that they used the crisis to advance their own agenda. I understood that they vaunted the Austrian school as the authority for this program. You have disabused me. Please, then, what would von Mises do in 2008?

Digging and refilling holes is a metaphor, it's not meant literally. It's used in economics discussions to refer to any kind of economic activity that's taking place just for the sake of it.

Debt and money printing are intimately linked in our system, to the extent that they're nearly the same thing, which is why I used them interchangeably.

If you go back a few hundred years, money printing was pretty simple: the King wanted more money than he could raise through tax to pay for a war, so he'd debase the currency by reducing the quantity of gold in it. We don't use gold anymore so there's no theoretical limit on how much money can be created.

The creation of central banks introduced an indirection. Nowadays governments pretend to not print money. Instead they always "borrow" it. Sometimes this is actually legitimate borrowing, because the lender is someone domestic or foreign who has some surplus currency and wishes to earn interest on it. But very often the lender is the central bank. The central bank is described as independent, but in fact is just another arm of the government. It is granted special powers by law, and in many countries (e.g. the UK) the head is appointed by the government, answers to government and their salary is paid by taxes. Specifically the Central Bank is allowed to type a higher balance into its own computers, and banks are required to respect that balance. So the Treasury issues bonds, and the CB buys those bonds with newly "typed in" money, and this is just an obfuscated way for the government to print money in the end. They literally borrow from themselves.

You may wonder what happens to the interest payments, if the government is borrowing from itself. The answer is that the Treasury pays the central bank which keeps the interest payments for a while ... and then the Treasury takes them back!

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/nov/09/bank-of-eng...

Repayments meanwhile simply disappear, the money is wired to the central bank and then deleted. This really puts into perspective how meaningless the whole charade really is.

> The former stimulates the economy at the roots, the latter generates immediate employment and long-term wealth.

Well, spending on welfare is an economic depressant, you're paying people to not work. The second part is on firmer ground: Keynesians argue that the government should spend abstractly on "infrastructure" during recessions to stimulate employment (in the construction sectors primarily), and this will create wealth.

But this argument also has great problems. It's not yet as discredited as counter-cyclical monetary policy. You'll see governments refer to this concept routinely. However it doesn't work, conceptually:

1. With only a few exceptions if an infrastructure project was actually worth it the private sector would want to be building it already (because it'd have clearly positive ROI). The exceptions are ones where you need eminent domain to seize large quantities of contiguous land, which pretty much means railways, airports and roads (but usually not roads these days). So either the government can simply take over private sector activity, which doesn't actually improve the economy (same stuff gets built), or it can invest in things with expected negative ROI.

2. Governments have a long track record of being very bad at calculating infrastructure ROI.

The problem is that there are very limited opportunities to build heavy transport projects these days. Look at the difficulties the UK has faced with HS2, Heathrow third runway etc. You have to demolish a lot of homes and people don't like it, and environmental law offers many opportunities for delay, so in practice by the time an infrastructure project gets off the ground the recession was already years in the rear view mirror.

Combine these things and infrastructure spending by governments, counter-cyclical or not, often ends up just being a waste of resources, or very ambiguous at best. The poster child for this problem right now is Belt & Road, although in the past EU spending was also famous (Spain's airports to nowhere, etc). An airport in a place with no demand i.e. not a city, is not literally digging a hole and filling it again, but it's somewhat similar from an economic perspective. You move a lot of earth and in the end it's not useful for much.

> I understand them to say of 2008:

That's not quite what they say about 2008 no lol :)

von Mises would have done nothing in 2008. Just let the recession proceed without interference until it reaches its natural end. Fundamentally those houses just weren't worth much and the debt was bad, no way to go back in time and fix that, so you just have to take the economic hit and let things shake out. It sucks but you can't unspill milk, better to focus on what went wrong and how to avoid a repeat.

The Austrian analysis of 2008 is that it was caused by government interference in the market, specifically, governments became very keen on the idea of everyone being able to own their own home. US law and regulation was changed to strongly incentivize banks to issue mortgages, in particular, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac started buying up pretty much any mortgage going even if it wasn't a good investment, but that didn't matter because the government was always willing to take them. Eventually it all came tumbling down. The fix would therefore be (a) stop government interference in the housing market, (b) forbid fractional reserve banking, which is why banks have to be bailed out when they fail.

There's more to unpack about welfare being "paying not to work" - 82 year olds, absence of employment in mining towns - but you've put the argument for small government well. You made me imagine a monkey driving a bulldozer.

Keynes' error was to pretend that the monkey is a qualified operator who follows the drawings. But the more democratic a nation becomes, the more its leadership resembles a cork bobbing on the tide. Furthermore, economics does not have perfect insight, so even a benevolent dictator will certainly fuck it up if she meddles.

Then, in a recession, you can take action to alleviate the pain somewhat, but you will inevitably just store up future pain for yourself. You could mitigate that future pain once the crisis has passed, but you won't, because the mitigation will alienate the voters. The pretence that you'll accept even a tiny amount of pain in the good times is the self-deception of an addict.

How am I doing?

This then reduces to the trolley problem. Where the one person on the side track is only presumed to be there, but might actually be further down the main track, and might get rescued anyway.

