A More Efficient Method?

What follows is a conditional. If you reject the antecedent, then obviously you reject the entire conditional.

Let us assume that you are a member of a large-scale libertarian socialist society. Almost all the world runs along collectivist or similar lines in some way or another, and runs well enough that no one is starving or suffering due to systemic failures. But you get a good idea. Well, two good ideas. The first is some very efficient new method for producing some desirable good or service. The other is that, since the idea is yours, you're going to see if you can't use it to benefit yourself more than other people. What's to stop you? Surely there's nothing wrong with hiring some workers on relatively exploitative terms (although probably still far, far less exploitative than those in modern society) and produce said good or service to the net benefit of all society! Why would anyone be opposed to that, so long as everyone involved agrees to the arrangement?

This was a question I was unable to answer in a recent conversation. However, having had time to reflect, I have not some several answers.

Let's start with the least obvious: if you try to create a subset of society where such exploitation is driven by anything other than survival necessity, you will inevitably be reintroducing all the problems of classism and authoritarian hierarchy — in this case, though, those are your problem, not the workers' problem. In capitalism, exploitation works out fine because workers have pretty much no other choice except to participate in a capitalist economy. If they lose or leave their job at a capitalist firm (and a magnanimous welfare state won't subsidize their unemployment) all they can do to survive is get another job at a capitalist firm (which might be a firm where they are their own boss, but that doesn't really change their relationship with the material wealth of society). In a libertarian society, if they are dissatisfied with work at your firm, they can simply leave and go work anywhere else in a voluntary organization. That is, unlike in capitalism, there is almost no cost to leaving your job, outside of purely physically practical considerations. So unless your hypothetically superior good or service is SO desirable, and SO beneficial to the people working for you (not to mention society at large), then there is little chance that people will be willing to continue working under inferior conditions. It is easy, when one holds the mistaken belief that we currently live in a free society, to forget that there are huge social and economic impediments against most people actually improving the conditions of their lives, set up both consciously and implicitly by capitalists and the institutions which they support and which support them. Such barriers would not exist in a free society, so there would be nothing to stop brain-drain (and hand-drain, as it were) away from any given exploitative firm and towards voluntary, libertarian firms.

A second reason this would be unlikely to work is illustrated best by the results of the Ultimatum Game. Expanded to a larger society, it seems highly unlikely that a group of people would be willing to bequeath to any one individual so large a share of their collective wealth that a productive firm could be established with the resources. On a smaller scale, it seems unlikely that you would find many people who would be willing to work for a firm where they would earn relatively less than another worker, even if they (somehow) earn more than workers in other firms (again, without the societal and institutionalized economic coercion of capitalism). (That this entirely begs the question of what they are earning in a largely collectivist society without large-scale fiat currencies is left aside for the purpose of this discussion.)

A final reason this is unlikely to arise is the lack of institutionalized secrecy in a free society. If you were the manager of a firm which had a superior method of production, the only way to keep it from being copied by anyone and everyone (including all the libertarian, collective firms in that particular line of business) would be to keep it completely secret — high fences, pledges of confidentiality, dark windows. But whatever facility you use to run your firm would be owned by society at large — after all, outside of a capitalist system (including state capitalism), no one seriously thinks of a factory, a storefront, or a suite of industrial machinery as belonging to a single individual for their personal use. And outside of a society with capitalist-style property rights, you would have no right to stop people entering your factory or store or whatever to observe your methods and use them elsewhere. After all, if your firm can produce SUCH excess wealth that it's worth reinstating exploitative labor relations for, then everyone else will want to use it too. And since no capitalist firm is an island, huge chunks of the rest of society will have to be involved in you establishing your firm (building your factory, supplying your raw materials, etc, etc.). So, pretty soon, workers will have no reason to stay with an exploitative firm to produce that exact good or service, and will instead move to collective ones the first instance the exploitation outweighs the benefit.

There are probably other reasons besides the idea stated at the beginning of this post wouldn't work in a free society, but those three are the ones that I was able to articulate to myself in the last couple of days. They are, like any highly hypothetical discussion like this, premised on many assumptions which not everyone agrees with, including, I'm sure, the person who raised the hypothetical scenario in the first place. But they are all, I believe, answers consistent with the view of society, politics and ethics I advance.

