Just this guy, you know?
Dagon
Karma: 11,957
There are (at least) two models which could partially explain this:
1) The high-status/high-rank people have that status because they’re better at abstract and long-term thinking, and their role is more toward preventing catastrophe rather than nudging toward improvements. They leave the lesser concerns to the underlings, with the (sometimes correct) belief that it’ll come out OK without their involvement.2) The high-status/high-rank people are rich and powerful enough to be somewahat insulated from most of the prosaic AI risks, while the average member can legitimately be hurt by such things. So everyone is just focusing on the things most likely to impact themselves.
edit: to clarify, these are two models that do NOT imply the obvious “smarter/more powerful people are correctly worried about the REAL threats, and the average person’s concerns are probably unimportant/uninformed”. It’s quite possible that this division doesn’t tell us much about the relative importance of those different risks.
I don’t know enough about attacker motivations and economics, or what is the elasticity of attempts to extort (nor about elasticity of victims who choose to pay). It certainly won’t solve the problem. It MAY reduce the incidence, or it may just make it more expensive for victims and slightly less profitable (but sill way positive) for attackers.
I do wonder why it’s preferable to tax at punitive rates, but not to just outlaw entirely. Philosophically, sin taxes are annoying, because they assert a sin without much justification or calculation of “how bad is it”. When framed in a Pigou contex (tax enough to be neutral about the externality), it’s a much stronger theory. In this case, it’s very hard to calculate the pigouvian cost (externality value) of paying a given ransomware demand, so taxation seems a weaker tool than just outlawing it (note: I don’t know enough to really advocate for this either, I’m just comparing the two).
Take what used to be a property tax and turn it into a sales tax, which is levied on sales of property.
This would alleviate a lot of my concerns. Sales taxes (on actual sales, as long as it’s not imputed or assumed-sale where no money is actually changing hands) have a ton of advantages, not least of which is that the money is ALWAYS there to pay the taxes. I suspect it won’t satisfy the Georgists, though, as it doesn’t capture appreciation in value if there’s no sale for decades or longer. Maybe—it does remove the incentive for empty-land speculation.
[I have bad self-control, so my statements that I’m bowing out of this don’t seem to have stuck. Apologies.]
3. Practical: we need to calculate what fraction of the value is provided just by other people.
4. Practical: we tax that fraction of the price, and of the income from the property.
The theoretical calculation problem is in what you call “practical”. There’s no actual price signal or ground truth for that portion of the value. The use of the property combines land and improvement values in a way that’s idiosyncratic and inseparable. That calculation is going to be made up, and wildly inaccurate and unsupportable even in the ideal world where it’s not politically adjusted.
I’m not sure how to interpretYour suspected answer is how current implementations of the system work, but
I know that. I don’t know how the proposal differs from “run it the same way, just with higher values framed as land-value tax”. If the amounts are low, it’s workable. If the amounts are high, it’s not. I don’t know if the proposal is to somehow separate the ownership of land and improvements, or if there’s something else that makes it practically different from “much higher normal property taxes”. If it’s NOT just using a land-value justification to raise the dollar amounts greatly, please educate me.
Your first alternative hypothesis (there’s ALREADY a path to extinction) is clear to me, and it is unclear what sign or magnitude of change in that risk that AI will bring. Which makes your title a bit suspect—AI doesn’t bring a risk of extinction, it “merely” changes the likelihood, and perhaps the severity, of possible extinction paths.
I think there’s an underlying failure to define what it is that’s logically conceivable. Those math problems have a formal definition of correctness. P-zombies do not—even if there is a compelling argument, we have no clue what the results mean, or how we’d verify them. Which leads to realizing that even if someone says “this is conceivable”, you have no reason to believe they’re conceiving the same thing you mean.
They can only make decisions that generate enough income to pay the taxes
Out of curiosity, how is this different from current property taxes, or from mortgages for that matter?
Most of my objection (and confusion that it gets handwaved away so often) is NOT that the unimproved theoretical value of land could be taxed. It seems complex and unnecessary, but that’s not a unique problem with tax proposals.
My objection is to the core of the proposal that it’s taxed at extremely high levels, based on theoretical calculations rather than actual use value.
I have plenty of other concerns (like how it ACTUALLY works, for improved properties—do we split all deeds in two, one for the land and one for the improvements, and allow people to sell them separately? How does that work?), but they weren’t the crux of THIS discussion, and I suspect the answer is just “no—this is just regular property taxes, just calculated differently (and much higher), we still take the improvements if the tax is unpaid”.
people don’t like big sudden changes that cost them a lot of money.
People don’t like ANY changes that cost them a lot of money. The only saving grace of gradual rollout is that it’s easy to continuously delay the next step until it gets fully killed before going too far.
Any proposal that amounts to “nationalize Trillions of dollars worth of land value (or of net present value of future rent streams, same thing), without compensation” is going to face backlash from a lot of people, including me. REGARDLESS of timeframe or gradualness.
if a sufficient bribe to landowners would cost less than indefinitely continued rent-seeking.
