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What does an apocryphal story about a highly simplified and disingenuous demonstration of socialism have to do with anything?

bordercases 5y ago
The logic generalizes fairly well to the problems you have with all collective goods. Unless everyone acts optimally from the goodness of their hearts, which no one does, to shunt the load of producing the collective good, you need coercion, since at that point there is no individual incentive to contribute to a collective good if others are doing so. This is true for unions and undergrad experiments, as it is for centralized planning states, which unsurprisingly are often oppressive dictatorships. If you want to eliminate the need for coercion (which bears long-running costs onto the state), you need to appeal to individual selfishness, which implies competition. As markets have their own problems, you ultimately need a mixed-economy state, something China has become despite its communist roots, and ditto the USA despite its uber-capitalism. The economist Mancur Olson goes into this dynamic of collective action for Western states and beyond. He attempts to explain the general case of the rise and fall of efficiency in capitalist nations, as well as the outlier performance of some communist nations (all short-run) despite this model. https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigidities/dp/0300030797 https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigid... https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0465051952 https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0465051952 Cultural upbringing can make up some of the difference, but only in small scales or when the groups are tight-knit. Even in China, where on the surface Confucian culture totalizes the individual to the collective, there is also a culture of skillful deception and intrigue in Chinese politics that has flourished domestically and abroad in the 21st century.

bordercases 5y ago

The logic generalizes fairly well to the problems you have with all collective goods. Unless everyone acts optimally from the goodness of their hearts, which no one does, to shunt the load of producing the collective good, you need coercion, since at that point there is no individual incentive to contribute to a collective good if others are doing so. This is true for unions and undergrad experiments, as it is for centralized planning states, which unsurprisingly are often oppressive dictatorships. If you want to eliminate the need for coercion (which bears long-running costs onto the state), you need to appeal to individual selfishness, which implies competition. As markets have their own problems, you ultimately need a mixed-economy state, something China has become despite its communist roots, and ditto the USA despite its uber-capitalism. The economist Mancur Olson goes into this dynamic of collective action for Western states and beyond. He attempts to explain the general case of the rise and fall of efficiency in capitalist nations, as well as the outlier performance of some communist nations (all short-run) despite this model. https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigidities/dp/0300030797 https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigid... https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0465051952 https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0465051952 Cultural upbringing can make up some of the difference, but only in small scales or when the groups are tight-knit. Even in China, where on the surface Confucian culture totalizes the individual to the collective, there is also a culture of skillful deception and intrigue in Chinese politics that has flourished domestically and abroad in the 21st century.