Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order

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The Roosevelt Revolution was interesting in that it's the source of our minimal social safety nets. At the same time a lot of people argue that the Great Depression would have been shorter without all of the tinkering (Amity Schlaes took that topic on in The Forgotten Man).

Something else, Argentina was hitting my news radar last year a lot in terms of how they were locking down their financial system and trying to prevent money from leaving the country as they went into hyperinflation. I think they understood that problem and cracked down on civil liberties accordingly. You may say - hyperinflation isn't specifically 'taxation', I'd think bad economic conditions for the rich would include taxation but not include taxation solely. Ray Dalio is talking about countries where things are already sloped downhill and taxation would be one of many things going wrong that would encourage expatriation (as I was mentioning earlier - if a country is the best place to be in every other way and you raise taxes, most people rich or otherwise aren't going to want to learn a foreign language, culture, and customs to save 5%).

I guess to maybe stay out of the subjective questions - what do you think should be done to prevent capital flight? Is there a way to do that which doesn't violate first world principles related to freedom and rights which seem to include voting with one's feet?

I think investing in the stock market and becoming a everyday millionaire is the best way to deal with the changing world order.Also be sure to be wise with money and debt to deal with the order situation to and maybe move to Texas like Elon.

I'd take a page out of Sam Harris's philosophy that we'd probably want to get to a place where employment and right to live in anything like a dignified manner aren't so coupled that one needs upwards of three or four million dollars in investments to have any freedom above food stamps. I get that for years there's been a problem of needing to maximize labor force participation to stay competitive with other countries, it's been too expensive to do anything like UBI (or at least the non-libertarian version that would still cover medical needs separately) but we'll be getting to a place soon where the labor pool is so full and the workplace so Machiavellian that we very well could be up against a Hunger Games problem, particularly if automation keeps eating into the number of available jobs and we answer that by doing nothing. There was an MIT panel discussion a year or two ago that I remember and one of the specialists was saying that the problem with automation would be if we did it slow and sloppy, which sadly is quite likely to happen if labor is cheap and I have a sense that this could be as big a national security issue as letting social media destabilize our public square and news media.

Well there are plenty of places in this country where you can have a good living with 100,000 to 500,000 in investments like in Oklahoma or Mississippi or Arkansas or small town Texas especially if you have land..Id say the rich and corporations and all businesses and non-profits should pay zero taxes in the US.I would also abolish the min wage in all 50 states.UBI would just increase inflation until the dollar became worthless.Nobody should ever get something for nothing unless its their birthday or a holiday or special occasion for sure not a government policy for the masses.

The 'something for nothing' pertains to a free-rider issue and I get the sense that we've been trying to avoid something like an economic death spiral that we assume would be the result of giving people the option to leave the work world.

Inflation's something I've thought about a bit and it seems like, if I'm understanding this correctly, it would map on to how much money is circulating against how many goods. If we get to a point where automation is increasingly taking over we'd be in a position where more of the 'BS jobs' which are there for their own sake could be relinquished. For people who need to do something career-like to keep meaning we might translate some of that into organized charity work and let them fill in more of the gaps that the private sector can't.

My really big concern is the work place strangling integrity. If people are living hand to mouth, electrified by a work world that sees them all as fungible meat, and they have to fight other people for their survival (where competition starts going really wrong) we're making sociopathy a core value, to which a country that enshrines sociopathy as a core value can't raise a decent generation or if they try most of their children will be destroyed on contact with that environment. We need to get back to competence hierarchies more so than dominance hierarchies and for that to happen it seems like the boot needs to be taken off people's throats a bit even if it means that they'll be out on a bus to clean the sides of highways.

I want to stress that one last time: what's the revolution in "the roosevelt revolution"?
In successful revolutions, the people in power get dethroned. What does it say about a go ernment, when it incites a revolution - that it was not in power, possibly?



First: the rich have already left.
Amazon is in Luxembourg, because it gets away with paying zero taxes there.
Rich people already have their bank accounts in Switzerland, offshore islands, etc.
Tesla factories are heavily subsidized and close to wherever there's qualified personell and a market for high-end electric cars. If Musk could get a better deal in India, he'd be building cars in India. He's held accountable by his shareholders and *has* to find the cheapest place.
So let's not even pretend the discussion about raising taxes is anything but a diversion from the fact that they have already left.

