At different scales this means unionization and professional organizations, government regulation, and international regulation, to prevent whole countries from defecting - this is in large part what the EU is about, and a significant source of UK ill will towards it; and also generally what makes nationalists upset at globalists.
Collective action problems require collective action solutions. Large actors, however, tend to dislike collective action because it reduces their scale advantage.
Collective action has its own problem: power structures encourage corruption and misuse of the pooled power. Overall, I suspect government and international systems are more likely to be less corrupt because they can afford to build more checks and balances into their institutions, but the distance from the people decreases their perceived legitimacy.
Not an easy circle to square.
I read a bit I liked a while back about early feminism, in which members rejected wholesale the idea of power structures & authority, and established no authority. The author relates, however, that the power vacuum was naturally still filled- but because everyone wanted to pretend there was no power structure, the one that developed was unusually cruel & unaccountable.
I liked the bit because to me it seems like the strongest argument for official government- if the power vacuum must always be filled, let us be deliberate in how we fill it.
Another very big factor in having a properly accountable government is reducing information asymmetry as much as possible. Democracy doesn't work well if education is crippled, and there's been a serious decline in the quality and breadth of education in the U.S. (I can't speak to other countries, but I hear of decline elsewhere as well) It sounds a little conspiratorial, but I don't believe the massive student debt loads and the disparagement of fields of study such as philosophy, which prompts critical authority-challenging questions, are accidents. It is my opinion that the upheaval of the 60's scared major U.S. powers and they took steps to nullify student activism.
People in general are very disengaged, apathetic, and distracted. Much of the corruption in government, media, and business could be countered effectively by a population that knows how to inform itself. Instead we seem to be sinking, like Rome did, into corruption, ignorance, and widespread superstition.
I've seen it work, where people found ways to fluidly hold each other accountable and natural leaders gently stepped into the power vacuums with out any kind of formalized authority. And I've seen it fail catastrophically in a myriad of ways. It really comes down to the people who are involved, and how intentionally they approach the organizational problem.
I've also seen larger scale organizations that intentionally attacked this problem and created formalized structures that were built to minimize concentrated power and instead keep it distributed. It was essentially a formalization of the first case where the no-authority / structure model worked.
So it's doable. You can have collective action with out concentrated power and hierarchy. It just takes intention and strong (but compassionate) social accountability.
Let's see who naturally arises as a leader style also leads to special kind of hell.
It's important to make governments that are "about laws - not about men". Because if governments are built around single people, those people will concentrate power. When a system leads to the person in power hands off power to the next person, it's a way to distribute power.
The second principle that is a huge problem today is concentration of power into the hands of the wealthy. Thomas Piketty put his finger on the problem - in the 1970s, most obviously in the US, billionaires began to figure out how to use their wealth for persuasion. In that way they use their wealth to take more of the profits in the economy for themselves.
I think this is the problem of our time: How do we stop oligarchs and billionaires from funding a propaganda machine designed to break democracies so they can accumulate more wealth?
Link (and second recommendation) for the curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
Not just "sometimes", it takes the threat of violent people in uniforms ALL of the time when dealing with people bent on illegally benefiting themselves at the expense of others.
The issue is that the violent people in uniforms, (and even the people controlling them for that matter), can ALSO be bent on benefiting themselves at the expense of others.
It's not only grassroots organizations that can be corrupt, the government itself is actually even more likely to be corrupt. So you almost have to solve corruption before you try to solve the other structural issues. And corruption is just a very hard problem to solve.
It talks about how socializing risk and privatizing profits is actually the definition of corruption.
No. Once upon a time we nominated experts to make most of those decisions. Groups like the EPA or the IRS were given a mandate to examine what was going on and ban behaviors that did harm. But today "regulation" is a bad word. Everything is political. The EPA and IRS cannot ban anything without massive public debate. In fact, most regulatory bodies are so under pressure to reduce any and all regulation that they rarely ever ban anything. Quick and efficient regulation of harmful behavior is dead.
