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And many of our problems are collective action problems: where it makes sense for individuals to defect on their own, and they can only raise the standard for t
by barrkel 8y ago
And many of our problems are collective action problems: where it makes sense for individuals to defect on their own, and they can only raise the standard for the group if they act together.
At different scales this means unionization and professional organizations, government regulation, and international regulation, to prevent whole countries from defecting - this is in large part what the EU is about, and a significant source of UK ill will towards it; and also generally what makes nationalists upset at globalists.
Collective action problems require collective action solutions. Large actors, however, tend to dislike collective action because it reduces their scale advantage.
Collective action has its own problem: power structures encourage corruption and misuse of the pooled power. Overall, I suspect government and international systems are more likely to be less corrupt because they can afford to build more checks and balances into their institutions, but the distance from the people decreases their perceived legitimacy.
Not an easy circle to square.
- sandworm101 8y agoIt also means laws/regulations to just plain ban harmful behaviors. Collectivization to alter market forces cannot fix everything. Some things need to just stop. Selling CFCs needs to stop. That won't happen by naming and shaming involved companies. It won't happen by people gathering on facebook to organize a boycott. It happens by people in uniforms enforcing the law, with violence when necessary. Sometimes that is the only way to stop individuals bent on illegally benefiting themselves at the expense of others.
- mhb 8y agoWell it takes collective action to decide what to ban.
- sandworm101 8y ago>> collective action to decide No. Once upon a time we nominated experts to make most of those decisions. Groups like the EPA or the IRS were given a mandate to examine what was going on and ban behaviors that did harm. But today "regulation" is a bad word. Everything is political. The EPA and IRS cannot ban anything without massive public debate. In fact, most regulatory bodies are so under pressure to reduce any and all regulation that they rarely ever ban anything. Quick and efficient regulation of harmful behavior is dead. Example: the recent bill to ban upskirting photography in the UK. Nothing much to debate. But the bill gets killed by the new breed of politicians who demand every new regulation be subject to the full public process in order to make the act of passing new regulations as difficult as possible.
- aalleavitch 8y agoWhat we lack is trust. We lack security in each other, in many cases for entirely legitimate reasons. Reestablishing systems of trust is one of the challenges we’re facing right now.
- s73v3r_ 8y agoIn general I probably agree with you. But I seriously can not comprehend how that applies to the example given in the parent post.
- smolder 8y agoI'll take a stab. People don't trust their government or their justice system to fairly enforce the law or to draft a law that, all legalese deconstructed, is fair in the first place.
- Nasrudith 8y agoReminds me of the one common Freudian slip I notice in the wake of a scandal. If they talk of restoring trust as a goal they are so irredeemably corrupt they see only the bad PR as a problem and not the heinous abuses. Since trying to fix the problem doesn't even come to mind to them as something to lie about when they are in hot water!
- bluGill 8y agoOn your example: are you sure there is nothing to debate? No possible harm? No possible unintended consequence? One thing I've observed over and over is that there are unintended consequences to everything. It often takes years to figure them out.
- User23 8y agoThank you for this lucid description of the authoritarian position.
- Nursie 8y agoIn the case of individual or small group actions that have the capability to seriously fuck things up for everyone else, what other position is rational?
- fucking_tragedy 8y agoViewing regulation as authoritarianism is an extremist position.
- User23 8y agoWhy was this flagged? Men using violence to enforce a preferred policy is exactly authoritarian. A simple factual description is in no way pejorative.
- dang 8y agoWould you please not post ideological battle comments to HN? They're not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- bilbo0s 8y ago"...Sometimes that is the only way to stop individuals bent on illegally benefiting themselves at the expense of others...." Not just "sometimes", it takes the threat of violent people in uniforms ALL of the time when dealing with people bent on illegally benefiting themselves at the expense of others. The issue is that the violent people in uniforms, (and even the people controlling them for that matter), can ALSO be bent on benefiting themselves at the expense of others. It's not only grassroots organizations that can be corrupt, the government itself is actually even more likely to be corrupt. So you almost have to solve corruption before you try to solve the other structural issues. And corruption is just a very hard problem to solve.
- mhneu 8y agoCory Doctorow has recently written an interesting piece on corruption: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/02/low-yield-crude.html https://boingboing.net/2018/07/02/low-yield-crude.html It talks about how socializing risk and privatizing profits is actually the definition of corruption.
- gascan 8y agoAs I see it, the corruption challenge of collective action is because it is so often not carefully, purposefully structured. Government is constructed with the express purpose of checking power. I read a bit I liked a while back about early feminism, in which members rejected wholesale the idea of power structures & authority, and established no authority. The author relates, however, that the power vacuum was naturally still filled- but because everyone wanted to pretend there was no power structure, the one that developed was unusually cruel & unaccountable. I liked the bit because to me it seems like the strongest argument for official government- if the power vacuum must always be filled, let us be deliberate in how we fill it.
- watwut 8y agoDunno about feminism, but I definitely observed the same on agile projects that rejected concept of formal leader and management. Let's see who naturally arises as a leader style also leads to special kind of hell.
- rcy 8y agosounds like it was this: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
- mhneu 8y agoThis is why representative democracies and rule of law are so important. It's important to make governments that are "about laws - not about men". Because if governments are built around single people, those people will concentrate power. When a system leads to the person in power hands off power to the next person, it's a way to distribute power. The second principle that is a huge problem today is concentration of power into the hands of the wealthy. Thomas Piketty put his finger on the problem - in the 1970s, most obviously in the US, billionaires began to figure out how to use their wealth for persuasion. In that way they use their wealth to take more of the profits in the economy for themselves. I think this is the problem of our time: How do we stop oligarchs and billionaires from funding a propaganda machine designed to break democracies so they can accumulate more wealth?
- dbingham 8y ago
- jeffdavis 8y ago"Collective action has its own problem: power structures encourage corruption and misuse of the pooled power." Exactly. I tend to be wary of concentrating power. The larger the group the more likely that there are conflicts of interest within the group. Perhaps more importantly, large groups just don't make sense in a lot of cases. If I make a union of milk drinkers, we can buy in huge bulk and get a discount. But then we have 1000000 bottles of milk in one place that will go bad in a couple weeks. We need to invent a distribution network, and a way to figure out who actually needs milk and when, and a way to track who is drinking the most milk so they can pay higher dues. In other words, the union hasn't accomplished anything and basically everything will be the same.
- dv_dt 8y agoBut as a criticism against the already collected power of corporations and oligarchs that wariness just means individuals stay unfocused and weak vs concentrated and powerful interests. The broad correlation (and correlation isn't necessarily causation) is that as union power decreased, so did real wage growth.
- mcguire 8y agoShort version: power vacuums get filled.
- Retric 8y agoIt simply means groups need to adapt to the realities on the ground. Your 1,000,000 milk drinkers may be better off measuring existing players vs buying milk collectively. Dealing with information asymmetry not distribution can result in better outcomes without expending nearly as many resources. PS: Consumer reports is a solid example. Collecting a lot of information on each toaster/fridge/bed is not practical for an individual, but split that among 1,000,000 people and each can save more money than the cost of a subscription.
- s73v3r_ 8y agoAt the same time, you can also fight back against companies that would seek to cut corners with milk production.