Author: Ramsi Woodcock

Categories
Miscellany

How Very Magical and Unlike Furniture Are the Dead Building Blocks of Life

What makes it so hard to understand, as an intuitive matter, how life would evolve out of the primordial soup is that the molecular building blocks of life, the organic compounds from which cells form, do not behave at all like the objects we encounter in daily life.

If we take a bunch of junk from our everyday lives—some china, a bike or two, some furniture, some clothes, and so on—and throw it together in a vast cauldron and shake it up, nothing much is going to happen, apart from some shattering, even if we shake it for a very long time.

What makes the molecular building blocks of life different is that they react with each other, they stick and unstick and pass energy through each other and spontaneously fold up or unfold. My bike and my desk don’t do that.

To imagine equivalents of these molecular building blocks in our world, we would need to think of physical objects that, while still dead and mechanistic in their nature, would have fairy-like qualities to them. My bike might normally be inert, for example, except when it comes into contact with styrofoam, in which case the wheel would spin like crazy, shredding the styrofoam to pieces. My desk would need to have a tendency to lose its legs when it comes into contact with my china, after which it would need to have a tendency to stick to any car tires into which it comes into contact, but not before. And so on.

My things would, in other words, need to act a bit like windup toys, bumping around in mechanistic ways, but also managing to get wound and rewound through mechanical encounters with each other and with the environment.

(Of course, the physical things I encounter in my lived experience are just themselves agglomerations of molecules, so in a sense there is not really a difference in kind between the molecular world and the world of my lived experience. But the physical things I encounter in my world are generally great big uniform clumps of certain molecules—they are lots of steel or lots of plastic—rather than mixes of molecules that are likely to react with each other. Indeed, the molecular components of my things are specifically chosen not to react with other things. If my desk were capable of quickly changing its chemical composition when it comes into contact with oxygen, as the molecules involved in life sometimes do, then I wouldn’t consider it a very good desk. And so if we look to these physical things for intuition regarding the inevitability of life, we come up empty.)

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization

Using Intellectual Property Rights in Social Media Innovations to Diagnose Kill Zones

The most important charge against the Tech Giants is that they are creating kill zones: no one wants to create new online functionality that Google or Facebook in particular might easily copy. Whether kill zones exist remains a subject of debate, but that hasn’t stopped antimonopolists from wanting to respond anyway by breaking up the Tech Giants.

But there’s a treatment that is more likely to cure the disease without killing the patient—one which has the added benefit of helping us determine whether there actually is a disease to begin with.

But first, let’s consider why kill zones would be a problem if they really do exist.

If kill zones exist, then startups won’t introduce innovative social media functionality into the market because they will know that if Google or Facebook copy it, consumers will prefer the Google or Facebook versions—because those versions will be integrated seamlessly into the rest of the functionality those companies offer—and so the startups will lose out in the market. But because the startups won’t introduce the new functionality, Google and Facebook will feel no need to introduce it either, and so the functionality never makes it into our online lives.

The saga of Vine, Twitter’s erstwhile video sharing service, provides a nice illustration of the kill zone argument. Vine pioneered the video sharing format, but just as it looked poised to take off, Facebook introduced essentially the same functionality in Instagram, and because Instagram was already much bigger, social media users found it easier to embrace the format in Instagram than by migrating over to Vine. The lesson of that episode for someone with a bright idea for the next big thing in social media is: don’t waste your time. So long as it’s something that the Tech Giants can copy, they will, and they’ll win.

To be sure, TikTok shows us that innovation is still commercially viable in social media, the Tech Giants notwithstanding. But the key to TikTok’s success is the algorithms it uses to target videos to users, and those are not easy for the Tech Giants to copy. That means that major, irreproducible innovation is still possible in this space.

But not all good ideas that make our lives better are necessarily major, irreproducible technological steps. If there hadn’t been a Vine, video sharing might have taken a lot longer to invade social media, and that would have been a loss to users, many of whom love the format.

So what to do about kill zones?

I am often struck in reading Nick Lane’s excellent books on biochemistry (Power, Sex, Suicide, and The Vital Question are my favorites) by how much more careful biochemists seem to be in diagnosing problems and sussing out solutions than we are in antitrust. All the more struck, in fact, because biochemistry is a more mechanistic, indeed, easy, field than is antitrust.

