American Politics

Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim

There is a corruption at the heart of American politics, caused by the dependence of Congressional candidates on funding from the tiniest percentage of citizens

The problem is deeper than the funding of candidates.
The deepest problem is in markets themselves.
Markets are great tools for allocating scarce resources.
Markets cannot do anything with abundance other than value it at zero.
There is no logically possible market mechanism to give abundance a value.
Humans require and value abundance.

There is a fundamental break here between the human value of abundance, and market value (aka money).

We are now very close to delivering technology that can deliver abundance of all material needs.
All of our currently dominant social structures are based upon scarcity, and cannot deal with abundance,

The issue is far deeper than the funding of election candidates, it is about the whole notion of funding itself.

There are alternatives.
We could develop distributed trust networks (we have them already, we could just augment them with technology).
We could create technologies that guarantee all individuals all the essentials of life (all fully automated).

Markets could then be relegated to those things that are actually scarce (which are few), and most people could live in abundance, freedom, diversity and security.

The “box” of market valuation has most minds firmly within it.
It is not an easy box to get out of, and it is possible.
I am doing it.

[followed by]

Hi Daniel
It doesn’t seem so to me.
People can adapt to new realities very quickly.
We are already highly evolved for cooperative behaviour within group, and to punish cheating, all we need to do is provide new contexts for “within group” and “cheating”.

Actually having the technology to put in place is step one.
The trick is getting to that step.
There is no economic justification for creating something that will invalidate economics.
A little bit of a catch 22 there.

So it is a matter if getting people to believe that it is worth putting resources into creating something that will supply them with food, shelter, energy, education and communication indefinitely at no further cost.
That can be done within the economic paradigm.
What happens next will happen, even if most people cannot conceive of it beforehand.

[followed by]

Hi Daniel

I agree that there are often unintended consequences to actions. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, that is unlikely to ever change. From another aspect, exploring any infinity from any starting point on any multidimensional topology is going to mean that we are constantly meeting new things, running into new issues.

What I propose is not a solution to all possible problems, it is simply a solution to many of the problems that have dogged humanity up until now.

To be human is to have problems.
I am simply proposing that we give ourselves the best set of tools we can to deal with those problems we are yet to encounter. I don’t see our current economic paradigm delivering that.

[followed by]

Hi Daniel
Agree with most of both of your posts.
Evolved systems are amazingly complex, and there are no “simple” solutions. The solution I am proposing is about as far from simple as human technology has yet achieved, and it is doable – big, and achievable.

I agree that the existing system will need to be under severe stress in order for a replacement to gain dominance.

As to how, I see it happening. Discussions such as this one become available to many.
I see things like Kickstarter, and the Adaptiva parallela board as steps on the path, as is the open source community.

I see many conversations happening in many different groups, introducing new paradigms. It is very much like stirring a Bose Einstein condensate, for a long time nothing happens, then something happens – a state change.

So yes – lots to do, and lots of people doing it.

[followed by]

Hi Gigi

What you say would make sense in a world where production is limited.
It does not make any sense in a world where the means of production (self replicating, self maintaining, machines) are distributed to everyone.

I agree with you that we currently produce enough for all, but it is the system of distribution that we have chosen (money and markets) that fails to deliver what is needed where it is needed.

The entire system we have now is based on scarcity, not in any sort of absolute terms, but in terms of asymmetric distributions at the local level. Much of the legislation of the world appears to be there in order to create or maintain asymmetric distributions of something for the benefit of some group.

Consider oxygen, it is important, and abundant, and has zero monetary value.

Consider what life might be like if almost all material goods were like oxygen, simply there for the using, created as needed from sunlight and matter from whatever local rock is available (taken apart to its component isotopes and reassembled into what is needed). We do not have such machines yet, and we are not many years away from being able to make such things.

[followed by]

Hi Gigi

I see things quite differently. I don’t see greed as such being a major problem, what I see is people responding to the incentives society puts in place. If society rewards accumulation of money, then that is what many will do. The money game is the biggest game in town at present.

I have not met many people without empathy. Most people (well over 90%) have empathy, and many have limited the contexts in which they display it (due to various cultural incentives and life experiences). In law enforcement we work on 15% being compliers, 80% conditional compliers, and 5% non-compliers (roughly – seems about right in my experience).

It seems to me that all humans are clearly genetically programmed to cooperate within group. We also all have strong tendency to punish cheats (something required by Games Theory in order to stabilise cooperative strategies).
The trick seems to be to create a context in which people identify the entirety of humanity as the “in group”, Currently most are stuck at “nation” level.

I agree that right now, we are dealing with a world of scarcity.
What I am asserting is that we are very close to having the ability to deploy technology that would change that, yet there is little or no incentive within the current dominant paradigm to do so.
Just putting that out there – raising awareness!

[followed by]

Hi Gigi

I think empathy follows a similar pattern to compliance, and I acknowledge that there is no direct relationship. Empathy seems to be there only for those that people class as people. So for some, this applies only to siblings, or to family, or to tribe, or to countrymen, or to those of the same culture or religion, etc.. And it is my experience that almost all people have empathy to some people in some degree. It’s all about context.

We do definitely live in a world where most people experience scarcity.

We certainly possess the technical abilities to create a different sort of experience for the vast majority (perhaps even everyone).

Greed is certainly present, in abundance, and greed is rewarded in American society.
Human beings are very good at making the most of whatever set of incentives they find themselves in..

[followed by]

Hi Gigi

I’d be interested in any links you have to any studies that back up that link to DNA.

I have no doubt that DNA gives us certain tendencies, and in my experience, those tendencies can be over-ridden by higher order functionality.

What you say make no sense to me in an evolutionary context. Humans have very long childhoods, which necessitates strongly evolved social cooperation to raise children. Empathy is a big part of that suite of cooperative strategies.

All of the studies I have seen, and all of my direct experience (as a trainer, as a teacher, and in many different realms) is that most people have a strong ability to empathise, and whether they do or not depends very much on the context of the situation.

So if you do have studies, I would love to read and critique them.

The evidence of practices like those in http://www.servicespace.org/ is that all people can be bought to empathy, if given appropriate contexts in which to do so.

Check out http://www.evolutionaryleaders.net/blog/when-generosity-meets-venture-capital#comment-4619

[followed by]

Hi Gigi

Checked out the first two in detail, and neither establishes a genetic link – only a link to the size of the amygdala.
The brain is a very plastic organ, and changes size based on use.
Patterns of behaviour tend to follow family patterns as well as genes – it is actually very difficult to separate out the two. The paper “Political Orientations Are Correlated
with Brain Structure in Young Adults” is very careful to specify this.

The conclusions you have drawn do not appear to be supported by the evidence I have seen thus far.

I am certain there will be some genetic effects, and I strongly suspect that they will be far less than the effects of environment in this particular case, given the huge plasticity of the brain.

And simply writing off people as not being capable of empathy because of their genetically determined primitive brain doesn’t appear to be supported by either of the first two studies.

It seems to me that most of the modern work shows just how plastic the brain can be, and how much brain structure responds to the uses we put it to.

Hence my reference to the importance of context.
You might be interested in Michael Merzenich’s work on neuroplasticity, and some interesting stuff in Pamela Greenwood’s book “Nurturing the Older Brain and Mind” as a couple of examples amongst many thousand.