Foseti vs. Aretae

Foseti has a couple good posts up answering a couple of mine from when he was vacationing among the Eurocrats.  Ok.  vacationing might be mildly inaccurate, but he did admit to imbibing good chocolate, so I'll call it a vacation nonetheless.

In his first post, he objects to my borrowed Spencer quote:

The desire to command is essentially a barbarous desire. … Command cannot be otherwise than savage, for it implies an appeal to force, should force be needful.

His retort:

Command created the modern world (for better or worse). Were Augustus, Cromwell, George Washington, Frederick the Great, Queen Victoria, and Douglas MacArthur barbarians? Perhaps – these men and women have commanded. But if you argue this position, it follows immediately that modern civilization is the creation of barbarians.

In the second post, he objects to my growthism:

Aretae's 2nd law:

Economic growth is more important (over time) than whatever you're worrying about

Though this is mostly because economic growth drives whatever you're worrying about.

Again his response:

This is of course, true in a trivial sense – economic growth is obviously incredibly important. The "law" itself, is just as obviously false. For example, infants in South Africa may have more pressing concerns than when they’ll be able to afford the next generation of the iPad.

And he cites Dalrymple:

They have discovered what the moralists of all ages have known, that happiness is not proportional to levels of material consumption, at any rate once absolute poverty has been surpassed.

But his more pressing concern is that:

Even if we all agree that economic growth is the only important factor, the debate just becomes about what increases economic growth.

All in all, they seem strong attacks, but unsurprisingly I believe they're mostly mistaken or misguided, on all but 1 point.

His final point...we don't know what increases economic growth...is correct.  I can't answer perfectly, and neither can anyone else.  However, I don't think that detracts from the position, because there is a reality as to what does indeed cause growth, and despite our not knowing perfectly what that is...what I wish to do is draw attention to the big issue...so that folks can study it better.

On the other hand, EVERYONE who has studied the situation seriously (Krugman to Caplan) has a great deal of agreement about economic growth (Price controls are bad, transaction costs are bad, high marginal tax rates are bad, uncertain regulatory future is bad, free trade is almost always good, monopolies are bad, occupational licensing is bad, unstable property rights are atrocious, more unbridled innovation is good)

Now, addressing the points I think he gets wrong:

1.  Growth wins.
Honestly, the over time solution to AIDS in infants in South Africa is...economic growth for South Africa.  That problem doesn't occur in rich countries.  Ditto poverty in India (or Singapore 1960), deforestation in Haiti (or Brazil 1990), Pollution in Beijing (or LA 1980), etc.  Almost all the problems facing the world come down to the fact that the people aren't rich enough to AFFORD better choices.

Comments about ipads or cars are entirely spurious, as the real issue is moving the median income in Bangladesh from $2/day to $10/day...or in Russia from $100/week to $500/week.  It's about moving the Brazilian per capita GDP (inflation adjusted) from $3,500/year in 1980 to $10,500/year now...That's the kind of money that will buy real sewers.

In America, the GDP increase has been accompanied by a longevity increase of about 2x...an average per capita living space increase of maybe 10x [cite: first immortal?].  A decrease hours of work per week from 70-90 down to 40.  A decrease in the number of hours of work per week an unskilled laborer requires to feed himself (and his family).  A proliferation of art.  A proliferation of music.  Romer's slide from his charter cities concept talking about the number of hours of unskilled work it takes to buy a lit desk for reading for an hour.  In 0AD, the number was on the order of 1 hour of work.  Now, it's on the order of 6 seconds.  Cars are not just more...they're safer...they're lower polution...and they're more, even though the first cars were massively lower pollution than horses.

Growth, Growth, Growth.  The most powerful person in the world in 1800 was worse off in innumerable ways than a minimum wage single immigrant mom off welfare in America today.  And we would be nuts not to  expect the same to be true of Bill Clinton today, and the bottom of the barrel in 200 years, (Singularity willing).

2.  I dispute that command got us here, or even helped.  The difference between the life of a just-agricultural peasant in 10,000BC and a peasant in England/India/China in 1800 was essentially Nothing.  That's what command bought us.  What we have over a starving $1/day African is the economic growth from the commanders getting the hell out of the way and letting the entrepreneurs do their work.  Commanders at best do nothing, and at worst destroy the whole system.  It remains true that England, the least led of the populous countries (power was fractured, no one had the right to tell others what to do in many cases) is the place where growth started...and it was started by the peasants weavers while illegal from the point of view of the guilds and leaders.  ILLEGAL activity, that the government was, for the first time in history, not strong enough to prevent, was the proximate cause of the industrial revolution, and our modern world.   If only we'd had good command and  leadership, we wouldn't have the modern world at all, but would all still be serfs.

Now...I agree that when faced with Barbarians, there often seems little choice but to respond with barbarity.  And so when barbarians such as Rommel Rommel's boss [Corrected, via Isegoria] come to conquer, we must unleash our own barbarians to combat them.  That makes them no less barbaric...just friendly, perhaps necessary, barbarians.

3.  Contra Dalrymple, Will Wilkinson has been collecting research  for the last ... half-decade(?) on happiness.  By his read, it turns out that Dalrymple is wrong.  Happiness increases monotonically with income, and without bound.  Richer people are happier, on average than poorer ones, ceteris paribus.  Sometimes there's no paribus, and it doesn't work out, but richer is indeed happier, just like more autonomous is happier.  Of course, this is subject to the present-remembered happiness divide, but it is a strong result.   Here's the first citation I found:

As the graph indicates, life satisfaction is higher in countries with higher GDP per head. The slope is steepest among the poorest countries, where income gains are associated with the largest increases in life satisfaction, but it remains positive and substantial even among the rich countries; it is not true that there is some critical level of GDP per capita above which income has no further effect on life satisfaction. Instead, each doubling of income adds about the same amount to life satisfaction, across poor and rich countries alike.

4.  In the first piece, Foseti says:

People will always follow good commanders – the alternative is to follow bad ones.

No...there are two forms of social organization among cooperating men:  Equals, and leader-follower.  The alternative to following commanders is to follow no commanders.  Humans are not well-constructed for leader-style command and control....but Agriculture has had us trapped us in the model for 12000 years.  As this agricultural structure fades, I hope that so too will the model that has us all trapped in Roman-style thinking about command-and-control.