Markets aren’t totally efficient, but they are the most adequate part of our civilization. For-profit corporations usually follow the same general structure, so the best form of governance looks like a joint-stock company.
While I don’t fully agree with the claim here (the comment or in the book) the best argument along these lines is probably David Friedman and “The Machinery of Freedom”.
Well, I don’t agree with the underlying argument, but to try to steelman it I’d say something like: Markets are pretty efficient at causing economic growth, causing us to ‘grow the pie’ (more total absolute wealth for everyone, as opposed to ‘sharing the pie’ which refers to distributing wealth more evenly), and moving resources around to where they are most needed to allow large complex profit-seeking systems to function. All those little decisions made by selfish semi-rational actors add up to much better decision-making about profitable uses of resources than top-down relatively-small-number-of-decision-maker relatively-coarse-grained decisions seen in, for example, socialism.
Of course, some translation of the things being exchanged/optimized must be made to apply this directly to the governance sphere. There we are instead talking about how to set the underlying social rules which guide the game. So instead of moves in the economic game itself, we are talking about how we could make the rule system itself be made up of a messy compromise of many self-interested semi-rational limited-knowledge actors opting for or against rules. I haven’t heard of any complete translation of this, but some limited ones include libertarian philosophy (skirt around the problem of effective rule-setting by minimizing the rules and letting the economy work it out), quadratic voting (including arguments for how to directly make a fair-ish sort of vote-buying work), and some ideas of my own that I haven’t heard elsewhere...
For instance, if we believe that libertarian governance is good for some segment of the population (consenting adults wanting to engage in minimally regulated economic exchange), then perhaps we could set aside certain jurisdictions (similar to how we have certain geophysical locations where gambling is less regulated) where libertarian governance would hold sway. There would be guards on the entrances (it could simply be a secured building in each major city) who ensured that only adults who could demonstrate being of sound mind and judgement could enter. This would limit the sort of contracts and exchanges which could be made there, and there would be tricky questions about moving wealth across the ‘border’ in regards to tax evasion and such, but it might still allow for some interesting interactions which otherwise couldn’t occur in most modern societies. I don’t endorse a literal implementation of this libertarian-enclave as a viable experiment since I haven’t gone looking for dangerous loopholes (and I’m sure there are some), but I think the general area of consideration has some potential worthy of exploration. Details of things like this need to be worked out in more detail before an actual experiment could be proposed.
Overall, I don’t think this is particularly relevant to what Holden was talking about, since I don’t see how it would be helpful to either ethical decision making or governance of corporations which might hit ludicrous windfalls and need to share more wealth/power after doing so. This is just my attempt to steelman what the above comments were pointing at.
This is a Moldbug argument, but:
Markets aren’t totally efficient, but they are the most adequate part of our civilization. For-profit corporations usually follow the same general structure, so the best form of governance looks like a joint-stock company.
More like a statement, rather than an argument.
While I don’t fully agree with the claim here (the comment or in the book) the best argument along these lines is probably David Friedman and “The Machinery of Freedom”.
Efficient at what? There’s no such thing as just being optimal...you have to optimise something.
Well, I don’t agree with the underlying argument, but to try to steelman it I’d say something like: Markets are pretty efficient at causing economic growth, causing us to ‘grow the pie’ (more total absolute wealth for everyone, as opposed to ‘sharing the pie’ which refers to distributing wealth more evenly), and moving resources around to where they are most needed to allow large complex profit-seeking systems to function. All those little decisions made by selfish semi-rational actors add up to much better decision-making about profitable uses of resources than top-down relatively-small-number-of-decision-maker relatively-coarse-grained decisions seen in, for example, socialism.
Of course, some translation of the things being exchanged/optimized must be made to apply this directly to the governance sphere. There we are instead talking about how to set the underlying social rules which guide the game. So instead of moves in the economic game itself, we are talking about how we could make the rule system itself be made up of a messy compromise of many self-interested semi-rational limited-knowledge actors opting for or against rules. I haven’t heard of any complete translation of this, but some limited ones include libertarian philosophy (skirt around the problem of effective rule-setting by minimizing the rules and letting the economy work it out), quadratic voting (including arguments for how to directly make a fair-ish sort of vote-buying work), and some ideas of my own that I haven’t heard elsewhere...
For instance, if we believe that libertarian governance is good for some segment of the population (consenting adults wanting to engage in minimally regulated economic exchange), then perhaps we could set aside certain jurisdictions (similar to how we have certain geophysical locations where gambling is less regulated) where libertarian governance would hold sway. There would be guards on the entrances (it could simply be a secured building in each major city) who ensured that only adults who could demonstrate being of sound mind and judgement could enter. This would limit the sort of contracts and exchanges which could be made there, and there would be tricky questions about moving wealth across the ‘border’ in regards to tax evasion and such, but it might still allow for some interesting interactions which otherwise couldn’t occur in most modern societies. I don’t endorse a literal implementation of this libertarian-enclave as a viable experiment since I haven’t gone looking for dangerous loopholes (and I’m sure there are some), but I think the general area of consideration has some potential worthy of exploration. Details of things like this need to be worked out in more detail before an actual experiment could be proposed.
Overall, I don’t think this is particularly relevant to what Holden was talking about, since I don’t see how it would be helpful to either ethical decision making or governance of corporations which might hit ludicrous windfalls and need to share more wealth/power after doing so. This is just my attempt to steelman what the above comments were pointing at.
I wasn’t replying to Holden.