I felt I remembered you doing this in your excellent The Media Very Rarely Lies article—but I asked a lot of people and no one could corroborate. Seems like an illusory truth kinda thing
I don’t understand why neocameralism is radically different from existing parliamentary democracy. Take Canada. Electors are analogous to shareholders; the House of Commons, board of directors; MPs, board members; and the Prime Minister, CEO.
(1) Electors elect an MP by plurality in each riding. The electors are analogous to shareholders, except that each elector owns one unalienable share.
(2) Although I’m not aware of any corporation whose shareholders elect the members of its board of directors by plurality in each geographical district, corporations have diverse ways for shareholders to elect board members. A corporation can specify its bylaws about how shareholders elect board members, or the rules can be hardcoded into the corporate charter. The charter can be subject to amendments ratified by the board or shareholders, and all rules are subject to the corporate law of the jurisdiction of incorporation. So, theoretically, a corporation could set up its board elections so that shareholders elected board members by geographic district. Regardless, in Canada, the House of Commons could pass electoral reform to make election of its members more like your typical corporate board. But even if it didn’t, having geographically representative directors doesn’t obviously violate shareholders rights of control and ownership over the corporation.
(3) The MPs elect or acquiesce, by majority vote, to a party leader becoming Prime Minister, who is head of government, essentially the CEO of Canada. Likewise, the House of Commons can vote non-confidence in the Prime Minister. Of course, the Commons can’t just vote whenever it feels like to fire the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister can call a new election. But, corporate boards also have to meet according to their own procedures, determined in advance.
(4) Canada’s federal government has other institutions like the Senate (whose members are appointed for long terms, like the UK’s House of Lords) and the courts. It even has what it calls a constitution. However, in many cases, Parliament can formally override the courts using the “notwithstanding clause.” And, informally, the Senate and courts have no norms or enforcers to rely on to truly frustrate the House of Commons and its chosen prime minister. Even Canada’s so-called constitution is expressly viewed as “unwritten” in that it is a non-exhaustive collection of laws recognized by norms and practices to have constitutional significance.
So, what exactly makes Canada not neocameral? The only thing I can think of is that the “shares” are not alienable and thus not tradeable on an exchange. But, suppose a Canadian citizen could sell their right to vote on the membership of the House of Commons. In that case, I don’t see what would distinguish Canada from a for-profit government. Even if it didn’t pay dividends (like Alaska does), the value of alienable voting rights would be subject to the forces you identify in your post (the right to partially control the direction of the people and territory under the sovereignty of Canada). Shareholders would presumably want to maximize the value of their alienable voting rights. If the government threatened to cancel voting rights, their tradeable value would collapse.
Apologies for the long comment. I just don’t think Yarvin would see Canada as akin to his ideas (minus the right to sell one’s vote, that is). I’m not convinced that, if he thinks (as I assume) Canada sucks, why his ideas would be any better if implemented. Or perhaps, he would agree that, if Canada allowed alienation of the franchise, it would inevitably evolve into his proposed system of government?
There are certain essential features of corporations that are incompatible with sovereignty. For one, the civil suits necessary to deter breaches of fiduciary duties that are at certain times more profitable for directors and officers than the loyal and prudent managenent of the corporation require the courts of a sovereign higher than the corporation to be enforced.
Likewise, securities regulation, which is necessary for accurate pricing, requires a power above the corporation to enforce mandatory disclosure. This power higher than the corporation could be public like the SEC, or private like the NYSE (as was the case before 1934), which both have reporting requirements. (That mandatory disclosure is necessary for accurate pricing is evident from the fact that only dogshit securities get sold on over-the-counter markets.) But all states must have secrets for national security. When a neutral third party can decide disputes between the SEC or NYSE and a corporation drawing this line for, e.g., trade secrets, that is only possible because corporations are not sovereign. Either the sovereign corporation would respect the fiduciary law of corporations and securities regulation to about the same extent that nation-states today respect international human rights law, or the sovereign corporations would not truly be sovereign, but would rather be a member of a confederacy led by a securities exchange. Would this securities exchange not need a military force to prevent a great variety of conduct incompatible with a well functioning securities exchange, such "hostile takeovers" effected by the means sovereigns use for such endeavors, as opposed to those used by investors?
