Microeconomics and Corruption
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Epistemic status: reply hazy, ask again later
I think, fundamentally, I started thinking about the issues in this whole thread of posts years back, when I posted a question to the author of Undocumented Features about how immigration worked in his universe, in particular the Republic of Zeta Cygni of the Future Imperfect Era. His answer was simple enough: cool people get citizenship because they're cool.
Like, what actually was I expecting? A real understanding of how a state runs in a space opera about cool characters doing cool things? An understanding of how some characters could serve as head of government while having other full-time jobs and raising a family, even being genetically enhanced? The answer I was looking for was never there, and I was a fool to expect it to be.
But the underlying question is still interesting, with all to significant real-world consequence: how can we build a plausible fictional state where people are happy and free, and cool people can do cool things? And the much harder corollary: and how do we do that in real life?
With Sailor Moon, you get the smallest hints, but you generally feel like the characters want to make a utopian society. People doing cool things while people live with love and justice — and passion, knowledge, beauty, courage, elegance, and revolution — these are core values, not just lip service. But, like, it's a real society where people like the Black Moon decide to nope out of the system, because it's not ever truly perfect, try as they might.
I'm taking my question far, far too seriously because it's interesting to me, and I think that these characters want the same answer that I do. Not when we see them in canon, since they're only middle schoolers, but what the older versions of those characters try to build.
Switching gears for a bit, we recently had the Summer Solstice, so I ended up reading a rationalist sequence, as one does. If you don't know what rationalists are, they're essentially a group of misfit thinkers online and around the SF Bay who like to think through everything from first principles to improve decision making. Which is not to say that the group doesn't have their own biases, hangups, and just plain weirdos (like many counter-culture movements). You've probably read HPMoR so you have some idea. A "sequence" is just a collection of essays on a theme, generally in blog post format. The author will tell you how sure they are of themself.
One thing about rationalists is that they're just about the only group who routinely think through social problems at a systems level. Social scientists observe, politicians gauge the possible, activists assert a direction, psychologists end up working in marketing. But the rationalists, who may not be fully trained in a field, are asking why society the way it is, and how can we make it cooler and more free? And what gets in the way of that?
A key essay on the problems inherent in policy -- and on a more worrisome level, problems inherent in reality -- is Meditations on Moloch. Malthusian traps exist, and many stable equilibria in game theory are just awful states in which to live. I'll excerpt a little bit here, but I have always thought that it's worth a read.
Moloch is either the Carthaginian god who demanded child sacrifice, or the name of the practice of child sacrifice. Historians used to think that Roman sources made up the child sacrifice thing to make Carthage look worse, as a kind of propaganda. Then archaeologists found the graves. Anyway, Ginsberg and the author of this essay, use Moloch as a metaphor for the forces of nature that lead to pointless, wasteful consumption of life, art, joy — and love and justice.
It's safe to say that in Sailor Moon's universe, Moloch is an agent, perhaps even the identity, of the biggest bad, Chaos. In our own fanfiction, where we've crossed in AMG, literal devils do exist and try to get people into these traps. A good portion of rationalists don't like to think of divinity, but I've always thought that it might perhaps make their arguments stronger.
Many religions have a prohibition on usury, including Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists -- which typically includes a prohibition on charging any interest. But loans and interest are at the very heart of capitalism. John Calvin is the theologian who broke the dam here, and ever since then areas with high concentrations of Calvinists still have large banking sectors (Switzerland, the Low Countries, Northeastern U.S.).
And I think we can all agree that capitalism is the optimal approach to make large amounts of wealth. But capitalism is absolutely not the most moral approach, despite the Objectivist view. Falling into the idea of optimizing for economic well-being is a trap, one that by its nature means not optimizing for anything outside of economic well-being. And the things outside the economy are things like art, friendship, and justice, things that have great but unmeasurable value.
I don't think I'll ruffle too many feathers by saying that there's a malaise in modern society that's growing. You may have heard the term "late-stage capitalism" being thrown about, almost as a charm to invoke the end of the current economic system. I don't think anyone knows what that next system is, though they certainly have strong beliefs. It might involve Universal Basic Income? Meanwhile corporations are acting like nothing has changed, and is ready to ingest the next generation, if only people were willing to work!
