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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

> Humans happen to be super cooperative, and that puts us more squarely in that space more often.

Humans also happen to be super competitive, and downright hostile. The "leveling" the article speaks about has been tried: it's strong government on social-democratic principles. It works. And it gets abandoned as soon as general wealth has risen enough. Egalitarianism and democracy are, strangely enough, not natural partners. The article doesn't even mention it. Unfortunately, there's no link to the paper, so there's no way to tell what the assumptions are. In fact, I can't even find the journal.

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> The "leveling" the article speaks about has been tried: it's strong government on social-democratic principles. It works. And it gets abandoned as soon as general wealth has risen enough.

Is that really true? I don't see e.g. Scandinavia rushing to abandon all their social programs. The US took a big turn away from cooperation, but that seems to be much more about a breakdown of social trust relating to some specifics of US history (race relations, "stranger danger", ...) than some general principle about high general wealth societies.

I would go even further and say that the US is the only Western democracy that has abandoned some of the most important social-democratic principles. E.g. it's the only Western democracy with no universal healthcare, an industrial prison complex, weak labour rights etc.

That's not true; the UK has gradually weakened healthcare (introducing prescription charges, privatising eyecare and dental), significantly weakened labour rights (legalising arbitrary firing in the first two years), and I think privatised part of the prison system as well. No doubt those from other countries will have their own stories.

The UK has privately managed prisons, which is quite a lot different to privately owned prisons in terms of incentives.

I think it's a bad idea too, but I don't think it's quite the same as the prison industrial complex in the US.

IMO, there have been two waves of social-democratically inspired politics: at the end of the 19th century, and after WW2. Once some complacency was reached, the policies were slowly being undone.

While West and North Europe have done so slower than the USA, there's been an undeniable tendency towards free market policies, favoring companies and capital and eroding worker's rights. The voters seem to agree: parties left of center have been in steady decline over the last decades. This is not purely driven by individual wealth, of course. Issues such as immigration and (more recently) climate change also play a role.

Can one flip this and say that America is the only nation that might still have some classical liberal principles left? Quite the list of positive rights that the rest of the West has come up with.

Basically all developed societies are "super cooperative", irrespective of stuff like wealth inequality. You want to see a society where the "competitive" spirit OP talks about is still flourishing, look no further than Afghanistan. A remarkably "equal" society, since few people there have any wealth at all - but still not a place you would want to be in.

We've had one abandonment of social democracy cycle so far, I wouldn't draw timeless conclusions based on that.

In particular, if uneven industrialization and colonization hadn't created such large scale inequality for norms arbitrage, it might have kept going. If I had to draw any conclusion from this n=1 it would be about the "thermodynamics" of post-colonialism, not the staying power of social democracy.

>>The "leveling" the article speaks about has been tried: it's strong government on social-democratic principles. It works. And it gets abandoned as soon as general wealth has risen enough.

Social spending by government has rapidly increased as societies have gotten wealthier:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

But that money just ends up as pension benefits for unionized public sector workers, a significant fraction of whom are now in the top 10% of income earners. A NYS public school teacher now receives approximately $88,000 a year for their pension if they retire after 35 years, and it's practically impossible to fire them:

https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried...

New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why...

> Humans also happen to be super competitive, and downright hostile.

I'm curious, what makes you say that?

Living in America?

There's a difference between ideals and practice. The ultra rich and multi-billion dollar corporations are allowed to directly financially influence our politicians through lobbying which is just a legal form of bribery. We're not the best example of a pure democracy.

America is a nation mostly shaped by the idea that human nature is competitive and hostile (and capitalism would be the way to channel these emotions for productive outcomes).

I rather live in a place that underlines a different trait of human nature. There will always be aggression and competitiveness, but places that make the base assumption of cooperation turn out to be much nicer, more liveable and generally more efficient.

Also: if the US had the same voting system as most modern democracies where one vote has the same voting power, independent from which province or state you are voting, policy and live in the US would look a lot different.

What places did you have in mind that exemplify that cooperation?

Nordic countries. Probably, as the article suggests, the lack of defensible high concentrations of resources. Up until the most recent centuries of course. But genetics and culture are slower to change.

Do most modern democracies have equal power for each vote, regardless of their province/state/region? Don't most use voting districts to elect individuals?

Most democracies do indeed elect their representatives per voting district, with each vote inside said district having the same voting power, and each district electing one representative.

Then, for those where a prime minister rules, the prime minister is chosen by the elected representatives.

In presidential democracies, the president is usually directly elected by voters, on a nationwide basis, independently of voting districts.

So having a majority of the votes gets you elected.

> So having a majority of the votes gets you elected.

In a presidential democracy, yes. In the others, maybe. Win 51% of the districts with 51% of the vote, and lose the other 49% without getting any votes. You've won the election, but haven't gotten the majority of votes.

Yes, it's usually less extreme than in the US, but it still has the same issues with different district sizes.

> In the others, maybe. Win 51% of the districts with 51% of the vote, and lose the other 49% without getting any votes.

To help with it, many countries regularly redraw their districts based on population size (census data).

How is it in the US? (honestly have no idea)

The US has a winner-take-all approach. If a district votes 40% party X and 60% party Y, then party Y gets all of the representatives.

These numbers are not atypical. So generally in the US, 40% of voters are not represented.

A parliamentary democracy with proportional representation would, assuming say 10 seats for a 'state', split those 10 seats according to the vote. So you'd get 40 X'ers and 60 Y'ers.

However, the parliamentary allows smaller parties to emerge, and as the support of a smaller party is necessary to get a majority of overall votes, the smaller parties have real power.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01059-y

For reference, I simply typed “Nature Human Behavior” into google.

I use DDG, and it wouldn't come up with the journal. I think the problem is I quoted it, and the name is in British English, Human Behaviour. Even then it's not the top hit, but the side bar result (which I tend to ignore). Thanks for straightening that out.

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