Revolutions almost always result in prolonged mass violence. Most often of the horrific, needless, and soul shattering kind. A sampling of recent revolutions: the Bolshevik Revolution, the French Revolution, Cambodian civil war/Khmer Rouge takeover, Nazi takeover of Germany, Chinese Communist Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, etc etc.
I propose a new heuristic for my fellow HN'ers: if someone pines for revolution, its a very good signal that they are poorly acquainted with history or that they are a sociopath.
I think it is difficult to say now that those were necessarily horrific and needless, without considering the horrors experienced daily under feudal/serf systems.
Moreover, the selection of revolutions you have put together seems one-sided. It was revolution that gave people in Britain the vote, it was (at least partially) revolution that ended apartheid in South Africa and white minority rule in much of Africa writ large, etc. etc.
The Khmer Rouge killed 1.5 to 2 million (or 25%!!!!) of all Cambodians. Pretty tough to argue that the deaths of 25% of any population is anything but needless and horrific, particularly when you learn about Pol Pot's insane and homicidal policies. Imagine if every 4th person you know were dead in the next 5 years because a guy had a plan to... make our lives better by ruining them indefinitely for some distant vision of Utopia.
The Nazis are truly astronomical in terms of both death count and evil. They successfully created an actual hell on Earth.
Stalin's regime is estimated to have killed 20 MILLION of his own people. I wonder if the murdered would say, "Yeah, but its worth it in the end because no more monarchy!"
Mao's derangements are estimated to have resulted in 45 MILLION dead Chinese. That's 45,000,000. Again, I wonder if their surviving loved ones felt better off? Mom was beaten to death for being "a capitalist", but at least we don't have to worry about that darned monarchy anymore! How would you feel if your Mom was beaten to death? How would you feel if your brother or sister were summarily executed based on an accusation? What if you saw your child needlessly starve to death? These aren't just numbers. These are real human lives extinguished for political ends.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Your logic is truly deranged. Revolutions are really, really, really bad for everyone, and the vulnerable, weak, and poor are not exempt. Most of them can usually just count on good old fashioned starvation in their near futures as the revolutionaries lurch from one disastrous or insane policy to the next. If they don't starve, there's a good chance the revolution will at some point purify them anyway.
So, I'll point you back to my suggested heuristic.
> Mao's derangements are estimated to have resulted in 45 MILLION dead Chinese.
Both of these death estimates are primarily due to starvation (not murder and not the result of violent revolution decades earlier) and are based off of differential estimates of population (ie. counting declining births as deaths, etc.).
Most importantly, they are not comparative with famine deaths prior to these revolutions under the feudal system. Integrated over time, those deaths almost certainly outnumber the deaths due to these events. Moreover, many of those who died post-revolution would never have even had the chance to be born in a feudal society given how many children died of starvation etc. during those times.
Tens of millions of people die of easily preventable deaths (no water, no food, etc.) in the status quo every year. Those numbers were even worse under feudalism. Do those not get to be counted against the non-revolutionary status quo?
You buried the lede. Death per unit time is extremely important. And yes, huge numbers died of starvation as the result of revolutionary, utopian (and insane and nonsensical) policies. But the starvation deaths were the direct result of the violence and insanity. The two cannot be decoupled. So, I certainly would "count" them. I think most people would.
Is there an argument about how the deaths per unit time went down in those countries post-revolution?
> many of those who died post-revolution would never have even had the chance to be born
I'm not ceding this point, but hypothetically, by your logic, these were just bonus lives whose horrible ends shouldn't count?
> Tens of millions of people die of easily preventable deaths
Yes, this is the default state of nature and thus humanity. Violent, cataclysmic revolution is almost never the best (or even a good) solution. There are limited examples of success, but what sane person would bet their life on it?
I think, fundamentally, the problem with violent revolution is that its leaders are most often ideological zealots who are ill-equipped to lead a nation. They tend to think the same tools that gained them power (violence) will yield effective results in governance. Or, and I think this is a more likely explanation, they are probably just sociopathic, power-crazed murderers.
The best case --- if it works --- is "non-reformist reform" as the European social democracies were planning. Some Marxists think it was doomed to fail because you can't avoid the antagonisms. I think they were merely prudish about printing money (especially Germans), and if drank more Post-Keynsian kool-aid (and let in more immigrants not as an underclass like in America), we would all be Socialist already.
