Your second structural critique of economic frameworks (inability to handle commitments) overstates the problem: you don’t need to leave economics behind to get credible commitments, you just need repeated-game reasoning or any decision theory that conditions on what policy you’d want to be known to follow. The third (commensurability) is correct but I’d frame it differently in a way I think adds critical information: the problem isn’t that pricing things is crass, it’s that certain things are structural preconditions for markets to function at all (rule of law, territorial integrity, leadership integrity) and treating them as goods within the market they enable destroys the system that makes prices meaningful.
I think the problem with the prediction markets toy example is that generally it’s just not a big problem if someone profits from advance knowledge of which day they’ll do something.
There is, however, a structural problem when predicting outcomes with many but-for participants: it’s often much easier to sabotage a project than to make it better, and it can be hard to detect sabotage. Big, important projects of the kind that might attract large prediction markets would therefore create an incentive for contributors to bet against the project’s success and throw the game.
There are two problems with your criticism of land value taxes. First, you don’t offer an argument that the autonomy cost of land value taxes is greater than the cost of less ideal property taxes (or other taxes) that collect the same revenue. They’d just redistribute the capacity to build churches somewhat at random rather than on the basis of money. Second, if a community hub is valuable to people who themselves have something to offer to the transactional economy, then it should be fundable via some method like subscription, magnanimous patronage, or assurance contract.
Income tax is not a fully viable alternative, either. Land and poll taxes increase (and may even have created) the value of money (see Talents and There Is a War), while an income tax reduces money’s value by making all labor-dependent goods and services more expensive. Too high an income tax vs land and poll taxes simply discourage people from transacting in legible, taxed ways and encourage gray markets.
The argument about revenue is plausible; much like the Biblical resistance to a census, we might rightly dislike allowing central authorities to acquire the capacity to collect taxes in excess of what’s needed to provide essential services, if we (quite reasonably) expect that the remainder will be squandered on political patronage.
I agree on higher education; the Western University system is better explained (both synchronically and historically) as induction into a clerical elite, than as a means for teaching and certifying scarce and productive skills.
On free trade, the autonomy costs of free trade are amplified when the domestic economy is already under financialization pressure (high taxes driving firms toward short-run cost-minimization, which means offshoring), so the problem isn’t free trade per se but free trade in the context of a domestic policy environment that’s already squeezing producers.
The bit on AGI is hard for me to parse but my impression is that you’re making the argument that known limits to the standard microeconomic perspective are relevant to AGI futures, such that we can’t assume microeconomic principles are sufficient information to constrain those futures the way we want. (On the other hand, short-run AI is not AGI, so it breaks fewer microeconomic assumptions.)
you don’t offer an argument that the autonomy cost of land value taxes is greater than the cost of less ideal property taxes (or other taxes) that collect the same revenue
Another thing is that if the Georgist claim that the current mode of land ownership is the primary enabler of extreme wealth concentration[1] is correct, it enables other forms of autonomy violations that some form of LVT would prevent.
Your second structural critique of economic frameworks (inability to handle commitments) overstates the problem: you don’t need to leave economics behind to get credible commitments, you just need repeated-game reasoning or any decision theory that conditions on what policy you’d want to be known to follow. The third (commensurability) is correct but I’d frame it differently in a way I think adds critical information: the problem isn’t that pricing things is crass, it’s that certain things are structural preconditions for markets to function at all (rule of law, territorial integrity, leadership integrity) and treating them as goods within the market they enable destroys the system that makes prices meaningful.
I think the problem with the prediction markets toy example is that generally it’s just not a big problem if someone profits from advance knowledge of which day they’ll do something.
There is, however, a structural problem when predicting outcomes with many but-for participants: it’s often much easier to sabotage a project than to make it better, and it can be hard to detect sabotage. Big, important projects of the kind that might attract large prediction markets would therefore create an incentive for contributors to bet against the project’s success and throw the game.
There are two problems with your criticism of land value taxes. First, you don’t offer an argument that the autonomy cost of land value taxes is greater than the cost of less ideal property taxes (or other taxes) that collect the same revenue. They’d just redistribute the capacity to build churches somewhat at random rather than on the basis of money. Second, if a community hub is valuable to people who themselves have something to offer to the transactional economy, then it should be fundable via some method like subscription, magnanimous patronage, or assurance contract.
Income tax is not a fully viable alternative, either. Land and poll taxes increase (and may even have created) the value of money (see Talents and There Is a War), while an income tax reduces money’s value by making all labor-dependent goods and services more expensive. Too high an income tax vs land and poll taxes simply discourage people from transacting in legible, taxed ways and encourage gray markets.
The argument about revenue is plausible; much like the Biblical resistance to a census, we might rightly dislike allowing central authorities to acquire the capacity to collect taxes in excess of what’s needed to provide essential services, if we (quite reasonably) expect that the remainder will be squandered on political patronage.
I agree on higher education; the Western University system is better explained (both synchronically and historically) as induction into a clerical elite, than as a means for teaching and certifying scarce and productive skills.
On free trade, the autonomy costs of free trade are amplified when the domestic economy is already under financialization pressure (high taxes driving firms toward short-run cost-minimization, which means offshoring), so the problem isn’t free trade per se but free trade in the context of a domestic policy environment that’s already squeezing producers.
The bit on AGI is hard for me to parse but my impression is that you’re making the argument that known limits to the standard microeconomic perspective are relevant to AGI futures, such that we can’t assume microeconomic principles are sufficient information to constrain those futures the way we want. (On the other hand, short-run AI is not AGI, so it breaks fewer microeconomic assumptions.)
Another thing is that if the Georgist claim that the current mode of land ownership is the primary enabler of extreme wealth concentration[1] is correct, it enables other forms of autonomy violations that some form of LVT would prevent.
Discussed here, I think: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really