Example: the recent bill to ban upskirting photography in the UK. Nothing much to debate. But the bill gets killed by the new breed of politicians who demand every new regulation be subject to the full public process in order to make the act of passing new regulations as difficult as possible.
One thing I've observed over and over is that there are unintended consequences to everything. It often takes years to figure them out.
Try again.
Exactly. I tend to be wary of concentrating power. The larger the group the more likely that there are conflicts of interest within the group.
Perhaps more importantly, large groups just don't make sense in a lot of cases. If I make a union of milk drinkers, we can buy in huge bulk and get a discount. But then we have 1000000 bottles of milk in one place that will go bad in a couple weeks. We need to invent a distribution network, and a way to figure out who actually needs milk and when, and a way to track who is drinking the most milk so they can pay higher dues. In other words, the union hasn't accomplished anything and basically everything will be the same.
The broad correlation (and correlation isn't necessarily causation) is that as union power decreased, so did real wage growth.
Dealing with information asymmetry not distribution can result in better outcomes without expending nearly as many resources.
PS: Consumer reports is a solid example. Collecting a lot of information on each toaster/fridge/bed is not practical for an individual, but split that among 1,000,000 people and each can save more money than the cost of a subscription.
"The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company without money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."[1]
The gene is the unit of selection is perfectly right. It's missing a finer point in that groups of genes are unities of selection too, but it's correct.
Your last illustration there reminds me a little of this:
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/08/627082032/1-year-old-shows-up...
>>>
His name is Johan.
He drank a bottle of milk and played with a purple ball as he waited for the immigration judge, The Associated Press reported.
John W. Richardson, the judge at the Phoenix courthouse, said he was "embarrassed to ask" if the defendant understood the proceedings. "I don't know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law," he told Johan's attorney.
If the judge had integrity he would resign or be disbarred.
It was a reference to the quote above which is saying the reason individual people loose is not because they are dumb but because they are unable to match their opponents resources.
> “Well I just don’t get why the baby didn’t defend itself from the bear."
How can individuals defend themselves when the system and corporations subvert their rights.
That’s an insult to the concept of justice.
Agreed. Unfortunately our justice system has been turned into a legal system. Legalities are more important than justice and it's sickening.
"It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."
I would expect any average individual to lose against AT&T in whatever their issue is unless AT&T willingly concedes to them.
Picking on AT&T for no particular reason.
The inefficiencies are what make the system A)navigable, and B) work.
When you have humans trying to run something that no human can fully mentally represent without significant investment in external memory aids, you have a recipe for disaster, because one bad move by a large actor propagates far better than the same move by a smaller actor.
Real life analogy: Your kid trips.<-Less severe YOU TRIP.<-More severe
Hyperbolic analogy: Jack trips Giant trips
Which has worse consequences?
Ideally, the ability for individuals to sign contracts with corporations should be forbidden. Maybe a single 1 person corporation that doesn't involve a lawyer either direct or as a contractor.
I get into a restaurant, I order some food. That's a contract where I get into the obligation of paying, and they get into the obligation of serving the food.
It's much more likely that the justice system needs a complete rework.
In which case just save everyone the hassle and pass a law requiring proportionality to the degree of defined max lawyers per lawsuit of size defined in some workable metric so it doesn't take decades just to go through every mortgage in a AAA bank with solo lawyers on each side. It would limit the use of lawyer armies but it may lose a constitutional challenge on grounds of right to petition the government for redress.
We are also fairly dumb when it comes to understanding things like ecosystems, genetic regulatory networks, the climate, the brain, etc. Those are all systems that have similar properties.
It's just when you are caught up in it, you can't afford to think about it. You have to both be a part of it and not allow the responsibility of knowing you influence the system - therefore don't have the capacity to reason about the consequences of every single action - crush you.
It's more like you are the bear and you are trying to take care of a baby. There's the idea that you are just this tiny, little singular organism in comparison to the whole, but you aren't. Everything we do has consequences, everything we do directs systems. If you think some things you do just don't matter, you are missing some perspective.