Letting in immigrants while you are trying to reduce working hours is a good idea because a) moral b) you are trying to show off you have the best society, let people vote with their feat c) you still need to make investments so being able to have total working hours go up while per-capita working hours goes down is good. Especially if there is a tech/productivity lag where you don't get fully automated dank shit for a few years after you make labor scarce
Letting in immigrants as beneath-the-table workers while trying to lower working hours means you get apartheid not utopia, so yeah, it's bad. The thing that makes America less bad is at least the elite likes to overwork itself for cultural reasons so the rat race is just as stupid but less unfair than it would otherwise be.
The best-of-both-worlds is what I want. The first decently country to let in immigrants while reducing working hours is going to crush everyone else with a strong, more technologically- and culturally-advanced society. I am excited to see it happen.
(incidentally a very vague materialist take on why the soviet union sucked is it began too underdeveloped, and in the rush to do more work they ended up too military-industrial. A lot of people say "not enough consumption" but you ought to connect it being able to let demand "pull" investment rather than centrally "push" investment. More consumer goods or less working hours are somewhat equivalent once you are (post-)industrialized.)
https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/
Edit: Btw, I think the poster above meant the millions of undocumented immigrants living in USA without full rights.
The US has admitted more than 1.2 million refugees (I believe the number is closer to 3 million), this chart only counts refugees under UNHCR mandate.
"Syrians good, Greeks bad, let's breed Neo-Nazis with austerity so Syrians bad soon too. Oh and more coal." Is that really net good?!
[citation needed]
"Mainstream economic theory" states, AFAICT, that once the monetary side of things has done what it can, you need to proceed to Step 4, fiscal stimulus:
> I would summarize the Keynesian view in terms of four points:
> 1. Economies sometimes produce much less than they could, and employ many fewer workers than they should, because there just isn’t enough spending. Such episodes can happen for a variety of reasons; the question is how to respond.
> 2. There are normally forces that tend to push the economy back toward full employment. But they work slowly; a hands-off policy toward depressed economies means accepting a long, unnecessary period of pain.
> 3. It is often possible to drastically shorten this period of pain and greatly reduce the human and financial losses by “printing money”, using the central bank’s power of currency creation to push interest rates down.
> 4. Sometimes, however, monetary policy loses its effectiveness, especially when rates are close to zero. In that case temporary deficit spending can provide a useful boost. And conversely, fiscal austerity in a depressed economy imposes large economic losses.
* http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/keynesianism-exp...
Can you provide a link to the "mainstream economic theory" that you are referring to that says otherwise?
Krugman at least was a "New Keynsian", which is a very complicated confused thing in the way the neoclassical parts and keynesian pieces are mashed together. I mostly subscribe to the Post-Keynesian stuff, which makes a lot more sense to me, and is more embracing of the weird/humanities side of Keynes. https://vebaccount.substack.com/p/the-post-keynesian-worldvi... is a good primer, and really that person's entire corpus is a gem of really good writing. For something that (at least in the last few years) is much more grounded, try http://jwmason.org/the-slack-wire/.
Now you might say that the opposition's views of the mainstream is an unfair place to begin. To that, I say just look at the shit Larry Summers says.
No, it didn’t.
Mainstream economic theory (or even the major heterodox theories) has never held that monetary policy is a sufficient substitute for fiscal policy in general, and mainstream economists in the US (of all stripes, though they differ on what fiscal policy should be) are always complaining about Congress not taking what they see to be appropriate fiscal action and leaving the economy to the Fed and monetary policy.
Also the theory has not kept up. A lot of people spout decent ideas and do decent empiracle stuff, but the theory is not reformed and opposed to those conclusions so they just ignore it.
Really, the crazy Chicago people to their credit were always more honest about what the mainstream theory actually said. The saltwater people were rather two-faced in making sure they sounded less rediculous but not having an epicycle-free theory underpinning their more reasonable suggestions.
But I don't think adding more caviets to the bad old stories is going to cut it. People need narratives, and if you say "supply curve up, demand curve down, many astrices" you are biasing a certain simplification when people inevitably need narratives.