The corporate form is a very elegant way to solve certain agency problems using markets and courts. Having neatly solved the agency problems between shareholders and officers and directors, the invisible hand takes care that the corporation creates value for consumers. But the markets rely on the courts to function properly at the first stage, by enforcing the fiduciary relationship between the shareholders and the directors and officers.
Suppose the Baltimore Police Department is loyal to the CEO of Baltimore, the CEO doesn't see a way to get the share price of Baltimore up, takes a short position on Baltimore, tips a few BPD chiefs to do the same, and the BPD chiefs use the proceeds of their short sale to give the all the BPD officers a bonus, while refusing to spend tax dollars to make Baltimore valuable and profitable but keeping it all for himself and the BPD, and then rules Baltimore tyrannically. What is Yarvin's solution to this kind of situation in Patchwork? Surely the BPD will not cooperate in the CEO of Baltimore's prosecution for insider trading. "Ummm uhhhh turn off the guns with the blockchain. Bitcoin solves this." As if arms which are not Blockhain-controlled could not be covertly smuggled. This part of the design is essentially the patchwork equivalent of the Plato's communal paternity scheme in The Republic: an almost ad hoc fix to the Achilles heel of the system, that exceeds the bounds credulity to believe would work IRL.
Although representative democracy has agency problems of its own, and looks rather shabby at dealing with them in comparison with corporations, the idea that the agency problems inherent in sovereignty can be solved with the mechanisms used to solve agency problems in corporations depends upon the untenable assumption that the market could function without an independent legal system of a higher sovereign to act a referee. It is not sexy, edgy or exciting to assert that constitutional government is the only practicable solution to the agency problems inherent in sovereignty, but "As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!"
I have not read "Zero to One" but I imagine it goes like this:
“Of course we'll bundle our MorganNet software with the new network nodes! Our customers expect no less of us. We have never sought to become a monopoly. Our products are simply so good that no one feels the need to compete with us. --Where do you want your Node today?”
CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morgan Data Systems press release
It's from alpha centauri, the videogame. The quote was making fun of microsoft's own defense of it's monopoly at the time.
I generally agree with regard to the inaccuracies of the increasingly widespread media coverage of UR, but hasn't Moldbug/Yarvin been pretty consistently critical of GDP as a target, at the very least since he wrote "Sam Altman is not a Blithering Idiot" and especially since he returned to writing?
I recall him arguing that a sovereign corporation trying to maximize GDP is the equivalent of a non-sovereign corporation trying to maximize revenue, when what well-run corporations actually do is try to maximize returns to shareholders (capital value + profit). That's why he's in favor of make-work projects, protectionism, and targeted technology restriction, in order to maximize the value of the sovcorp's human capital (which luxuries, which contribute positively to GDP, can impair).
As I see it, the truest criticism of Moldbug is that he essentially reverse-engineered some aspects of the European Old Regime through his Austrian-economics-derived methodology, but at the same time never truly understood what that regime was (nor necessarily cared). This may seem like an irrelevant historical curiosity, but it's hugely important because the Old Regime was, in fact, a system of profoundly limited government, albeit through different (much more effective!) mechanisms than those of the Founding Fathers. Anyone who cares about liberty today would do better to start by studying the Old Regime rather than 1776 or 1787.
Love it! Finally, someone who actually grapples with his ideas. Being a fan of Yarvin and having read I think literally all of it, some posts several times over, I'm a bit annoyed at hearing, "derrr, he wants kings with crowns and stuff, that's so stoopid". SMH. He may be wrong about things, there's plenty to criticize, but if that's the level of criticism, it's not even worth engaging with.
I see him as in an intellectual tradition with America's founding fathers. They attempted to design a government from scratch, with the understanding that human nature is flawed, so you have to align incentives in such a way that it will produce good governance regardless.
But it seems clear now that they failed. Clearly by their own standards. (They were deeply concerned about the problem of "faction"; they didn't want a party system, much less a 2-party system, but they thought they had effectively guarded against it...and yet they got one almost immediately. And it was, by their admission, designed for a religious people, an Anglo-Protestant people. It may be debatable whether or not it really was an ideal system even if for the original founding stock, but we don't have such a people now.
So we need to go back to the drawing board. You can criticize his suggestions... Whether it could work is an empirical question, and the only way to find out would be to try. Ideally on a small scale.