In biochemistry, the basic repertoire of behaviors of the smallest units of analysis—molecules—is known with absolute certainty, thanks to the laws of chemistry and quantum physics. If molecule A hits molecule B, we know exactly what will happen. And hypotheses in biochemistry are often testable: you can find a thousand or ten thousand living human bodies in which to observe the biochemical behaviors that interest you.

By contrast, in antitrust, the basic repertoire of behaviors of the smallest units of analysis—human beings—is almost infinite and the subject of perennial debate. We like to assume rational, profit maximizing behavior, but we know, thanks to decades of behavioral economics, that actual behavior is much, much more complex and varied. And hypotheses in antitrust are almost impossible to test on the scales required to produce real knowledge: where do you find ten thousand similar markets to deconcentrate in order to determine whether breakup actually works?

You would expect, then, that antitrusters would be even more careful in diagnosing problems and sussing out solutions than are biochemists. But instead the sheer complexity of the problem seems to impel us in the other direction. It tempts us to boil away the complexity and then find clarity in a residue that bears little resemblance to actual markets. (For the record, I am as guilty of doing this as the next antitrust scholar.)

We should take a page from biochemistry and recognize that while kill zones sound plausible, plausibility is not reality, and so any solution to the kill zone problem must include, as a precondition, some attempt to determine whether there really is a problem. We need to diagnose.

Simply breaking up the Tech Giants doesn’t do that. It’s a bit like the antioxidant craze Nick Lane critiques in his books. It was certainly plausible that free radicals, which do destroy cells, might be the cause of disease, and so molecules that neutralize the free radicals—antioxidants—would be conducive to health. But when biochemists looked closer, they discovered—at least according to Lane—that free radicals are an integral part of the process by which cells regulate the amount of energy that they generate. They’re not all bad, in other words, and so mitigating the harm they do is not as simple as just getting rid of them through the use of antioxidants.

Similarly, a closer look at Google and Facebook’s behavior might reveal something more complex at work than the mere crushing of competitors, and smashing these big companies might, then, not be the solution.

One way to try to determine whether kill zones really are a problem, and, as an added bonus, potentially to treat any problem that does exist at the same time, would be to provide something like intellectual property protection for social media innovations.

Let’s look first at how this works as treatment. By giving startups the right to charge Google and Facebook for any new social media functionality that Google and Facebook appropriate from them, an intellectual property regime would restore the incentive for startups to enter and innovate, regardless whether Google and Facebook use their technology or not. If the new technology is successful, either the startup profits by succeeding independently in the market or by generating licensing income from Google and Facebook if those companies choose to license the technology. The heart of the kill zone fear is that Google and Facebook can take ideas, and the markets that go with them, without paying compensation: this solves that problem.

To return to our example, if Vine had had a right to demand compensation for Instagram’s embrace of video sharing, then Vine might not have become a business failure after all, and the lesson of Vine for social media entrepreneurs today would be that innovation does pay after all, the power of the Tech Giants notwithstanding.

Indeed, intellectual property rights in social media methods would not only encourage innovation, but would also likely lead to the incorporation into Google and Facebook of any successful new social media technologies, guaranteeing that the economies of scale that only these companies can bring to social media technologies would be realized. Google and Facebook would be forced to license any new social media innovations that meet with success in order to prevent their own platforms from sinking into irrelevance, so they would both pay a reward to innovators and incorporate the new innovations, giving them the greatest possible reach. You would get the benefits of size without the costs to innovation.

That would be a big improvement over breakup, which would lead to smaller and hence, for users, less valuable, social media platforms, at least until a new dominant platform could emerge, as one surely would given the value of size to any social network. But with the return of a dominant platform, the kill zone would presumably reappear and the rate of innovation would fall again. Thus in a breakup scenario, unlike in an intellectual property scenario, one cannot both have economies of scale and innovation at the same time.