The particular sequence I read last month was on Immoral Mazes -- which is to say organizations that encourage immoral, deceptive, and unproductive behavior as the only way to get ahead. Some of these are simple effects of game theory, e.g. establish a performance metric, and it quickly becomes a target/goal. Most often, these tend to arise in multilevel hierarchies with a weak sense of mission. They encourage you to stay in the maze, climbing the ladder, until it just becomes a game of relationships, loyalty, survival, and hiding problems. The better you are at that, the more money you make, and the less of your soul you keep.
A good synonym for "immoral maze" would be "rat race". A good synonym for "maze behavior" would be "corruption". Rationalists really like redefining terms, essentially doing a clean-room re-implementation of a concept that already exists. This version of corruption includes primarily legal actions, but those that corrupt the soul, make working worse for everyone, yet seem to self-assemble and self-reinforce in large, multilevel bureaucracies. A bad equilibrium, the power of Moloch.
If you don't understand what I'm talking about, you might want to read the sequence, but I suspect that most people have an intuitive understanding of bad bureaucracies due to working in a job. Otherwise, I don't necessarily recommend reading that whole sequence, because it's long, and the conclusions were somewhat weaker than I hoped. But it does give me some hints to the question that I really want answered, which is: How to make a society with freedom, love and justice where cool people can do cool things? Or, now, a different corollary: how do we stop corruption before it starts?
For BSSM, I think the canon path is actually much harder to explain than our fanfic. Economic and social forces on Earth still haven't pushed for change effectively. Only a whole post-bubble generation of disloyalty to employees has made Japan start to question its corporate culture. It's hard to see how Usagi changes this as Neo-Queen of Crystal Tokyo, with her biases from her upbringing (e.g. Japanese "ganbare" work culture), and she absolutely can't do it alone.
And while Ami Mizuno has her heart in the right place, at age 13 she's already deepest into the rat race, orienting her whole life around exams, which will lead her up the ladder in some hospital and/or university. (Education is a whole other topic, believe me.) And certainly Haruka Tenoh is part of the capitalist class — instead of helicopter parents, her parents gave her a helicopter! Both of these characters show a little more callousness than one would hope for in an ally of justice. They might have what it takes to make it to the top and then have their honor suddenly re-emerge when it's useful, but likely their life paths will lead to more personal compromises. Less work-life balance. Possibly there's a josei story to be written about compromises adult Ami would be willing to make, but who wants to write that? Not me.[1]
On the other hand, in our fanfic, where we're starting anew on the Moon, more options open up. As I said in the last post, we're building an entire economy out of wholecloth. The population consists of lots of mission-focused staff from Moonbase Alpha who were never interested in getting rich at the expense of others, else they wouldn't be there at all. And at least in the early days, small population ensures that all local industries will be organizationally flat, lacking middle managers. And, of course, a set of magical girls who want to make a better country for everyone.
On one side of the coin, in an environment like the unterraformed lunar surface, corruption means death very quickly. On the other, it's a golden age, where everyone has common cause, and decisions taken here will have long lasting effects on the centuries to come. Corporate-style corruption will stick around once it gets started, and spread itself, so it must be guarded against at the very start. It's important to get work culture right from the very beginning. So much of a person's time is spent in employment that it makes up a massive part of quality of life.
One thing that changes the playing field massively is Usagi's gift, in the canon future, of a millennium of life and health. This changes work dynamics an incredible amount. The most obvious thing is that people aren't dying frequently, there are less obvious ways to move up the chain. If a person can't advance through the moral maze, if they can't run the rat race, it's less incentive to participate. People delay gratification, but a century or two is an awfully long time. Which means that corporate growth is the main way to personally advance -- or leaving.
Another major effect is on women. If a woman can be healthy for centuries, and child birth and maturation happen at the same rate, suddenly women really do not need to choose between careers and having a family. You can do it earlier, or even later. What loss is a twenty year break when you have three centuries of job experience? Why not hire a mother if she has the youth of her own daughter? This changes the equilibrium by a lot; it may even slow growth because women just keep postponing families.
