A very rough list of the political / economic questions on my mind at the moment

[chess]

I realise that most of the following is pretty far up the idealism curve / probably not actually relevant because nobody who matters is going to ask my opinion on it, but these are the things churning around in my head that I'm trying to research / figure out at the moment.

These are mostly notes to myself, but I would appreciate input on any of them too (especially if it is in the form of 'you should read X' rather than 'that is completely stupid why are you even thinking about it?').

Most important as it's actually a clear and present demand of many people:

* 'Ban Lobbying' potentially impacts a lot of 'good' charities / think-tanks / individuals who are dedicated to a cause. How do we distinguish between 'constituent who has a legitimate interest in an issue', 'genuine advice from experts' and 'paid-for lobbying'?

Things I want to prove / disprove in general, and ideally write a clear and simple explanation of, because I keep getting into arguments over them and am ill-informed:

* Returning to a gold standard / gold or some other solid actually useful commodity as a store of value - what terrible things does that do to the world economy?
* Debt-backed money - is it actually untenable or can appropriate regulations to avoid obfuscation of debt values save it? (If so, what are these?)
* Alternative bases for money - what are the characteristics of the 'forex standard'? what about People-Backed Money (somewhat similar to the Equal Money guys' idea, but with actual exchange rather than a system where prices can't be market-set because you don't actually receive anything - so why ask for money at all when you could earn more social capital by gifting it?) what money-sink tricks can you use to get around the 'inflation is bad, it steals my savings' bleating while still maintaining an incentive to keep the economy running rather than letting money stagnate?
* Why social capital / 'whuffie' only schemes are a Bad Plan (or are they?)
* What are the downsides of 'socialise basic needs, capitalism for luxuries'? How does that work in practice? What are the awkward edge effects which need to be controlled for? How do you do it without authoritarian measures / what level of authoritarian measures are acceptable?
* Is it possible to have a government without going down the icky routes of 'monopoly on force' or 'serious brainwashing program'?
* 'banking', up to and including credit default swaps and CDOs, is an inevitable evolution of the desire to trade - discuss
* What kind of things constitute 'artificial scarcity', and how can we remove these barriers to progress in the easiest fashion - or are they in fact doing a good thing even though they have undesirable side effects? (Related: how do we manage the transition between 'full employment everyone needs to do as much work as they can to produce mostly physical stuff' and 'technological unemployment, most people are out-competed by machines and need to find something else to do', especially the tricky middle stages where we still need some compulsory work?)
* Is it possible to have a government without going down the icky routes of 'monopoly on force' or 'serious brainwashing program'?
* What are the alternative modern government forms to 'representative democracy', how would you implement them and what are their pros and cons?

Comments

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

'Ban Lobbying'

Follow the money. I think that would be complicated in practice but potentially effective.

[favouredenemy.livejournal.com]

Chris Martenson has a fantastic and simple series called 'the Crash Course'. I'd advise anyone to read it. I think a lot of your questions about the current state of affairs will be answered in simple, factual terms.

http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse

[chess]

I have the feeling I don't agree with this guy's premises as he appears to have fallen for the 'inflation is evil' trap, but I'm only on chapter 6 so I'll hear him out :)

[favouredenemy.livejournal.com]

Can you explain the 'inflation-is-evil trap' to me?

I also don't believe Martenson describes it as 'evil' so much as 'subject to Governmental management', with the implication of 'and therefore, also mismanagement'.

He puts particular emphasis on how the Federal Reserve is run by the banks, and how the banks are in it for their own benefit, not the benefit of their customers, which particularly impacts American readers/viewers, but since the UK economy is pretty much tied to bigger hitters, it still bears some relevance.

[chess]

The 'inflation is evil' trap goes like this:

1) When I make money by selling goods and services, the money is something I have rightfully earned. (Pretty much true.)

2) Inflation reduces the value of my money - stealing from me the thing that is mine! If I've earned something, it should be mine to keep! (Not so true.)

3) Therefore, inflation (and all money sinks - e.g. wealth taxes etc) is evil. (Not at all true.)

Unfortunately inflation or some other money sink is required to keep money in circulation - otherwise you get pools of it lying around in the hands of people who have low marginal value on it because they have so much, but are afraid to spend it in case they need it in the future...

[gwyntar.livejournal.com]

There's fairly general agreement that inflation above a couple of percent is economically undesirable. Deflation is also undesirable.

It's hardly a scourge to be avoided at all costs though, although very high inflation is extremely damaging.

[daxx-61.livejournal.com]

Quick and dirty answers to some of these. Bear with me as I'm currently home sick and my head is a big ball of fuzz.

---

* Returning to a gold standard / gold or some other solid actually useful commodity as a store of value - what terrible things does that do to the world economy?

You'd get laughed out of the room if you seriously proposed a return to the gold standard to any economist worth their salt.

Primarily it would hamper both growth and spending. Fiat money allows much faster economic growth because expansion of the money supply is actually feasible, and doesn't encourage saving nearly as much. You'd also effectively lose control over monetary policy and the government would be less able to respond effectively to economic crises.