But given the state of things, I for one would be prepared to go all in and roll the dice. Western civilization is racing toward a cliff. In the Yookay, the government is ramping up the importation of fighting age foreign rapists with feverish intensity, and jailing people for complaining about gang-rapes that have been deliberately inflicted on their children. I'm sorry, literally Nazi Germany would be better than that.
And although the US is most resistant, because as he puts it, "The home of the screwworm is also the home of the screwworm-eating wasp. Unfortunately, one can’t really rely on the wasp to eradicate the screwworm. But it keeps the screwworms relatively sane, honest and under control, which is both a good thing and a bad thing."
Nevertheless, that seems to seems to be where we're all headed. Just like Rhodesia and South Africa.
"He’s not concerned with who deserves to rule or what values they should uphold, per se. His goal is to design the structure that most reliably produces prosperity; his frame is, in some broad sense, utilitarian."
And that's a good insight; it explains how I went from once upon a time an anarcho-communist gender feminist, to later left-liberal anti-Islam New Atheist, to eventually far-right (neo)reactionary...with basically the same moral compass. I have becoming increasingly less allergic to white nationalism; he's completely right that all of their concerns are extremely valid, but that they don't have much of a solution; just convincing all whites to be pro-white enough, even if it could be done, doesn't seem likely to fix the structural problems that got us here in the first place.
But the other point is: although I have to believe for pragmatic reasons that it is entirely valid and even necessary to put your own people first... My reasons are still ultimately consequentialist. My big concern is that the Islamization/South Africanization of the West will kill the goose that lays the golden egg and plunge us into a new dark age. And that would be a tragedy for all humans.
What we should want is order, security, prosperity, healthy happy families... IOW human flourishing. And human betterment (smarter, less criminal, etc). With technology when it becomes available, and, as every civilization has been doing since the dawn of time until now, removing from the gene pool those who create the greatest negative externalities (thieves, rapists, murderers).
I think almost every last foreigner needs to be kicked out of the UK at this point, given how dire the situation is... But I'd welcome rule by the Chinese or space aliens if they could provide good governance and deliver the above results.
Not to be a pedant but Apple does on fact have a constitution - its articles of incorporation. Albeit that is not the source of its value
"Am I the only one who remembers Scott Alexander offering a bounty to anyone who could find a lie in the mainstream media?"
I don't remember this. Not saying for sure it didn't happen, because I write lots of things, but can you remind me what you're thinking of?
I felt I remembered you doing this in your excellent The Media Very Rarely Lies article—but I asked a lot of people and no one could corroborate. Seems like an illusory truth kinda thing
I don’t understand why neocameralism is radically different from existing parliamentary democracy. Take Canada. Electors are analogous to shareholders; the House of Commons, board of directors; MPs, board members; and the Prime Minister, CEO.
(1) Electors elect an MP by plurality in each riding. The electors are analogous to shareholders, except that each elector owns one unalienable share.
(2) Although I’m not aware of any corporation whose shareholders elect the members of its board of directors by plurality in each geographical district, corporations have diverse ways for shareholders to elect board members. A corporation can specify its bylaws about how shareholders elect board members, or the rules can be hardcoded into the corporate charter. The charter can be subject to amendments ratified by the board or shareholders, and all rules are subject to the corporate law of the jurisdiction of incorporation. So, theoretically, a corporation could set up its board elections so that shareholders elected board members by geographic district. Regardless, in Canada, the House of Commons could pass electoral reform to make election of its members more like your typical corporate board. But even if it didn’t, having geographically representative directors doesn’t obviously violate shareholders rights of control and ownership over the corporation.
(3) The MPs elect or acquiesce, by majority vote, to a party leader becoming Prime Minister, who is head of government, essentially the CEO of Canada. Likewise, the House of Commons can vote non-confidence in the Prime Minister. Of course, the Commons can’t just vote whenever it feels like to fire the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister can call a new election. But, corporate boards also have to meet according to their own procedures, determined in advance.
(4) Canada’s federal government has other institutions like the Senate (whose members are appointed for long terms, like the UK’s House of Lords) and the courts. It even has what it calls a constitution. However, in many cases, Parliament can formally override the courts using the “notwithstanding clause.” And, informally, the Senate and courts have no norms or enforcers to rely on to truly frustrate the House of Commons and its chosen prime minister. Even Canada’s so-called constitution is expressly viewed as “unwritten” in that it is a non-exhaustive collection of laws recognized by norms and practices to have constitutional significance.
