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icantfindaname posted:
Haha yeah just ask any Venezuelan 
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Oct 6, 2017 17:43
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Main Paineframe posted:Populism was at its zenith in the 19th century because mass politics had become possible, but countries were still largely controlled by an oligarchic elite which justified their inherited rule by reinventing themselves as technocrats and imagining that they were the smartest and most rational people who were best situated to rule according to science without getting caught up in popular fervor. Oh, yes, certainly. I think it's important to simultaneously appreciate just how much the public-hygiene obsession of the Progressives served to conveniently delegitimise opposition by slum residents to slum clearance, or opposition to heavy-handed vice regulation, or opposition by engineers/teachers/Tammany-Hall-era civil servants to professionalization and regulation, etc. The most well-known American misadventure was probably Prohibition. James C. Scott (whose book I linked above) has many more hair-raising tales of technocrats - often the offspring of the new bildung bourgeoisie - pursuing "scientific management" or other proto-Taylorisms at the closing decades of the long 19th: concocting wild schemes in defiance of local knowledge (what Scott calls "metis") that then cause misery and suffering for thousands of people, having the failures blamed on the uncooperative yokels, getting rewarded by being appointed to concoct even wilder and bigger schemes, etc. Many of these were "scientific" only in the sense of plausible-sounding aphorisms that made pretty diagrams, rather than pesky stuff like fieldwork to obtain data or trialling test pilots. And, of course, these schemes served to further elite interests. The self-serving transparency of the neoliberals of the 1910s would make their successors a century later look rather pedestrian. And yet. We would probably regard someone who, today, advocated the abolition of public health agencies as the frothier kind of libertarian. That is the terrain advantage of technocratic politics - once the nominal commitment to quantified performance is conceded, political struggle turns toward cumulating better metrics and better processes. The knowledge of the managerial state can be written down and accumulated - in contrast, metis dies with each generation.
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Oct 6, 2017 18:00
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ronya posted:The knowledge of the managerial state can be written down and accumulated - in contrast, metis dies with each generation.
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Oct 6, 2017 18:15
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It's bad because it causes the government to heap benefits on the majority population in the country at the expense of the minority. This leads to non-stop wars because even if the current minority population is wiped out, very soon the majority population fractures and a new minority arises.
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Oct 6, 2017 18:20
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qkkl posted:It's bad because it causes the government to heap benefits on the majority population in the country at the expense of the minority. This leads to non-stop wars because even if the current minority population is wiped out, very soon the majority population fractures and a new minority arises. This except the minority population is rich people and the majority population is everbody else, the war is the class war, and it's good, not bad.
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Oct 6, 2017 18:22
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Is one's local knowledge the same as one's grandfather's? Who can say?
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Oct 6, 2017 18:22
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ronya posted:Is one's local knowledge the same as one's grandfather's? Who can say? *is self aware* Probably not!
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Oct 6, 2017 18:25
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TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:Haha yeah just ask any Venezuelan Venezuela isn't very socialist.
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Oct 6, 2017 18:27
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OwlFancier posted:This except the minority population is rich people and the majority population is everbody else, the war is the class war, and it's good, not bad. You'd better work hard at it then.   And yet: 
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Oct 6, 2017 18:32
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ronya posted:And yet. We would probably regard someone who, today, advocated the abolition of public health agencies as the frothier kind of libertarian. That is the terrain advantage of technocratic politics - once the nominal commitment to quantified performance is conceded, political struggle turns toward cumulating better metrics and better processes. The knowledge of the managerial state can be written down and accumulated - in contrast, metis dies with each generation. If someone who advocated that would be publicly regarded as crazy (which, unfortunately, isn't true at all) then isn't that a victory for populism, not technocracy? Your assumption that previous generations' technocrats failed simply because they weren't doing real science doesn't ring true either. Just look at some of the more recent economic studies, like the one that claimed raising minimum wage killed jobs and the one that claimed that the slow employment recovery is just because people are all staying home playing videogames instead of working. Both studies gathered and crunched real data; it's just that they manipulated their methodology to get the result they desired.