* Why social capital / 'whuffie' only schemes are a Bad Plan (or are they?)

Because they rely on a number of things: there being no scarcity (obviously this won't work as scarcity will always exist); some universal measure and method of measurement of social capital which isn't subjective (this doesn't exist either); and here being no way of gaming the system (which would make it no different to other currencies).

* What are the downsides of 'socialise basic needs, capitalism for luxuries'? How does that work in practice? What are the awkward edge effects which need to be controlled for? How do you do it without authoritarian measures / what level of authoritarian measures are acceptable?

It really depends on what you mean by "socialise". There are various degrees of this from instituting a partial command economy, to Ingsoc, to a free market with subsidies. The downsides are largely reliant on what method you use - mostly there is a tradeoff you have to make between actual provision of basic needs and efficiency.

A good example of that tradeoff is actually the NHS, which has a serious problem - it's a fiscal black hole. It is genuinely not possible to spend "enough" on the NHS regardless of whatever else the government is spending money on, at least until the day where we eliminate all death and disease. The government therefore has to make a judgement on what level of spending is sufficient to do the most social good whilst leaving some money for other necessities.

So you'd essentially have to define what is "enough" in terms of provision, and what counts as a basic need/luxury. It would be a difficult project and most likely it would be simpler and more efficient to just subsidise a free market, or privatise certain parts of key industries, as we do at the moment.

* Is it possible to have a government without going down the icky routes of 'monopoly on force' or 'serious brainwashing program'?

The question you have to ask here is "what does the government do when a bunch of violent nutters disagree with them?". A government virtually defines itself by having a legal monopoly on force, because without that the government is inherently unstable (and not in a positive way).

The other way is by unanimous consent of the governed, but getting that is tricky.

---

I may throw some answers up to the others at some point if I have more time.

[passage.livejournal.com]

I think the gold standard problem is much more fundamental than this - a gold standard prevents trade. It's rather like Greece in the Euro at the moment, their currency can't move to reflect the fact that their economy is broken, so it can't price exports effectively to bring their economy back again.

The gold standard gives your currency all the inflexibility of being chained to Germany without any of the "being able to nick all Germany's money" benefits.

Chess, what is it you found appealing about the gold standard?

[chess]

I don't find anything appealing about the gold standard, but I get into endless arguments with Americans who think it is the solution, and I need to work out how to refute their arguments.

The problem seems to be that 'debt-backed money' (which is what we have now - some set of organisations are empowered to create debt-money pairs to control the money supply) is very obviously 'money from nothing' - unbacked, non-store-of-value money - when you look at it closely, and also people are blaming it for the current crash (which may or may not be fair - it seems that obfuscation of debt values is more to do with it than spending Money From Nothing - but certainly 'creating dollars and using them to ignore our trade deficit' is much easier with debt-backed money than gold-backed money).

So people reject debt-backed money and then look around for something else - but all they can find is gold-backed money, or some other resource-backed money, because that's the previous system and nobody has suitibly articulated a new one yet.

[gwyntar.livejournal.com]

I think you are confusing the basis of the currency with fractional reserve banking. Modern currency is not "debt backed" - it's not backed by anything other than the belief people will accept it, and will continue to do so. It's called "fiat currency". Although there has been some money printing going on (quantitative easing) it's very hard to make a case that that has actually done any harm. (It's interesting that the ECB is much less willing to do this due to the Weimar hyperinflation).

"Debt backed money" sounds like a confused term for fractional reserve banking, which has been around for a very long time. It's a wonderful thing because it allows people to invest money they don't have a use for at a reasonale rate of return in comparative safety. These assets, multiplied by a factor of several times, are then made available to people who want capital for use in estblishing/growing productive enterprises.

The arguments against a gold standard are very simple:

1) Currencies cannot (easily) change in value against each other. This means in a global trade system if some countries enjoy productivity rises other countries wages and prices will have to adjust. Since wages are really really bad at adjusting for this kind of thing you instead get unemployment and unsustainable external debt.

Note that with _floating_ currencies if there are two countries A and B, and productivity improves in country A, country B _benefits_.

2) New major gold deposit found? INFLATION! Major gold mine flooded? DEFLATION!

It's plausible to claim that a lot of the current problems are down to China and (to a lesser extent) Germany preventing their currencies from strengthening and then lending money at overly generous interest rates so that consumer nations are able to continue buying their exports. This lead fairly directly to debt bubbles, especially in the US and southern europe.

Note you cannot "create dollars and use them to ignore your trade deficit", unless your trade party is willing to accept dollars. What's actually been going on is that the surplus countries have been more than willing to make loans to the deficit countries (China's insatiable appetite for U.S. gov. debt, German/French banks collection of highly questionable Southern European paper).

[chess]

I would like to think that any economist worth their salt would laugh about the gold standard, but the 'crash course' linked above seems to be very fond of the thing and so does quite a lot of the the US... or at least a commodities-based, store-of-value standard of some kind, if not gold.

