(I don’t have a stake in the libertarian fight, but, I recommend reading the intro and 1-2 chapters of Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, which argues “there are tons of special snowflake ways of handling overfishing-etc without exactly establishing a central authority or privatizing the commons.”
on a skim, the proposal is for the fishers to voluntarily hire an enforcer / voluntarily agree to certain contracts regarding the deployment of fishing boats. i agree that this is neither a central authority, nor privatization. but isn’t it exactly a union?
the suppliers of a good/labor voluntarily agree to certain provisions on the production of said good/labor for their own long-term benefit.
(i really appreciate the resource, and will give it a closer look!)
could you point to one that’s not essentially “agree to a reasonable division in an ultimatum-like game”, or help me understand how such an agreement is not essentially what a labor union is doing?
But, I think you’re sort of prematurely/overly lumping things together (see: lumper/splitter), which I think is erasing detail that is worth actually thinking through.
The point is the people in all the different situations did not start by asking “do we want to handle this with labor unions or government centralization or privatization”, they started by working through the details of the individual cases, and maybe the stuff ends up sharing some structures or could be ontologized a particular way, but the details of what the people-on-the-ground want/need and the realpolitik matter a bunch.
the details of what the people-on-the-ground want/need and the realpolitik matter a bunch.
i guess this is what i’m trying to understand.
as a meta point, i get the impression that you think i’m being obtuse for rhetorical reasons. but i promise you: i’m just obtuse!
like, based on this comment, it seems like you think i’m going “today i will lump these two obviously different things together, he he he” (i guess because i want to lose some arguments on the internet :) ). but from my perspective, i can’t tell the difference! everyone’s telling me that there’s a clear distinction between labor unions and fishery contracts, but no one is telling me what that difference is. i’m confused!
as a meta point, i get the impression that you think i’m being obtuse for rhetorical reasons. but i promise you: i’m just obtuse!
Okay lol, fairnuff.
The thing I vaguely remember from the book’s early chapter was, a fishing town where they rotated slots you get in the lake each season. I can’t remember if that was a thing the town elders/government decided sort of from on-high, or that the fishermen negotiated together and organically turned into a norm, or what.
But, the point was “rotate slots in the lake” is a mechanism that is neither exactly private property, nor setting a limit on number-of-fish. This doesn’t have much to do with labor unions.
I believe there were 1-2 other mechanical details in that chapter but I don’t remember, that were similarly “oh, huh, I guess you could do it that way.”
(The implication here not being that AI safety unions should use rotating slots, which is nonsensical in this case – I was mostly replying narrowly to the “how do the proverbial fisherman avoid overfishing without limiting supply?”. With a bit of a broader implication for “mechanism-space is deep and wide and local-details-space is deep and wide”, which might or might not be relevant to the OP idk)
(I don’t have a stake in the libertarian fight, but, I recommend reading the intro and 1-2 chapters of Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, which argues “there are tons of special snowflake ways of handling overfishing-etc without exactly establishing a central authority or privatizing the commons.”
on a skim, the proposal is for the fishers to voluntarily hire an enforcer / voluntarily agree to certain contracts regarding the deployment of fishing boats. i agree that this is neither a central authority, nor privatization. but isn’t it exactly a union?
the suppliers of a good/labor voluntarily agree to certain provisions on the production of said good/labor for their own long-term benefit.
(i really appreciate the resource, and will give it a closer look!)
Well the point is there are a lot of different examples that have different little fiddly details.
could you point to one that’s not essentially “agree to a reasonable division in an ultimatum-like game”, or help me understand how such an agreement is not essentially what a labor union is doing?
Nope, I did not actually read it that thoroughly.
But, I think you’re sort of prematurely/overly lumping things together (see: lumper/splitter), which I think is erasing detail that is worth actually thinking through.
The point is the people in all the different situations did not start by asking “do we want to handle this with labor unions or government centralization or privatization”, they started by working through the details of the individual cases, and maybe the stuff ends up sharing some structures or could be ontologized a particular way, but the details of what the people-on-the-ground want/need and the realpolitik matter a bunch.
i guess this is what i’m trying to understand.
as a meta point, i get the impression that you think i’m being obtuse for rhetorical reasons. but i promise you: i’m just obtuse!
like, based on this comment, it seems like you think i’m going “today i will lump these two obviously different things together, he he he” (i guess because i want to lose some arguments on the internet :) ). but from my perspective, i can’t tell the difference! everyone’s telling me that there’s a clear distinction between labor unions and fishery contracts, but no one is telling me what that difference is. i’m confused!
Okay lol, fairnuff.
The thing I vaguely remember from the book’s early chapter was, a fishing town where they rotated slots you get in the lake each season. I can’t remember if that was a thing the town elders/government decided sort of from on-high, or that the fishermen negotiated together and organically turned into a norm, or what.
But, the point was “rotate slots in the lake” is a mechanism that is neither exactly private property, nor setting a limit on number-of-fish. This doesn’t have much to do with labor unions.
I believe there were 1-2 other mechanical details in that chapter but I don’t remember, that were similarly “oh, huh, I guess you could do it that way.”
(The implication here not being that AI safety unions should use rotating slots, which is nonsensical in this case – I was mostly replying narrowly to the “how do the proverbial fisherman avoid overfishing without limiting supply?”. With a bit of a broader implication for “mechanism-space is deep and wide and local-details-space is deep and wide”, which might or might not be relevant to the OP idk)