Despite our superior technology, there are many things that Western countries could do in the past that we can’t today—e.g. rapidly build large-scale infrastructure, maintain low-crime cities, and run competent bureaucracies.
Why do you focus on these problems? I mean, sure, the average person in the West can feel threatened by crime, infrastructure decay, or incompetent bureaucracy. But they live every day under much bigger threats, like the threat of losing their job, getting evicted, getting denied healthcare, or getting billed or fee-d into poverty. These seem to be the biggest societal (non-health, non-family) threats for our hypothetical average person. And the common pattern in these threats isn’t decay or incompetence, it’s exploitation by elites.
The threats of losing one’s job or getting evicted are not actually very scary when you’re in healthy labor and property markets. And we’ve produced so much technological abundance over the last century that our labor and property markets should be flourishing. So insofar as those things are still scary for people today, a deeper explanation for that comes in explaining why our labor and property markets arent very healthy, which comes back to our inability to build and our overrregulation.
But also: yes, there’s a bunch of stuff in this curriculum about exploitation by elites. Somehow there’s a strange pattern though where a lot of the elite exploitation is extremely negative-sum: e.g. so so much money is burned in the US healthcare system, not even transferred to elites (e.g. there are many ways in which being a doctor is miserable which you would expect a healthy system to get rid of). So I focused on paradigm examples of negative-sum problems in the intro to highlight that’s there’s definitely something very Pareto suboptimal going on here.
It seems to me that such “unhealthiness” is pretty normal for labor and property markets: when I read books from different countries and time periods, the fear of losing one’s job and home is a very common theme. Things were easier in some times and places, but these were rare.
So it might make more sense to focus on reasons for “unhealthiness” that apply generally. Overregulation can be the culprit in today’s US, but I don’t see it applying equally to India in the 1980s, Turkey in the 1920s, or England in the early 1800s (these are the settings of some books on my shelf whose protagonists had very precarious jobs and housing). And even if you defeat overregulation, the more general underlying reasons might still remain.
What are these general reasons? In the previous comment I said “exploitation”, but a more neutral way of putting it is that markets don’t always protect one particular side. Markets are two-sided: there’s no law of economics saying a healthy labor market must be a seller’s market, while housing must be a buyer’s market. Things could just as easily go the other way. So if we want to make the masses less threatened, it’s not enough to make markets more healthy overall; we need to empower the masses’ side of the market in particular.
I think questions of power differences between the “elites” and the “masses” are very relevant to the AI transition, both as a model for intuitions and as a way to choose policy directions now, because AI will tend to amplify and lock-in these power differences and at some point it’ll get too late. For more context, see these comment threads of mine: 1, 2, 3, or this book review.
Why do you focus on these problems? I mean, sure, the average person in the West can feel threatened by crime, infrastructure decay, or incompetent bureaucracy. But they live every day under much bigger threats, like the threat of losing their job, getting evicted, getting denied healthcare, or getting billed or fee-d into poverty. These seem to be the biggest societal (non-health, non-family) threats for our hypothetical average person. And the common pattern in these threats isn’t decay or incompetence, it’s exploitation by elites.
The threats of losing one’s job or getting evicted are not actually very scary when you’re in healthy labor and property markets. And we’ve produced so much technological abundance over the last century that our labor and property markets should be flourishing. So insofar as those things are still scary for people today, a deeper explanation for that comes in explaining why our labor and property markets arent very healthy, which comes back to our inability to build and our overrregulation.
But also: yes, there’s a bunch of stuff in this curriculum about exploitation by elites. Somehow there’s a strange pattern though where a lot of the elite exploitation is extremely negative-sum: e.g. so so much money is burned in the US healthcare system, not even transferred to elites (e.g. there are many ways in which being a doctor is miserable which you would expect a healthy system to get rid of). So I focused on paradigm examples of negative-sum problems in the intro to highlight that’s there’s definitely something very Pareto suboptimal going on here.
It seems to me that such “unhealthiness” is pretty normal for labor and property markets: when I read books from different countries and time periods, the fear of losing one’s job and home is a very common theme. Things were easier in some times and places, but these were rare.
So it might make more sense to focus on reasons for “unhealthiness” that apply generally. Overregulation can be the culprit in today’s US, but I don’t see it applying equally to India in the 1980s, Turkey in the 1920s, or England in the early 1800s (these are the settings of some books on my shelf whose protagonists had very precarious jobs and housing). And even if you defeat overregulation, the more general underlying reasons might still remain.
What are these general reasons? In the previous comment I said “exploitation”, but a more neutral way of putting it is that markets don’t always protect one particular side. Markets are two-sided: there’s no law of economics saying a healthy labor market must be a seller’s market, while housing must be a buyer’s market. Things could just as easily go the other way. So if we want to make the masses less threatened, it’s not enough to make markets more healthy overall; we need to empower the masses’ side of the market in particular.
Those problems don’t sound new and also don’t seem that relevant to navigating AGI.
I think questions of power differences between the “elites” and the “masses” are very relevant to the AI transition, both as a model for intuitions and as a way to choose policy directions now, because AI will tend to amplify and lock-in these power differences and at some point it’ll get too late. For more context, see these comment threads of mine: 1, 2, 3, or this book review.