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Oct 6, 2017 18:46
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Main Paineframe posted:If someone who advocated that would be publicly regarded as crazy (which, unfortunately, isn't true at all) then isn't that a victory for populism, not technocracy? I think I can safely assume that you are declaring these studies false because you have other studies, not because you have Superior Local Knowledge (i.e. lived experiences, or common sense, or divine revelation, etc.) that proves them false. It's just studies upon studies. So the technocrats have already won - never mind the implicit concession that these studies should influence policy, or that there should be policies rationally oriented around jobs or the not-killing thereof. ronya fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 18:49
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I think the argument is that the entire idea of the one scientific way to do politics is bunk because you can find or create a study to say whatever you want and thus, your approach is simply echoing your own internal ideology while pretending otherwise.
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Oct 6, 2017 18:57
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ronya posted:I think I can safely assume that you are declaring these studies false because you have other studies, not because you have Superior Local Knowledge (i.e. lived experiences, or common sense, or divine revelation, etc.) that proves them false. It's just studies upon studies. So the technocrats have already won - never mind the implicit concession that these studies should influence policy, or that there should be policies rationally oriented around jobs or the not-killing thereof. Where did I say those studies were false?  All I said was that they manipulated their methodologies to get the result they wanted. That result is true, at least for a particular set of circumstances, a particular collection of data, and a particular method of analysis. Just as other studies determine the truth for other sets of circumstances, other collections of data, and other methods of analysis. What's the overall truth, the best study, the scientific consensus as a whole? Who can say? Certainly not me.Conservative economists come out with studies saying a higher minimum wage kills jobs, liberal economists come out with studies saying a higher minimum wage doesn't kill jobs, and the determination of quality is ultimately made by a self-proclaimed "technocrat" who picks the side that supports the policies they already wanted anyway. You seem to be implicitly making a "no true technocrat" argument, peddling a worldview where the only true technocracy is when science comes to a complete consensus on the absolute truth for any given issue and then a politician who is also a perfect evaluator of scientific quality puts it into practice totally unaltered, regardless of their personal opinion.
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Oct 6, 2017 19:05
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Anyway, the way to "engage in a battle of studies" is simply to point to the very apparent result in daily life in a result of that methodology. (Also, social history itself doesn't have to be technocratic focused.) The result of technocratic studies can be discussed outside studies themselves. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 19:19
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Technocracy is almost praxeological in its fondness for the belief that if something is done with a particular intent and supported by a study then it must work, and any evidence to the contrary is overruled by the fact that it was done by a sensible pragmatic person with a think tank behind them so obviously it's right.
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Oct 6, 2017 19:23
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OwlFancier posted:Technocracy is almost praxeological in its fondness for the belief that if something is done with a particular intent and supported by a study then it must work, and any evidence to the contrary is overruled by the fact that it was done by a sensible pragmatic person with a think tank behind them so obviously it's right. That is because modern 2017 technocracy is written in an essentially a language of power, it is very obvious who is ruling and who is to be ruled.
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Oct 6, 2017 19:30
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TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:Haha yeah just ask any Venezuelan One big problem with Venezuelan socialism is that there's no market freer than the black market, and guess what's historically controlled the economy in Venezuela?
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Oct 6, 2017 19:46
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Main Paineframe posted:Where did I say those studies were false? No - my point is that actually-existing politics is translated into a policy space that is very much constrained by the direction of studies du jour. That is a technocratic ideology, as flawed as it is, in action. And the methodologies advanced by each side contribute toward shifts in the emphasis of what is measured and what policies are prioritized - e.g. the contemporary focus on the impacts of youth employment is what underpins carved-out exceptions for younger workers, exemptions or higher minimums for certain industries, etc. in the kinds of minimum wage legislation that are successfully passed. None of that is encoded in the slogan FIGHT FOR $15 but it's what it achieves. Mass politics doesn't do details, policy does. These things matter. I do not think anyone would deny that, e.g., Sidney Webb played an enormous influence on British socialism, but the argument of the early Fabians for the minimum wage was (infamously enough) completely different and advocated job loss in order to deter 'ruinous competition' by the minimally productive; as such the ancillary policy orientations of a plank with widespread popular support instead reinforced the eugenic tendencies of the early socialists. Obviously there is not One Policy Truth discoverable through elite meditation, but the intellectual frameworks favoured by the intelligentsia do matter - it forms the stuff of ideology - and these are produced through the struggle over day-to-day politics. If we take it for granted, it is because we live in our Westernized liberal democracies where it is dominant. But there are plenty of other ways in which actually-existing or proposed governments could engage in the manufacture and perpetuation of legitimacy.