Of course, any intellectual property rights regime comes with its own bureaucratic costs: someone must decide what really is a protectable social media innovation. And there is the possibility of holdup. There is never a guarantee that any two parties bargaining over a license fee will actually reach agreement, and if they don’t then the technology will not propagate. But holdup, at least, can be solved by a regime of compulsory licensing at regulated rates. (If it seems like a lot to ask a regulator to decide on a license fee, shouldn’t it seem like quite a bit more to ask a regulator to decide precisely how Facebook or Google should be broken up?)

But the really nice thing about an intellectual-property-based approach to kill zones is that it is also a diagnostic tool that can be applied in advance of taking any difficulty-to-reverse actions. We would be able to diagnose the existence of kill zones if, in response to the creation of intellectual property rights, startups were to appear and Google or Facebook were to license the startups’ technology. The fact that Google and Facebook would choose to license the technology would tell us that these big companies view the technology as a competitive threat, and that would in turn tell us that in the absence of the intellectual property rights they would have simply copied the functionality and run the startups out of business. If, on the other hand, startups do not appear or Google and Facebook do not license their technologies, we could conclude that there are no kill zones and phase out the intellectual property rights.

By contrast, under the breakup approach, there would be no way to know whether there was kill zone until after breakup, because only then could we see whether innovation had increased in response. And if there were no increase in innovation, suggesting that there had not actually been kill zones, we would need to wait for the smashed bits of the Tech Giants to knit themselves back together before we could reacquire the benefits of large networks that we currently enjoy.

Indeed, even those who remain committed to the breakup remedy ought to support the imposition of some sort of intellectual property rights regime first, purely as a diagnostic tool. Introducing intellectual property rights and seeing what happens would tell us more about whether there really is a kill zone than any economic study to which an antimonopolist might appeal for diagnostic support today, because any economic study is necessarily counterfactual: the economist can only draw on data about the industry as it is now, or about other industries, to decide whether there would be more innovation in the event that Google and Facebook were to change their behavior.

By contrast, introducing intellectual property rights has the character of an experiment designed to elicit a response (licensing of new startup innovations) that can exist only if the underlying kill zone disease is present.

Would Google and Facebook try to game the diagnosis, by avoiding licensing any technology under a temporary, diagnostic intellectual property regime in order to avoid sending the signal that there is a kill zone? I think not, because doing that would be their loss. If Google and Facebook don’t license successful new technologies, competitors will grow at Google and Facebook’s expense, and they won’t enjoy a dominant position anymore—in which case we would end up with more long-term competition in the market, which is what antimonopolists hope for anyway.

Of course, such a diagnostic experiment would hardly be the sort of large-scale, controlled undertaking one needs for scientific certainty. But it would be a start, and perhaps inch antitrust in the direction of the level of respect for the complexity of its subject that is characteristic of a science.

Categories
Miscellany Monopolization Uncategorized

Don’t Cancel Student Debt; Redistribute It

A culture that does not understand, let alone value the innerness of things is going to have an ambivalent relationship with learning, especially elite learning. For such a culture—our culture—the question what is it for? will forever trouble the educator’s sleep, or, more to the point, the sleep of government officials who are asked to allocate funding for higher education and the voters who are asked to vote for those government officials.

Add into the mix the fact that the politics of the academy are not broadly shared by the electorate at large, and I see in fully-government-funded higher education nothing but: danger. The danger that America’s great system of higher education will starve and wither.

Fortunately, and no doubt because of our cultural ambivalence to education, the funding system we currently have in place provides some protection. The student loan system taxes those who have actually worshipped at the altar of education to pay for its survival. It is, in a sense, a regime of forced alumni giving, with schools asking students to borrow against the future cash flows that become student loan payments so that schools can take this giving up front in lump sums.

The effect is to tell those who wonder what is it for?: we don’t need you. We will pay for this system ourselves.

To be sure, it is not really the students who are saying this, at least not entirely. It is the schools that have been able to decide, within certain limits, just how much funding they receive, because schools have a great deal of market power with respect to students.