Here's my problem with von Mises. The cause of 2008 was a period of deregulation, basically Jamie Dimon going "trust me, bro" and kicking his lips. It's not an economic cause, it's a political one; but if we examine economists' contribution to the issue, we see decades of free-market-fundamentalism which, I put it to you, created massive overconfidence. The neolibs got exactly what they wanted and created a peculiarly neolib crisis. So the Austrian school is just as fingers-in-ears deaf to political folly as Keynes.

Right, 82 year olds can't usually work anyway so state pensions are indeed not holding back the economy. It gets blurrier in the somewhat common case where state pensions can be awarded at, e.g. 55 (see Greece, US air traffic controllers...). I was mostly thinking of minimum wages, out-of-work credits, long term disability benefits in the case where working is actually possible, etc.

I think your description of Keynesian monetary policy in terms of addiction is interesting!

You can view 2008 as either caused by regulation or deregulation, it's a fascinating event in that way, and is why different parties were at loggerheads over it.

The view that it was caused by deregulation is as you say: banks were allowed to do risky things that leveraged up their risk until they were going to fail, and this provoked the crisis.

The view that it was caused by regulation is to observe that the only reason banks aren't allowed to collapse in the first place is the odd way in which they are regulated. A banking license is a regulatory permission to tell people they have $1000 on deposit whilst not actually being able to service such a withdrawal. In the case of a normal company like FTX, that's fraud. With the right license, it's not.

If retail banks weren't allowed to do anything with deposits except keep them safe, they could not have become endangered by bad aggregated mortgage debt, and then could have just been allowed to fail. It would have hurt investors a ton but bubbles always do - the ATMs would have kept working though and that's what politicians really respond to, the crisis of the innocent working guy. To fix this situation you don't pass a law, you repeal a law, hence, caused by regulation.

A warning to others: This is far more contested, and more nuanced, than this post makes it out to be. I believe this narrative as stated would not fly without lots of debate and pushback in any mainstream economics department today.

Among many other things, the recent history (of inflation, recession, and economic growth over the past 4 years) is completely wrong: stimulus was used during the COVID recession (early 2020), and the recession was very brief as a result. In the US we have had steady and strong growth continuously outside a short drop around March 2020. Inflation set in around a year later (due to many factors, not monetary or fiscal policy alone -- but again, this is complex and highly contested). Interest rates started being raised seriously two years later (spring 2022). Economic growth has continued throughout this process aside from the early-mid 2020 lockdown shock. There was never a time when "interest rates [were] hiked even though the economy was trashed by lockdowns."

University economics departments are probably still bastions of Keynesianism, but they aren't the ones whose opinions really matter :)

COVID certainly saw stimulus be used, but I didn't say that's when Keynesianism was discredited. It's really happened during the post-pandemic recovery period.

The US claims to be experiencing strong growth right now, but there are reasons to be a bit skeptical of that. Opinion polls that have historically always tracked reported economic performance have now diverged significantly, with people telling pollsters that they feel the economy is poor whilst the government announces that it's actually doing great. This leads left wing economists like Noah Smith to claim that there's suddenly a sort of ignorance crisis in which people have suddenly stopped being able to assess their own economic security. I think it's more likely that US data has gone bad, ably assisted by a very pro-Biden civil service. For example one metric they use to measure economic strength is job openings, but read any thread about the job market on HN and you'll see lots of highly skilled people struggling to find work along with many reports of what appear to be fake job openings, held open just to collect CVs.

In Europe what we see is very weak or non-existent growth when controlled for inflation despite truly vast levels of immigration, i.e. real economy is probably shrinking in the UK:

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-constant-pri...

Did shrink in Germany:

https://archive.is/F2IX2

And inflation has reached very high levels.

For an Austrian "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon". The post-COVID inflation is for them entirely a function of stimulus, which you'd expect to have a delayed impact in that case because when the stimulus money landed in people's bank accounts everywhere people might spend it was closed. The economy reopens, travel becomes possible again and that money starts flowing out of the bank. Inflation appears immediately, exactly as expected.

Again it's a clearer picture in Europe. The UK started rapidly raising interest rates at the start of 2022, just as COVID was ending. Two years of lockdowns had left the economy in a terribly weakened state, nobody in the UK would claim the boom times were back, yet the BoE left Keynesianism behind and ramped up interest rates to levels last seen just before the last crisis in 2008. Back then they reacted by dropping rates to zero. This time they reacted by raising them to historical norms. A pretty clear repudiation of Keynes.

Slippery slope is not a fallacy when you are merely observing what already happened.

The slippery slope is a fallacy when it is assumed it will surely happen.

Hey, looking for a source for "about half the US economy is government spending these days". I've searched online for 2023 and I'm seeing a pretty okay 23% for government spending.

> we seem to have a tendency towards polar vortices of worldviews

First past the poll voting with primaries encourages (forces) politicians to go to the extremes. Ranked choice voting can reduce extremism. It’s also cheaper for tax payers as it eliminates expensive and wildly discriminatory/disenfranchising runoff elections.

Many Americans already don't understand progressive tax as a concept. How can we realistically expect them to understand ranked choice voting?

