True but why do we have to rule people’s lives with a top-down approach? What has convinced us that top-down incentive design by a select few is preferable to localized decision making?
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Replying to @PanPatterson
A government is an agent that imposes an offset on your local payoff matrix to make your personal Nash equilibrium compatible with the common good. For this to work, all control must be exerted at exactly the right level, including control of the government itself.
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Replying to @Plinz @PanPatterson
After 40 years of ruling itself, the working class in my own country (Eastern Germany) voted to be exploited by the bourgeoisie again, because the results were better: higher productivity, better living conditions, shorter working hours. What do you make of that?
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Replying to @Plinz
The theoretical notion that Gov could create improved payoffs to increase net societal utility is nice, but how often has that been brutally wrong? The power needed to redesign incentives in such a thorough manner is the *same* power that can wreak havoc by poor rulers.
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Replying to @PanPatterson @Plinz
Judging by the fact that Eastern Germany is substantially better off here than back behind the iron curtain, I'd say it was a great move. The real victory, though, is government moving away from despotism and allowing people to make choices.
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Replying to @PanPatterson @Plinz
Would you say the working class is less free now versus before? Freely engaging in labor with a business owner isn't just good for its improved standard of living. It allows individuals to arrange their own affairs according to massive information not available to the few.
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Replying to @PanPatterson
During socialism, the working class still had to show up for work, but its factories were controlled by committees, not by an elite of owners with skin in the game. Unless you were caught stealing you could no get fired, and there was no incentive for innovation or efficiency.
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Replying to @Plinz
It sounds like we both agree that socialism in East Germany was less preferred. Help me understand how you get to top-down rulership.
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Replying to @PanPatterson
Perhaps think about it like a nervous system, or from a cybernetics perspective. Decision making needs to represent available information and actual incentives (this is sometimes hard to see because people are confused by moralistic stories).
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Replying to @Plinz
How could an artificial system represent all necessary information that individuals use to make choices? Especially when such data may not be representable or translatable in language. Also, if moralistic stories are just confusion then why do we care about UBI or UBfood?
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The reason that we are interested in UBI style models is that in a highly automated society, participation in the labor market is possibly no longer the primary mode of allocating resources to individual households, and a new model has to be developed.
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Replying to @Plinz
As much as I'm skeptical of the high risk inherent in top-down government, I am somewhat open to the UBI. Automation disruption may require fundamental change to the labor market -- maybe, though we still don't know how many new labor opportunities will emerge.
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Replying to @PanPatterson @Plinz
I favor UBI to UBfood or UBhousing because localized individuals and networks have more information and skin in the game than a national committee of central planners.
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