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Oct 6, 2017 20:00
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edit: Regarding real life examples of socialism, I feel like one decent example where the socialism aspect itself seemed to work fairly well would be former Yugoslavia. I could absolutely be wrong about this, so please feel free to correct me. From what I understand, the factors leading to its collapse weren't caused by the market socialism itself, but rather by foreign responses to the socialism. Granted, one could argue that hostile foreign capitalist responses to socialism is its own practical characteristic of the ideology, but I don't think that's what people are usually getting at when they talk about how bad socialism is in practice. edit2: I also think that one could very easily make the argument that, for many smaller, less powerful nations, socialism is preferable to the capitalist alternative, even if the result is still bad. Heck, even looking at the USSR as an example of a not-small/weak nation, I think one could convincingly argue that it was superior to Russia both before and after its existence. I think a lot of the way people view capitalism is biased by looking at countries that heavily benefit from the exploitation of foreign labor and resources. You can't really look at the quality of life in Western capitalist countries and divorce that from their current and historical actions towards other countries. OwlFancier posted:I think the argument is that the entire idea of the one scientific way to do politics is bunk because you can find or create a study to say whatever you want and thus, your approach is simply echoing your own internal ideology while pretending otherwise. Well, more accurately it actually is possible to determine whether a study is more valid and was conducted properly, but there's no way to really enforce that only the good studies are used to guide policy. The sort of people conducting and evaluating these studies have their own biases*, and the American public isn't really capable of judging whether one technocrat's study is more valid than another's. * Regarding this, I feel like there's a bit of a fundamental conflict where, on one hand, you need people with certain skills in order to run society, but on the other hand simply having those skills in the first place often brings its own strong biases into the equation. An example is something like financial regulation. You need people with some level of financial expertise in order to write/enforce good financial regulation, but simply having the financial expertise creates perverse incentives against upsetting the financial industry. Even if someone has never worked for the financial industry themselves (like someone with an academic background in finance), simply having that skill-set means it's still a future option that they could be closing themselves off to if they act too strongly in opposition to the industry's interests. The best solution I can think of to this issue is to ban regulators from working in the industry they regulate for the rest of their lives. Provide them a good stipend if necessary; I think it's a reasonable cost to remove a strong potential vector for corruption. I would apply this same standard to at least all federal politicians. Main Paineframe posted:Conservative economists come out with studies saying a higher minimum wage kills jobs, liberal economists come out with studies saying a higher minimum wage doesn't kill jobs, and the determination of quality is ultimately made by a self-proclaimed "technocrat" who picks the side that supports the policies they already wanted anyway. You seem to be implicitly making a "no true technocrat" argument, peddling a worldview where the only true technocracy is when science comes to a complete consensus on the absolute truth for any given issue and then a politician who is also a perfect evaluator of scientific quality puts it into practice totally unaltered, regardless of their personal opinion. Yeah, there's also the fact that there's some grey area/subjectivity involved in the assumptions one uses when conducting a study. While in many cases it's possible to flat out say "this study is bogus because its assumptions are stupid/wrong," in many cases things fall into more of a grey area where plausible arguments can be made in favor of different sets of assumptions. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 20:21
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ronya posted:No - my point is that actually-existing politics is translated into a policy space that is very much constrained by the direction of studies du jour. That is a technocratic ideology, as flawed as it is, in action. And the methodologies advanced by each side contribute toward shifts in the emphasis of what is measured and what policies are prioritized - e.g. the contemporary focus on the impacts of youth employment is what underpins carved-out exceptions for younger workers, exemptions or higher minimums for certain industries, etc. in the kinds of minimum wage legislation that are successfully passed. None of that is encoded in the slogan FIGHT FOR $15 but it's what it achieves. Mass politics doesn't do details, policy does. No, what underpins exceptions for younger workers and certain industries is the lower bargaining power and voting power of those groups, as well as the ability to come up with plausible excuses for exempting them from the moral imperatives inherent in a minimum wage discussion. It has nothing to dok with science - it's simply an expression of the balance of political power between employers and workers in different sectors of the labor "market" at the time those laws were passed. Oh. I think I see the disconnect. Are you counting philosophy (and therefore ideology) as a science? Or are you just saying that all human thought happens through the lens of science and therefore all ideologies are fundamentally based on science in some way? Either way, you'd be wrong, but you're not doing a very good job of communicating your stance clearly so I'm not even sure what I should be rebutting.