The same way other nations do?

It's vital that a democratic nation fully understands the method they use to elect representatives. People need to understand how their vote maps to a preference, and how their votes are tallied to determine who wins and who doesn't.

If a significant share of the electorate does not understand the vote tallying process and expects an outcome different from the one that actually resulted from counting the votes, you will get accusations of vote fraud and election tampering.

Seems like you've already got that problem with FPTP.

(What I'm getting at is that the problem's not the voting system, it's something else).

Maybe, but on a maslow pyramid of healthy democracy, that would be a tier above an informed electorate and critical thinking skills.

If you figure out how to develop those, please include Britain on your speaking tour.

Proof by example: Alaska already does ranked choice voting

https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php

True, but that doesn't actually establish that voters understand how it works. IIRC, they've only had it for a short time, so there's not much of a track record to establish that voters are casting votes in ways that are consistent with their beliefs and desires.

1) Americans don't understand progressive tax because they are constantly being bombarded with information as to what it means. If you watch Fox news daily you will have a misunderstanding on the matter. Take care to make generalizations when you see things like knowledge differences divided between party lines. People aren't different, but the information they get is.

2) Many social choice experts advocate for cardinal systems over ordinal. Approval is quite popular due to its simplicity and effectiveness while Star or Score improve on alignment but all of these are substantially better than the current system. Cardinal has the advantage in the tabulation being that you do not need multiple elections (exception of Star, which is strictly 2 elections), and you can do a parallelized reduce sum tabulation. So algorithmically it is easy to understand (sum columns/candidates, pick largest total: argmax(column sum)). That has implications for transparency and election security. Some people are convinced these methods are harder for people to understand but I'd refer you back to point 1 and add that we're also very used to these systems as we're currently using a cardinal voting system on HN.

It is plain from the stories of fox news orphans that information diet can ruin good people, but I refuse to believe that people aren't different.

I rebut your thesis thus: Oskar Schindler.

What do you think the main difference in people is? Biological? Because I'm saying environmental. I'm not sure why you reference Schindler. Certainly there is a distribution and I'm not claiming people are clones (I don't think you are either). So outliers aren't proof of anything, to either argument.

I think Dawkins' model of memes is helpful.

I'm going to use freighted language and examples for brevity. Readers, please be generous; I'm doing conservatism because it's the topic on hand, but this applies equally to progressivism.

A meme is the fundamental unit of transmissible culture - a catchy tune, laying napkins on the lunch table, the concept of punishment for wrongdoers. Memes are hosted in sentient minds.

A baby's first memes come from its parents. Subsequently, from family, babysitters, toys, telly, other children, books.

Memes are virulent to different degrees. An earworm is very infectious, but greeting people with "howdie doodie" is not particularly so.

A meme may fade away from a host in time, or be displaced by another meme, or last a long time in the host's mind.

Individuals are more or less susceptible to any given meme. This is influenced by the memes they have already. Some memes reinforce each other, and are often found together and transmitted together - for example, the meme for belief in god tends to cohabit with the meme for prayer, and we observe them being transmitted together.

The belief in a holy text tends to confer resistance to displacement on proximate memes such as the belief in a personal deity, and also tends to cause the host to expend effort on transmitting the meme complex. These meme complexes are self-sustaining.

We might expect meme complexes that include dogma to confer great tenacity on accompanying memes. Good luck convincing a fundie that the earth is old; their memes inoculate them against arguments.

So we have the fox news complex: initial infection is through mild right-wing memes, affect the host's behaviour, and increase susceptibility to secondary infections such as "election was stolen" or "9/11 was an inside job".

Someone with a very strong base set of memes, such as critical thinking or compassion, is much less susceptible to all the constituent memes of the fox complex. But someone with a weak base meme type - say, consumerism and apathy to books - is more easily infected.

I'm not aware of any research in this field. Do please improve my understanding!

While I think at the broader level you are correct in mechanism I'm unconvinced that this is how it works in reality. There are too many examples of ideas spreading like wildfire far faster than people die out. Ideas that people hold with high passion. An example might be same-sex marriage where we see a larger rate of increase in support post legalization[0]. While younger generations have higher initial support, all generations increase in their support. 30% in the 00's and 60% today for the 55+ age group. That can't be due to the transfer of 35-55's because their baseline was only 40% in the 00's.

Remember that Dawkins use the analogy of a virus, not of an inheritable disease. Certainly you are correct in part as there are analogies to inheritable diseases with thought but it's also important to remember how quickly these mutate and that the mutation does not occur at inheritance like this is a game of telephone (in some way it is, but I hope that was clear). Moreso, things are mutating faster than ever. Religion is a great example of this, as it is a highly inheritable belief, yet the rate at which interpretations of a religious text has changed has changed much quicker than before. That's because, unsurprisingly, the interpretations are a reflection of ourselves and our times are changing faster than ever.

