41 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
41 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
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# Political ideologies in tension.
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Currently, the various dominant ideological strains (neoliberalism, progressivism, etc.) are each able to point out each other's flaws, but not convince their opponents of their merits. I think that Goodhart's law and analogies to presocratic Greek philosophy are two fruitful lenses through which to view this situation. I conclude that better political technology is needed.
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### The situation
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[Goodhart's law](https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585)[^1] points out that when you chase a metric, you will end up getting high scores by breaking the relationship between the metric and what initially made you care about it. For example, a few years ago the Spanish government wanted to reduce deaths from traffic accidents—a laudable goal—and ended up achieving this by changing the calculation methodology for "traffic accident deaths" so as to not include people who died from traffic accidents in the hospital a few days later.
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An enlightened progressive might correctly point out that a similar dynamic applies to letting laissez-faire market capitalism run amok. It will similarly lead to situations which maximize corporations' profits at the cost of human flourishing. On the less harmful side, this will result in addictive games or social media platforms. On the perverse side, this will lead to deals like the [Sumangali form of child labor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumangali_%28child_labour%29), where one side of the trade can't evaluate it and is thus reliably exploited. Therefore, labor protection laws and the paternal hand of the state is needed. To be clear, the argument isn't that laissez-faire market capitalism sometimes produces bad outcomes, but rather that in the absence of regulations, profit will be optimized for *at the expense* of human flourishing, and directly traded-off against it.
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Conversely, neoliberals correctly see that relying on the paternal hand of the state has its own problems, like tremendous inefficiency compared to the private sector, [pork-barrel spending](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel), myopic policies resulting from short election cycles, or corruption of the political process through [revolving doors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_%28politics%29) and ultimately [regulatory capture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture). And market forces can indeed be a potent force to bring prosperity.
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So we are in a situation where each side can make a convincing case that the other is wrong to its own followers, but isn't able to address the objections from the other side. This reminds me of presocratic philosophy, where Thale proposed that everything was made out of water and Anaximenes proposed that everything was made out of air. Like politics today, each could see that the other was wrong, but they couldn't convince the other side.
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What is causing this situation is that both sides are wrong. More specifically, both sides have an [inner rethorical contradiction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia#Definitions) in that they are strongly pushing for an imperfect mechanism that doesn't always aim for human flourishing, but pretending that the mechanism that they are pushing for will always result in human flourishing, no matter how strongly they push.
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### Proposed solutions
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At the individual level, a solution to this might involve something like following a Kantian categorical imperative: don't take actions—like profiting at the expense of other people's flourishing—that would make society shittier if other people did them as well. This might apply to personally working for a tobacco company, or personally making annoying advertisements.
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At the societal level, the solution is less clear, and I think requires some ideation. Some solutions which I brainstorm were:
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- Rely on charismatic political figures who are able to live with the tension between ideologies, and recognize the value in both.
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- Come up with better mechanisms to align governments and human flourishing
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- Come up with better mechanisms to align markets and human flourishing
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- Periodically refound states and institutions to rid them of ideological cruft and realign them with human flourishing
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- Have more innovation around forms of government, perhaps within smaller states or with entities such as [Próspera](https://prospera.hn)
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- Read the literature on [regulatory economics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_economics) and related areas.
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Oddly enough, Effective Altruism (EA), a social movement that I am very sympathetic to, doesn't have great answers here. What it recommends is, greatly simplified, "rigorously rank problems in the world and start working on them in order of importance". But this isn't enough to run a state. In fact, it's even worse, because one of the main EA organizations, Open Philanthropy, doesn't trust itself enough to be able to specify "the good", and so employs a kludge called "worldview diversification" in the meantime.
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Other ideologies also have their own ideas here. I like the vision sketched in [State Capacity Libertarianism](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/what-libertarianism-has-become-and-will-become-state-capacity-libertarianism.html). My sense is that some recent feminist/progressive anthropology and social science also has the aim of highlighting or conceiving new types of societies in whose image we would improve our own society.
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[^1]: In fact, [Goodhart's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law), also known as the [Lucas critique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique) says something narrower, and it's the
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---
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OP doesn't optimize too far because it doesn't believe it has good measures of the good, and so fears falling prey to Goodhart's law. But it could develop better measures which could allow it to deploy more optimization power.
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This explains their current attachment to worldview diversification
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