I prefer not to think like that. I'd say we're doing our best to navigate hard problems, and it's not yet clear how to do things more effectively. Worst case scenario we're acting dumb, and I'd argue that is kind of a useless statement. We're acting, and we can do better, so put some time into working on doing better.
1. Our wiring isn't perfect, but who is better equipped to defend a person's interests than the individual themself? Serious question.
2. I don't think the "power" and coerciveness of multinational corporations is anywhere near that of government, which people bashing corporations usually want to make larger and more powerful. As Diedre McCloskey says, what happens if you are morally opposed to some new fighter jet or corporate subsidy, and unilaterally decide to pay fewer taxes because of it? The answer is you go jail. What happens if you choose Samsung or an Iphone? Nothing.
3. It's not like there is just one monolithic corporation. There are many, and they have various interests, capabilities and incentives. Usually they're competing with each other. Further, in time, many corporations correctly view these irrationalities as market opportunities and actively work on helping consumers combat them. E.g. see Acorns, Wealthfront, or hundreds of apps that help people use their phones less.
Organizations who have similar levels of resources and expertise as those who are infringing upon the individual’s interests, obviously. Otherwise it ends up being a David vs Goliath situation.
Someone who actually knows something about the topic in question? It is highly in the interests of any person to have both a plentiful and safe food supply, and safe, breathable air and safe, drinkable water. Pesticides constantly straddle this line; how much pollution is acceptable for food production, but still leaving the air and water safe? Do you honestly expect any random person to be able to make the correct choice in that situation? No. That's why we have experts in that field which study the effects of these chemicals, and the impact they have on the environment, and come to the conclusion of what's safe or not.
Another similar issue: One's actions do not exist in a vacuum. There's a recent story of some farmers spraying a certain herbicide to protect their crops from pigweed. However, not every farmer in the area is using it, or the herbicide resistant crops. The thing about spraying is that it goes in the air, and tends not to recognize property lines. The herbicide kills the crops on the neighboring farms. So while the original farmer who sprayed acted in their individual interest, they most definitely did not act in the interest of society in general, and clearly not in the interest of their neighbors.
"I don't think the "power" and coerciveness of multinational corporations is anywhere near that of government, which people bashing corporations usually want to make larger and more powerful."
No, we just want government to actually act in people's interests.
"As Diedre McCloskey says, what happens if you are morally opposed to some new fighter jet or corporate subsidy, and unilaterally decide to pay fewer taxes because of it? The answer is you go jail."
Yes, you broke the law, and so you must face the consequences. And unless you're Al Capone, you're not going to jail. Please stop parroting this ridiculous argument.
"What happens if you choose Samsung or an Iphone? "
What happens if you stop paying the balance on your Samsung phone because you switched?
"Further, in time, many corporations correctly view these irrationalities as market opportunities and actively work on helping consumers combat them."
I have huge doubts that many of them do this, and I have huge doubts that they are effective in this.
That said persistently refusing like many conscientious objectors will land you in jail though. It isn't a ridiculous argument but the literal truth. It also isn't a very effective tactic of protest but more a matter of fanaticism of principle.
My grandparents lived most of their life under the menace of a nuclear holocaust, but when they were born the electric power system was still in infancy and they had no electricity whatsoever in their house.
Going back centuries, the Ishtar Gate was built so that people arriving to Babilonia would be scared
I think that we are more scared by what we don't know that by what we can't manage
The world IS hard, but we're also very dumb
We know smoking gives cancer, but we still smoke anyway.
We know cars pollute the environment, but we ride them anyway.
etc. etc. etc.
To paraphrase Eliezer's famous quote about AI - the Corporation does not hate you, nor does it love you; you're just a potential revenue source, and as long as it believes you'll net it something, it'll let you have your way.
One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own.
“Well I just don’t get why the baby didn’t defend itself from the bear.”