So, what exactly makes Canada not neocameral? The only thing I can think of is that the “shares” are not alienable and thus not tradeable on an exchange. But, suppose a Canadian citizen could sell their right to vote on the membership of the House of Commons. In that case, I don’t see what would distinguish Canada from a for-profit government. Even if it didn’t pay dividends (like Alaska does), the value of alienable voting rights would be subject to the forces you identify in your post (the right to partially control the direction of the people and territory under the sovereignty of Canada). Shareholders would presumably want to maximize the value of their alienable voting rights. If the government threatened to cancel voting rights, their tradeable value would collapse.
Apologies for the long comment. I just don’t think Yarvin would see Canada as akin to his ideas (minus the right to sell one’s vote, that is). I’m not convinced that, if he thinks (as I assume) Canada sucks, why his ideas would be any better if implemented. Or perhaps, he would agree that, if Canada allowed alienation of the franchise, it would inevitably evolve into his proposed system of government?
There are certain essential features of corporations that are incompatible with sovereignty. For one, the civil suits necessary to deter breaches of fiduciary duties that are at certain times more profitable for directors and officers than the loyal and prudent managenent of the corporation require the courts of a sovereign higher than the corporation to be enforced.
Likewise, securities regulation, which is necessary for accurate pricing, requires a power above the corporation to enforce mandatory disclosure. This power higher than the corporation could be public like the SEC, or private like the NYSE (as was the case before 1934), which both have reporting requirements. (That mandatory disclosure is necessary for accurate pricing is evident from the fact that only dogshit securities get sold on over-the-counter markets.) But all states must have secrets for national security. When a neutral third party can decide disputes between the SEC or NYSE and a corporation drawing this line for, e.g., trade secrets, that is only possible because corporations are not sovereign. Either the sovereign corporation would respect the fiduciary law of corporations and securities regulation to about the same extent that nation-states today respect international human rights law, or the sovereign corporations would not truly be sovereign, but would rather be a member of a confederacy led by a securities exchange. Would this securities exchange not need a military force to prevent a great variety of conduct incompatible with a well functioning securities exchange, such "hostile takeovers" effected by the means sovereigns use for such endeavors, as opposed to those used by investors?
The corporate form is a very elegant way to solve certain agency problems using markets and courts. Having neatly solved the agency problems between shareholders and officers and directors, the invisible hand takes care that the corporation creates value for consumers. But the markets rely on the courts to function properly at the first stage, by enforcing the fiduciary relationship between the shareholders and the directors and officers.
Suppose the Baltimore Police Department is loyal to the CEO of Baltimore, the CEO doesn't see a way to get the share price of Baltimore up, takes a short position on Baltimore, tips a few BPD chiefs to do the same, and the BPD chiefs use the proceeds of their short sale to give the all the BPD officers a bonus, while refusing to spend tax dollars to make Baltimore valuable and profitable but keeping it all for himself and the BPD, and then rules Baltimore tyrannically. What is Yarvin's solution to this kind of situation in Patchwork? Surely the BPD will not cooperate in the CEO of Baltimore's prosecution for insider trading. "Ummm uhhhh turn off the guns with the blockchain. Bitcoin solves this." As if arms which are not Blockhain-controlled could not be covertly smuggled. This part of the design is essentially the patchwork equivalent of the Plato's communal paternity scheme in The Republic: an almost ad hoc fix to the Achilles heel of the system, that exceeds the bounds credulity to believe would work IRL.
Although representative democracy has agency problems of its own, and looks rather shabby at dealing with them in comparison with corporations, the idea that the agency problems inherent in sovereignty can be solved with the mechanisms used to solve agency problems in corporations depends upon the untenable assumption that the market could function without an independent legal system of a higher sovereign to act a referee. It is not sexy, edgy or exciting to assert that constitutional government is the only practicable solution to the agency problems inherent in sovereignty, but "As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!"
I have not read "Zero to One" but I imagine it goes like this:
“Of course we'll bundle our MorganNet software with the new network nodes! Our customers expect no less of us. We have never sought to become a monopoly. Our products are simply so good that no one feels the need to compete with us. --Where do you want your Node today?”
CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morgan Data Systems press release
It's from alpha centauri, the videogame. The quote was making fun of microsoft's own defense of it's monopoly at the time.