Part of that power (this part not, technically, market power, but rather scarcity power) is due to students’ fairly inelastic demand for education: they rightly place great value on education, and are willing to pay a lot for it. But lots of the schools’ power is also due to students’ lack of understanding of the meaning of the large amounts of debt they take on, allowing schools to raise tuition levels without fear of alienating their clients. And more power still comes from schools’ reputations, which are so strong that many schools can raise tuition levels without losing even those students who understand the meaning of long-term indebtedness.

Insidious, perhaps.

But it is thanks to this power of schools to choose their own funding levels that America has the greatest, wealthiest system of higher education in the world. I do not think that an America in which student debt were cancelled, and the student loan funding system for higher education replaced by one of full government funding for higher education, would be anywhere near so wealthy, or so excellent.

It is easy for a graduate pushing for debt cancellation to forget that 60% of Americans do not have a college degree. And many more Americans who do are still troubled by the question what for? Why should they be expected to vote the levels of funding that schools have been able to arrogate to themselves through the current student loan system? The answer is, they won’t.

True, other developed countries that have a public funding model still manage to funnel a lot of cash to schools. But America is different. Remember: each and every developed country in Europe and Asia has a concept of culture.

We have no such thing here in the United States.

Each of those European and Asian countries descends from kingdoms and empires that claimed power by divine right, which is to say, claimed to have a direct connection to the innerness of things. Though many have mellowed and democratized, or at least acknowledged the moral superiority of democracy, they all retain the notion that the state has inner meaning. The expression of the state’s inner meaning is culture, and culture is realized through elite education. The notion that the state should pay for education is not, therefore, subject to question in those countries in the way that it is here, where the state’s only meaning is out-in-the-world practical: to make us happy.

All this is not to say that the student loan system doesn’t need reform. It does. If we correctly understand the system to be a tax on the educated, then we should reasonably ask that it be progressive: that the rich should subsidize the poor.

The current system does that, but only very little. At present, borrowers can sign up for income-based repayment, which uses the federal government’s general tax revenues to reduce the student debt burden of poor students who end up earning less after graduation. To the extent that federal taxation is mildly progressive, income-based repayment is itself mildly progressive.

But real progressivity in the student loan system would mean something different entirely. What we should demand is that rich students—or those who go on to become rich—subsidize poor students and those who go on to be poor. Thus the redistribution associated with progressivity should remain “in the family” of the educated, and be much more extreme than it is today.

Today, those from rich families pay the sticker price for tuition up front and then are free of any further payment obligations to schools, no matter what heights their incomes happen to reach. By contrast, poor students fund themselves through loans, and unless they do well enough after graduation to pay off their loans in full, they go on income-based repayment and their repayment burden varies with income. If they make more, their payments go up, if less, they go down. Thus today, the student-loan system is progressive only with respect to poor students who don’t do well after graduation! The rich, by contrast, pay the equivalent of a flat tax. That’s not progressive.

Instead, we need all students, including the rich, to make payments to fund education over their entire working lives, and those payments need to be adjusted based on income, to the end of redistributing wealth from the most successful to the least.

One way to do that would be vastly to increase tuition bills, so that even rich students must take out loans to fund their education. Then all students would go on income-based repayment after graduation, and the income-based repayment schedules could be used massively to redistribute from the most successful of the educated to the least. The poorest, least successful graduates would end up with very low monthly payments, or immediate debt forgiveness, and the richest and most successful would end up with very high monthly payments—right into the millions of dollars per month, if necessary. Think of it, again, as forced alumni giving, in which those who can give more, do.

The introduction of increasingly generous income-based repayment terms over the past couple of decades signals that the student loan system is already moving slowly in this direction.

Instead of calling for student debt cancellation, and placing politically-vulnerable, inescapably elitist institutions at the mercy of democratic majorities that are not sure they want them, let’s keep education in the family—but make sure that anyone who wants to join, can join, and that the richest graduates pay their way.

[Note: Given that the New York Times doesn’t have to disclose its interest in smashing Google or Facebook whenever it writes about the antitrust cases against them, maybe I don’t need to disclose my own competitive interests when I write about them. But I am an educator.]