But honestly, I don't know what the solutions to corruption are, or what steps the Moon Kingdom will take to fight it. We're writers, right? Not futurists. I do have a sense that the lunar state will care deeply about corruption, because a good portion of the monsters of the week are corrupted versions of good things. And that traditional tools of the state are either too blunt (bans) or too invasive (surveillance) to work miracles. And indeed, these tools often work very poorly on Earth today, and corruption tries to subvert these things wherever possible. Administrative capture is just too easy for networks of corrupt corporations.
I think that what it comes down to is culture. Unless you're in the brainwashing wing of the Sailor Moon fandom, the people of the future have to decide that they want to live in a particular society. There's no way to make a utopia unless the people in it actually believe in it, at a deep cultural or religious level, and promote it where the state can never reach. (State religion might be another post.)
Corrupt societies are at a more stable equilibrium than just and moral societies. So too, monarchy and autocracy are at a more stable equilibrium than republics. That means that it's easy for a society to slide into corruption and autocracy, but very hard to get out of that state. (As I have seen recently.)) And it's not because those systems are better. Remember, Moloch is forcing us here!
The strength of Sailor Moon is the story's ability to show us true darkness and true light, even in everyday situations, and that those choices have real consequences. Work culture and corporate culture at the very heart of most everyone's moral choices right now. Why should the future be any different? So instead of leaving you with a description of what the future society is like, this post mainly leaves with story ideas, because no utopia is perfect in the face of physics and human nature, and the choices therefrom are actually interesting.
How might a large capitalist company try to push its way into the Moon Kingdom, and what might they do about it? How do individuals react? What is important to them, and how is it different than our own society? What sort of tactics do they take to stop corruption -- small companies, government oversight, pure culture? Is corruption considered an economic problem, or a moral problem? How do they deal with immigrants who have different values? Does the Moon Kingdom's not optimizing for economic growth mean it gets left behind by a society that does, i.e. is there a Red Queen's race? And if corruption ever spreads, what are the consequences?
[1]: I haven't read enough of ''Dungeon Keeper Ami'' to know if it applies to that one.
-------
Epistemic status: reply hazy, ask again later
I think, fundamentally, I started thinking about the issues in this whole thread of posts years back, when I posted a question to the author of Undocumented Features about how immigration worked in his universe, in particular the Republic of Zeta Cygni of the Future Imperfect Era. His answer was simple enough: cool people get citizenship because they're cool.
Like, what actually was I expecting? A real understanding of how a state runs in a space opera about cool characters doing cool things? An understanding of how some characters could serve as head of government while having other full-time jobs and raising a family, even being genetically enhanced? The answer I was looking for was never there, and I was a fool to expect it to be.
But the underlying question is still interesting, with all to significant real-world consequence: how can we build a plausible fictional state where people are happy and free, and cool people can do cool things? And the much harder corollary: and how do we do that in real life?
With Sailor Moon, you get the smallest hints, but you generally feel like the characters want to make a utopian society. People doing cool things while people live with love and justice — and passion, knowledge, beauty, courage, elegance, and revolution — these are core values, not just lip service. But, like, it's a real society where people like the Black Moon decide to nope out of the system, because it's not ever truly perfect, try as they might.
I'm taking my question far, far too seriously because it's interesting to me, and I think that these characters want the same answer that I do. Not when we see them in canon, since they're only middle schoolers, but what the older versions of those characters try to build.
Switching gears for a bit, we recently had the Summer Solstice, so I ended up reading a rationalist sequence, as one does. If you don't know what rationalists are, they're essentially a group of misfit thinkers online and around the SF Bay who like to think through everything from first principles to improve decision making. Which is not to say that the group doesn't have their own biases, hangups, and just plain weirdos (like many counter-culture movements). You've probably read HPMoR so you have some idea. A "sequence" is just a collection of essays on a theme, generally in blog post format. The author will tell you how sure they are of themself.
One thing about rationalists is that they're just about the only group who routinely think through social problems at a systems level. Social scientists observe, politicians gauge the possible, activists assert a direction, psychologists end up working in marketing. But the rationalists, who may not be fully trained in a field, are asking why society the way it is, and how can we make it cooler and more free? And what gets in the way of that?
