Anarchy

Post Reply New Topic

To reach permanent anarchy, governments should be overthrown. Two options: civil disobedience or military force. Both require forming another organization, at least temporarily. There is a problem here: Organizations can't be abolished voluntarily, and every organization want to grow. As organizations grow, the people having power in the organization get corrupt. As an organization gets corrupt, another organization wants to be an alternative and demands revolution. It is impossible to break the vicious cycle.

Secondly, majority of the people in the world *demand* leaders. They want to avoid making decisions, in other words they are voluntarily slaves.

With the slave morality and the vicious cycle, anarchism is not possible for long durations.

And yet strangely enough it has been the most common system for most of the existance of our species or a least untill the invention of property.

This is not true.



Do you think that cavemen were taking orders from their leader like ''Would you like to collect some berries for me dear?''? Nonsense.

Secondly, anarchy has nothing to do with property, it is about authority. Leadership = Authority in long term, because as I said power corrupts. There were small organizations, they have become larger as technological advances allow. Only our paradigm about ''the competent leader'' changes over time.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 084634.htm

I don't think the cavemen had leaders using modern hunter-gatherers as models for early man there is np reason to think they had.

I think our political science buddies may be falling into a common trap in evolutionary psycology
Article on This issue.

Last edited by JakobVirgil on 19 Sep 2012, 11:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

I've never seen a such bad piece of pseudoscience

wow 64% of some small pool of texans student prefer a tall person for leader

32 elections out of 57 election have been won by the taller candidate,7 more!

evolutionary psychology is the right-wing version of Psychoanalysis

Having a "strong" chin is important too.

To be elected it helps to have the chin of a Leader.

ruveyn

No solid evidence, right. This study completely disregards Hitler, Stalin and Napoleon. That's why I said ''Only our paradigm about ''the competent leader'' changes over time.''.

By the way, which anarchy are we talking about? Anarcho communism or anarcho capitalism or else?

First I was going to reply by meticulously going through Ostroms analysis of fisheries, groundwater basins and irrigation projects and point out how she used rational choice theory to explain why the institutions set in place succeeded or failed in preventing free-rider problems. Then I would carefully point out that new institutional economics (a field which is very much dominated by the Cambridge series on the Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions, which included Governing the Commons) draws heavily upon neoclassical economic theory and actor models from microeconomics - also known as rational choice. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_instit ... _economics

Then I was going to point out that Ostrom has previously been president of the public choice society, and I would humble suggest to define the goals of the society with the following quite from the website of the society:

"The hard core in public choice can be summarized in three presuppositions: (1) methodological individualism, (2) rational choice, and (3) politics-as-exchange."

On this basis (while acknowledging that membership of a society does not mean that an individual necessarily agrees 100 percent with its vision) I would consider myself to be well in my right to arrive at the conclusion that the work of Elinor Ostrom is to be considered part of the rational choice tradition.

Then I was going to point out that Ostrom said the following regarding "panacea" (taken from an interview here: http://www.shareable.net/blog/no-panace ... nor-ostrom"

"No panaceas! We tend to want simple formulas. We have two main prescriptions: privatize the resource or make it state property with uniform rules. But sometimes the people who are living on the resource are in the best position to figure out how to manage it as a commons."

In this light I would (while acknowledging the limitations of my capacity for interpreting the words of others) carefully point out that this is not a criticism of rational choice, but of several policy options (state control or privatization of resources). I would then carefully point out that Ostroms third option, as mentioned above, is in itself based upon the same concepts of rational choice which are used to advocate either state control or privatization of resources.



... but since I'm feeling lazy I just grabbed my copy of "Governing the Commons" and consulted the index. Then I found reference to "rational action" and consulted these pages, which resulted in the following statement (Ostrom, 1990: 33):

"The decisions and actions of CPR appropriators to appropriate from and provide a CPR are those of broadly rational individuals who find themselves in complex and uncertain situations. An individual's choice of behaviour in any particular situation will depend on how the individual learns about, views and weighs the benefits and costs of actions and their perceived linkage to outcomes that also involve a mixture of benefits and costs."

