10 ms·

> If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace

by moxious 10y ago

> If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace automation. But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you weren't valuable enough. You present the "liberatarian outlook" in a bit of a caricatured way; "disruption is good" does not need to be paired with let people die in the streets and assume they weren't valuable enough. There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from. Where they provide a social safety net, they seem to somehow lack the incentive structure necessary to foster really new ideas. Without jumping to either extreme, since such policy decisions are definitely not "all or nothing" -- I'd just suggest that it's a matter of where you focus your resources. Focusing on social safety net leaves other things unaddressed. Focusing on innovation and individualism clearly leaves some people's needs unaddressed too. Ultimately, the best (for me) is to have a wide dispersion of countries who make different choices, with the freedom to move between them to find the fit that's right for you.

throwaway729 10y ago
There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from. I have a few critiques of this hypothesis. First, I do not think it's true. If by "innovation" you mean tech unicorns, then sure. But those same places tend to have world class universities churning out highly useful technological advances and scientific insights. Burning huge piles of VC cash to create a monopoly a dozen other companies are also competing for seems like a weird metric for measurng innovation... But I guess that word means different things to different people. Second, these countries often but not always have strong economies. Necessity is the mother of innovation, and lack of necessity often coincides with wealth. Third, Germany seems like an obvious counter example to this, as long as you're willing to consider innovation as something that encompasses a lot more sectors than young Internet services targeting highly aggressive growth curves... Their energy industry is highly innovative, for example.
vacri 10y ago
> You present the "liberatarian outlook" in a bit of a caricatured way; "disruption is good" does not need to be paired with let people die in the streets and assume they weren't valuable enough. I have never seen a libertarian argue for social safety nets. Instead they argue that private charity would somehow rise up out of nowhere and people would give more than they currently do in taxes, all to help the needy. Of course, this doesn't make sense to anyone that knows a) people and b) history. Libertarianism is a way to say "fuck off, what's mine is mine and you can't take it", dressed up in flowery language. There is no provision in there to help our hypothetical unfortunate who is dying in the street. In fact, libertarianism argues that anything other than some random citizen helping in a purely voluntary manner would result in a trip to the courts. In short, libertarianism is a caricature. It requires a lot of willful ignorance of how people behave, and a lot of magical thinking about what would result from a libertarian society and how humans behave. Something like Poe's law applies here.
- zaphar 10y ago
  Pretty much every political or economic theory or ideology is a caricature in its pure form. Libertarianism is not special in that respect.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Hayek is generally considered a Libertarian and he argued for social safety nets. If you get your libertarianism from cartoonists ( and they are extremely plentiful ) then you'd of course think it a caricature. Any libertarian that basically denies all public goods is simply not to be taken seriously. I think Rothbard is generally the source for most of that. We've had plenty of people helping your "unfortunate dying in the street" under various regimes. Some are government, some are not. The peak brightness for the sort-of New Deal approach was LBJ. You may or may not agree, but Charles Murray is at least thinking about this, takes social welfare seriously and has an idea or two. My argument to other libertarians is that SSI and SNAP are simply in the noise of the general economy, have massive velocity and seem to work fairly well. They're "low load" - they will not prevent you building that new plant because of them ( indeed, it might be just the opposite ). I'm skeptical of claims of mass technological unemployment. That's partly because machines made stoop labor uneconomic, and stoop labor sucks really hard. We don't know what our problem is right now. Now - where are they right? There is a lot of load. When people complain.... Trumpishly ... about regulation , they're not kidding. They're not wrong. Some of it is a rock in the shoe; some of it is better founded. That's not an argument against regulation. It's an argument for better engineering of regulation. That's very difficult and even proposing it confuses people. And it fits the anti-elite narrative that's popular these days. After all, a libertarian is just someone who values liberty above simple face value - they think that liberty has emergent properties that create additional value. What must happen is that there must be dialogue between conservatives, liberals and libertarians. But the shouting continues...
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from. Where they provide a social safety net, they seem to somehow lack the incentive structure necessary to foster really new ideas. There have been plenty of tech startups in Northern Europe, which is reputed to have the best social safety-nets on Earth right now. They also have some of the best academic institutions in scientific subjects.

by moxious 10y ago

throwaway729 10y ago

There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from. I have a few critiques of this hypothesis. First, I do not think it's true. If by "innovation" you mean tech unicorns, then sure. But those same places tend to have world class universities churning out highly useful technological advances and scientific insights. Burning huge piles of VC cash to create a monopoly a dozen other companies are also competing for seems like a weird metric for measurng innovation... But I guess that word means different things to different people. Second, these countries often but not always have strong economies. Necessity is the mother of innovation, and lack of necessity often coincides with wealth. Third, Germany seems like an obvious counter example to this, as long as you're willing to consider innovation as something that encompasses a lot more sectors than young Internet services targeting highly aggressive growth curves... Their energy industry is highly innovative, for example.

vacri 10y ago

> You present the "liberatarian outlook" in a bit of a caricatured way; "disruption is good" does not need to be paired with let people die in the streets and assume they weren't valuable enough. I have never seen a libertarian argue for social safety nets. Instead they argue that private charity would somehow rise up out of nowhere and people would give more than they currently do in taxes, all to help the needy. Of course, this doesn't make sense to anyone that knows a) people and b) history. Libertarianism is a way to say "fuck off, what's mine is mine and you can't take it", dressed up in flowery language. There is no provision in there to help our hypothetical unfortunate who is dying in the street. In fact, libertarianism argues that anything other than some random citizen helping in a purely voluntary manner would result in a trip to the courts. In short, libertarianism is a caricature. It requires a lot of willful ignorance of how people behave, and a lot of magical thinking about what would result from a libertarian society and how humans behave. Something like Poe's law applies here.

zaphar 10y ago
Pretty much every political or economic theory or ideology is a caricature in its pure form. Libertarianism is not special in that respect.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Hayek is generally considered a Libertarian and he argued for social safety nets. If you get your libertarianism from cartoonists ( and they are extremely plentiful ) then you'd of course think it a caricature. Any libertarian that basically denies all public goods is simply not to be taken seriously. I think Rothbard is generally the source for most of that. We've had plenty of people helping your "unfortunate dying in the street" under various regimes. Some are government, some are not. The peak brightness for the sort-of New Deal approach was LBJ. You may or may not agree, but Charles Murray is at least thinking about this, takes social welfare seriously and has an idea or two. My argument to other libertarians is that SSI and SNAP are simply in the noise of the general economy, have massive velocity and seem to work fairly well. They're "low load" - they will not prevent you building that new plant because of them ( indeed, it might be just the opposite ). I'm skeptical of claims of mass technological unemployment. That's partly because machines made stoop labor uneconomic, and stoop labor sucks really hard. We don't know what our problem is right now. Now - where are they right? There is a lot of load. When people complain.... Trumpishly ... about regulation , they're not kidding. They're not wrong. Some of it is a rock in the shoe; some of it is better founded. That's not an argument against regulation. It's an argument for better engineering of regulation. That's very difficult and even proposing it confuses people. And it fits the anti-elite narrative that's popular these days. After all, a libertarian is just someone who values liberty above simple face value - they think that liberty has emergent properties that create additional value. What must happen is that there must be dialogue between conservatives, liberals and libertarians. But the shouting continues...

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from. Where they provide a social safety net, they seem to somehow lack the incentive structure necessary to foster really new ideas. There have been plenty of tech startups in Northern Europe, which is reputed to have the best social safety-nets on Earth right now. They also have some of the best academic institutions in scientific subjects.