I don't know how old you are, but I do remember a time before Fox news and before the 24hr news cycle. They first took off around 9/11 and then gained many more during the financial crisis. I grew up in a Fox family and unlike my many liberal friends (which I am undoubtedly left), I will occasionally watch such shows like Bill O'Riley, Hanity, or Tucker. Why? Because they are well scripted programs that exploit the aforementioned principles. It helps me prepare for the nonsense my dad says during holidays. There's two points here which I'll rely on inference for as I'm already writing a lot. The first is about how they can rapidly change long held beliefs (e.g. Russians are the bad guys) and the second is about how this exercise let's me interrupt my dad (and uncle and BIL) and tell them exactly what they are about to say.

Everyone can be manipulated, including you and me. We're being constantly manipulated and not always by intentional forces (more often unintentionally). Dawkin's viral theory is a great place to start but like viruses you have to understand that there's a much more complex and intricate system involved that creates a large array of effects and you're not wrong that there are both genetic and environmental predisposition that makes a virus worse for some than others. But the same goes for the reproduction rate as well as mutation rate. The truth is that you can convince fundies that the Earth is old. I know this because I am an example. I know this because the rate of people like me is not just increasing, but accelerating. Apples fall a lot further from the tree than they used to, not because the laws of physics changed, but because the geography did. So either you believe that I'm (and others) are an exception to the rule or that there is an underlying mechanism that allows this to happen. The former does not have explanatory power for the increase, let alone the acceleration.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/350486/record-high-support-same...

Yes, viruses are a very useful concept. Ideas propagate in ways that put us in mind of epidemiology.

Genotype is, broadly speaking, determined at birth. But our set of memes is in flux to a greater or lesser degree. That degree is the topic at hand; why are some more susceptible than others? I'm floating the idea that it's due to the ideas you already have at the time. That's why I brought up that some ideas confer resistance to certain other ideas.

Imagine instead a bacterium that is invaded by a variety of retroviruses, each of which change its DNA. Some of those DNA changes might increase our decrease resistance to some other retroviruses.

It's clear that strict logical consistency is not a necessary condition. Perhaps we could explore what "emotional consistency" might mean. It feels correct for me to say that when a person encounters an idea, the idea creates logical and emotional associations to other ideas that they hold, and that if the emotions reinforce the person's self-image, they will tend to adopt the new idea and incorporate it into their world-view. But I'm making this up - don't ask me to defend any of this!

Didn't want to pollute my effortpost, but: thanks for clarifying, and I agree that the Schindler outlier isn't a point.

> First past the poll

might be a typo, but it's first past the post , not poll; in case someone else gets it confused not knowing the term.

IDK the rules but I’m unable to edit the post anymore, thanks for the assist.

You can go much further and adopt more direct democratic approaches, for example, referendums, which focus more on actual issues than on which individual gets the power. This can also reduce extremism, as it requires (and causes) a wider debate (and thus mutual understanding) in society.

There is a historic reason why US and UK suffer from this problem the most, because they were built primarily on liberalism and not democracy. (Although to be fair, many US states has actually have quite a bit of direct democracy as a remainder from progressive era at the beginning at 20th century, and we would probably find that in issues that are put to referendums, people tend to vote much less by the partisan divides.)

counterpoint to referendums: Brexit, which has been a disaster for Britain.

Sure, counterpoint to freedom is that you can make a mistake. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have that freedom.

The Brexit referendum was organized (and supported) by the conservative government, which wanted more neoliberalism. It was more of a populist stunt than the expression of the will of the people. That's not true to the spirit of referendums or direct democracy - these should exist to allow people to discuss, raise and vote on issues aside from the government.

That characterisation is imprecise to the point of being misleading; may I tell the story in detail?

I particularly rebut any suggestion that the Tories organised the referendum. That's only true at the most superficial reading. The whole farrago (pun intended) was founded by fringe nutters in the party, offered as a sop by the party leadership, and co-opted and orchestrated by interests inimical to the nation. (There is a case to answer for treason.)

Ever since the first referendum to join the EU in 1975, the anti-Europe faction of the Tory party was muttering in dark corners.

They gathered political strength at the fringe, slowly bolstered by drips of propaganda such as Boris Johnson's baseless claim, as a journalist, that the EU regulated the bendiness of bananas. In 2013, a nameless senior Tory in the orthodoxy coined the phrase "swivel-eyed loons".

Boris Johnson, may he swing, is every bit as much a fabricator as Donald Trump. If truth enters his speech, it's because it got lost.

_Aside: English politics has always been a straight left-right axis, with the left split between Labour and Lib Dems but the right united in the Tories. Labour had always had a strong socially-conservative constituency, but social conservatism has never been a campaign theme, AFAICR, beyond "tough on crime", which is a cheap vote-winner for anyone anywhere. The Labour Party is relatively new, but the Tories and Lib Dems trace their ancestry back to the same Tory-Whig axis that America inherited. Brexit turned that axis into a quadrant, with the LDs united but with the Tories and Labour split._

After they dicked over the plebs with austerity in a recession, the nation was angry with neoliberals, and the anti-EU gang fed on that. Not without reason, given how Greece got the shaft to protect German investors.

Campaigning for an outright majority in 2013, Cameron (a widely-used nickname for Pigfucker) offered the loons a referendum to keep them inside the tent; if the right split, it would have been a huge embarrassment for him. At that point, an anti-EU platform would not have taken many votes, but they would mostly have been Tory votes.