We didn't have the social security administration until we did. We didn't have Medicare until we did. I'm not exactly a scholar on the New Deal but I remember a lot of claims that a lot of our highway infrastructure was laid down at that time.

I can't claim to know all the specifics of why Dalio chose that phrasing, just that word 'revolution' gets thrown around these days quite often for other kinds of big changes including technological upheaval. He could have meant it in all kinds of ways and perhaps several different ways to mild degrees at the same time. It's probably me as well, not being a Marxist, I'm used to the public colloquial use of the term where it isn't something as exact as completely overthrowing a whole way of doing things, except for perhaps the idea that GameB is sizing up collapse as a means to remodel the social contract and move things from cuttthroat competition to something much more collaborative (and I still think they're mostly chewing on ideas, have some people generating ideas and plans, but all of that is still on the drawing board and not in practical stages exactly yet unless it's Jim Rutt's vague goals of having GameB villas pop up around the US and other places a bit like a more modern and scientific version of Amish, Mennonite, or Quaker separation).



I don't get the feeling that they've left. If anything it seems like every major city in the US has these multi-acre fulfillment centers, the Amazon Prime trucks are everywhere, and anytime I think there's a Canadian goose going crazy out in front of my house I have to double-check to see if it's a Prime truck backing up (they make these really obscene noises - I think because they're electric and want people alerted to their presence).

They might clearly be taking on a much stronger presence in Europe but in the US they're far from quiet, if anything I think they're really starting to make Walmart look like minor players.


That happens, they're also not a Satanic cabal either. There was a Sam Harris Making Sense podcast, #205 with Daniel Markovits, where Daniel said a lot about the rich right now that sounds like most of the rich people that I've met - ie. that they're not the leisure class they used to be, that they're knocking themselves out both to stay ahead of their own competition against each other and also figuring out what it is they can do in the world to fix things. People love to demonize Peter Thiel and talk about New Zealand bunkers with his name on it, he's also still trying to do what he can to not need that bunker as are many. There probably are some mustache-twirlers among, they seem to be relatively non-representative. I think we're used to imagining that billionaires would have god-like power to change the world, and when most of their money is in their businesses rather than bank accounts it sounds like that's not how it's working for them.


I think we'd both have a pretty intense research project to iron that one out. The idea of corporations leaving higher paid places in the world to take advantage of cheaper labor is well older than I am and people spoke regularly about Apple's factories in China having suicide nets on the sides of the buildings. It's disgusting. You'd never catch me denying that this is happening because it's all over the place. I see neoliberalism as having promised that the the third world would get better standards of living, the first world would have cheaper goods, they loved the race to the bottom on costs anywhere they could get them but left alone the collapse of the first world which deeply imperils the claimed project (ie. it kind of doesn't matter if the US, Europe, and Aus/NZ started picking up China's surveillance technologies, social credit systems, etc. to deal with rampant unemployment, inability for so many to earn living wages, and being consigned to living standards akin to slavery).

I do have the sense that we might have to technocrat our way out of this because I don't see politics solving these problems, ie. it's the Hobbesian gene war that it always has been and the only way that gets less bombastic is if new game-changing technologies lower the cost of basic staples and make it so that people can have their capacity for integrity given back to them rather than needing to watch every thought or every fleck of honesty that their employer might not like.

Amazon is operating throughout the EU, it's the same as in the US.
But for tax purposes, their EU seat is in Luxembourg. Amazon does not pay corporate tax in any other EU country, so the EU might as well triple corporate tax. It's too late, they have found -or made themselves- a way to not pay taxes, so discussing whether raising taxes will drive them away is simply moot. We'd be discussing raising taxes they're already not affected by.



Yeah... Or do what has worked in the past and given workers and voters the little safety and power they have: unionize, threaten violence.
Amazon may not be paying taxes, but they do need delivery staff in the countries they're selling in, for now. They can't outsource that, they will have to replace them with robots and drones....
I need to get a hunting rifle so I can do my christmas shopping by shooting delivery drones midflight.
.... It's incredibly strange, thinking about the medium term future: somehow it's either "same s**t, different day", or "welding a damaged combat drone back together with electricity from a car battery on the battlefield of a civil war that erupted over whether a meme was intentionally or accidentally racist".