Categories
Antitrust Civilization Monopolization

Nietzsche on Competition and Monopoly

When the traveler Pausanias visited the Helicon on his travels through Greece, an ancient copy of the Greeks’ first didactic poem, Hesiod’s Works and Days, was shown to him, inscribed on lead plates and badly damaged by time and weather. [I]t . . . began straight with the assertion: ‘there are two Eris-goddesses on earth’. This is one of the most remarkable of Hellenic ideas and deserves to be impressed upon newcomers right at the gate of entry to Hellenic ethics. ‘One should praise the one Eris as much as blame the other, if one has any sense; because the two goddesses have quite separate dispositions. One promotes wicked war and feuding, the cruel thing! No mortal likes her, but the yoke of necessity forces man to honor the heavy burden of this Eris according to the decrees of the Immortals. Black Night gave birth to this one as the older of the two; but Zeus, who reigned on high, placed the other on the roots of the earth and amongst men as a much better one. She drives even the unskilled man to work; and if someone who asked property see someone else who is rich, he likewise hurries off to sow and plant and set his house in order; neighbor competes with neighbor for prosperity. This Eris is good for men. Even potters harbor grudges against potters, carpenters against carpenters, beggars envy beggars and minstrels envy minstrels.’

Hesiod . . . first portrays one Eris as wicked, in fact the one who leads men in hostile struggle-to-the-death, and then praises the other Eris as good who, as jealousy, grudge and envy, goads men to action, not, however, the action of a struggle-to-the-death but the action of competition. The Greek is envious and does not experience this characteristic as a blemish, but as the effect of a benevolent deity . . . . Because he is envious, he feels the envious eye of a God resting on him whenever he has an excessive amount of honor, wealth, fame and fortune, and he fears this envy; in this case, the God warns him of the transitoriness of the human lot, he dreads his good fortune and, sacrificing the best part of it, he prostrates himself before divine envy.

If we want to see that feeling revealed in its naïve form, the feeling that competition is vital, if the well-being of the state is to continue, we should think about the original meaning of ostracism: as, for example, expressed by the Ephesians at the banning of Hermodor. ‘Amongst us, nobody should be the best; but if somebody is, let him be somewhere else, with other people.’ For why should nobody be the best? Because with that, competition would dry up and the permanent basis of life in the Hellenic state would be endangered. . . . The original function of this strange institution is . . . not as a safety valve but as a stimulant: the pre-eminent individual is removed so that a new contest of powers can be awakened: a thought which is hostile to the ‘exclusivity’ of genius in the modern sense, but which assumes that there are always several geniuses to incite each other to action, just as they keep each other within certain limits, to. That is the kernel of the Hellenic idea of competition: it loathes a monopoly of predominance and fears the dangers of this, it desires, as protective measure against genius—a second genius.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Homer on Competition, in On the Genealogy of Morality 187, 189-92 (Keith Ansell-Pearson ed., Carol Diethe trans., 1995).

Three observations. First, Nietzsche’s remark that “[e]ven potters harbor grudges against potters” reminds us that McCloskey ought to have included envy (the second Eris) among the bourgeois virtues, though she did not. In fact, one often senses that the only really human feeling left in the modern world—the only one for which any individual really is capable of killing or dying—is that of envy. Caged, to be sure, hidden, so rarely acknowledged that one would call it subconscious if one did not so often see that knowing look in the eyes of those it is consuming. I suppose in modern guise envy is what Nietzsche elsewhere calls resentment. Which leads to the second observation.

Second, Hellenic potters may have envied Hellenic potters, but what is distinctly un-bourgeois about the Hellenic world, as described by Nietzsche, is this: “[b]ecause he is envious, [the Greek] feels the envious eye of a God resting on him whenever he has an excessive amount of honor, wealth, fame and fortune, and he fears this envy[.]” The modern does not fear God; he believes, instead, that he deserves his wealth, even when he doesn’t have it, which is why envy spoils into resentment in him. Only the successful Greek would ever mistake himself for a God; but even the unsuccessful modern does that.

Third, Nietzsche is a Chicagoan through and through, not an antimonopolist in the contemporary mold. Yes, Nietzsche does ask : “[W]hy should nobody be the best?” And he does answer: “Because [if someone were the best], competition would dry up and the permanent basis of life in the Hellenic state would be endangered[.]” But the reason for which the best must be smashed is not to promote fairness. It is not to make equal.