Note that if made in public, for legitimately-owned assets, and voluntarily accepted, the term is no longer “bribe” but “purchase”. A whole ton of my objections go away if the government (or even a private entity) is buying land and then figuring out the best use for it, charging optimal rent to the people who own the improvements separately.
Some people may not like the transition, but the whole point of the transition is to achieve a more stable and more efficient economic system, in the long run. Even if the transition period is somewhat turbulent, I’d argue that that’s still better than having to deal with <current problems>
Said every revolutionary ever. Thanks for the conversation, I think I understand our cruxes. I do legitimately fear and disagree with the idea and its supporters, not just misunderstand the purpose or implementation. Bowing out now—I’ll continue to read responses, but no more posts, for a while at least.
Georgist model, individuals (or firms) still make the decisions about what to do with the resources.
Kind of. They can only make decisions that generate enough income to pay the taxes, which are calculated as the theoretical value (maximum rent attainable by any use), not the actual choice.
Wait! Is the actual problem we’re trying to solve “high rents”? From everything I’ve read, it’s “inefficient use of land”, in other words, failure to maximize land-rents collected, which are now taxed at a high percentage of theoretical value.
In some sense, bulldozing 10 single-family houses to build a 30-unit apartment does “reduce rent” on a per-unit basis, but it increases it on the land. As designed, as far as I can tell. It’s unclear what bulldozing them to build a datacenter does to rents, but that may be necessary if the powers-that-be decide that’s the income level needed to pay the taxes.
How many older people who own land do you know, who’re happy with CURRENT inheritance taxes? Saying “land value is no longer inheritable, it goes only to the state” seems about as likely as any other implementation of massive tax increases.
I mean, yes. Real Estate is about the only perpetual bond still available to buy. Current owners stand to lose their entire investment (in the land portion, at least, but also in the improvements because they can’t be separated and bankrupt is bankrupt). Those who hope to invest in real-estate lose their dream, which is a surprisingly powerful factor in public sentiment.
The key seems to be (like other communist nationalizations) painting ALL landowners as the bad guys. Or trying to convince people that “only the big guys” will be impacted, but that’s so transparently a lie that it probably doesn’t fly anymore.
No practical Georgist would say that we should start taxing land at 100% of its value overnight. Any conversion over to a Georgist taxation system would have to be a gradual process, taking at least 30 years in order to give everybody enough time to re-adjust their personal finances,
It’s comments like this that really confuse me about why anyone I respect is even talking about this. I just can’t take it seriously. In the current system where some land is privately owned, and can be inherited as part of an estate, 30 years is nowhere near sufficient for this transition to go without significant impact. Probably off by a factor of 3 or more. And even THEN, there will be a threshold effect somewhere (my guess is in the 20-30% of assessed land-only rent, but it will depend on details), where people actually understand what’s going on and revolt. Without a plan to actually recognize that this is a massive government takeover of currently-private assets, this is just dorm-room dreaming.
Thanks. Is there any argument that its popularity is any different from communism (in theory) popularity? “Government will make better resource decisions than profit-motivated private entities”.
Has any modern proponent tried to analyze the path from here to there (how to compensate current landowners for the taking) or what the new equilibrium is like (how to operate in a world where the government owns all the land, and people/private orgs own the improvements)?
One aspect I’ve never understood—if something is taxed at 100% of value, how is it different from the much simpler model of government ownership? What does it mean to “own” land if you don’t get any of the income/value it generates? Why would anyone ever invest in land?
If it’s taxed on theoretical maximum value, even worse. Now it’s a liability, not an asset—you can lose money if you can’t actually use it as well as the tax authority says you should, but making more rent than you’re taxed on is evidence that the valuation should go up.
(This is entirely separate from all the practical measurement, calculation, and separation of land and improvement valuation. And separate from the political issues of evicting grandma. I’m really missing something about what ownership even means in the 100% tax case).
Funny, I’d assumed (without really thinking about it) that it was a ROTATED copy, not a front-to-back transposition, even though the text actually said “mirror image”. A flipped copy would have a number of inconsistencies, like which hand it’s comfortable to extend in greeting, or even which side their shirt buttons on.
Assuming you’re somehow gravitationally/rotationally symmetrical as well, and that quantum uncertainty doesn’t matter, you are probably right. I strongly suspect that this pile of assumptions is not just infeasible, but impossible in our current universe.
I’m not sure how this would work, especially in conflicting-expectation cases (one person watches a die roll 20 times, another person only saw the last 5, they have DIFFERENT expectations in this non-independent-trials world. What actually happens with what frequency? Depending on specifics, presumably casinos hire people to differentially watch games and preferentially shuffle or change the dice.
Other good effects: nobody expects to get cancer, so I guess it doesn’t happen?
But really, it’s just confused in conception—this fallacy is based on a reference class—events are no longer independent, but it’s unclear in what way they’re entangled. If I roll 12 different dice, does it apply? If I roll the same die 12 times, but only observe the first 2 and the last, do the 8 unobserved rolls affect the expectation?