But I'm not getting my hopes up for technology. The last few big tech things have all ended up as devices for twisting and distorting individual perceptions of reality to the point where a civil war could really break out over a meme. That, and surveillance. I do not expect real world abundance. At best, ecologically sustainable cardbord boxes. - ecology is a problem, because if most of the earth is a hot mess, that means most of their assets are a hot mess.
Zucc's Metaverse will allow some to live in virtual luxury, while it'll be the first time even the most basic face to face conversations will be technologically mediated and manipulated.
It will be hailed as a safety feature. I will say "eat the rich", you will hear "bless the rich", in my voice, and my lip movent will match perfectly.

There is some push to unionize Amazon and it's been getting publicity, I hope the best for em.

For elitist online nuttery:


Rob Henderson's been talking a lot lately about 'luxury beliefs' and the ways in which the elites (I'd rather just say 'wealthy' though as the term 'elite' claims competence) have to hold themselves out against commoners, used to be able to do that through differences in outward appearance based on possessions, but now that there's less of that they hold beliefs solipsistic enough to indicate that if they can get away with holding those beliefs then they're part of an upper strata. I'm not sure how feasible that is long-range but it one of the things Rob was mentioning with this was how the defining trait of a luxury belief is that it confers status on upper class individuals while actually doing harm to those in the lower classes (like making chaos of an environment where people of more common means are struggling).

For Facebook, Twitter, ad TikTok's capacity to unravel society and what that says about technology though, I think it's worth pointing out that the Gutenberg revolution went this way as well. Some technologies are really caustic on culture and human sanity, effectively open the floodgates of BS, and as far as I understand it that came with the printing press before, after several decades, things at least started to calm down. I do hope the side effects of social media calm down before we're of pensioner age but that's probably something we don't have a lot of say in, and of course we already need to start thinking deeply about how we'll be combatting deep fakes.

The technology that I'm interested in is the type were housing all of a sudden becomes radically more available and affordable because the construction costs and times to completion have plummeted. New ways of growing food, like vertical farming and plant factories, getting to the point where one or two countries' cock-ups don't push hundreds of millions of people into deep food insecurity of the kind that would trigger local wars and pogroms. The kind of technology I'm hoping for is the kind that barely makes the news other than the 'gee whiz' minute that the 24 hour news cycle maybe puts aside one minute per week for. This is more hoping that the less sexy stuff that Stephen Pinker was talking about a few years ago actually surpasses our Gutenberg 2.0 problems, even better that it surpasses them while that battle cools down (and it seems like right now social sanity is getting a bit better of a foothold and there are fewer people who aren't getting some sense of a lot of Jonathan Haidt's concerns about our institutions getting destroyed by the foolishness of the last seven to ten years).

Rob Henderson is interesting, thanks.

Regarding the Gutenberg revolution and subsequent chaos: fair enough, going from zero individual media reception, i.e., being illiterate, to not-zero is a huge step.
But the media consumed were not particularly ephemeral, you can develop critical abilities in readers and so. It's hard to develop critical skills when you're so inundated in media that themselves only exist for a few years (facebook, in my generation, is pretty much out of fashion now)... Rather than developing critical abilities, we switch to a new platform, and belittle the poor elderly and people in developing countries who still use facebook.


Regarding the technologies you were thinking of: yeah, we've been waiting for inner city vertical farms for a while now... But the problems with famines are, as far as I understand, 'maeket inefficiencies', rather than underproduction.
And custom designed wooden framed houses have come down in price a lot lately - but the property prices have shot through the roof.
I do wish star trek technologies would necessarily lead to a star trek society, but I do see how the belief of that happening, inadvertently, could easily be exploited....

As far as I understand it Covid's disruptions to supply chains put something like 30 million Nigerians deeper into food insecurity, and from what I'm hearing with both the stoppage of Ukrainian exports and the stoppage of Russian natural gas creating ammonia for fertilizer that food insecurity in the global south might be even worse this year than it was with Covid. We still seem to be in a place where a few country's bad decisions can really have outsized impacts in developing regions and that's where I still think we have more than market inefficiencies, it's just that the kinds of global supply chains we had up through the end of 2019 did a good job of masking that. The goal would be to get to a place where other people's screw ups stopped with them, as of now it seems like they can still destabilize the whole world and it's not a good situation where the world is as peaceful and orderly as it's worst actors allow it to be.

Some more triangulation - Lyn Alden backing Ray Dalio's concept of long-term debt cycles: