Mutual A

"Formal order, to be more explicit, is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain" - james c scott, seeing like a state

as i see it

1) there's challenges in building an egalitarian society and conservative intellectuals have the most incentive to find those challenges

2) education has only recently been widely accessible

in particular its important to stress the complexity limits on top-down incentives that institutions impose means they frequently fail in achieving desired outcomes, which to go back to the OP, results in a net loss for basically everyone involved while also fostering resistance

it's certainly true that institutions that are either directly coercive or backed by coercion think about incentives to control people but that no more means that thinking about incentives is bad than the fact they use mathematics means that mathematics is bad

to consider "incentives" in the most general sense of "things that persuade people to do things" as bad you throw out ever formally considering how people might act in the world which is just absurd

i once held similar beliefs but i think that you can still believe that it is possible to model what people value and look at how they might react to situations while also acknowledging limitations in that modelling

unfortunately the only people properly thinking about "madman disrupts world oil supply, throws everything into crisis" were people writing airport thrillers and action video games

helped that it was a (mostly) mutually beneficial multi-generational project

wonder how hard it would be to make a custom feed that emphasizes conversations people you follow are having with each other (probably one of the best parts of social media for me!)

yea

positive sum interactions with minorities does seem to be effective at reducing prejudice! but you can't scale it in the same way that you can with a popular podcast and there's legit concerns about creating nazi bars and the like

i suspect that the process of dechudding people looks less like any popular influencer or streamer eating into rogan or whoevers audience and far more like people joining leftist IRL spaces for whatever reason and shifting their opinion based on social pressures / exposure

like imagine a counterfactual where social media never takes off but jacobin still has a million subscribers by the late 2010s. you'd get center-left publications like Crooked Timber engaging with them

part of this is everyone being on the same small number of platforms unlike the days of the blogosphere where ppl could just be ignored, but its also a consequence of the left becoming something that these people have to acknowledge

right, i may have overstated the case in my reply because its bsky, a more considered response would factor in the "psychic wages of whiteness". nonetheless

Rainbow capitalism is back? Perhaps a good sign?

"No battle-Tarutino, Borodino, or Austerlitz-takes place as those who planned it anticipated. That is an essential condition."

this sort of thing is why i see public choice as fundamental to any anarchist theory of capitalism and why i don't really care about its origins, that's something for intellectual historians to take note of i want to change the world

one of the best books on capitalism i've read is political capitalism by holcombe (a mises institute guy and so it has some blindspots) which makes the point about how transaction costs mean that the ruling class has an easier time acting in concert than the masses bc its smaller

so what public choice does much better than marxism is that it actually considers the incentives facing the individuals who make up "the proletariat" or "the bourgeois" rather then treating each group as a collective agent

rational choice theory has issues, but critiques that it is inherently egotistical in how it models people is laughable. im reading Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement which tries to grapple with the various incentives of the individuals taking part cf

in particular the marxist move to declare particular ideas "bourgeois" or "proletarian", with those in former camp nothing more than sophistry

i completely disagree! public choice theory and transaction costs more broadly does a really good job of explaining *why* the old left strategy of "unite the working class" or "vote for social democrats" has so many issues and pitfalls

right, but socialists who are out of power finding themselves in power and quickly accommodating to the system is not at all unprecedented cf

oh sure you actually have to do some work to find the radical implications of something like The Logic of Collective Action but it's there and if Marx was willing to spend 500 pages engaged in immanent critique of the classical economists, why not do that for the neoclassicals?

it's so cool that leftists dismiss all of neoclassical econ as bourgeois apologia when some of the best analyses of why have been done by some pleasant bureaucrat economists who are taken for granted within the field

yeah this is where the marxist LTV lead people down a really stupid path because everything I've seen on the economics of imperialism shows it to be a convoluted form of rent seeking enabled more by public choice dynamics than labor aristocrats enjoying the benefit

after all "socialist" is a term that many democrats now have positive views on which was definitely not the case in the 1990s!

that's true but i think that it's possible to do long term persuasion on the left