Really what we need to do is run more big policy experiments at the fed. The more wild policy swings there are, more more politics feels alive, and better are empiracism is. The micro empiracism today is good but barely econ. (It's sort of abstract social science do a tiny thing and then stats.) The macro empiracism is still frequently quite bad, where better data would help but clearer trends from legit experiments would help even more.
I totally disagree with this. Big social policy involves/requires taxation, and a robust debate around what kind of tax regime we want to have in order to support those social policy objectives. The Fed can't collect taxes, and it doesn't involve robust debate because it's not democratic.
Fair.
Let me step back a bit, I do agree the undemocratic fed is ultimately bad. But I also wouldn't want to subsume it to congress in today's state, because FTPT, Senate, and supermajorities are not democratic, and ensure no experiments + tiny overtone window of things where are actually.
I like democracy, but the problem is democracy in its current US form (parliamentary system is better but EU constitution is fucked and causes similar problems) is best at interpolating the options that have been presented. If the democratizing happens with out expanding the "doing" overtone window, it's like 100% exploitation not exploration, and we are also kinda fucked.
It's frustrating because alternative democratic methods would probably be great for experimentation. Highly ideological parliament + independent civil service + sortition for skepticism is an exciting potential brew.
> Big social policy involves/requires taxation
No it actually doesn't, because "potential output" barely exists and to the extent it does we are nowhere near it. We can print money, and if there is inflation we can fix bottlenecks --- like WTF why isn't the port of Los Angelis twice is big by now with tons of extra rail freight capacity?
When there is no obvious benefit, and labor force participation is actually high (vs the headline unemployment rate which is widely acknowledged to be bullshit) then, and only then, do we need to worry about reducing demand across the board with taxes.
I agree with you that there are some decidedly undemocratic elements to many "democratic" systems (such as the ones you've mentioned), and to be clear I wish that was not so. But these same democratic systems have historically not just expanded the overton window, but exploded it: the advent of progressive taxation in the early 20th century; the advent of high income tax rates in the 1930s-1950s; the social welfare states that most social-democratic European governments erected in the 1950s-1970s (and the skeletal welfare state the United States erected at the same time) - just to name a few.
> We can print money, and if there is inflation we can fix bottlenecks
We can't just print money to the extent that's required for the really big policy changes. You want a UBI? A universal capital endowment? Free health care? These things require significant revenue to sustain year after year after year. I don't think that's necessarily a problem, there just isn't a free lunch. And the US is the most likely to be able to get away with it: there are plenty of nations that don't entirely control their monetary policies (EU countries, for example)
It seems when the rate of change is endogenously high, things have happened in the US, but now with more stagnation the many veto points strikes harder.
> We can't just print money to the extent that's required for the really big policy changes.
I still disagree.
Free healthcare especially can save money because the current thing is so inefficient --- though in the first few years I expect the backlog of "deferred maintenance" to get in the way.
Unpayed UBI is scarier, but I think we can still try it. There might an awkward adjustment period, but I wouldn't be surprised if it his a new steady state.
> And the US is the most likely to be able to get away with it
Yes
Last thing to consider is the MMT reversal scenario, where the technocrats just worry about reaching "potential", and quantitative stuff ensuring enough spending and taxing, and the politicians decide the qualitative stuff, and also what level of inflation is acceptable -- because it is still a subjective decision somewhat.
In particular, doing a UBI first might be the best way to force higher taxes: people will fight harder to keep their existing UBI than they will to get a UBI in the first place, so with inflation vs loosing it vs more taxes or JG (which is supply and demand of a sort), the latter options might have a better shot.
For example, Republican Jerome Powell is no Pinko, but under his watch the fed has become less closed minded about that "full employment" should look like. This is good, and is precisely because that and the pandemic checks that we are seeing great bottom half wage gains (in real terms too) and increased strikes.
So yes, ultimately you can't trick "the man" with new ivory tower shit, but you can at least attack the straw mans and deflections. Maybe the best theory of change is to create new pandemics so they will have to print more checks to defend the system, and eventually, one of those strike waves will be the revolution :D. (Is this conservationism? I don't think so, because it's about the system's response to a bad thing making "working class lives" better not worse.)