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Oct 6, 2017 21:26
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The only science I want to hear from is the immortal science of dialectical materialism.
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Oct 6, 2017 21:35
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"Plausible excuses"? Perhaps the plausibility of a notion may have some relation to extant frameworks on the topic? the minimum wage binds a remarkably small proportion of the labour force; it would not exist anywhere if demographic eligibility rested upon bargaining and voting power. And of all the innumerable ways to subcategorize those it does bind, youth is highlighted because of the extant concern highlighted in the literature by duelling white papers and think tanks. "it's simply an expression of the balance of political power between employers and workers in different sectors of the labor "market" at the time those laws were passed" implies a truly strange reading of political power - that, e.g., the prevalence of youth exemptions would imply that youth are the most prominent and salient sectoral division of labour as power goes. That hardly seems plausible! ronya fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 21:41
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ronya posted:If populism seems anaemic today, this is why. We're talking about a world where elite policymakers and media people are insisting there's a swirling maelstorm of populism that's going to destroy the beloved postwar order (nevermind that order actually ended in the 1970s, but whatever)
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Oct 6, 2017 22:32
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icantfindaname posted:We're talking about a world where elite policymakers and media people are insisting there's a swirling maelstorm of populism that's going to destroy the beloved postwar order (nevermind that order actually ended in the 1970s, but whatever) Wait what who thinks the postwar consensus is still a thing?
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Oct 6, 2017 22:43
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icantfindaname posted:The Gracchi were good, though? they were good in trying to address land and wealth inequality but they also broke the constitution which term limited tribune of the plebeians and try to run again: it would be like if leftist version of obama ran 3rd term after passing single payer or something
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Oct 6, 2017 22:45
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OwlFancier posted:Wait what who thinks the postwar consensus is still a thing? Given by how frequently I've seen "the postwar order" used in op-eds both in an economic and geopolitical sense, lots and lots of journalists and newspaper editors It's almost like they want to elide the 1970s and 80s and pretend they never happened or something
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Oct 6, 2017 22:46
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ronya posted:"Plausible excuses"? Perhaps the plausibility of a notion may have some relation to extant frameworks on the topic? What? I haven't seen anyone this determined to make their posts incomprehensible since Eripsa. Do you think the minimum wage might have affected slightly more people when it was first passed eight decades ago? To say nothing of the effect on the rest of the wage scale when a wage floor is set. That's the opposite of what I'm saying. Youth exemptions from regular labor law are a bad thing, done because youth lack political power and are therefore easier to screw over.
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Oct 7, 2017 03:11
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There's a whole lotta  here, but imo populism has bad connotations because most people are pretty clueless about politics and don't really know what they want and are vulnerable to manipulation.Basically mass politics is fine as long as there are responsible community leaders/public figures directing people in productive directions, but when you have frauds, fools, and charlatans leading things it's basically just a dangerous waste of time.
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Oct 7, 2017 03:42
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Because the mob like internet forums tend toward extremism. Its hard to yell stop in a crowd of pitchforks and torches.
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Oct 7, 2017 05:00
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Free silver is a good example. What people wanted/needed was inflation and debt relief. Switching to silver would have had that effect (in the short term), but it would also have added volatility and wouldn't have fixed the systemic problems. The actual solution was fiat currency and a central bank.
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Oct 7, 2017 05:28
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icantfindaname posted:Given by how frequently I've seen "the postwar order" used in op-eds both in an economic and geopolitical sense, lots and lots of journalists and newspaper editors Most Journalists have a theory of history where the '70s and '80s never happened. Ronald Reagan was a popular figure in the two year Bush Administration from '90-'92.
