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Comment by wiz21c | Hacker News Reader

> decline in interest rates and corporate tax rates mechanically explain over 40 percent of the real growth

I interpret that as : "capitalists have taken over the control of our governments"...

Is that right ?

That's what you want to read. All the paper says is that interest rates and corporate tax rates have fallen over the past three decades.

There were a variety of reasons for that, only some of which had anything to do with capitalists in the government.

No, not really --it means financial engineering became more important than actual engineering for stock valuations.

That is correct.

Well documented and the Princeton oligarchy study [0] cemented what left wing authors have pointed out for decades.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746.amp

From the abstract of the paper:

> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

However, it's not correct that "capitalists have taken over the control of our governments" (unless you're speaking as British royalty of the American Revolution, eh?) rather they set up the governments in the first place.

I’m totally on board with the idea that we were never a valid democracy - and effectively a defacto oligarchy - to begin with

Oligarchy is the unavoidable state of human society, even in communism as it’s ever been instantiated you have oligarchy

This claim is historically inaccurate

Do you have an epistemological elucidation of your claim?

I don't know look at any organization in humanity, the most obvious one is what happened with the Democrat party, Biden is undeniably feeble and there was an entire oligarchic effort to deny that reality even during his 2020 campaign. We're told democracy is in peril if Kamala doesn't win when she's never been successfully entertained in a primary, in fact she's only lost with near zero support. That's apparently "popular will" when it's by now obviously nothing more than manufactured consent.

If you want more rigorous work, read up on Elite theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_theory

It's "the unavoidable state of human society" because there is a theory in philosophy, political science, and sociology, and that theory has some people advocate for that theory? That's not evidence. There are multiple other, conflicting, schools of philosophy and sociology, all of which have people that advocate for them.

Got any evidence?

So when I say - point at any organization even supposedly egalitarian ones and you'll see oligarchy. There are rulers and the ruled, rulers are abnormally competitive and willing to use deception and other underhanded tactics that normal people will not. Therefore in any organization of considerable power, rulers establish themselves, this has always happened in communism too. Unions devolve into the same power structure they seek to fight.

Have any evidence of an exception?

You made the claim. Evidence is the job of the one making the claim.

But, consider a good sports team. The coach is not chosen because he used underhanded tactics to triumph over other coaching candidates, but because he has a track record of being able to coach. The players are chosen, not because they win political contests, but because they're better at playing the game. The starters are chosen, not because they used deception, but because they're actually better players than the ones who are not starters.

And yes, I know you can find teams that are power structures rather than meritocracies. They tend to be the worst teams, though.

A sports team isn't a political body like a government or union. It's entertainment and performance can't be faked.

The Quakers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making

I think it's really naive to think that Quakers were somehow immune to basic power structures found in every society. Even emphasizing consensus as an ideal or practice doesn't mean there aren't the same oligarchic structures and power brokers you find everywhere else.

Clearly you've never hung out with Quakers.

You asked for a counter-example, I provided one, you dismiss it with no evidence.

Truly has it been said, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."

I’ve found in this debate - and most - that almost nobody holds a position from first principles but rather an experience they had.

Not possible to reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason into

There’s a certain sort of left leaning person who’d be triggered by reading about elite theory and oligarchy and I suspect that’s what I’m up against but sure impugn me as unprincipled.

Depends on what you mean by "valid". King George probably thought we weren't but not in the way you mean, eh?

We could draw a line from the Magna Carta to the Equal Rights Amendment.

Democracy is a work-in-progress.

Moreso the 3/5ths compromise means the republic didn’t actually represent a significant portion of their claimed collective territories inhabitants. The articles of confederation was a business arrangement primarily to consolidate a market with similar laws for the ability to monopolize the cotton market. Of which Britain was largest purchaser btw.

So yes, from the beginning the Americas were a free “wilderness” that economic colonialism torched through. The Holocaust of first nations is just not even recognized as anything worth mentioning it seems.

So yeah - as KRS One would say: “you can’t have justice on stolen land.”

I bring up the genocide of the First Nations a lot. Slavery too.

The point of the Revolution wasn't that the USA became a utopia instantly, the point is that they threw out the king and then didn't make themselves kings.

Establishing and extending freedom and human rights has been and continues to be a slog, a hard-fought and ongoing battle.

In re: the original statement, the capitalists didn't take over the government, they started it, and we the (rest of the) people are taking it over from them.

