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B Jacobs
Karma: 523
I think this might just be a US thing. Worker co-ops employ tens of millions of people (probably more than a 100 million, though it’s hard to count) and they’re dirt common in countries like France and Italy.
I haven’t looked into why the US is so resistant to co-ops but if I had to hazard a guess I’d say it’s probably a more hostile legal environment (plus half a century of anti-socialism/collectivization & pro-capitalism/privatization propaganda).
There’s also an element of self-reinforcement. Capitalist firms do better when there are more capitalist firms around, co-ops do better with more co-ops around.This legal-loophole-story is also news to me (probably also a US thing?), though I am familiar with a similar dynamic. From what I read coops do tend to include new workers into the fold, but they don’t do this with contract workers. This would mean co-ops are an excellent way to improve upon traditional firms, but not a way to get rid of this new gig-economy. In any case, giving some workers a say is still an improvement over the status-quo.
don’t make it impossible
Beware trivial inconveniences. Where do the preferences come from? If someone puts a jumpable lava-moat between me (+all other blond people) and the voting booth, I have a “revealed preference” to no longer go out and vote. When the classical liberals then point at the data showing that blond people have a lower preference for voting they’re not wrong, but they are misleading.
One thing I am unclear on is (if we know) why trust was decreasing.
That’s beyond the scope of this post. I presented some studies that point the finger at rising inequality, but it’s probably more than just the increase in wealth disparity. If I had to guess, social trust is probably also one of those common goods capitalists are burning when maximizing shareholder value, but I’d have to look into it more.
The goal should obviously be to increase trustworthiness, but since that’s (at least somewhat) subjective, I would settle for increasing the benefits that come with high-trust-societies I mentioned in the post.
Why do you think that?
You definitely need to think about these things to value working in a coop (or a corporation in which part of your compensation is voting stock) vs “just a job”. If you are going to just grant a proxy, you’d prefer to be paid more in money and less in control.
This is a false dilemma. By granting a proxy you can keep the money while relinquishing control. But even if it was true that you’d be sacrificing money there are still people who don’t want to think about corporate governance but do want to fight the evils of capitalism and thus would be happy to give a fellow co-op member a proxy rather than earning a bit more (e.g. me).
I upvoted, but I don’t expect it to be particularly popular or front-page-worthy. It may be partly about the vibe, but I suspect it’s mostly about the content—it’s a little less rigorous in causality of impact than the more common front-page topics, and it comes across as an attempt to influence rather than to explore or analyze from a rational(ist) standpoint.
No it’s the vibe, I ran a natural experiment to test it and it’s clearly just the vibe. I posted the same measured even-handed post on co-ops to the EA forum and LW, but in the former they were called co-ops in the latter socialst firms. The former was upvoted, the latter was downvoted. Also, the most venerated posts on LW (e.g. the sequences) often don’t even cite their sources, while that post cited dozens of scientific studies. Also also, my other recent post on co-ops was also data-heavy and it also got downvoted. Rationalists just have an anti-socialist bias.
Ah thanks! I’m probably just in an unlucky timezone then.
The literal, narrow interpretation of what you say is true, but what is implied is not. Coops do work well as many-billion-dollar enterprises, not just as a local consumer-service organization. E.g. Mondragon had a total revenue of 11 billion euros in 2023, while maintaining growth, since that was a 5% increase from the year before.
Also, you don’t necessarily need to think about investment strategy or influencing corporate decisions in a coop, since you can grant someone a proxy.
Also also, why are socialist-vibe blogposts so often relegated to “personal blogpost” while capitalist-vibe blogposts aren’t? I mean, I get the automatic barrage of downvotes, but you’d think the mods would at least try to appear impartial.
Since I talked about existing worker co-ops I obviously knew co-ops exist, and this was (I had hoped clearly) talking about conventional firms, which do not have that structure. Even when workers own stocks in conventional firms, they (in the vast majority of cases) do not have control. I made a whole post about this if you’re interested.
Thanks! Yeah, I think I’ll do that (in a couple weeks)
This post does not talk about strength of preferences so this seems a bit off topic. Nevertheless I think this misses some important considerations. You say:
the probability that one would actually go ahead and vote in a race does correlate with the strength of one’s preferences. So, perhaps, this is indeed working as intended.
This doesn’t take into account voter suppression. Take for example Texas; from 2012 to 2018, 542 polling places were closed in counties with significant increases in African-American and Latino populations, while counties with fewer minority increases saw only 34 closures.
They also placed restrictions on absentee ballots and limits on drop-off locations. For example; Harris County, which had only one drop-off location for 2.4 million voters.
It’s not so much the strength of preferences that determines who votes, as much as who is systematically discouraged from voting.
the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess
So I read this article and occasionally checked the sources and while it’s not a bad article by any stretch, the scientific backing is not as strong as they imply. For example they write:
the sexes differ in their -preferences- for competition. As both Kasparov and Repková have intuited, men are simply -more competitive-
With the words “preferences” and “more competitive” being hyperlinks to their source. This implies (especially in the context) a “nature” explanation, but the source doesn’t show that. And that’s another thing, it’s one study. Of course you can link to the same study twice, but it feels a bit icky to do so this close together about the same claim. A link to a study implies you have evidence for your claim, and if your claim has two links a couple words apart a reader will naturally assume you have two studies, which is a much stronger reason to believe someone. I think this is therefore a bit misleading.