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Oct 7, 2017 05:44
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Main Paineframe posted:What? I haven't seen anyone this determined to make their posts incomprehensible since Eripsa. I am aware that's what you're saying. But why youth in the particular? Why not any other arbitrary way of classifying the labour force? Why is a state-wide minimum wage prevalent at all across much of the Western world, instead of simply industry-specific minimums or regionalized minimums? Foucouldian all-things-including-rational-discourse-are-secretly-an-expression-of-power-relations-in-society nihilism is very 3edgy5me and all, but the thesis implies an implausible set of power relations. Do the ~3-5% of the labour force upon whom the minimum wage form a unified and identifiable class who are powerful enough to mobilize, articulate, and defend their interests in this regard? But we see that minimum wages across the Western world do not typically rise above this proportion, so are we do believe that the bottom 3-5% are sufficiently mobilized but the 6th and 7th percentiles are not? And of this group, are we to believe that youth are uniquely disempowered but the old, mentally "slow", or female (all three of which were actually-existing targets of minimum wage exemptions or increases under early socialism) are not? We're supposed to believe that full-time non-tipped labour across the entire applicable jurisdiction form a distinct social grouping that then drives their legislative identification as a category? Does "set of power relations" have any actual explanatory power here, or is it a just-so story applied to any imaginable outcome of politics?
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Oct 7, 2017 05:50
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Duckbox posted:There's a whole lotta hell, just take a look at ca voters rejecting twice in the last five years abolishing the death penalty and just this past year voting to expedite the appeals process
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Oct 7, 2017 07:02
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Problem is with 'technocrats' is you get people who are just as dumb and easily manipulated as the average voter, but now think they're the smartest person in the room and have entire entourages of hangers-on assuring them of that.
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Oct 7, 2017 07:29
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ronya posted:I am aware that's what you're saying. But why youth in the particular? Why not any other arbitrary way of classifying the labour force? Why is a state-wide minimum wage prevalent at all across much of the Western world, instead of simply industry-specific minimums or regionalized minimums? For me to explain from first principles why a minimum wage exists and what it's meant to accomplish would take far too long and get pretty far off the thread topic. Frankly, it's mind-boggling that you keep talking about what socialists think but don't understand why "the labor force" is a distinct group in society. Describing the differences between labor's political power 80 years ago and labor's political power now would be too much of a derail, so just take my word for it that most of the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act originated from decades of labor struggles and activism, rather than scientific study and analysis.
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Oct 7, 2017 15:08
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Halisnacks posted:Have Sanders, Warren and co. (and Clinton's loss) not made socialism a politically viable term? Decades and decades of anti-communism in the US
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Oct 7, 2017 17:28
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stone cold posted:hell, just take a look at ca voters rejecting twice in the last five years abolishing the death penalty and just this past year voting to expedite the appeals process Yeah, the initiative process is an abomination and most of the stuff we vote on is either poorly written activist/special interest bullshit that doesn't do what it says it does or ways for the legislature to shift responsibility onto "the voters" so they don't have to stake their careers on controversial tax increases/legal weed/criminal justice reform/paving wetlands. Direct democracy has its merits, but taking legislative review/repeal out of the picture and just praying that the courts will throw out any hidden bullshit after the fact (which they don't because "will of the people" and all that) is a mind-bogglingly bad decision that we can trace right back to the original Populists/Progressives. Also lol that we recalled Gray Davis a year after he won reelection because people blamed him for poo poo Enron did and then he wasn't allowed to be on the ballot and all the other candidates were clowns or empty suits so we got a weird muscle man governor.
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Oct 8, 2017 08:09
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OwlFancier posted:This except the minority population is rich people and the majority population is everbody else, the war is the class war, and it's good, not bad. this except the promises made to everybody else are completely impossible to fulfil, the people making them are blatant liars, and after the glorious revolution everybody else will notice too late they got hosed because the blatant liars are just making a power grab suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Oct 8, 2017 |
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Oct 8, 2017 10:12
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Inescapable Duck posted:Problem is with 'technocrats' is you get people who are just as dumb and easily manipulated as the average voter, but now think they're the smartest person in the room and have entire entourages of hangers-on assuring them of that.
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Oct 11, 2017 07:42
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OneEightHundred posted:And the problem with the populist alternatives has been that you get that anyway, except they're also incompetent and ethically challenged. It turns out you can have technocrats like that too!
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Oct 11, 2017 09:08
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