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Comment by CyMonk | Hacker News Reader

I often wish I lived in a world where people understood that social democracy, socialism, Marxism, and communism are not synonyms.

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Redo the whole justification and analysis based on network effects and utility to payor instead of from each according to his ability to each according to his need and this statement would become a lot more practically believable

Insurance!

-is based on network effects

-has utility to both payor and payee

-long modelled as "from each according to his ability to each according to his need"

-is already practically believable

-only synonymous with "gambling"

Incorrect. Insurance is modelled on expected value with premiums that provide a profit on average across a pooled group. Try again.

So is gambling but we also know that is a joke.

The point is that leveraging some subtle disparities in EV* would what'd be necessary for something like the above "ideologies" to "work" over time (although so far the politicians on the whole don't think like this)

*usually supported by better data and models, which is what governments that don't piss the people off with taxes are good at

Perhaps true regarding requiring the change to payor expected value to work, however, if you made that change you would no longer have social democracy, socialism, Marxism, or communism because payor expected value is the opposite of the basis of all those ideologies. All of those ideologies have taking as much as possible from the payor under the false assumption that transferring to other individuals directly or spending indirectly through growing government is a net positive, when it is not strictly (or even likely) to be so.

1986 but supports your general point (Swiss federals do not have a deficit AIUI, public spending is stable). Such governmental competence is indeed rare but exists-- and the public infrastructure is far better than their "socialist" brothers up north.

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/public_interest/detail/welfa...

We're branching pretty far from the original point but the above is true because the people paying the taxes tend to want what is best for the country (It's more complicated than this but if there is some unifying characteristic that defines the country it is more likely to be true because that unifying characteristic makes the guys who are competent care more about everyone else. That characteristic can be racial (I.E Japanese or Korean) or it can be ideological in some instances (I.E. what has held America together in the past). You basically benefit if you have nationalism but not too much nationalism. It's all a complex mess with many, many feedback loops operating. The only thing that is certain is the socialists are wrong about how the world works and so lead to ruin, while having good intentions. The basics of the correct model of reality that leads to good outcomes is around reinforcing mechanism to encourage individuals to care about their community in a way that defines community large enough to reasonably avoid local tribal community violence. The reason why it works is it encourages the 5-15% of the population that is highly capable and can actually get stuff done to get stuff done in a way that enriches the community and themselves rather than just themselves. This often leads to strong checks and balances across competent institutions enforcing the rules and providing services that the competent people determine are both cheapest to provide via government and in their interest to provide because of network effects (I.e. some level of healthcare makes sure workers can work in their factories because they are healthier more, some level of transport does the same, etc.)

The other crap doesn't work because it tends to devolve into dictatorship of the few and/or paralyzed committees if the dictatorship of the few isn't casting its gaze on that aspect of the government. This happens because the model of good and evil in each of these ideologies isn't internal, it's the competent people who made it are bad and everyone else is good and would be better if they just had some of the bad guys money. They tend to build hierarchies instead of intermixed/interregulating groups and they are always surprised when they are usurped and turned into a dictatorship of the one/few by someone operating in their own interest because good and evil are not external, it's an internal battle within all of us (good and evil is convenient, could be framed as selflessness/selfishness or any number of other dichotomies.)

Thank you, that was much more comprehensive than typical HN responses so I'd need a bit of time to add further nuance or tie back to the "point"

>The lesson which Swiss social insurance administrators have learned from the insurance business generally is that client behavior usually changes in response to administrative actions--and that benefit levels should be structured to account for these changes.

From the linked pdf, but of course being a direct democracy with sustainable cross-tribal communal traditions probably helps.

Partially towards your point: the swiss (municipal) governments have strong yet uniquely mutually beneficial ties* to the private sector--that often result in "corruption" in other democracies--

As mentioned, would need to think further with special regards as to how one should persuade "crap-artists" towards more rational "world-models". the idea of internality seems productive for that.

*personnel and knowledge and competency exchange without uh "mission exchange"

(Tangentially: the Swiss take of pan-Germanic "spiessig" ("karen") probably suggests that they are not conservative in the normal sense of that word)

This isn't what I am talking about as a problem with the socialism/communism/etc, it's a basic feature of repeated models with intelligent agents (of which life is a passable example of) If you keep a system the same people will maximize their own benefit over time within it. I think it's a big part of why systems with lots of checks and balances work so well over strong hierarchies. They are inherently unstable (and in the best case unstable in a way that destroys socially sub optimal behaviour like market power abuse). The dynamism prevents the worst of the power concentration that happens in hierarchies.

I personally don't think you can convince many of the crap-artists from believing their crap because it has a bunch of religious qualities to it so is very hard to deprogram. It would be nice if we stopped letting these people anywhere near children with this crap so as to avoid the worst of the brain cancer spreading but that's probably the extent of what we can do. The idea that there is some bad rich guy causing all your personal problems and all one has to do to fix your problems is steal more from that rich guy is alluring because the alternative of fixing yourself is hard and people seem to have a myriad of mechanisms to other problems to be able to endure them.

Especially among the people who advocate for them.

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