A key essay on the problems inherent in policy -- and on a more worrisome level, problems inherent in reality -- is Meditations on Moloch. Malthusian traps exist, and many stable equilibria in game theory are just awful states in which to live. I'll excerpt a little bit here, but I have always thought that it's worth a read.
Quote:Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question – C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers – what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?
And [Allen] Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.
There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”
The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”
Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”
Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”
The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.
Moloch is either the Carthaginian god who demanded child sacrifice, or the name of the practice of child sacrifice. Historians used to think that Roman sources made up the child sacrifice thing to make Carthage look worse, as a kind of propaganda. Then archaeologists found the graves. Anyway, Ginsberg and the author of this essay, use Moloch as a metaphor for the forces of nature that lead to pointless, wasteful consumption of life, art, joy — and love and justice.
It's safe to say that in Sailor Moon's universe, Moloch is an agent, perhaps even the identity, of the biggest bad, Chaos. In our own fanfiction, where we've crossed in AMG, literal devils do exist and try to get people into these traps. A good portion of rationalists don't like to think of divinity, but I've always thought that it might perhaps make their arguments stronger.
Many religions have a prohibition on usury, including Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists -- which typically includes a prohibition on charging any interest. But loans and interest are at the very heart of capitalism. John Calvin is the theologian who broke the dam here, and ever since then areas with high concentrations of Calvinists still have large banking sectors (Switzerland, the Low Countries, Northeastern U.S.).
And I think we can all agree that capitalism is the optimal approach to make large amounts of wealth. But capitalism is absolutely not the most moral approach, despite the Objectivist view. Falling into the idea of optimizing for economic well-being is a trap, one that by its nature means not optimizing for anything outside of economic well-being. And the things outside the economy are things like art, friendship, and justice, things that have great but unmeasurable value.
I don't think I'll ruffle too many feathers by saying that there's a malaise in modern society that's growing. You may have heard the term "late-stage capitalism" being thrown about, almost as a charm to invoke the end of the current economic system. I don't think anyone knows what that next system is, though they certainly have strong beliefs. It might involve Universal Basic Income? Meanwhile corporations are acting like nothing has changed, and is ready to ingest the next generation, if only people were willing to work!
The particular sequence I read last month was on Immoral Mazes -- which is to say organizations that encourage immoral, deceptive, and unproductive behavior as the only way to get ahead. Some of these are simple effects of game theory, e.g. establish a performance metric, and it quickly becomes a target/goal. Most often, these tend to arise in multilevel hierarchies with a weak sense of mission. They encourage you to stay in the maze, climbing the ladder, until it just becomes a game of relationships, loyalty, survival, and hiding problems. The better you are at that, the more money you make, and the less of your soul you keep.
A good synonym for "immoral maze" would be "rat race". A good synonym for "maze behavior" would be "corruption". Rationalists really like redefining terms, essentially doing a clean-room re-implementation of a concept that already exists. This version of corruption includes primarily legal actions, but those that corrupt the soul, make working worse for everyone, yet seem to self-assemble and self-reinforce in large, multilevel bureaucracies. A bad equilibrium, the power of Moloch.
If you don't understand what I'm talking about, you might want to read the sequence, but I suspect that most people have an intuitive understanding of bad bureaucracies due to working in a job. Otherwise, I don't necessarily recommend reading that whole sequence, because it's long, and the conclusions were somewhat weaker than I hoped. But it does give me some hints to the question that I really want answered, which is: How to make a society with freedom, love and justice where cool people can do cool things? Or, now, a different corollary: how do we stop corruption before it starts?
For BSSM, I think the canon path is actually much harder to explain than our fanfic. Economic and social forces on Earth still haven't pushed for change effectively. Only a whole post-bubble generation of disloyalty to employees has made Japan start to question its corporate culture. It's hard to see how Usagi changes this as Neo-Queen of Crystal Tokyo, with her biases from her upbringing (e.g. Japanese "ganbare" work culture), and she absolutely can't do it alone.