The Tories were already a neoliberal govenment, and they were blithely confident that they would win the referendum - it was a free hit for the loons, which was supposed to shut them up for another decade. Cameron had nothing to gain except silencing an annoying sideshow. He was already five years into an aggressive neoliberal strategy.

He shrugged off the power of bullshit stories such as "bendy bananas" and "Romanian squatters", despite the fact that they were in the Sun (proles), the Mail (proles with pretensions of intelligence), the Spectator (unintelligent toffs), and the Telegraph (obedient middle class). My apologies if you take the Spectator for the cartoons.

Despite their swivelly eyes, the Leave campaign acquired a huge war chest - namely, money from forex speculators and from Russia, which tells you exactly who benefits.

_Aside: London has been a haven for Russian money since glasnost. Russian oligarchs had been funding the Tories for years. Russia had total access to English politics up until the 2022 sanctions. The report from the inquiry into Leave campaign irregularities was suppressed._

The Leave backers brought in Steve Bannon, fresh from Trump's campaign. Bannon is not a great talent, but, in the milieu of English political campaigns, he was ahead of the curve. England was unprepared for bare-faced lies being astroturfed on Facebook.

Meanwhile, Cameron burned his war chest on fucking leaflet drops.

Cameron failed to generate any positive talking points, and expected to win by default. He argued that we'd become poor if we left Europe, which did little to sway working-class voters whom he had spent 6 years impoverishing. This arrogance was reflected by Gove's soundbite "people in this country have had enough of experts".

A new constituency emerged: "gammon", named for their ruddy complexions; choleric boomers, typically educated and middle-class but who long ago waved goodbye to curious intelligence, susceptible to and active on Facebook. These people are not as bad as your American fox news zombies, but of the same ilk - spittle-flecked rants at the breakfast table, "simple common sense", highly emotional yet sublimely certain of their own rationality. These chumps did not have a legitimate grievance against the government or the EU; their apoplexy was inchoate; they were merely channeled by the grifters.

Combine the gammon with the uninformed working class plebs, who bought into the threats of waves of gypsies arriving from Romania and mixed it with baseline sentiment against immigrants from all countries, and also the huge constituency that just wanted to give the arrogant neoliberals a black eye, and you have a win against the odds for Leave.

Excuse my rambling. It's hard to be concise when you're incandescent with fury.

Your ignorance is clear from near the start of your rant.

"Ever since the first referendum to join the EU in 1975"

The referendum in 1975 asked "Do you think that the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community (the Common Market)?"

We'd already been forced into the EC (the predecessor of the EU) without our consent. We were then forced into the EU without our consent as well.

I think the people have had enough of experts.

What if experts ran day-to-day things, but the people could override the experts with a popular vote?

Sounds like Switzerland. I think it works well there. But the Swiss make a virtue of civic duty, and, IIUC, voting is frequent and somewhat compulsory, which I imagine tends to sustain an informed electorate.

If you don't have an informed electorate, then you're in danger of Brexit. I could paste my previous, but let's just say that sheep exist to be fleeced.

I read quite a bit on Swiss democracy and the causality seems to be the other way around than politicians elsewhere always claim. Having lots of referenda on many levels (local, cantonal, federal) increases voter participation and makes people more informed and involved in politics.

I agree - I'd call it a virtuous cycle. Although I suppose there's a time and effort cost.

But I dint see how, e.g. the UK, could get there from here. If we started having six referenda a year, I foresee the electorate largely switching off, leaving only the rabid and the pensioners. They don't need any more influence.

If we campaigned for this change, the campaign won't survive its first day. There's nothing in it for the legacy media, and it's not snappy enough to go viral.

Perhaps if we first moved to coalition-based politics, the way would open to direct democracy? I anyway like coalition-based politics on its own merits, which I hope would be:

- increased voter information and engagement - moving discourse from identity politics to issues - reduce the power of media interests - offer choices between broad manifestos and single-issue campaigns - enfranchise people not represented by the current dominant parties - capture voter preferences more accurately - reduce the cyclical nature of government - due to which, promote long-term thinking

Germany looks like a happy example; Israel looks like a problematic one. Israel suffers from an intolerant minority; from here, the tail looks to be wagging the dog on all the big issues, which is not a healthy dynamic. I think that's particular to that nation, though.

Coalition politics is still a very tough sell in countries with FPTP. We'd have to start by abolishing that.

Every time I think through a political issue, I arrive at the same conclusion: the most pressing issue for the UK and America is the abolition of FPTP. It's frustrating.

Why do people keep repeating this lie; there is no Brexit disaster. Life goes on as normal in post Brexit Britain; lockdowns did way more harm than Brexit and we've mostly recovered from those. The rest of the EU seems to be suffering more economically than Britain. We're selling more into the EU than when we were in the EU, have many trade agreements with US states and other countries, were ahead of the EU with Covid vaccines and first to support the Ukraine.

Geez dude, we are living in two very different Britains.

He listed a series of facts. You are living in that Britain even if you don't realize or accept it. The different Britain you believe you inhabit may exist only in your mind.