Predicting the Future (and Other Abilities We Don't Have): Part 1

Humans are good at lots of things.  This series of two posts is about a number of abilities that are not among those things.  Part 1 discusses the fashionable tendency to make guesses about the future course of society and then heavily imply (without usually stating outright) that these guesses constitute accurate predictions.  Part 2 discusses the trouble we tend to have in viewing ourselves in a historical context.  This makes it easy for us to believe that we happen to live in revolutionary times, or that none of the old rules apply.  These types of charlatanism can have far reaching consequences, as it turns out.

Part 1:  Extrapolation is an Art, not a Science

One of the ways to get people to pay attention to your predictions is by preaching the good news: eternal life.  Ray Kurzweil has made a number of predictions about the bright future that technological growth will bring us, with this being by far the most notorious.  Although his version of immortality, uploading ourselves onto computers, differs somewhat from the standard Christian view, one can't help but notice the religious flavor of this prediction.

Kurzweil's other predictions for this century include, yes, flying cars, but also reverse-engineering the human brain, nearly perfect simulations of reality (for our digital selves to live in), and, crucially, an AI that is more intelligent in every way than all humans combined.  He has freed himself from any responsibility to explain how these things will be accomplished.  Nobody has the slightest idea how to do the interesting ones.

I will defer the actual technical explanation of why these are truly goofy predictions to authors who have basically handled it: Steven Pinker, Douglas Hofstadter, PZ Myers, and many others have noted how technology and scientific discovery don't progress in the way Kurzweil has claimed.  Instead, I want to draw attention to the fact that these attempts to predict the future are actually a very human tendency.

In the early 1960's, progress in programming machines to do certain tasks (like proving theorems), gave researchers supreme confidence that essentially human-like A.I. would be a solved problem within 20 years.  They should have said that at this rate, it would be done.  What actually happened was that computers became more and more sophisticated but left AI behind: the problems they were doing were just much harder than they had anticipated.  Even relatively simple tasks like constructing grammatical sentences proved to be far out of their grasp.  Now, the most successful language tools largely involve throwing our technical understanding of language out the window and using probabilistic models.

Economies are not spared from erroneous predictions about the future.  Kurzweil and others jumped on the tech-boom bandwagon, claiming in 1998 that the boom would last through 2009, bringing untold wealth to all.  Maybe they should have been reading Hyman Minsky instead of Marvin Minsky.

Enough about the good news.

The other way to get people to pay attention to your predictions is by telling them the bad news: social breakdown the end of the world.  Overpopulation is an issue along these lines that receives attention that is disproportionate to the seriousness of the claims made by its scare tacticians.  Among these claims is the belief that we are imminently reaching the carrying capacity of the Earth, at which point starvation, crowding, and wars over scarce resources will tear human civilization to pieces.

This hypothesis relies on progress not happening, the opposite of the singularitarians' reliance.  But the very same question can be asked of both: how do you know?  This is where it becomes apparent that extrapolating patterns is an art for the Kurzweils of the world.  If you extrapolate one variable, you get intelligent machines.  If you extrapolate another, you get the end of the world.  But if you extrapolate yet another, say the total fertility rate (TFR), it doesn't look so scary.  Defined as the average expected number of children born per woman, the world's TFR has been steadily declining in the post-war period, from almost five in 1950 to almost 2.5 today.  As it approaches two, the world population approaches equilibrium.

Phony overpopulation scares are common in the history of anglophone countries, from Thomas Malthus to American anxiety over the "yellow peril" around the turn of the century (see Jack London's The Unparalleled Invasion for a rosy portrait of the future).  Wealthy people and business interests are often the biggest proponents of the theory that population growth is the largest problem facing the world.  Conveniently, it's one of the only major global issues that isn't their responsibility.  In reality, the only reliable way to lower growth rates is to facilitate the economic growth of poor countries to the point where people there have a decent standard of living.

The danger in blowing the perils of overpopulation out of proportion is that it leads people to prioritize population control above reproductive rights and, more generally, morality.  If it really is that serious, then we have carte blanche to do whatever is necessary.  The bottom line is that, despite the very real possibility of overpopulation becoming an issue, there is no reason to think it is serious or imminent enough to change what our goals would be, were it not imminent.  Our immediate task is still figuring out how to get communities to lift themselves out of poverty while handling climate change and other real crises.

We have a predisposition to weigh the likelihood of possible futures, either good or bad, based on how exciting or terrifying they are instead of how probable they are.  Anyone interested in solving problems should be aware of this bias.

Part 2 covers a second, related bias that people have: the impression that the times we currently live in offer wider and more revolutionary possibilities than existed in the past.  This impression, created by the fact that we live now, not in the past, is the source of huge blunders and the general abandonment of reason.