Oh, and CPR (in this case) means "Common Pool Resources".

I suppose one might argue that this is *not* a real rational choice approach, but then I would see no other alternative other than resorting to even more Wiki-Fu:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Buy why, oh why, would Ostrom turn herself into a "hack" by adopting such a pseudo-scientific approach? Why would she ignore obvious examples of altruism, solidarity and self-sacrifice? Guess what, she has an answer to that too (Ostrom, 1990: 38 ):

"This general conception is one way of fulfilling Popper's advice to make the rationality principle "an almost empty principle"" (Popper 1967). It places the primary weight of theoretical analysis on specifying rigorously and fully the models of the situations in which individuals find themselves. It accepts Popper's methodological advice to emphasize the way we describe the situations in which individuals find themselves so that we can use observable variables to reject our theories, rather than internal, in-the-mind, subjective variables, which are far more difficult to measure." (my italics added)

... she's so hot .

... and isn't it impressive how I can communicate the content of a book which I haven't even read? I must be some sort of psychic ⸮.



Perhaps I just got tired of writing "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" all the time...

While I agree that economics (in its current state) is in no way as scientific as the three classical scientific Nobel categories, and that Alfred Nobel never himself intended to establish "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel", I do not however consider this a reason for a priori discounting the work of those who have been awarded "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". As a result, I see no fault in pointing out that both Elinor Ostrom and Douglass North have received the "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel".

Awarding "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" (you see, it's pretty awful) to Robert C. Merton and Myron S. Scholes for a new method to determine the value of derivatives might not seem clever, especially in the light of the current financial crisis. But awarding Egas Moniz "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine" for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy (=lobotomy) in certain psychoses isn't exactly Nobel's finest hour, either.



In light of my comments above I consider these statements to be without merit and uncalled for.



While the burden of proof strictly speaking is also on me in this respect, I did not make any claim about the specific value of rational choice in statistical studies. I simply pointed out that there are serious methodological challenges when using experiments in the social sciences. I thus feel no immediate compulsion to survey the existing studies that use both rational choice theory and statistics in response to your statement. Not only because this would mean reading hundreds, if not thousands, of articles, but also because I might get a No True Scotsman reply.

And finally (double quote, I know):



The tragedy of the commons is a Nash equilibrium. And it occurs in the real world, not just in an experimental setting.

I fail to see the controversy.

There is a very solid correlation between height and math skills in grade school, for instance...

This is actually a rather good intervention.

My understanding is that nominalist and I are having a calm conversation over the definition of anarchism in its broadest sense, while everyone else is having a chaotic fight where the actual definition of concepts is totally irrelevant. Mind you, I more or less tuned out of that second bit pages ago, so it may have gotten better.

anarcho-capitalism is not anarchism

If we apply that 3 principle to economists we come to the right conclusion : we don't have to trust economists because they have a strong rational-interest in being biased

According to whom, or which classification?

Murray Rothbard himself: "[cut] historically anarchism is the anti-state wing of the socialist movement [cut] we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical"

It is a radically different form of anarchism from left-anarchism in general, but it is anarchism nonetheless. It derives from a different tradition: anarcho-capitalism is basically total, unrestrained liberty, beyond what classic liberalism argues for but in the same line; left-anarchism is rather a logical conclusion reached from socialism and democracy.

Although, to be honest, I don't know if it fits my "positive anarchism" definition outlined above. Maybe yes, maybe no. Replacing the state by private interaction is still creating a new system of horizontal organisation, but with maybe more "horizontal" than "organisation", and without enough "replacing". It may weaken my definition or weaken anarcho-capitalism as an anarchism. I let you choose. I was more thinking of left-anarchism myself anyway.

Yes anarcho-capitalism is more a combination of american individualist anarchism(Tucker,Spooner) with Austrian economics. A system like that would quickly degenerate in a new form of feudalism