On the contrary, it is to achieve even greater heights of inequality. As Nietzsche says: “[t]he original function of this strange institution [of smashing the best] is . . . not as a safety valve but as a stimulant: the pre-eminent individual is removed so that a new contest of powers can be awakened[.]” So far from making equal, the purpose of competition is to create “—a second genius.” Thus, in the language of today’s antitrust, Nietzsche’s antimonopolism is dynamic and Schumpeterian. He would smash the best only where the best stand so high above everyone else that they inhibit the process of overcoming and surpassing associated with dynamic competition. The notion that markets should be fair, in the sense that the best should be placed on an equal footing with the rest, plays no role in this calculus.

Are we there yet with the Tech Giants? Is Google already an Alexander—“that grotesquely enlarged reflection of the Hellene,” as Nietzsche calls him in the same essay—raging unchecked across the earth? I suppose that the “kill zone” narrative comes closest to making a genuinely Nietzschean case for breakup: no one will innovate in Google’s markets because Google will win.

But only to the extent that the harm of the kill zone is thought to be the toll it takes on excellence.

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization

Self-Preferencing and the Level Playing Field

I, too, have been enamored of sports metaphors in antitrust. How can the level playing field not convince?

Two wrestlers meet on the floor. If it is uphill for one and downhill for the other, neither will excel. One will find it too easy to win, and so train little. The other will find it too hard to win, and so train little. So, too, in business. If Amazon stands at the top of the hill, because Amazon owns the floor and has chosen to put itself there, then it will do little to improve itself, for it can too easily win against the third-party sellers that it has placed at the bottom of the hill.

But the level playing field is but the pretense of fairness. A way, only, of highlighting a much greater unfairness that we in fact revere. For when the athletes meet, one wins, and not, we like to think, by chance, but because one is better. And why is that one better? Forsooth, because that one does not compete on a level playing field at all. His muscles are better developed. He has better stamina. He is a quicker thinker. He has the focus of mind required to train more. His intuition is better. He has a better spatial sense. And so on. That is, he has an advantage that he does not share with his opponent.

Let us say it is his muscles. In muscle space the field is not level; he stands at the top. And he self-preferences, for he does not, say, starve himself for a week before the bout in order to waste his muscles a bit and thereby level the playing field in muscle space. No! He seizes his advantage. He uses it to win—inevitably to win—and despite this inevitability he feels that he deserves this win, that it is an expression of who he is and not of the tilt of a field.

Why should he feel that his victory is about him given that it was not earned on a truly level playing field? Because it is not a complete leveling that we really seek in any contest. What we seek is to reveal the character of a field that we value. Once we have isolated that field, we glory in whatever tilt we find to it.

If what interests us is who is the strongest, then we want to level the irrelevant fields, and then watch which way the parties slide on the field of strength. If it is the strength of wrestlers, then we level the floor, so that we can better perceive the tilt in their relative strengths.

We can therefore only really object to self-preferencing if the particular instance of self-preferencing at issue relates to a field that we do not think important. We cannot oppose self-preferencing itself, for to do that is to oppose all tilts of field, which is to say, to oppose excellence. It is to insist that no one win the match, or equivalently, that it only ever be determined by a flip of the coin.

(You ask me why the strong massacre the weak in war and want to celebrate it. What challenge is there in that, you say? I say: what challenge was there in your successes, dear reader, any of them, apart from the anxiety you may have felt over whether you would succeed, an anxiety born of your ignorance regarding where your strengths lay? Do you not massacre your opponents too, and call it achievement?)

We can oppose Amazon’s self-preferencing only if it lies in a space that we think irrelevant. If, instead, it reflects a superiority that we desire—if, in the commercial context, it is a superiority in product space, meaning that the self-preferencing delivers better products to consumers—then we must celebrate Amazon’s blood-letting.

We might legitimately say that in giving priority to ads for its own products, Amazon is tilting a field about which we do not care much—the field of marketing—and that prevents the tilt of a different field, that of product quality, from determining the outcome of the game, as we would want it to do.

