Modern Polymathism

Pragmatic Protests

Today was the first day of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, and it was quite eventful. More important than the public spectacle it became was the insight I got from being at the protests. I wanted to get a good view of both sides, so I not only talked with and interacted with the security forces, but I also participated in an unsanctioned protest march.

I'm not an unrealistic hippy / anarchist who thinks they should be allowed to smash windows, etc., but I'm also someone who feels the constitution does grant us the explicit right to peaceful protest (public marches, demonstrations, speeches, etc.). I've also been around a good amount of law enforcement / military types to have sympathy for their concerns as well.

By the end of the march, I found a lot of flaws in the police tactics. Firstly, the whole practice needs a good dose of pragmatism. The question of whether protests are achieving anything real is for another post, but the question is how to balance free speech, security and the public good (ie broken windows, inconveniencing others, etc.).

Today's events show the limits of blunt force policing. From their angle, these must be their goals: protect G20 summit from real security threats, prevent damage to property, and ensure public safety & convenience. Their tactics were typical a large display of manpower in force along with light armor and psy-ops (sound equipment, formations, etc.), but they failed to achieve the last two goals.

From my vantage point, if you want to accomplish those goals you need to wield power with discretion – not bluntly. The city should have issued the protest permit, closed down Penn and allowed them into downtown outside of the secure zone. This way traffic would have been predictably routed onto Liberty and the protesters could march at will to downtown in peace.

I don't think everyone was there to start a fight – most were happy to chant and wave signs. The protests started off very calm – people were happy, but as the police continued to confront them, everyone became pissed off and police force was stepped up even further. Not only did this lead to many being gassed and beaten, but also severely disrupted many neighborhoods by playing cat and mouse with the protesters.

This all could have been avoided if they just let them go downtown. The fences were already in place to keep most protesters back, and anyone who crossed the barriers would be the troublemakers who deserve to be confronted.

Force must be wielded with a focus on achieving the overall goals – not just security at all costs.

Governance for Self-actualization

As you know, I think that self-actualization should be everyone's goal, and that it can be best had when we have the most capabilities and least coercion. The issue is finding the proper balance, and this is easier said than done. I've been reading an amazing book: Amarya Sen's Development as Freedom. The concept that comes out more and more is that, not only must the dials of governance be set properly, but that every society has its own optimum settings as seen through the lens of its core beliefs.

A great example of this is a comparison of income inequalities and unemployment in Europe and the United States. The basic argument is that in Europe there is lower inequality of incomes than in the US, however the US has vastly lower unemployment rate. Sen believes, justifiably by my take, that the difference is mostly philosophical. The US believes more in rugged individualism so we're more appalled by unemployment than the EU, and conversely the EU believes more strongly in income equality and hence their system reflects this.

There is no overall “right” answer as is proposed by the partisans – there are only gradients between many points of view (as opposed to the usual two). If we're to self-actualize and achieve happiness, what is the best system? We know there can really be only one system implemented at a time and place. Is there a system that allows everyone to set the dials of government as close to their beliefs as possible?

There is - the answer is that we need to change the “place” part of that equation. We need government to have to compete for citizens / residents just like any business has to today. The idea is to move each dial of governance to the lowest possible level so that they have the highest relevance for each citizen. By doing this, you democratically capture the beliefs of the area so that the dials can be set to each area's optimum setting. If you happen to have minority beliefs in your area, move to one that better represents you. In this way, you can live under whatever system you'd like from communism to minarchism, and should you decide you don't like it – just move.

What's the form of these areas? They could be similar to the current system of states with counties with districts and cities with wards. The issue here is which dials are located at which level. The deciding factor here should be externality effects. For instance, environmental issues would have to be decided at the highest possible level because regulating only the upstream part of a river makes no sense – as does CO2 emissions in only one state. For other issues such as gun rights there are gray areas that could be construed as externalities, such as guns passing from pro-gun to anti-gun states, however it seems that most of these cases are usually unenforceable – even a draconian government can't regulate guns or drugs well.

There's an issue though with this though: a local system favors some systems of living over others. For instance, if one state were to enact higher labor laws many businesses would move out to other states with less strict laws – as they do today already. The issue is that income distributive systems require either corporations and/or the rich to subsidize everyone else's activities, and if they move away this can't happen. This is truly a conundrum.

One of the issues we're fighting against with this more localized form of governance is switching costs. In the US, moving from state to state isn't a big deal - you just change your residency. Moving from country to country however has always been very difficult. What this does is vastly increases switching costs that makes everyone think twice before changing citizenship. The same issue is true with states as a whole. The US Civil War decided that no state may secede, which is nothing but massively increasing the switching costs from the national government. I see no good reason that a state can't secede and/or join another country (Canada maybe?) or even form another nation itself. Anything else is coercion.

So would a system like this really encourage a variety of settings for their dials of governance? I believe it would – of course many options aren't as likely such as pure communism, however I think a very similar thing such as the US & EU belief/policy gap would take place. Each area would decide where it wanted to set to the controls, and adjust accordingly. Let each area make its own decisions, bounded by limits of reality – not national coercion. In this way, we'll allow everyone to live as close as they can to their belief optimum.

Zero Sum Economics

I heard someone the other day say that capitalism must grow or die, but is this true?

I'm guessing that they're using capitalism to mean: private ownership of assets and very free markets. Using this definition, can capitalism work in a non-growth economy? By “work” I'm going to define this as: “is capitalism better than a more socialistic system in a zero-sum game?” I would argue that capitalism / free markets are far better at allocating resources in a zero-sum game.

Economics is the study of allocating scarce resources. This is Econ 101. Scarce usually means “non-infinite” - it's easy to allocate infinities such as information – just copy-paste it. The difference in scarcity here is between growing finite resources and a fixed amount of resources. If we assume we can only use Earth as our source, then yes at some very high level we have a zero sum game due to the law of conservation of mass. However, we're currently not close to tapping all the resources in the Earth so we can assume a growing resource base.

What if we imposed a system where everything had to go back to its original form though? Many environmentalists support this view. If we extract coal, we need to sequester the carbon – perhaps underground again. Can free markets still allocate resources in this extreme environment? Of course.

Can value increase in a zero-sum materials game? I think we've already seen this answer. A ton of iron ore, limestone, coke, energy, etc. is worth less than the steel it creates. A car is worth more than the weight of its steel. Value is about the organization of matter into more useful forms. Materials science is showing us that ubiquitous carbon promises to be a miracle material when ordered the right way. When a sheet of properly ordered carbon a few microns thick is stronger than an 1/8” sheet of steel and was produced from perhaps 1mL of carbon powder and some electricity – I think anyone can see that value is being added above and beyond mere raw materials and labor.

If we apply this to the economy at large, we see that the zero-sum resource game actually can work quite well – thought with slower growth of course. This eliminates the argument for capitalism needing a growing pie to survive. Socialistic measures would have the same problems they experience today - improper allocation of resources due to the effects of: “some of us aren't smarter than all of us”. In other words individual economy agents make better decisions about material allocation and conversion than a leviathan of a state.

Thoughts?