And while Ami Mizuno has her heart in the right place, at age 13 she's already deepest into the rat race, orienting her whole life around exams, which will lead her up the ladder in some hospital and/or university. (Education is a whole other topic, believe me.) And certainly Haruka Tenoh is part of the capitalist class — instead of helicopter parents, her parents gave her a helicopter! Both of these characters show a little more callousness than one would hope for in an ally of justice. They might have what it takes to make it to the top and then have their honor suddenly re-emerge when it's useful, but likely their life paths will lead to more personal compromises. Less work-life balance. Possibly there's a josei story to be written about compromises adult Ami would be willing to make, but who wants to write that? Not me.[1]
On the other hand, in our fanfic, where we're starting anew on the Moon, more options open up. As I said in the last post, we're building an entire economy out of wholecloth. The population consists of lots of mission-focused staff from Moonbase Alpha who were never interested in getting rich at the expense of others, else they wouldn't be there at all. And at least in the early days, small population ensures that all local industries will be organizationally flat, lacking middle managers. And, of course, a set of magical girls who want to make a better country for everyone.
On one side of the coin, in an environment like the unterraformed lunar surface, corruption means death very quickly. On the other, it's a golden age, where everyone has common cause, and decisions taken here will have long lasting effects on the centuries to come. Corporate-style corruption will stick around once it gets started, and spread itself, so it must be guarded against at the very start. It's important to get work culture right from the very beginning. So much of a person's time is spent in employment that it makes up a massive part of quality of life.
One thing that changes the playing field massively is Usagi's gift, in the canon future, of a millennium of life and health. This changes work dynamics an incredible amount. The most obvious thing is that people aren't dying frequently, there are less obvious ways to move up the chain. If a person can't advance through the moral maze, if they can't run the rat race, it's less incentive to participate. People delay gratification, but a century or two is an awfully long time. Which means that corporate growth is the main way to personally advance -- or leaving.
Another major effect is on women. If a woman can be healthy for centuries, and child birth and maturation happen at the same rate, suddenly women really do not need to choose between careers and having a family. You can do it earlier, or even later. What loss is a twenty year break when you have three centuries of job experience? Why not hire a mother if she has the youth of her own daughter? This changes the equilibrium by a lot; it may even slow growth because women just keep postponing families.
But honestly, I don't know what the solutions to corruption are, or what steps the Moon Kingdom will take to fight it. We're writers, right? Not futurists. I do have a sense that the lunar state will care deeply about corruption, because a good portion of the monsters of the week are corrupted versions of good things. And that traditional tools of the state are either too blunt (bans) or too invasive (surveillance) to work miracles. And indeed, these tools often work very poorly on Earth today, and corruption tries to subvert these things wherever possible. Administrative capture is just too easy for networks of corrupt corporations.
I think that what it comes down to is culture. Unless you're in the brainwashing wing of the Sailor Moon fandom, the people of the future have to decide that they want to live in a particular society. There's no way to make a utopia unless the people in it actually believe in it, at a deep cultural or religious level, and promote it where the state can never reach. (State religion might be another post.)
Corrupt societies are at a more stable equilibrium than just and moral societies. So too, monarchy and autocracy are at a more stable equilibrium than republics. That means that it's easy for a society to slide into corruption and autocracy, but very hard to get out of that state. (As I have seen recently.)) And it's not because those systems are better. Remember, Moloch is forcing us here!
The strength of Sailor Moon is the story's ability to show us true darkness and true light, even in everyday situations, and that those choices have real consequences. Work culture and corporate culture at the very heart of most everyone's moral choices right now. Why should the future be any different? So instead of leaving you with a description of what the future society is like, this post mainly leaves with story ideas, because no utopia is perfect in the face of physics and human nature, and the choices therefrom are actually interesting.
How might a large capitalist company try to push its way into the Moon Kingdom, and what might they do about it? How do individuals react? What is important to them, and how is it different than our own society? What sort of tactics do they take to stop corruption -- small companies, government oversight, pure culture? Is corruption considered an economic problem, or a moral problem? How do they deal with immigrants who have different values? Does the Moon Kingdom's not optimizing for economic growth mean it gets left behind by a society that does, i.e. is there a Red Queen's race? And if corruption ever spreads, what are the consequences?
[1]: I haven't read enough of ''Dungeon Keeper Ami'' to know if it applies to that one.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto