A reminder unemployment and underemployment and labour displacement existed in Roman times, and could be inferred to have carried into post Roman serfdom and the age of kings. It might not be the best choice for a peasant normally but walking off the land did happen. There are court records seeking the return of successful townspeople provably off their lords domain, and similar documents around marriage and land inheritance.
Peasant revolts would be fights for retained rights, even if informal - not just new rights, if at all about new rights.
You’re right that "walking off the land did happen". Although the feudal system legally bound serfs to the land, there were ways for individuals to escape this bondage. For instance, a serf who lived in a town for a year and a day without being reclaimed by their lord could often gain their freedom. These people, known as 'villeins' in some records, were essentially free peasants who had successfully left their lord's domain.
How does this compare to employment bonds of today?
At least I know of likes of Infy, TCS etc doing this (in the home country) — making freshers sign bonds for 2-3 years and if you want to leave within that period the only way is to pay a good amount irrespective of whether you didn’t receive a salary raise or didn’t get the opportunities which were good good for you. If you don’t pay the bond — they won’t usually drag you to a court (they send legal notices for sure) but they will also not issue you an experience certificate.
A boon for the very thing you describe was the Black Death of the 14th century. The colossal depopulation of Europe increased the de facto bargaining power of peasants to the point where they could competitively seek out better labor wages and land concessions in places well outside their previous manor. Thus, many peasants did exactly this, to the point where the noble elites and monarchies of Europe tried to enforce tougher regulations and laws against free movement, wage increases and even conspicuous displays of prosperity by the increasingly wealthy peasant classes of society (many of who were also turning to mercantile ventures to further diversify their income.
As is usually the case with government social and economic dictates that attempt controls against the practical social and economic reality of the world around them, these laws slowly but inexorable failed, leading to the steady erosion of feudalism throughout Europe (though not everywhere at similar times, and in some places this repressive system lingered for centuries longer, ie: Russia, Sicily, etc)
If anything, for all its grim deadliness, the Black Death was oddly beneficial to the future social and economic flourishing of Europe, starting with the rise of the Renaissance, and leading from there to so many other things, for better or worse for the rest of the world.
Can we please move to a more intelligent discourse on this than “rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down”? The social hierarchy shows self sustaining intent on small scales, but by and large it has been clearly shown to be emergent and ever-evolving. Believing that someone is keeping you from moving up the hierarchy is a story you tell yourself.
Even YC is designed that way, they fund people that can get into MIT or stanford or harvard maybe? Others with great records are rarely accepted, this is a known fact
this is easily shown to not be true? from 2025 numbers I think:
University of California, Berkeley - 26 founders
Stanford University - 21
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 17
Cornell University - 10
Georgia Institute of Technology - 7
Carnegie Mellon University - 7
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 7
Harvard University - 6
University of Oxford - 6
University of Cambridge - 6
University of Pennsylvania - 5
University of Washington - 5
Columbia University - 5
Johns Hopkins - 4
Yale - 4
Caltech - 4
UCLA - 4
YC is, last I heard, largely an in-person thing. And it makes sense for CA schools to be highly represented because of that.
The continue the bonsai metaphor: would its inevitable demise tell us about how hierarchies can be uprooted? Or conversely, that existing hierarchies that are well tended to rarely meet their end?
Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives.
I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right.
No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in.
Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.
Land value tax would be a good addition to the Japanese model. Raise the tax high enough, land prices are zero, leaving behind only the value of the home. Homes, like cars, will naturally depreciate in value. No weird artificial depreciation of houses needed.
You can still have investment in real estate, but it will be a competitive market. You can't sit on land and let it appreciate without putting in the work, because appreciation of land means higher taxes.
Japan also has less social mobility - it’s a great country but it’s no paradise.
Homes get torn down all the time because they aren’t worth anything - not exactly environmentally friendly.
Even in America today you have plenty of things worth investing in that don’t have to be homes if you can’t stomach the initial investment. Idk what you envision about replacing investment in homes with “research” though certainly curious to learn more about what you envision.
Japan has relatively cheaper real estate because of their lax zoning laws and frequent earthquakes drive the long term value of construction down. Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate.
It dosen't really have anything to do with what you are saying because the Nikkei underperformed relative to FTSE or S&P 500.
Land are worth something because it's undertaxed. If you tax land high enough, the price of land is zero. This means you don't have to take out a loan to buy the land, but maybe you need to do so for the building. Lands in cities are often high enough that they exceed the value of buildings. So, land price being zero save you money up-front, but you have to pay higher taxes on the land.
The improvements are naturally depreciating assets. Your house, much like your car, fall apart over time without maintenance. Ideally, you aren't taxed on improvements.
So, in a properly functioning market, you can buy property, but it's depreciating in price all the time, while you are left with a tax bill on the land. Each time, land value roses, you are left with a higher tax bill every year.
Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "expert" in any given field to spread propaganda favourable to them.
The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.
One day society will collapse and in the chaos people will come together to create a new constitution. The people who find themselves in a position to write that constitution will not have time to read up on psychology and systemantics and cryptography and voting theory and AI, etc, etc. There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
Has anyone tried to write a constitution based on all this? Not with the expectation that it will actually be used, but as a way to teach these important theories and give a good example of how they can be applied to law?
Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.
> There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
I'm not certain.
Both the US Constitution and the first French Constitution, for instance, were the produce of one century of thinking ideas through. Each successive French Constitution has been redesigned to avoid the problems that led to the fall of the previous one.
Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.
Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
Yes, severely capping funding, or even banning all private funding and giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money, is probably one of the most important things you can do for the health of a democracy.
It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol
But essentially it’s very close. The result here was that private campaigning was rediced a lot. Debates are mostly state-organized. Big portion of posters are on state-designated special billboards. There’re still some ads on all sorts of media, but there’s less of them and they’re less intense. Private events are next to nonexistent. Compared to US, I’d say campaigning, when put on a spectrum, is closer to being banned than the other side.
If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on the part of moneyed individuals.
Propaganda is definitionally just strategic spread of information. You shouldn't expect people to turn their brains off just because you've said propaganda. Any political speech done with forethought and intent is propaganda.
Suppose we allow only short published stump speeches and nothing else.
What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote?
Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.
Well that doesn’t happen currently so it probably won’t happen in this scenario. Nor does it really happen in countries that have implemented bans on private campaign financing.
I think this would be pretty tricky to do. For example, I love the idea of limiting candidates to a little stump speech pamphlet that gets included in the voting materials.
But, what if instead of doing typical advertising, a candidate coordinates secretly with people outside your jurisdiction. Co-conspirators could spend months or years running stories about some issue—crime, homelessness, drugs, etc, that might even have some kernel of truth (but be wildly overblown). People in your society might jump in with their own stories related to the problem, legitimate stories of things that happened to them, but filtered up by “the algorithm.” Then, the malicious candidate can just reference the well-known (overblown) issues in their pamphlet. It’s perfect because they don’t even have to make or defend any specific claims, just gesture broadly at the fears that individuals have self-selected.
What do we ban? Getting your news from outside the jurisdiction? Discussing your experiences? Politicians meeting people outside jurisdiction? I don’t really see it…
I dunno. My gut feeling is that we just have to come to terms with the idea of democracy requiring some sort of media literacy. But then if people were good at identifying ads and ignoring them, they wouldn’t be used so widely.
Are stump speeches not propaganda? I don't see why the election system should privilege candidates whose political views are most compellingly expressed in quick little text blurbs.
I don’t think that’s true? There are exceptions, but Mike Johnson or Chuck Schumer aren’t successful because they’re getting really good zingers on social media.
I mean, that is exactly why people even know their names. You think people actually read schumers policy positions on his website? Maybe a single digit percentage do. Most everyone just blindly picks the party line option even on primaries usually the party endorsed candidate wins.
I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants are the cause of all our issues and the media will be full of crimes by illegal immigrants, etc.
Strongly disagree, in the age of teleprompters and speech writers this is a major part of campaigns (because of TV) but hardly matters at all for actual governing. Our excessive focus on it is not helping us select better leaders.
If you're happy to accept almost literally everyone as Stalinist I suppose so. But if the word is going to mean anything then no, spending a lot on propaganda isn't Stalinist. It is routine governance. If you intend to organise people politically it is going to take a lot of propaganda.
Routine governance in Stalin’s time is what we now call Stalinism. “Just the way we do things” doesn’t tell you much about the quality. Unlimited campaign spending has a huge potential to consolidate power and allow more spe ding in a positive feedback loop.
The problem is that whatever system we come up with in theory, will have to be built in practice out of people, and there is never any shortage of people who will happily abuse the system and fellow people out of greed or delusion. That's why an AI overlord arising and taking over is not a threat, it's our only hope /s
I don't think we can. I think video game worlds (especially MMOs) have somewhat similar structures appear, where there's a portion of people that seem to become rich.
> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics.
There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found useful, from a (leftist) video essay:
> See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...]
> Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of the things we do in our day-to-day lives can be justified by either one, we don't often notice the contradiction between them, and it's easy to imagine whichever one tends to be our default is everyone else's default as well. [...]
> Your conservative friend thinks you're naive for thinking the system even can be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation [...] Many conservatives assume liberals [...] know The Hierarchy is eternal, that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them. [...]
> > that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them.
They're right... when the other is someone like them.
And they have a blind spot for an other who is not like them.
Meanwhile, what is the blind spot of the people who are not like that (i.e., who believe in equality)?
Is their blind spot that they can't imagine so many people who are trying to gain advantage, and being deceitful about it?
This analysis is highly muddled. "making things equal" != democracy. Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies. The concepts of democracy and capitalism have a far greater reach than the current US political climate where both are malfunctioning. The US is a superpower attempting to become a third world country and corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.
There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should not have it comes to have it. This is what every system so far has succumbed to. We need a truly equal system where all concentration of power is avoided unless absolutely necessary for the functioning of society to avoid an eventual collapse of the system.
The basic mechanism you’re describing is essentially accurate, however:
> As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship.
This doesn’t logically follow. The existence of a power differential doesn’t necessitate the differential being exploited to increase the differential. If we assume individuals are maximally selfish, this might hold, but that isn’t the case; people do altruistic things all the time, and there’s good reason to think most people are hardwired for it. The problem of liberal democracy is how you design a system to address those who are hardwired towards malicious selfishness; it isn’t clear that you truly can.
I would say that over a long enough period of time it's unavoidable that a selfish person will use the power to gain more. Selfish people are more likely to seek positions of power, so even if most people are altruistic, the people that seek power are more likely to be selfish.
I’ve come to basically the same conclusion. Attempts to engineer perfect political systems that are immune to this sort of infiltration is like trying to build a structure that will never need to be repaired—you can expend a lot of resources and effort on it upfront, but on a long enough timeline there will be failure modes you didn’t foresee.
Cancer can be also said to be fault of a system living longer than it needs to. In the end, what matters less is the specific instance of the system than ensuring the continuity of development is passed on.
But for states, they still feverishly cling to the idea of unity even as it brings increasing fragility and stagnation.
What if a true democracy is not a worthy goal? What if some people should have more or less say in something.
Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing?
Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair?
If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinces enough people that for very large values of 2, the answer is five, democracy says the answer is 5. How do you protect against this outcome in a pure democracy?
Education would probably be the answer. In a true democracy we would need to make sure everyone is well educated. Of course there are a lot of decisions that require very specialized knowledge that can't be taught to everyone, and in such cases it might be necessary to have limited participation or some kind of weighted voting.
This is nonsense. Most/all democracies have laws that only certified doctors can practice medicine. This makes doctors unequal from other people. Is this incompatible with democracy?
Democracy is about equality of rights, not equality. People are not equal in every aspect, but they should be equal in front of the law, for example.
Freedom is not absolute because your freedom stops where somebodys freedom beginns.
Hence, if you practice medicine without qualifications there is a high chance you will hurt somebody. It is not undemocratic to protect against hurting others. Hurting others is not a right.
Yes. This is why every society of note limited the franchise prior to the 1900s. You can only have debates among equals among people who are equal. The sort of equality communists imagine requires that you either radically re-engineer the human pysche or implement Harrison-Bergeron-style handicaps on exceptional people.
Depends on what the doctor can do with that inequality. If it means the doctor gets paid 20 times more than others then yes that is incompatible with democracy, as over time that wealth difference will be used to increase the inequality. But if the power is limited to only decisions about health, which is necessary for healthcare to function, then it should be acceptable. You'd still have to make sure that even that level of power is not used to gain more power, though.
One can argue whether 20 times more is too much or too little but I would say that it is correct that a doctor gets paid quite a bit more than unskilled labor. Some people who become doctors might still go through with it if it were not but most (sane) people would not go through the lengthy and very demanding path that is medical school and residency if it was not a better paid than a job that very many people could do. I can tell you here and now that I don't think I personally would have had the stamina to become a medical doctor.
Sure, I can agree with that. There does need to be some kind of incentive to do jobs that enough people don't naturally want to do. But the differences in rewards should be kept as small as possible and created only as a last resort. As I said, power concentration should only be allowed if absolutely necessary. If no one wants to become a doctor, then I'd consider it absolutely necessary to increase the incentives of doing so bit by bit until we have enough doctors while keeping in mind the risk that comes with the power differentials created. At some point an extra doctor might not be worth the extra risk of power concentration.
Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal". In a democracy, the people have the power to decide and anyone has the power to elect, be elected and to voice his opinion freely.
> Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal".
His point is that democratic systems are subverted if absolute equality is not enforced. It’s a crude argument but basically correct. The only way you prevent usurpation is by making sure one individual doesn’t have any obvious means of scaling his influence to the point that he can challenge the democratic militia.
What you call influence is simply trust that others impart to an individual. There is very little a single individual can physically do by themselves. So if there is someone with the influence to challenge a militia then it's better to say a proportionate number of people are also challenging the militia with the person as their proxy.
This is the argument populists make regarding Caesar, and there might be some truth to it, but it falls apart when you look at a Venezuela or North Korea; it’s easy to say that a nation gets the government it deserves when you aren’t the one having your life threatened.
Then again, outsized influence is a problem in democracies as well; this is what creates the conditions for a Caesar figure to emerge in the first place.
>There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible.
Only if by that you mean equal opportunities for everyone.
But if you mean equal outcomes, then you're guaranteed to get USSR/Cuba/Venezuela poverty, famines and shortages, and even there that didn't fix the issue of the elites being super wealthy, it just made everyone else equally poor.
People will never end up equal no matter how many thumbs the government puts on the scale, that actually makes it so much worse.
Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes. Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.
All the countries you mention had a lot of power centralization, which I'm arguing is the reason all systems fail. If we avoid centralized power, we avoid the corruption and theft that inevitably comes with it.
> Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies.
No, Capitalism can only reinforce hierarchies. Its core tenet is accumulation of capital, and thus power.
> corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.
Corruption is what happens when the capitalist class gets powerful enough to bend the rules. Incompetence is what happens when they figure out they can put a puppet in place and order him to bend the rules faster for them.
>that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them
That's true even in the most leftist and forcefully egalitarian regimes like communism. There are a few taking the ultimate decisions and there are some that benefit.
Our current regime lies through their teeth daily. Like obvious, completely made up lies. Every. Day. It's not a misunderstanding. One side is pushing for authoritarianism, one is not. One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence. I'm so fuckin tired of pretending there is just some kind of misunderstanding between both "sides".
No, the video makes the point that it's not really a misunderstanding, there are fundamentally different values in tension. If you believe in and value hierarchy then authoritarianism is natural and desirable, the lies are just for assuaging your less committed or more sensitive allies and befuddling your enemies.
But people do not value hierarchy for its own sake. They value hierarchy when they're on top of it, or at least in the top half. There are not actually fundamentally different values, but different interests.
>I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
That would work in MMO games,not in reality. If the system is not naturally evolving, it will produce tragedies. Look at communism. It was supposed to produce "a better" society but resulted in tens of millions of deaths, loss of freedom and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
We can at the very least tweak existing systems to be meaningfully better.
For example we could phase out all marketing and advertising. We could simplify and automate accounting and many other jobs. We could reduce the work week to 30 hours. We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job. Make moving down on a career ladder or switching careers entirely a common and non-humiliating occurrence, etc.
The most pertinent question to ask is - why haven't any of these already happened? What kinds of people prevent these changes from occurring and what should be done about it? Do you know any of these people - are some of them your family members. Are you one of them? Why does no one seem to ask these questions and seek answers? :)
> We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job.
Most of your comment I agree with but I take issue with this part.
Some time in recent history education became a means to an end: getting a decent job. This is not strictly speaking the point. Learning for the sake of learning still has tangible value that cannot be substituted by requisite training for entry level jobs.
I'm not really sure what caused this shift (but I definitely understand and respect it) but it's heavily misguided. If only we could all be so lucky as to be highly educated in a mundane job.
I don't want to live in a world where we only learn what we need to know in order to do our job. Do you?
The way labor availability doesn't actually help most peasant families if they don't have land to use it on. And when land is locked up by Big Men or temples or aristocrats, the system traps excess labor in a way that looks inefficient, but is actually great for those doing the extracting
People make mistake assuming that system is the same inefficient and exploitive for everyone. The owners and rule makers have everything in abundance, service providers from construction to healthcare queue at their doorstep. You might hear the owners and rule makers complaining about the reality and economy but it's something completely different from what you think.
This blog series by Bret Devraux keeps bringing me back to the black death, and how that reformed labor relations.
I have heard about that a few times now. But this series really emphasizes how much surplus labor the rich could extract. And hence shows how much social impact it had when that labor reduced, and could suddenly negotiate.
I wonder if the black death, and subsequent social change, might have been the best thing to happen to the peasant class.
I wonder what would happen given today’s demographic if mass migration was shut down. There may be similar change. But ruling class is hard at work to avoid that.
The black death killed a lot of people, but mostly the old and infirm. Europe was left an extremely young and dynamic place.
Today's demographic situation also involves a shrinking population, but it's for lack of young people. The world is getting a lot older really quickly, and that means less energetic and dynamic, and it means a lot of resources flowing to older unproductive people.
My personal guess about this is that wealthy people tend to lock wealth away in unproductive but safe ventures instead of value production. When there is a large labor population decrease and labor can demand more of the wealth of a society, they tend to use that wealth in a more productive way for the average person and that leads to social flourishing. Hence, I am not at all worried about the decrease in population - that will increase the power of labor and unlock a lot of horded wealth towards actually productive ends, not whatever dumb or safe shit rich people think is smart.
The modern UK leasehold system is, in many ways, rooted in the feudal landholding arrangements. In the UK, when buying a house, the buyer sometimes leases the land rather than owning it outright, and must pay ground rent to the landlord. A lease is usually bought for 80 years or more, but occasionally properties are sold with only a few years remaining. If the lease is not renewed, the homeowner risks losing the property to the landlord. The right to renew is not a given and comes with premium costs. Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to restrict or abolish this system but it continues to persist.
Vast majority of houses are not leasehold. It’s 125 years at lease, and aside from a couple of decades the ground rent was always a peppercorn (actual ground rents started in the 90s and have now finished)
You're right, but the proportion of leasehold is still somewhat high (about 7% of houses in the UK). Kinda weird that it's still a thing. There's also a good scam going where leaseholders will try and persuade you to buy out of the lease for X thousand £, because people want the piece of mind rather than paying the ground rent.
In UK and most of the rich EU, one doesn't even have to get indebted to be in precarious position. The land owning and tenancy alone make it, any person at any time is one letter away from being homeless or from at least months long legal battle.
Yeah, and imagine how much more time could the medieval peasants have spent working if only they had electricity, machines and computers at their disposal.
I think the origin of the trope is that the peasants sat around doing nothing during winter, when there was nothing to plant or harvest.
It's probably true that there was less work in the winter (although you still had all your maintenance tasks, e.g. repairs and preparing firewood), but this was compensated by much more intense labor in the spring and summer.
Overall, though, it makes no sense to say medieval peasants worked less than people do now, it's likely very comparable, and the variations would depend on the quality of your soil/irrigation and how much you were going to get taxed.
It is really great that Snopes was around in medieval times and can confirm or deny! /S
The thing is, no one knows what medieval peasants were doing, cos we weren't there. We have this or that piece of evidence, but evidence can be misinterpreted.
The majority of people today don't work as hard as the farmers of today. It is completely implausible that they work harder than the farmers of the middle ages, who almost certainly had to work harder than modern farmers (thanks to no mechanization).
That’s not really a fair comparison when vastly more of the population worked as farmers. The article has a good bit of evidence though that the amount of food needed to feed laborers didn’t lower meaningfully during the period cited as having short work hours, while the economic record that statistic is based on is very spotty. They probably worked way more hours.
I can recommend reading ACOUP to any technically minded person even if it's about history.
I haven't had the time to read this series yet but I can recommend for example his articles about the industrial revolution, making of iron and steel or sieges in the Lord of the Rings compares to read world tactics.
He has a knack for analyzing society from a systems level perspective and going into the right amount of depth for somebody who wants to understand the principles without having any background in history.
When you get to the end, remember that's how many to most black people lived until very recently until they were expelled from the land with nothing, due to the rise of more efficient farming techniques. The very few who owned their own land were more slowly pushed out when they were denied farm loans. Black people owned about 15 million acres of land in 1910, now they own about 1 million.
The idea that "efficiency" alone caused it glosses over how policy and power structures actively shaped who got to benefit from modern agriculture and who got left out (or pushed out).
how much have land ownership shrunk per person, for all americans, since 1910? i wouldn't be surprised if it was similar. which isn't to, in any way, discount the especially terrible treatment people of color have had in american history.
If you enjoy even a smidge of this, please look at other articles/series on their blog, ACOUP is absolutely phenomenal and I've not seen many writers (here also historian and tenured professor) both be so accessible and graspable while having a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation AND providing ample sources.
10/10 couldn't recommend more.
I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoyed the one on iron.
I found the one for Sparta too emotionally charged for my interest. But I really really endorse most of the other ones especially ones touching in economics and logistics of ancient world.
(Btw he's not a tenured professor, much to his chagrin, he's an adjunct professor. This is exactly why he wrote A LOT about broken academia system too.)
It's just funny since his blog is the entire reason I learned about the difference of adjunct and tenured professor, and why a big problem in academia is that they tenure less and less and rely on lots of adjunct professors instead.
There is a vast gap in how academia treats adjunct vs tenure track professors, a difference the author of this blog has spent a decent amount of words explaining and complaining about.
It's been awhile since I've read it, but it does offer a similar approach in the sense that it's an easy read. Bret does a good job of making the various topics fun and interesting, even in areas I normally wouldn't be interested in.
As a side note, I've read some interesting critiques on Diamond's theories. But I did find the whole book to be an interesting perspective, even just thinking about things North America lacked such as animal husbandry that may have drastically changed the way it developed.
My impression is that it is correct enough the look good on surface. Like learning Freud, you see his points, it makes sense, but the details are wrong and so you spend most of your time learning why he wasn't exactly right.
_his_ blog. It’s all written by one man. But I agree that it’s a remarkable blog, so fascinating and freely given.
While I’m in grumpy-old-man-shakes-fist-at-newfangled-grammar mode, I can _almost_ accept that people writing in the “historical present” is unavoidable these days since TV historians have made it so trendy, but it’s especially jarring when he changes tense in the middle of a sentence (emphasis mine):
> These settlers _were_ remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings _are_ trying to do is…
I'd normally be frustrated with all of the grammar mistakes, as it indicates to me that the author can't be bothered to proof read their own work before they expect others to read it.
However, now I see the mistakes as an indicator that it hasn't been written with an LLM which then makes me more inclined to want to read it.
"chatgpt, a guy on hacker news just said spelling mistakes are a sign llms haven't been used - write <thing> with a reasonable amount of convincing spelling mistakes so that it appears to be written by a human."..
A reminder unemployment and underemployment and labour displacement existed in Roman times, and could be inferred to have carried into post Roman serfdom and the age of kings. It might not be the best choice for a peasant normally but walking off the land did happen. There are court records seeking the return of successful townspeople provably off their lords domain, and similar documents around marriage and land inheritance.
Peasant revolts would be fights for retained rights, even if informal - not just new rights, if at all about new rights.
Labour mobility predates the modern era.
You’re right that "walking off the land did happen". Although the feudal system legally bound serfs to the land, there were ways for individuals to escape this bondage. For instance, a serf who lived in a town for a year and a day without being reclaimed by their lord could often gain their freedom. These people, known as 'villeins' in some records, were essentially free peasants who had successfully left their lord's domain.
How does this compare to employment bonds of today?
At least I know of likes of Infy, TCS etc doing this (in the home country) — making freshers sign bonds for 2-3 years and if you want to leave within that period the only way is to pay a good amount irrespective of whether you didn’t receive a salary raise or didn’t get the opportunities which were good good for you. If you don’t pay the bond — they won’t usually drag you to a court (they send legal notices for sure) but they will also not issue you an experience certificate.
A boon for the very thing you describe was the Black Death of the 14th century. The colossal depopulation of Europe increased the de facto bargaining power of peasants to the point where they could competitively seek out better labor wages and land concessions in places well outside their previous manor. Thus, many peasants did exactly this, to the point where the noble elites and monarchies of Europe tried to enforce tougher regulations and laws against free movement, wage increases and even conspicuous displays of prosperity by the increasingly wealthy peasant classes of society (many of who were also turning to mercantile ventures to further diversify their income.
As is usually the case with government social and economic dictates that attempt controls against the practical social and economic reality of the world around them, these laws slowly but inexorable failed, leading to the steady erosion of feudalism throughout Europe (though not everywhere at similar times, and in some places this repressive system lingered for centuries longer, ie: Russia, Sicily, etc)
If anything, for all its grim deadliness, the Black Death was oddly beneficial to the future social and economic flourishing of Europe, starting with the rise of the Renaissance, and leading from there to so many other things, for better or worse for the rest of the world.
This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.
Can we please move to a more intelligent discourse on this than “rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down”? The social hierarchy shows self sustaining intent on small scales, but by and large it has been clearly shown to be emergent and ever-evolving. Believing that someone is keeping you from moving up the hierarchy is a story you tell yourself.
> rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down
I mean, project 2025, heritage foundation, Thiel, Trump ... like in fact they are exactly on it.
You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent
Hierarchies and funnelling behavior seems to be emergent from people desiring more, and some securing it.
Even YC is designed that way, they fund people that can get into MIT or stanford or harvard maybe? Others with great records are rarely accepted, this is a known fact
this is easily shown to not be true? from 2025 numbers I think:
University of California, Berkeley - 26 founders Stanford University - 21 Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 17 Cornell University - 10 Georgia Institute of Technology - 7 Carnegie Mellon University - 7 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 7 Harvard University - 6 University of Oxford - 6 University of Cambridge - 6 University of Pennsylvania - 5 University of Washington - 5 Columbia University - 5 Johns Hopkins - 4 Yale - 4 Caltech - 4 UCLA - 4
YC is, last I heard, largely an in-person thing. And it makes sense for CA schools to be highly represented because of that.
I disagree, though only slightly:
I would say that it's rare that a hierarchy is deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward.
Rather, many hierarchies emerge organically, but those at the top seek to eliminate any that do not funnel surplus upward.
It's less a process of deliberate construction, and more a process of deliberate curation. Something like cultural bonsai.
The continue the bonsai metaphor: would its inevitable demise tell us about how hierarchies can be uprooted? Or conversely, that existing hierarchies that are well tended to rarely meet their end?
Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives.
I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right.
No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in.
Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.
Land value tax would be a good addition to the Japanese model. Raise the tax high enough, land prices are zero, leaving behind only the value of the home. Homes, like cars, will naturally depreciate in value. No weird artificial depreciation of houses needed.
You can still have investment in real estate, but it will be a competitive market. You can't sit on land and let it appreciate without putting in the work, because appreciation of land means higher taxes.
Japan also has less social mobility - it’s a great country but it’s no paradise.
Homes get torn down all the time because they aren’t worth anything - not exactly environmentally friendly.
Even in America today you have plenty of things worth investing in that don’t have to be homes if you can’t stomach the initial investment. Idk what you envision about replacing investment in homes with “research” though certainly curious to learn more about what you envision.
Japan has relatively cheaper real estate because of their lax zoning laws and frequent earthquakes drive the long term value of construction down. Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate.
It dosen't really have anything to do with what you are saying because the Nikkei underperformed relative to FTSE or S&P 500.
Better laws/incentives could still pull people out of the housing market.
>Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate.
Isn't this because most of Asia has just copied the western capitalist housing asset monetisation scheme with Japan being the only exception?
What do you mean by monenization scheme?
Land are worth something because it's undertaxed. If you tax land high enough, the price of land is zero. This means you don't have to take out a loan to buy the land, but maybe you need to do so for the building. Lands in cities are often high enough that they exceed the value of buildings. So, land price being zero save you money up-front, but you have to pay higher taxes on the land.
The improvements are naturally depreciating assets. Your house, much like your car, fall apart over time without maintenance. Ideally, you aren't taxed on improvements.
So, in a properly functioning market, you can buy property, but it's depreciating in price all the time, while you are left with a tax bill on the land. Each time, land value roses, you are left with a higher tax bill every year.
I think if freedom is a desired trait then your system cannot (will not) be entirely dictated by any design.
BF Skinner had the same idea. You can read it in his book, Walden Two.
> optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
You are confusing narrative, a positive spin with actual rules of the system. In political system they are never the same.
Freedom, equal opportunity etc are not objectives of our political system, they are just the narrative.
Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "expert" in any given field to spread propaganda favourable to them.
The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.
One day society will collapse and in the chaos people will come together to create a new constitution. The people who find themselves in a position to write that constitution will not have time to read up on psychology and systemantics and cryptography and voting theory and AI, etc, etc. There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
Has anyone tried to write a constitution based on all this? Not with the expectation that it will actually be used, but as a way to teach these important theories and give a good example of how they can be applied to law?
Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.
> There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
I'm not certain.
Both the US Constitution and the first French Constitution, for instance, were the produce of one century of thinking ideas through. Each successive French Constitution has been redesigned to avoid the problems that led to the fall of the previous one.
I'm less familiar with other examples.
Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.
File this under Lies Engineers Believe About Political Science.
Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
My criticism is of banning campaigning, it's a an engineers solution to a complex web of problems they don't understand.
Well that isn’t a very compelling argument unless you get a lot more specific.
Yes, severely capping funding, or even banning all private funding and giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money, is probably one of the most important things you can do for the health of a democracy.
It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol
But essentially it’s very close. The result here was that private campaigning was rediced a lot. Debates are mostly state-organized. Big portion of posters are on state-designated special billboards. There’re still some ads on all sorts of media, but there’s less of them and they’re less intense. Private events are next to nonexistent. Compared to US, I’d say campaigning, when put on a spectrum, is closer to being banned than the other side.
If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on the part of moneyed individuals.
Propaganda is definitionally just strategic spread of information. You shouldn't expect people to turn their brains off just because you've said propaganda. Any political speech done with forethought and intent is propaganda.
Suppose we allow only short published stump speeches and nothing else.
What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote?
Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.
Well that doesn’t happen currently so it probably won’t happen in this scenario. Nor does it really happen in countries that have implemented bans on private campaign financing.
I think this would be pretty tricky to do. For example, I love the idea of limiting candidates to a little stump speech pamphlet that gets included in the voting materials.
But, what if instead of doing typical advertising, a candidate coordinates secretly with people outside your jurisdiction. Co-conspirators could spend months or years running stories about some issue—crime, homelessness, drugs, etc, that might even have some kernel of truth (but be wildly overblown). People in your society might jump in with their own stories related to the problem, legitimate stories of things that happened to them, but filtered up by “the algorithm.” Then, the malicious candidate can just reference the well-known (overblown) issues in their pamphlet. It’s perfect because they don’t even have to make or defend any specific claims, just gesture broadly at the fears that individuals have self-selected.
What do we ban? Getting your news from outside the jurisdiction? Discussing your experiences? Politicians meeting people outside jurisdiction? I don’t really see it…
I dunno. My gut feeling is that we just have to come to terms with the idea of democracy requiring some sort of media literacy. But then if people were good at identifying ads and ignoring them, they wouldn’t be used so widely.
Are stump speeches not propaganda? I don't see why the election system should privilege candidates whose political views are most compellingly expressed in quick little text blurbs.
That is how the system already works. Tv and social media soundbites are king, rather than substance.
I don’t think that’s true? There are exceptions, but Mike Johnson or Chuck Schumer aren’t successful because they’re getting really good zingers on social media.
I mean, that is exactly why people even know their names. You think people actually read schumers policy positions on his website? Maybe a single digit percentage do. Most everyone just blindly picks the party line option even on primaries usually the party endorsed candidate wins.
I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants are the cause of all our issues and the media will be full of crimes by illegal immigrants, etc.
Being able to give a good speech is merit when the goal is to select a leader.
Strongly disagree, in the age of teleprompters and speech writers this is a major part of campaigns (because of TV) but hardly matters at all for actual governing. Our excessive focus on it is not helping us select better leaders.
I used to think that, before 2016. Apparently, incoherent rambling is also a successful strategy.
Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist (2004) https://vimeo.com/90583017
Initial debates usually feature all serious candidates anyhow. Advertisement aka propaganda draws a line for me.
> Banning campaigning would go a long way.
With tongue in cheek, that qualifies you as the "people like Stalin" category. Not a good idea.
And allowing for infinite money to pay for propaganda is somehow not Stalinist?
If you're happy to accept almost literally everyone as Stalinist I suppose so. But if the word is going to mean anything then no, spending a lot on propaganda isn't Stalinist. It is routine governance. If you intend to organise people politically it is going to take a lot of propaganda.
Routine governance in Stalin’s time is what we now call Stalinism. “Just the way we do things” doesn’t tell you much about the quality. Unlimited campaign spending has a huge potential to consolidate power and allow more spe ding in a positive feedback loop.
The problem is that whatever system we come up with in theory, will have to be built in practice out of people, and there is never any shortage of people who will happily abuse the system and fellow people out of greed or delusion. That's why an AI overlord arising and taking over is not a threat, it's our only hope /s
I don't think we can. I think video game worlds (especially MMOs) have somewhat similar structures appear, where there's a portion of people that seem to become rich.
> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics.
There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found useful, from a (leftist) video essay:
> See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...]
> Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of the things we do in our day-to-day lives can be justified by either one, we don't often notice the contradiction between them, and it's easy to imagine whichever one tends to be our default is everyone else's default as well. [...]
> Your conservative friend thinks you're naive for thinking the system even can be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation [...] Many conservatives assume liberals [...] know The Hierarchy is eternal, that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them. [...]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs
> > that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them.
They're right... when the other is someone like them.
And they have a blind spot for an other who is not like them.
Meanwhile, what is the blind spot of the people who are not like that (i.e., who believe in equality)?
Is their blind spot that they can't imagine so many people who are trying to gain advantage, and being deceitful about it?
This analysis is highly muddled. "making things equal" != democracy. Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies. The concepts of democracy and capitalism have a far greater reach than the current US political climate where both are malfunctioning. The US is a superpower attempting to become a third world country and corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.
There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should not have it comes to have it. This is what every system so far has succumbed to. We need a truly equal system where all concentration of power is avoided unless absolutely necessary for the functioning of society to avoid an eventual collapse of the system.
The basic mechanism you’re describing is essentially accurate, however:
> As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship.
This doesn’t logically follow. The existence of a power differential doesn’t necessitate the differential being exploited to increase the differential. If we assume individuals are maximally selfish, this might hold, but that isn’t the case; people do altruistic things all the time, and there’s good reason to think most people are hardwired for it. The problem of liberal democracy is how you design a system to address those who are hardwired towards malicious selfishness; it isn’t clear that you truly can.
I would say that over a long enough period of time it's unavoidable that a selfish person will use the power to gain more. Selfish people are more likely to seek positions of power, so even if most people are altruistic, the people that seek power are more likely to be selfish.
I’ve come to basically the same conclusion. Attempts to engineer perfect political systems that are immune to this sort of infiltration is like trying to build a structure that will never need to be repaired—you can expend a lot of resources and effort on it upfront, but on a long enough timeline there will be failure modes you didn’t foresee.
In other words, cancer always spreads.
Not necessarily the first cancer, but eventually one will.
Cancer is when a component of a system acts to replicate or enrich itself instead of acting to perpetuate the system.
Cancer can be also said to be fault of a system living longer than it needs to. In the end, what matters less is the specific instance of the system than ensuring the continuity of development is passed on.
But for states, they still feverishly cling to the idea of unity even as it brings increasing fragility and stagnation.
What if a true democracy is not a worthy goal? What if some people should have more or less say in something.
Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing?
Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair?
If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinces enough people that for very large values of 2, the answer is five, democracy says the answer is 5. How do you protect against this outcome in a pure democracy?
Education would probably be the answer. In a true democracy we would need to make sure everyone is well educated. Of course there are a lot of decisions that require very specialized knowledge that can't be taught to everyone, and in such cases it might be necessary to have limited participation or some kind of weighted voting.
You instill civic virtue from a young age.
Nothing has been as effective at dispersing and diffusing power than Liberal democracy.
This is nonsense. Most/all democracies have laws that only certified doctors can practice medicine. This makes doctors unequal from other people. Is this incompatible with democracy?
Democracy is about equality of rights, not equality. People are not equal in every aspect, but they should be equal in front of the law, for example.
Freedom is not absolute because your freedom stops where somebodys freedom beginns.
Hence, if you practice medicine without qualifications there is a high chance you will hurt somebody. It is not undemocratic to protect against hurting others. Hurting others is not a right.
Interesting thought exercise though.
> Is this incompatible with democracy?
Yes. This is why every society of note limited the franchise prior to the 1900s. You can only have debates among equals among people who are equal. The sort of equality communists imagine requires that you either radically re-engineer the human pysche or implement Harrison-Bergeron-style handicaps on exceptional people.
Depends on what the doctor can do with that inequality. If it means the doctor gets paid 20 times more than others then yes that is incompatible with democracy, as over time that wealth difference will be used to increase the inequality. But if the power is limited to only decisions about health, which is necessary for healthcare to function, then it should be acceptable. You'd still have to make sure that even that level of power is not used to gain more power, though.
One can argue whether 20 times more is too much or too little but I would say that it is correct that a doctor gets paid quite a bit more than unskilled labor. Some people who become doctors might still go through with it if it were not but most (sane) people would not go through the lengthy and very demanding path that is medical school and residency if it was not a better paid than a job that very many people could do. I can tell you here and now that I don't think I personally would have had the stamina to become a medical doctor.
Sure, I can agree with that. There does need to be some kind of incentive to do jobs that enough people don't naturally want to do. But the differences in rewards should be kept as small as possible and created only as a last resort. As I said, power concentration should only be allowed if absolutely necessary. If no one wants to become a doctor, then I'd consider it absolutely necessary to increase the incentives of doing so bit by bit until we have enough doctors while keeping in mind the risk that comes with the power differentials created. At some point an extra doctor might not be worth the extra risk of power concentration.
Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal". In a democracy, the people have the power to decide and anyone has the power to elect, be elected and to voice his opinion freely.
> Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal".
His point is that democratic systems are subverted if absolute equality is not enforced. It’s a crude argument but basically correct. The only way you prevent usurpation is by making sure one individual doesn’t have any obvious means of scaling his influence to the point that he can challenge the democratic militia.
What you call influence is simply trust that others impart to an individual. There is very little a single individual can physically do by themselves. So if there is someone with the influence to challenge a militia then it's better to say a proportionate number of people are also challenging the militia with the person as their proxy.
This is the argument populists make regarding Caesar, and there might be some truth to it, but it falls apart when you look at a Venezuela or North Korea; it’s easy to say that a nation gets the government it deserves when you aren’t the one having your life threatened.
Then again, outsized influence is a problem in democracies as well; this is what creates the conditions for a Caesar figure to emerge in the first place.
If things are not equal, then the voice of some people is louder than the voice of others, and that is no longer a true democracy.
>There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible.
Only if by that you mean equal opportunities for everyone.
But if you mean equal outcomes, then you're guaranteed to get USSR/Cuba/Venezuela poverty, famines and shortages, and even there that didn't fix the issue of the elites being super wealthy, it just made everyone else equally poor.
People will never end up equal no matter how many thumbs the government puts on the scale, that actually makes it so much worse.
Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes. Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.
All the countries you mention had a lot of power centralization, which I'm arguing is the reason all systems fail. If we avoid centralized power, we avoid the corruption and theft that inevitably comes with it.
> Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies.
No, Capitalism can only reinforce hierarchies. Its core tenet is accumulation of capital, and thus power.
> corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.
Corruption is what happens when the capitalist class gets powerful enough to bend the rules. Incompetence is what happens when they figure out they can put a puppet in place and order him to bend the rules faster for them.
>that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them
That's true even in the most leftist and forcefully egalitarian regimes like communism. There are a few taking the ultimate decisions and there are some that benefit.
Our current regime lies through their teeth daily. Like obvious, completely made up lies. Every. Day. It's not a misunderstanding. One side is pushing for authoritarianism, one is not. One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence. I'm so fuckin tired of pretending there is just some kind of misunderstanding between both "sides".
No, the video makes the point that it's not really a misunderstanding, there are fundamentally different values in tension. If you believe in and value hierarchy then authoritarianism is natural and desirable, the lies are just for assuaging your less committed or more sensitive allies and befuddling your enemies.
But people do not value hierarchy for its own sake. They value hierarchy when they're on top of it, or at least in the top half. There are not actually fundamentally different values, but different interests.
It's a mistake to assume that it's just about advantage or greed.
People even relatively far down may believe The Hierarchy offers predictability and stability—even if I think their belief is incorrect.
Authoritarians tend to be fearful, and it offers a partial answer to those fears.
>One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence.
Violence like shooting political opponents for voicing their opinions?
Proof by counterexample: I think it would have been a good decision to shoot Adolf Hitler for his opinions, don't you?
Simpler example: WWII happened, causing more than Hitler to be killed. Wars are political acts.
I don't think those at the top of the social hierarchy would condone the 'better system'.
>I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
That would work in MMO games,not in reality. If the system is not naturally evolving, it will produce tragedies. Look at communism. It was supposed to produce "a better" society but resulted in tens of millions of deaths, loss of freedom and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
We can at the very least tweak existing systems to be meaningfully better.
For example we could phase out all marketing and advertising. We could simplify and automate accounting and many other jobs. We could reduce the work week to 30 hours. We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job. Make moving down on a career ladder or switching careers entirely a common and non-humiliating occurrence, etc.
The most pertinent question to ask is - why haven't any of these already happened? What kinds of people prevent these changes from occurring and what should be done about it? Do you know any of these people - are some of them your family members. Are you one of them? Why does no one seem to ask these questions and seek answers? :)
> We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job.
Most of your comment I agree with but I take issue with this part.
Some time in recent history education became a means to an end: getting a decent job. This is not strictly speaking the point. Learning for the sake of learning still has tangible value that cannot be substituted by requisite training for entry level jobs.
I'm not really sure what caused this shift (but I definitely understand and respect it) but it's heavily misguided. If only we could all be so lucky as to be highly educated in a mundane job.
I don't want to live in a world where we only learn what we need to know in order to do our job. Do you?
The kinds of jobs I imagine would leave people with far more energy and time to do whatever they want - including learning, or not learning :)
The way labor availability doesn't actually help most peasant families if they don't have land to use it on. And when land is locked up by Big Men or temples or aristocrats, the system traps excess labor in a way that looks inefficient, but is actually great for those doing the extracting
People make mistake assuming that system is the same inefficient and exploitive for everyone. The owners and rule makers have everything in abundance, service providers from construction to healthcare queue at their doorstep. You might hear the owners and rule makers complaining about the reality and economy but it's something completely different from what you think.
This blog series by Bret Devraux keeps bringing me back to the black death, and how that reformed labor relations.
I have heard about that a few times now. But this series really emphasizes how much surplus labor the rich could extract. And hence shows how much social impact it had when that labor reduced, and could suddenly negotiate.
I wonder if the black death, and subsequent social change, might have been the best thing to happen to the peasant class.
I wonder what would happen given today’s demographic if mass migration was shut down. There may be similar change. But ruling class is hard at work to avoid that.
The black death killed a lot of people, but mostly the old and infirm. Europe was left an extremely young and dynamic place.
Today's demographic situation also involves a shrinking population, but it's for lack of young people. The world is getting a lot older really quickly, and that means less energetic and dynamic, and it means a lot of resources flowing to older unproductive people.
My personal guess about this is that wealthy people tend to lock wealth away in unproductive but safe ventures instead of value production. When there is a large labor population decrease and labor can demand more of the wealth of a society, they tend to use that wealth in a more productive way for the average person and that leads to social flourishing. Hence, I am not at all worried about the decrease in population - that will increase the power of labor and unlock a lot of horded wealth towards actually productive ends, not whatever dumb or safe shit rich people think is smart.
The modern UK leasehold system is, in many ways, rooted in the feudal landholding arrangements. In the UK, when buying a house, the buyer sometimes leases the land rather than owning it outright, and must pay ground rent to the landlord. A lease is usually bought for 80 years or more, but occasionally properties are sold with only a few years remaining. If the lease is not renewed, the homeowner risks losing the property to the landlord. The right to renew is not a given and comes with premium costs. Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to restrict or abolish this system but it continues to persist.
Vast majority of houses are not leasehold. It’s 125 years at lease, and aside from a couple of decades the ground rent was always a peppercorn (actual ground rents started in the 90s and have now finished)
You're right, but the proportion of leasehold is still somewhat high (about 7% of houses in the UK). Kinda weird that it's still a thing. There's also a good scam going where leaseholders will try and persuade you to buy out of the lease for X thousand £, because people want the piece of mind rather than paying the ground rent.
Is there a division within Weights & Measures that handles the regulatory framework for peppercorns?
Just a point to say leasehold is very rare in Scotland. I remember being told about this when I was looking at places near London and being surprised.
In UK and most of the rich EU, one doesn't even have to get indebted to be in precarious position. The land owning and tenancy alone make it, any person at any time is one letter away from being homeless or from at least months long legal battle.
It's a fitting title to describe life today for most people.
The series actually talks about this in detail, in particular the (incorrect) trope that medieval peasants worked a lot less than we do.
Yeah, and imagine how much more time could the medieval peasants have spent working if only they had electricity, machines and computers at their disposal.
The joys of progress.
Is that a trope?
Yes https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medieval-peasant-only-work...
I think the origin of the trope is that the peasants sat around doing nothing during winter, when there was nothing to plant or harvest.
It's probably true that there was less work in the winter (although you still had all your maintenance tasks, e.g. repairs and preparing firewood), but this was compensated by much more intense labor in the spring and summer.
Overall, though, it makes no sense to say medieval peasants worked less than people do now, it's likely very comparable, and the variations would depend on the quality of your soil/irrigation and how much you were going to get taxed.
Wtf? Ok I guess so. I would have never guessed.
Its a favorite among degrowthers and those who romanticise life in primitive societies
Also a favourite among those that compare apples to oranges.
It is really great that Snopes was around in medieval times and can confirm or deny! /S
The thing is, no one knows what medieval peasants were doing, cos we weren't there. We have this or that piece of evidence, but evidence can be misinterpreted.
The majority of people today don't work as hard as the farmers of today. It is completely implausible that they work harder than the farmers of the middle ages, who almost certainly had to work harder than modern farmers (thanks to no mechanization).
That’s not really a fair comparison when vastly more of the population worked as farmers. The article has a good bit of evidence though that the amount of food needed to feed laborers didn’t lower meaningfully during the period cited as having short work hours, while the economic record that statistic is based on is very spotty. They probably worked way more hours.
We know enough facts to get a good picture even if we don't know exactly what they were doing\
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism provides a good description
I can recommend reading ACOUP to any technically minded person even if it's about history.
I haven't had the time to read this series yet but I can recommend for example his articles about the industrial revolution, making of iron and steel or sieges in the Lord of the Rings compares to read world tactics.
He has a knack for analyzing society from a systems level perspective and going into the right amount of depth for somebody who wants to understand the principles without having any background in history.
Very good series on of all things, making bread.
When you get to the end, remember that's how many to most black people lived until very recently until they were expelled from the land with nothing, due to the rise of more efficient farming techniques. The very few who owned their own land were more slowly pushed out when they were denied farm loans. Black people owned about 15 million acres of land in 1910, now they own about 1 million.
The idea that "efficiency" alone caused it glosses over how policy and power structures actively shaped who got to benefit from modern agriculture and who got left out (or pushed out).
how much have land ownership shrunk per person, for all americans, since 1910? i wouldn't be surprised if it was similar. which isn't to, in any way, discount the especially terrible treatment people of color have had in american history.
Until the industrial revolution, 80% of people worked the land.
If you enjoy even a smidge of this, please look at other articles/series on their blog, ACOUP is absolutely phenomenal and I've not seen many writers (here also historian and tenured professor) both be so accessible and graspable while having a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation AND providing ample sources.
10/10 couldn't recommend more.
I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoyed the one on iron.
I found the one for Sparta too emotionally charged for my interest. But I really really endorse most of the other ones especially ones touching in economics and logistics of ancient world.
(Btw he's not a tenured professor, much to his chagrin, he's an adjunct professor. This is exactly why he wrote A LOT about broken academia system too.)
That's an oddly specific thing to point out
It's just funny since his blog is the entire reason I learned about the difference of adjunct and tenured professor, and why a big problem in academia is that they tenure less and less and rely on lots of adjunct professors instead.
There is a vast gap in how academia treats adjunct vs tenure track professors, a difference the author of this blog has spent a decent amount of words explaining and complaining about.
I've enjoyed Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond recently. If you have read it, how does it compare?
It's been awhile since I've read it, but it does offer a similar approach in the sense that it's an easy read. Bret does a good job of making the various topics fun and interesting, even in areas I normally wouldn't be interested in.
As a side note, I've read some interesting critiques on Diamond's theories. But I did find the whole book to be an interesting perspective, even just thinking about things North America lacked such as animal husbandry that may have drastically changed the way it developed.
It's a problematic work. From what I remember from my time on /r/askhistorians, they really did not like it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wd6jt/what_d...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210619035356/http://www.columb...
My impression is that it is correct enough the look good on surface. Like learning Freud, you see his points, it makes sense, but the details are wrong and so you spend most of your time learning why he wasn't exactly right.
> their blog
_his_ blog. It’s all written by one man. But I agree that it’s a remarkable blog, so fascinating and freely given.
While I’m in grumpy-old-man-shakes-fist-at-newfangled-grammar mode, I can _almost_ accept that people writing in the “historical present” is unavoidable these days since TV historians have made it so trendy, but it’s especially jarring when he changes tense in the middle of a sentence (emphasis mine):
> These settlers _were_ remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings _are_ trying to do is…
singular "they" is older than singular "you"
I'd normally be frustrated with all of the grammar mistakes, as it indicates to me that the author can't be bothered to proof read their own work before they expect others to read it.
However, now I see the mistakes as an indicator that it hasn't been written with an LLM which then makes me more inclined to want to read it.
Conflicted.
"chatgpt, a guy on hacker news just said spelling mistakes are a sign llms haven't been used - write <thing> with a reasonable amount of convincing spelling mistakes so that it appears to be written by a human."..