[nwhyte]

'Ban lobbying' may look superficially attractive. But in fact, as you point out, it would penalise the committed but poor, while the rich and unaccountable would simply find other means of exerting influence, as they always have.

Obviously I should declare an interest since I'm sort-of in that line of business myself. I help governments which have insufficient diplomatic resources of their own to interact with the European Union. If my activities were banned, the people I work with would essentially have no means of talking to officials who are making rather important decisions about their countries.

I should also report that the vast majority of officials who I have had contact with actually welcome the chance to converse with lobbyists and other influencers. They are conscious that they work in boxes in their organisations with very few of their colleagues interested in what they are working on and with only limited access to information from the outside world. Often they also feel that interested members of the public have a right to have the development of policy explained to them. I think very few officials would want a ban on lobbying (there are some, but they tend not to be very good at their own jobs).

It is fair to demand that lobbyists and officials are transparent about what meetings have taken place and on what subject. It is absolutely right to demand that no public official should accept money or non-financial reward from a lobbying group (ie anything that looks like a bribe). It's certainly reasonable to scrutinise and expose the operations of those who are acting on behalf of the rich and powerful. But it's foolish to claim that the world would be a better place if it didn't happen.

[requiem-17-23.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced in the ability of anyone who has made a career out of governing to understand any technical subject. If they were capable of understanding it, they'd probably be practicing it instead of in politics.

Given that: What's the difference between lobbying and making sure ministers are well informed? And possibly of comparable importance, how do you prove that you are doing one and not the other?

[requiem-17-23.livejournal.com]

(Corrolary: I'm not convinced in the ability of anyone who understands any technical subject to govern their way out of a wet paper bag. I'm not advocating rule by people who don't want to rule.)

[daxx-61.livejournal.com]

"If they were capable of understanding it, they'd probably be practicing it instead of in politics."

That's a rather loaded statement. Are you saying that people who have chosen to specialise in a "non technical" set of domain skills and specialised knowledge aren't capable of picking up different skills? It reads like you're implying that if a person is capable of learning, say, engineering, they'd automatically consider that a more worthy career choice than economics. Because if you are saying that, I do take personal offense.

Let's remember that the people who rise to become and remain senior politicians are by-and-large extraordinarily smart and capable people. These are world-leaders in their field, and it's a very competitive field. The domain knowledge required to understand certain topics is not generally out of reach of these people if they wanted to acquire it - it's simply a matter of priorities.

[requiem-17-23.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that's not my intent at all and I can totally see how you got that from what I posted. Revised statement.

"I'm not convinced in the ability of every single person elected to a post that requires specialist information to be able to understand the information without an expert to interpret it for them and give advice. I'd find it hard to believe that someone would train as such an expert and then go into politics when they could be practicing professionally instead."

The point of the statement you quote was exactly to make the point that it was a matter of priorities, that very few people except people who do it for a living are capable of understanding it, for pretty much all 'it', and the opportunity cost of a career in politics is a career doing something else.

Also, I seem to have conflated 'technical' and 'complicated' in my head, and I'll remember that other people don't do that.

[daxx-61.livejournal.com]

Ah, in which case I agree with the thrust of what you're saying.

In an ideal world politicians would be more able to specialise. There's certainly some mileage in having different ministerial posts specialising in different issues and disciplines, but the problem is really that a specialised politician is less likely to get elected. I wonder if there's an effective way of providing sufficient incentives to politicans to become experts in another field, because that would certainly help.

[passage.livejournal.com]

Do you think it's a problem if I contact my MP, not to inform them of something, but to try and persuade them of my position on something? Only that sounds like you lobbying, but I thought it was a good thing.

[chess]

The problem is that there's a fuzzy line somewhere where 'I contact my MP to attempt to persuade them of my case, to help them better represent their constituency which includes me' and 'People who have concentrated the wealth of the world in their own pocket to such an extent that people are starving unnecessarily on the streets pay a lot of people to contact their MPs and attempt to preserve the status quo, thereby unreasonably amplifying their position'.

And there's an equally fuzzy line between 'I am a person who has dedicated my life to understanding a complicated topic, and the government don't seem to understand it and are screwing up because of this, so I will go and explain patiently to them where they've got it wrong' and 'I am a person who wants to improve my own position at the expense of others, so I will hire experts and/or pretend to be an expert in a complicated topic in order to drown out opposing viewpoints and confuse the issue to my benefit'...

[gwyntar.livejournal.com]

There's clearly a huge problem in the U.S. of this nature.

I'd be interested if you could point at any decisions made in this country that were obviously "bought" through lobbying.

[artw.livejournal.com]

I think the reason why people accept that there is a government is that a predictable unjust world is a lot easier to live in than a chaotic unjust world. We don't all get a fair share and we know that the policeman is not always your friend, but clean water comes out of the tap, there is food in the shops all year every year, there are doctors and medicines in the hospitals, the crime rate is falling as is the road accident rate, etc. I don't believe we'll ever live in a world where there isn't any work because machines do it all, because so much work is about human contact; the problem is the distribution of resources and the ideology that people shouldn't be paid for doing nothing unless they're rich.