Because they think they’re “citizens of the world” and ideologically believe nation-states are obsolete.

You are evidence for the argument made by the comment you replied to.

You think it is more important that the right (in your opinion) decision is made than the decision the electorate prefers is made.

This is actually a general argument in favour of rule by an oligarchy of experts rather than democracy.

An oligarchy of elected experts is precisely what representative democracy is. Giving every decision directly to the voters is not something you see in any democracy today. We elect people to make these decisions on our behalf.

Experts in what? They are only expert in getting elected. Few of them have any expertise relevant to the position they are elected to.

A lot of decisions are also subjective - not how best to achieve an objective, but what what your objectives are.

Hopefully experts in lawmaking. Of course you’re right that we as an electorate do terrible job of electing good lawmakers, but that’s on us, not the lawmakers. You’re absolutely right that this system sucks because of this. In fact, it’s the worst system of government in the world, except for all the others.

That's the wrong way around, I don't think any conventional analysis of voting systems concludes that.

FPTP forces parties to the center, because they have to be pre-formed coalitions before going to the polls. Single issue parties and fringe parties end up with nothing in FPTP.

That's why the usual argument for PR is that it allows smaller (fringe/extreme) parties to exist and have influence, so represents minorities better.

In practice this is what we see. Countries with PR often have very powerful fringe or single issue parties (often the Greens), whereas in countries with FPTP the main parties are all big tents that just represent the centre-left or centre-right.

> with FPTP the main parties are all big tents that just represent the centre-left or centre-right.

FPTP by itself might not be so bad, but combine it with primaries and you’ve got a recipe for extremism and scorched earth politics. Now throw in gerrymandering and we’ve got a wildly unrepresentative election process.

Don’t get me started on the electoral college either. I’m for a national popular vote.

FPTP essentially means that the actual government is operated as a time-limited dictatorship, since it's a winner-takes-all system. That means that once the elections are over, there is no need for actual politicking and bridge-building, the reigning champion or party can do whatever they like (according to some, even including killing their rivals /s).

In multi-parliamentary systems, the politicking does not end when the elections are over.

First Past The Post is the cause of many of the political ills in the United States, and I used to think RCV was the answer. But it is a disaster:

1. The rate of spoiled ballots goes way up, and disproportionately so in lower-income areas (https://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html#minn). Suppressing 3 to 5% of the vote in poor districts would be devastating; the winning margin is smaller than that in lots of elections.

2. With RCV, sometimes voting for someone you like will make them lose (https://rangevoting.org/ClayIrv2.html).

3. RCV doesn't break us out of two-party dominance. Once a third-party candidate gains more support, they can still be a spoiler under RCV, forcing you to choose between the lesser of two evils.

4. Audits are essential to ensure an accurate count, but RCV makes them vastly more difficult because you can't add up the votes from smaller districts to get the overall result.

5. Let's have voting machine companies write more unreviewed proprietary software and make it more complicated, that sounds like a great idea!

There's a much better method that actually does help us escape two-party rule. It's simple, cheap, well-tested, accessible, easy to understand, and doesn't even require changing any ballots or software. That method is Approval Voting (https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i...). Simply:

• Use the same ballots as we do today

• Let people vote for all the candidates they like

• Count all the votes

Done. No new ballots, no new procedures, no new software, and extremely simple to explain to voters.

Here's the intuition for why this works. When you vote using the current system, expressing support for one candidate requires you to withdraw your support from another candidate. RCV is the same in that you can only have one first choice: if you want to rank one candidate higher, you must rank another candidate lower. That's what keeps you from voting for your true favourite. With Approval Voting, your decisions about each individual candidate are fully independent: how you vote on one candidate has no effect on any other candidate. So you can express your full support for your favourite without harming the "lesser evil" candidate.

RCV is frequently criticized by mathematicians and economists, who are familiar with its many problems. This is one of those uncommon situations where the theorists and pragmatists agree: Approval is better from both perspectives.

> So there is this tendency of social activists towards conformance and centralization in the direction of authoritarianism. But on the other side, total denial of any systemic social problems that results in increasing inequality leaving more and more people fighting for scraps as monopoly powers increase.

Basically, from both ends of the spectrum here comes the tendency of concentrating and monopolizing power politically or economically. We are losing agency as individuals actors in the society.

> I hope more left-leaning people will pick up on the danger of this slippery slope.

They already spent the last few decades objecting to Joseph McCarthy. Denunciation of his evil, and celebration of his downfall to the "Have you no shame?" speech, was an element of modern leftist canon.

If they couldn't recognize what was happening every time they mentioned his name, they never will.

I think you are unfortunately correct, although I don't think it's accurate to frame this as an issue which only affects the left (though maybe that isn't what you meant). It's clear that humans simply aren't capable of learning to not go on witch hunts. Even with all of the time we spent teaching our children about Salem, Joseph McCarthy, and the like, it goes out of people's heads the instant they encounter a cause they think is righteous and important enough. At this point it seems clear that witch hunts are hardwired into too many human brains to be able to educate people out of it. We will need to figure out how to structure society in such a way that the tendency does as little damage as we can manage.