But we might also conclude that on an ecommerce platform rife with unregulated and unsafe products, the field of information about products should be tilted in favor of Amazon, because then, at least, it is easier for consumers to find the products that Amazon actually stands behind: its own, for which Amazon can be sued if the products turn out to be defective.

So I do not see how the sports metaphor ultimately adds anything to antitrust analysis. It certainly does not teach that the heart of antitrust is fairness, the rules of the game. It merely takes us back to the question that is the heart of all antitrust analysis: does the slaying of competitors improve the product entire, including our ability to find it?

Categories
Antitrust

Cheerledeing

The headline in the New York Times one day last week: “Antitrust Overhaul Passes Its First Tests. Now, the Hard Parts.” The article notes that “[t]he bills face fierce opposition from technology companies, which have marshaled their considerable lobbying operations.” That would have been a good place to mention the fierce support for the bills coming from the Times itself, although I suppose that would be obvious to anyone who had read the article’s headline.

The Washington Post recently called out OAN reporter Christina Bobb for reporting on the Arizona recount while also raising funds to support it. How about an exposé on the Times for cheering on antitrust reforms that target the paper’s own direct competitors—the Tech Giants—for advertising dollars? If the giants go down, the Times will gain.

But I guess the Washington Post will too.

Categories
Civilization Meta Miscellany World

Why Do Mechanical Explanations of the Social Deny Software?

They say that a good social theory must throw out some reality in order to have any explanatory power. Thinkers who favor mechanical explanations of the social—the people who claim that it is climate or asteroids or guns, germs, and steel that explain the rise and fall of civilizations—always seem to throw out the part of the mechanism that is the software. Why?

That is, all mechanistic explanations of the social treat people as machines—robots—that have certain operating limits. They need food and water. They need temperatures that are not too high and not too low. They cannot withstand the slash of a steel weapon. They are susceptible to disease. And so on and all true. These operating limits do constrain what the robots can do. But that is far from all.

Robots need an instruction set to run; they need, in other words, a behavior. And if the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence should be teaching us anything, it is that behavior matters a lot. There is a very big difference between a car, a car that knows to break before hitting something on the highway, and a self-driving car. There is a very big difference between a Rhoomba that moves only in straight lines and one that criss-crosses the room. It would seem to follow that the robots’ software should matter a lot in the rise and fall of civilizations. So why not make social theory by keeping the software and throwing out the robot hardware instead?

Programming in the social is thought, belief, training, worship, prejudice, emotion, philosophy, literature, letters, culture, art. It is the humanities. Humanistic explanations for things—Ruskin’s observation that you can read the decline of a civilization in its art—theorize the social in terms of the human robot’s programming. The humanities throw out the hardware.

(By programming I do not mean that we are necessarily controlled by others. In human beings we are dealing with semi-autonomous, artificially (nay, actually!) intelligent robots. So programming, for us, necessarily means self-programming at both the individual and social levels. Our programs are some peculiar function of inputs from other robots, inputs from the programs of the robots themselves (that is, we use our thought to influence ourselves), and hard-coded inputs (those determined by our genes).)

It is a peculiar thing that at the same moment that, as a technological matter, we are coming to recognize the transformative nature of artificial intelligence in relation to hardware, and indeed at the same moment that, thanks to the great financial success of companies like Google and Facebook, which derives entirely from the value of connecting businesses with individual minds, we are coming to appreciate the great difference influence over minds makes in social outcomes, we should continue to favor mechanical explanations for the social, to attribute the fall of Rome to barbarian invasions rather than decadence, or the rise of China to good policy rather than good spirit.

When we do consider the software, we tend to ignore the most important parts. We credit the power of propaganda, but not the power of religion, ideas, philosophy, love, or, indeed, art. But these too are a part of the programming, and if you judge by the things you yourself hold most dear, likely the most important part.

So do not tell me that talking won’t work. That writing will never change things. That symbolic protest is weak. Or that the only political power grows out of the barrel of a gun—unless you believe that your computer will behave the same no matter what software it runs.

Categories
Meta Miscellany World

If Mars Attacks, It Will Be Us

Maybe the best Martian policy would be to prevent anyone from colonizing Mars, rather than to colonize it first.