I generally agree with regard to the inaccuracies of the increasingly widespread media coverage of UR, but hasn't Moldbug/Yarvin been pretty consistently critical of GDP as a target, at the very least since he wrote "Sam Altman is not a Blithering Idiot" and especially since he returned to writing?
I recall him arguing that a sovereign corporation trying to maximize GDP is the equivalent of a non-sovereign corporation trying to maximize revenue, when what well-run corporations actually do is try to maximize returns to shareholders (capital value + profit). That's why he's in favor of make-work projects, protectionism, and targeted technology restriction, in order to maximize the value of the sovcorp's human capital (which luxuries, which contribute positively to GDP, can impair).
As I see it, the truest criticism of Moldbug is that he essentially reverse-engineered some aspects of the European Old Regime through his Austrian-economics-derived methodology, but at the same time never truly understood what that regime was (nor necessarily cared). This may seem like an irrelevant historical curiosity, but it's hugely important because the Old Regime was, in fact, a system of profoundly limited government, albeit through different (much more effective!) mechanisms than those of the Founding Fathers. Anyone who cares about liberty today would do better to start by studying the Old Regime rather than 1776 or 1787.
Great stuff. Tell him to give me a job though
Love it! Finally, someone who actually grapples with his ideas. Being a fan of Yarvin and having read I think literally all of it, some posts several times over, I'm a bit annoyed at hearing, "derrr, he wants kings with crowns and stuff, that's so stoopid". SMH. He may be wrong about things, there's plenty to criticize, but if that's the level of criticism, it's not even worth engaging with.
I see him as in an intellectual tradition with America's founding fathers. They attempted to design a government from scratch, with the understanding that human nature is flawed, so you have to align incentives in such a way that it will produce good governance regardless.
But it seems clear now that they failed. Clearly by their own standards. (They were deeply concerned about the problem of "faction"; they didn't want a party system, much less a 2-party system, but they thought they had effectively guarded against it...and yet they got one almost immediately. And it was, by their admission, designed for a religious people, an Anglo-Protestant people. It may be debatable whether or not it really was an ideal system even if for the original founding stock, but we don't have such a people now.
So we need to go back to the drawing board. You can criticize his suggestions... Whether it could work is an empirical question, and the only way to find out would be to try. Ideally on a small scale.
But given the state of things, I for one would be prepared to go all in and roll the dice. Western civilization is racing toward a cliff. In the Yookay, the government is ramping up the importation of fighting age foreign rapists with feverish intensity, and jailing people for complaining about gang-rapes that have been deliberately inflicted on their children. I'm sorry, literally Nazi Germany would be better than that.
And although the US is most resistant, because as he puts it, "The home of the screwworm is also the home of the screwworm-eating wasp. Unfortunately, one can’t really rely on the wasp to eradicate the screwworm. But it keeps the screwworms relatively sane, honest and under control, which is both a good thing and a bad thing."
Nevertheless, that seems to seems to be where we're all headed. Just like Rhodesia and South Africa.
"He’s not concerned with who deserves to rule or what values they should uphold, per se. His goal is to design the structure that most reliably produces prosperity; his frame is, in some broad sense, utilitarian."
And that's a good insight; it explains how I went from once upon a time an anarcho-communist gender feminist, to later left-liberal anti-Islam New Atheist, to eventually far-right (neo)reactionary...with basically the same moral compass. I have becoming increasingly less allergic to white nationalism; he's completely right that all of their concerns are extremely valid, but that they don't have much of a solution; just convincing all whites to be pro-white enough, even if it could be done, doesn't seem likely to fix the structural problems that got us here in the first place.
But the other point is: although I have to believe for pragmatic reasons that it is entirely valid and even necessary to put your own people first... My reasons are still ultimately consequentialist. My big concern is that the Islamization/South Africanization of the West will kill the goose that lays the golden egg and plunge us into a new dark age. And that would be a tragedy for all humans.
What we should want is order, security, prosperity, healthy happy families... IOW human flourishing. And human betterment (smarter, less criminal, etc). With technology when it becomes available, and, as every civilization has been doing since the dawn of time until now, removing from the gene pool those who create the greatest negative externalities (thieves, rapists, murderers).
I think almost every last foreigner needs to be kicked out of the UK at this point, given how dire the situation is... But I'd welcome rule by the Chinese or space aliens if they could provide good governance and deliver the above results.
Great stuff!