I don't think the behavior is something specific to the left. What is specific to the left is making opposition to witch hunts an explicit element of their catechism. Thus engaging in witch hunts reflects more poorly on them.

I don't know. I recall listening to conservative thinkers discuss the left. I'm not talking about alt-right or hard-right bozos, I'm talking about Thomas Sowell and Bill Bennett. They consistently used words like "opponent" or "opposition" when describing fellow Americans with differing worldviews. Then they dive into the ideas.

While I don't recall, for example, President Obama or President Clinton saying things like "enemy" or "evil" when describing fellow citizens, we do have candidates and mainstream press using much harsher and more negative terms. I started watching a video from the self-avowed "left" discussing what the left ought to know about the right (pushed by the algorithm). The expert being interviewed was a professor of some sort, and in his very first answer he used the phrase "fight the enemy" and "understand the enemy" when describing how to deal with half the population of fellow citizens who disagreed with his ideology.

Hillary Clinton's memorable "basket of deplorables" is another. Don't get me wrong. Ten years ago, you wouldn't hear that kind of rhetoric from conservatives. But conservatism has been swallowed by alt-right Trump-style populism. I try to tune out the rants coming from the far right, so I imagine there are plenty of examples coming from awful sources. But this "enemy" rhetoric should never come out of the mouth of anyone respectable when speaking of their own countrymen or countrywomen.

I think I agree with you in that it is "not just a left problem" but there seems to have been a predominance of this "kill the enemy" rhetoric coming more from the left for many decades, than from the right. Part of the reason for this is that so many of the leftist playbooks like Rules for Radicals or Marxist strategy papers from Engels include "destroying the enemy" (encompassing eliminating morality, eliminating traditional family units, and fomenting violent revolt). Playbooks on the right, traditionally, have included understanding the rhetoric of the left, analyzing its ideas in terms of economics and personal freedom, and using debating tactics to "win" arguments.

I have to conclude that this is not just a "both sides" problem, but that one side spends a lot more of its energy on pushing toward the extremes.

While I largely agree with what you said, about

> there is this tendency of social activists towards conformance and centralization in the direction of authoritarianism

I don't think that's the case, actually. I suspect the tendency actually comes from liberalism, i.e. notion of individual freedom. If we are to give people individual freedom, then we are going to be neglectful of the power they attain as groups. This is easily observable in the economic sphere, where the rich people are getting richer under liberalism, and as you note, we are oblivious to the plight of losers.

Another problem that you note is that the conflict is treated as two sides. In my personal political philosophy, there are 4 basic (sets of) moral values:

1. Value of human being itself (this gives ideology of humanism, rejection of which can be considered to be extremist), i.e. rejecting harm to humans, accepting humans as they are, forgiveness

2. Value of individual freedom (this gives ideology of liberalism, which is inherently neither left or right, usually considered "center"), i.e. most individual rights, rights to freely socially organize, ability to act independently to society

3. Value of human equality (this gives ideology of progresivism/socialism, which is the core of the "left"), i.e. this includes democracy, the idea we should collectively all have equal rights in society, we should all have fair access to economic resources, also strong moral universalism (also in this context, this also includes DEI)

4. Value of culture and our shared past (this gives ideology of conservativism, which is the core of the "right"), i.e. we should preserve existing (social) structures and culture through institutions, we should have property ownership, and we should have authorities in place to preserve the potentially harmful changes in society

It's pretty easy to see that all these values are logically independent, people do however largely share all of them. However, each person sees the world from a slightly different perspective on each issue, moral dilemmas tend to occur where there is a disagreement.

For example, the tendency of society towards centralization and authoritarianism is just an expression of value (4). It happens more or less independently of values (2) or (3) (neither of them really values time, unlike (4)), although the proponents of (2), being by nature more permissive, oblivious to any social institutions and not defining the desired end result, tends to allow it to happen much faster (this is also called paradox of tolerance).

So while I agree when you write:

> It seems the war between camps means that anyone trying to promote a more subtle or intricate message is shunned or ignored by both sides.

I don't think there are just 2 sides, there are at least 4 big sides, see above; however, treating problems as 2-sided is often practical in terms of acquiring political power.

I do however take slight issue with:

> But the first challenge would be for the left to acknowledge the need for freedom and the right to acknowledge the need for average people to exist without fighting for scraps.

You're saying, people who value (3) need to acknowledge (2) and vice versa. I agree with this idea (that was actually why I developed the above philosophy, to understand these contradictions), but the practical reality is different than what you wish. Most of the left is more accepting of liberalism than liberals are accepting of the left (historically, at the French revolution, the liberal ideas were part of the left, while the right was only values of (4), like there should exist nobility). And in fact, the Western societies are now so heavily tilted towards values of (2) that the centrists proudly think they can ignore (3) completely. In fact, ignoring (3) by liberals is dangerous and historically led to concentration of power and fascism (which is an extreme of (4)), and that's what we observe (that's why anybody who wants power goes after (3) sooner before they go after (2) - often by falsely adopting (3) as an ideological goal, because individuals are harmless, it's the ability of groups to organize through shared value of (3) that is a dangerous antidote to concentrated power).