I’d generally agree here - though frankly I don’t think it’s as notable as the “founders” want it to be that they didn’t immediately declare themselves lords (despite doing that for 100 years prior)

I currently live in “Prince William” County. Take that for what you will but it’s not cause lordships weren’t around

I don’t think anyone should get points for not behaving like a psychopath

Yeah I think we're in general agreement. Cheers.

> I don’t think anyone should get points for not behaving like a psychopath

Absolutely, but what counts as psychopathy has changed over time.

We're getting away from the main thread here, but uh, one of my personal favorite historical ideas is that the modern political concepts of freedom and democracy come from the Iroquois:

> Historians in the 20th century have suggested the Iroquois system of government influenced the development of the U.S. government,[293][294] although the extent and nature of this influence has been disputed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois#Influence_on_the_Unit...

In any event, it seems to me that we are recovering from some trauma in the past (I like the Younger Dryas for this but it doesn't really matter what the disaster was) and most of the psychopathy we see today is the residue of trans-generational PTSD.

> “Prince William” County

I guessed before checking that that's in Virginia. I haven't read it yet but "Albion's Seed" makes some interesting points (IMO):

> Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America is a 1989 book by David Hackett Fischer that details the folkways of four groups of people who moved from distinct regions of Great Britain (Albion) to the United States. The argument is that the culture of each of the groups persisted, to provide the basis for the political culture of the modern United States.[2] Fischer explains "the origins and stability of a social system which for two centuries has remained stubbornly democratic in its politics, capitalist in its economy, libertarian in its laws and individualist in its society and pluralistic in its culture."[3]

> The four migrations are discussed in the four main chapters of the book:

> ...

> The South of England to Virginia - The Cavaliers and Indentured Servants (Gentry influenced the Southern United States' plantation culture)[5]

> ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed

In Virginia exiled British nobility did their best to carry on with the strict social hierarchy of lords and serfs.

All around agreement - though I’d nitpick the degree to which psychopathy was pervasive, accepted, recognized and promoted

Namely it seems to be very rare in hunter gatherers and highest in “advanced” economies

You can read my theory on the original resource trauma was here: https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html

Yd might be causal to the loss of megafauna, but ultimately my claim is that was the loss of megafauna and resulting requirement to change society in the neolithic to domination based agrarianism

Riane Eiseler documented most of this in Chalice and the blade

That's a fascinating idea! The original trauma could just be when humanity reached the ecological limits of the Earth and the fundamental nature of life changed from Eden-like simplicity to competition with others for limited food/space.

(As an aside, you use "flywheel" as a metaphor for positive feedback loops, please don't do that. Flywheels are batteries not feedback loops. It's a pet peeve of mine, sorry.)

It gets a little ranty at the end, which I enjoyed, but you might want to separate out the paper from the rant?

In any event the population leveling out is a very good thing, as so many of our other problems stem directly from population pressure. However, don't forget the Amish! They are among the best farmers on the planet, they have huge families, and they don't fight nor do they use computers or high technology. I say it as a joke but there's some truth to it: the Amish are the meek who inherit the Earth.

In re: AI, the question of "what is good?" is open-ended, the AI force us to confront this question but AI (no matter how intelligent) cannot answer it for us. (cf. Wendel Berry's essay "What are People For?") In other words, Douglas Adams was right: the Earth and humanity are a computer calculating the answer the ultimate question of life, the Universe, and everything: "What is good? What are we for? Where shall we have lunch?"

In the meantime, I follow Bucky Fuller's ideas of the World Game and Design Science Revolution: apply our technology and resources to meet human needs efficiently without "disadvantaging anyone" and nobody has to get nailed to anything.

Politics is group therapy. Since there's enough to go around we don't have to fight each other anymore, we just have to flip back to the community and sharing mode from the competition and hoarding mode, which should be easy as the former is much more fun and fulfilling than the latter, eh? Graeber and Wengrow in "The Dawn of Everything" quote at length a letter from Ben Franklin:

> When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was to be brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness.

This was a Wilderness that had hosted large cities and civilizations that were swept away by diseases brought by the Spanish a few centuries earlier. ("1491" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/30... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A... ) After the destruction of N. Am civilizations by plague things might have perhaps been a little bit like the old times before the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction, at least for a couple of centuries before the next wave of Europeans arrived.

Anyway, politics is group therapy: we can help people heal from the mal-adaptive mode to normal kindly mode with any of a number of therapies, provided of course that their other needs are satisfied (meaning the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy. There has to be a context of safety and abundance to for community and sharing to be rational, eh?)

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