Let’s assume for a moment that Mars really can be developed into a self-sufficient Earth 2.0. A big if, of course.

But if true, then see: The New World.

Settlers always have high asabiya, thanks to the challenges they face, and homogeneous interests relative to those who remain in the Old World, with its historic divisions. The Old World always thinks it can control the new, otherwise it wouldn’t foolishly bankroll settlers. But the new is far, far away. It is protected by distance. It is bigger than the territory of any one mother country.

And because it is united—or will become united, because, again, regardless of the origin of the settlers, their interests are always more in common with each other than with those of their mother countries—it can exploit this bounty at scales that no one mother country can ever hope to match.

So, eventually, the new will know its own power and come to dominate the old.

It has, after all, happened before.

And even if we don’t think Mars might be viable, or we think it might be more likely to make a Cuba than a U.S.A., why risk it?

Indeed, colonizing activity by a dominant country is always a self-inflicted wound. Colonization necessarily dilutes the dominant country’s power, because any new territories dilute the power of the earth entire. If I’m two thirds of one and I add one, now I’m one third. The only reason to colonize is to preclude others from doing so; it’s a race to the bottom.

But you can also try to enforce a rule against racing.

And if you were wondering why, in the 15th century, it was the Spaniards who went off looking for new worlds, and not the great powers of the day, not the Ottomans or the Chinese, you have your answer.

Categories
Backwardness of law

Solved: The Problem of Indeterminacy in the Law

It’s not a problem of language. It’s a problem of writing:

Socrates makes the point in Plato’s dialogue [Phaedrus] that writing will not help in the search for truth. He compares writing to painting — paintings look like living beings, but if you ask them a question, they are mute. If you ask written words a question, you get the same answer over and over. Writing cannot distinguish between suitable and unsuitable readers: it can be ill-treated or unfairly abused, but it cannot defend itself. In contrast, truths found in the art of dialectic can defend themselves. Thus, the spoken is superior to the written word!

Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code 14 (2012).

The trouble is, if you don’t write it down, then you must enact people.

Categories
Miscellany

And Then There’s the Carrot

When April’s jobs numbers disappointed, the governors of South Carolina and Montana responded by cutting unemployment benefits. The idea is that, given the low minimum wage in those states, some low-wage workers are making more money by staying home and cashing unemployment checks than they could make working. Stop mailing the checks and they will get back to work—and work is good, because work means more restaurants can reopen and stay open for longer hours, making consumers happy.

Herein, of course, the stick: make workers lives’ worse so that they will cry uncle and go back to work.

Then there’s the carrot: convert the unemployment benefits into handouts. That is: stop conditioning the delivery of those unemployment checks on proof that the worker is unemployed.

That would send workers back to work because when you live at the bottom end of the income distribution you can always use more money. Even if you are already getting an extra $300 per week in unemployment, you are not exactly living the good life. You will go back to work to earn another $300 if the government won’t cut your $300 unemployment check if you do so.

Removing the requirement that a worker be unemployed to earn the current batch of extended federal unemployment gives workers a carrot for working: the extra wages they can earn, above and beyond those unemployment benefits, by going back to work.

I know removing that requirement undermines the paper rationale for unemployment insurance, which is to tide over people who are looking for work. But this country has a major inequality problem, this would be a one-time thing and Congress has already appropriated the money, and those currently receiving benefits (who, under this plan, are the only ones who would be made eligible to continue to receive payments even if they go back to work) are more likely to be poor and deserving than the vast swaths of the middle class that received stimulus checks over the past year.

(It might be a little unfair to those who did find jobs and went back to work, or those who didn’t lie about looking for work in order to get their checks. But as between a little unfairness and the stick, I say we go with unfairness. And if there’s money in the extended unemployment budget to pay out benefits to those who went off unemployment early, then we should do that, and the unfairness would be much reduced.)

Plus the fix that President Biden has mooted—making sure people on unemployment really are looking for work—is impossible to execute without a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy, which the Administration is not likely seriously to pursue anyway.

If you have the choice between achieving efficiency (getting people back to work) using the carrot or the stick, and the carrot is there, why not use it?

The worst you could do is make the poor a little richer.