Most leftists can also easily see through what DEI is being promoted honestly, as being true to values of (3), and what is just an ideological BS (and whitewashing) designed to attain power. I mean, if corporations (true for many academic institutions as well) really wanted DEI, they would promote more democracy in the workplace (and transformed the corporations into cooperatives, for example). Claudine Gay affair is a nice practical example of these institutions (and their masters) showing true colors.

> Most of the left is more accepting of liberalism than liberals are accepting of the left

This isn't true, it is legal to be a communist in capitalist countries but many communist countries made it illegal and imprisoned anyone who argued for capitalism. Liberalism wins when people get to vote and decide, people hate when their liberties gets taken away so you need to become authoritarian to push further than for example Scandinavia.

And even USA is a counter example, it is full of social programs and the state controls 40% of the GDP so the private sector is just 60%, meaning it is already a compromise between the ideologies. Liberalism is very accepting of different ideals and how they can fit together, it is when you remove it that you get to a bad spot.

When I am talking about acceptance of the values of equality (3) from liberals, I mean willingness to compromise and understand the benefit of value (3) for society. You're talking about acceptance on paper - yeah, you can have all these fringe ideas, and talk about them all you want, as long as they are not actually implemented. Which is nothing more than value (2).

And communist countries.. ah what a stupid trope (most of the self-declared "communist" countries were simply right-wing dictatorships). I am pretty sure in e.g. Kerala you can have any beliefs you want. Ideologically, communism is a whole spectrum of ideas between values of (3) and (4), and it doesn't even explicitly reject (2) (although the most famous implementations did that).

You're ignoring the fact that any ideology can be abused for power. A good example is Milei in Argentina, who is claiming to be a liberal as a means of becoming an authoritarian dictator. Yet it doesn't devalue liberalism.

Taking any of the values (2), (3), (4) to the extreme (in particular, at the expense of (1)) is dangerous and liberalism is not different. It just manifests as a different blind spot, in liberalism (value (2)) taken to extreme, it is a blind spot towards people at the extremes of the social hierarchy. Values (3) or (4) taken to extreme share a blind spot towards individual self-expression.

> yeah, you can have all these fringe ideas, and talk about them all you want, as long as they are not actually implemented.

Every developed nation is full of social programs to help the poor and give people things they need to live a good life. It varies a bit from country to country, but even USA has programs to give schooling to every kid and feed the poor so they don't starve and ensure even the poor get healthcare.

So no, I don't accept your argument here, we today do listen a lot to leftist ideas and implemented a ton of them, the evidence for that is everywhere.

I am not sure what country you're from, but if it's a Western one, it's unlikely that you have recently (in the past 40 years) fully adopted a more leftist proposal or idea compared to what was accepted 40 years back. So things as social programs largely exist as a consequence of value (3) being understood (and fought for) as important, rather than liberals understanding their importance (in fact, they let lot of it slide in the neoliberal era).

Although to be fair, dominance of ideological liberalism is probably ending, but it yet has to manifest in practical policies. In practical terms, value of (2) is the most important for the middle class, in contrast with value (3) which is the most important for the working (bottom) class, and value (4) which is the most important for the ruling (top) class. So the decline in the middle class (being teared apart by social inequality) in the US is changing the ideological dominance of (2). It's really just another way of reframing my point about liberalism causing its own demise.

That's why, when I am talking about importance of (3) compared to (2), I am not talking about just the bottom of social hierarchy, i.e. giving something to poor people to eat so they don't die (this is actually more based on value (1) than (3)). The value of (3) is also about having a political power (and democracy), and as such the top of the social hierarchy (to which liberalism is oblivious to) needs to be addressed as well. Value of (2) cannot do much about abuse of power by billionaires, for instance. It's simply out of the scope - as far as liberals are concerned, their existence and economic influence is fair and square. And that's why it can lead to fascism. (And we can see in practice, US is not very democratic at the moment, the will of majority of people is ignored in actual policy, but the will of the rich people prevails.)

Addendum (rereading my previous comment): Historically, the hubris that lead to suffering you describe under totalitarian communist regimes was ideological ignorance of value (2) (or (4) for that matter) when implementing (3), as in the circumstances of the communist revolutions, the (3) becomes a cultural hegemon. I think the left mostly learned from that, i.e. you can't have (3) without respecting (2), and also revolutions are tricky (meaning attaining anything without respecting (4) can be bloody). Today however, we are in a different situation, (2) has the cultural hegemony, and so the understanding that (3) is important has been lost to some extent, due to the same ideological hubris (but this hubris of liberals also exists towards conservatives, i.e. value (4), showing that it really comes from its ideological hegemony).

The first statement is not true, there were many capitalist countries that simply murdered anyone left of centre. Hell, its illegal to be a communist in Germany!

> So I have to conclude that this is not just a left problem

In America, the conservative movement drove fealty to ideals and invented cancel culture. It wasn’t leftists insisting our money trust god or that small children pledge allegiance.

The left adopted it because people were committing suicide because of the systematic hate and discrimination.

The religious right wing invented it because their feelings were hurt if everyone didn’t believe in their same sky fairy and preferred economic religion.

Specifically it's reactionary to American conformism

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