I’m also missing some social explanations that an academic/leftwing article would surely have mentioned. Take for example “stereotype threat”, the idea that stereotypes change how people perform. There is a semi-famous study about this in chess: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.440
The female players in the experiment were misled. They always played against men, but sometimes the researchers would say they were playing against women. When they believed they were playing against a woman their performance would improve even with the exact same opponent (e.g. they would play multiple games against the same man, and they would score better against him when they believed he was a woman). Performance was reduced by 50% when they believed the opponent was a man and they were reminded of the stereotype. To my academic/leftwing brain, this seems like a pretty glaring omission.
Hmmm, I don’t know if that works. There have definitely been times were I (phenomenologically) felt inconsistent preferences at the same time, e.g. I simultaneously want to hang a painting there and not hang a painting there. I do get this a lot more with aesthetic preferences than with other preferences for some reason. I think the proposed solution that we’re multiple agents is quite plausible, but it does have some problems, so that’s why I proposed this solution as a possible alternative.
I tried a bit of a natural experiment to see if rationalists would be more negative towards an idea if it’s called socialism vs if it’s called it something else. I made two posts that are identical, except one calls it socialism right at the start, and one only reveals I was talking about socialism at the very end (perhaps it would’ve been better if I hadn’t revealed it at all). The former I posted to LW, the latter I posted to the EA forum.
I expected that the comments on LW would be more negative, that I would get more downvotes and gave it a 50% chance the mods wouldn’t even promote it to the frontpage on LW (but would on EA forum).
The comments were more negative on LW. I did get more downvotes, but I also got more upvotes and got more karma overall: (12 karma from 19 votes on EA and 27 karma from 39 votes on LW). Posts tend to get more karma on LW, but the difference is big enough that I consider my prediction to be wrong. Lastly, the LW mods did end up promoting it to the frontpage, but it took a very long time (maybe they had a debate about it).
Overall, while rationalists are more negative towards socialist ideas that are called socialist, they aren’t as negative as I expected and will update accordingly.
EDIT: Nevermind. Over time the positive karma on the EAF grew while the negative karma on LW also increased (to the point that I had to delete it lest I lose my voting power, thanks karma system). Also the mods on the EAF promoted the post almost immediately while on LW it took about a day, long enough to make it sink to the bottom of the feed. So my original hypothesis appears to be correct, both the users and the moderators are more negative towards an idea when it’s called socialism versus when it’s called something else.
Sorry guys. I woke up to another giant batch of new comments and I just don’t have the time or energy to respond to them all with the quality that I would want. My comments were already getting shorter and shorter while my longer, more nuanced comments were getting sniped before I could post them. I’m sure some of you made some excellent points.
I cited controlled experiments, you counter with an observation that I have already responded to in both the post and the comments:
I explained this in this section:
One issue that arises with starting a socialist firms is acquiring initial investing.[27] This is probably because co-ops want to maximize income (wages), not profits. They pursue the interests of their members rather than investors and may sometimes opt to increase wages instead of profits. Capitalist firms on the other hand are explicitly investor owned so investor interests will take priority.
A socialist firm can be more productive and not dominate the economy if it’s hard to start a socialist firm.
The strength of a case depends on the strength of the evidence, not on the number of citations!
You are not engaging with the evidence I cited.
A spot check is supposed to take a number of random sources and check them, not pick the one claim you find most suspicious (that isn’t even about co-ops) and use that to dismiss the entire literature on co-ops.
I cite four different studies that show that the theory doesn’t match the observations, Lao Mein doesn’t cite anything. This is the most extreme version of being a selective skeptic.
I’m not handwaving anything I wrote a whole section about how experiments contradict this and what could explain this:
“Experiments have shown that people randomly allocated to do tasks in groups where they can elect their leaders and/or choose their pay structures are more productive than those who are led by an unelected manager who makes pay choices for them.[20] One study looked at real firms with high levels of worker ownership of shares in the company and found that workers are keener to monitor others, making them more productive than those with low or no ownership of shares and directly contradicting the free rider hypothesis.[21] It turns out there are potential benefits to giving workers control and a stake in the running of the organization they work for. This allows workers to play a key role in decision making and reorient the goals of the organization.[22] One explanation for this phenomenon is that of “localized knowledge”. According to economist Friedrich Hayek, top-down organizers have difficulty harnessing and coordinating around local knowledge, and the policies they write that are the same across a wide range of circumstances don’t account for the “particular circumstances of time and place”.[23] (For examples of this, read Seeing Like a State by political scientist James Scott) Those who make the top-down policies in a traditional company are different to those who have to follow them. In addition, those who manage the company are most often different to those who own the company. These groups have different incentives and accumulate different knowledge. This means that co-ops have two main advantages:
Workers can harness their collective knowledge to make running the firm more effective. Workers can use their voting power to ensure the organization is more aligned with their values. Interestingly enough, I have yet to come across a co-op that uses the state of the art of social choice theory, so they could potentially get a lot lot better.“
No, ownership is not the same, I explicitly said so in a previous post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7bqzFLqEoz44y6C6o/why-giving-workers-stocks-isn-t-enough-and-what-co-ops-get