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The New Economic Engine

anon_dabu said in #5447 3w ago: received

https://youtu.be/fRfRZKivGwA

From our gracious host's latest, we once are left with the question of what the new economic engine may be to save us from the inevitable Quiglian decay. I believe we should be able to make headway here.

One key point is that whatever this new engine is, participants must be unable to hedge their bets. If there is a clear new economic engine that is seizing the day, any incumbent parasite will of course attempt to embrace it and wear its husk as a skin suit.

In previous transitions, the corrupted players were systematically excluded. A French nobleman could not directly engage in commerce or he loses his status. To a pre-industrial manufacturer, a factory looks like a huge expensive way to make goods that gives none of the flexibility or craftsmanship of a small shop. Who would engage in financial transactions when usury is illegal?

These are a handful of instances of defenses against the parasites hedging into control of whatever the new engine is. One such defense in our time would be a socially unacceptable social organization that simply outcompetes. Maybe a true fraternity to create new corporations? How could you run a company in a legal grey area that will not be automatically destroyed by the modern state?

I suspect the examples given in this podcast are the best and just need to be combined in a novel way. Distributed corporate organization enabled by cryptocurrency to build and reinvest into legally grey and hard to trace manufacturing sells is the obvious route. If you focus on areas that help secure sovereignty without being seen as a threat you might be able to grow into a critical mass that replaces the parasitic managerialism we have today.

I say all this, but it still seems implausible. It is more likely we will continue to decay until a technology innovation occurs that allows a new military power to come in and remake the state. The end result may be better or worse than our current predicament.

From our gracious ho received

alexham said in #5448 3w ago: received

At the risk of being anti-contrarian, I'll go with VC backed, and later publicly trading, AI & deep-tech startups, principally based out of hubs like SF, SoCal and Austin, run or controlled by founders and/or their hand-picked successors.

There is more I want to say on this topic, I also watched the episode and it was great. But the TL,DR is it's misleading to search for a singular economy-wide instrument of expansion / economic engine. The modern economy is a patchwork of different capitalisms: industrial/entrepreneurial capitalism, monopoly capitalism, financialized capitalism, managerial capitalism and so forth. These are associated with different shareholder bases / legal structures and underwritten by different capital market structures.

My favorite capital market structure / instrument of expansion are public biotech investors. But they are small fish compared to what SV based (and I use SV principally as a social graph as opposed to a location, so for example Thrive counts as SV) private market investors have become.

The reason this is an instrument of expansion is because, the VCs invest in startups, they generate returns and take in inflows, thereby compounding their AUM, only to reinvest into more and more startups. This is likely to continue to compound, particularly as long as the AI boom persists -- which I expect.

Now this is not perfect, and its prone to inefficient king-making, bubbles, trading on access instead of due diligence capability and so forth. But insofar as there is a new economic engine, this is it. The idea that investors on the blockchain are gonna build crypto scams and longevity medicines in seasteads is as realistic as Moldbug's cryptographic chain of command.

At the risk of being received

anon_ruje said in #5449 3w ago: received

We are too deep into the cycle of decay to properly provision a new economic engine, its the wrong order of operations. Its the man dying of cancer trying to figure out which workout routine will have him look the best on the beach this summer. Ultimately our broken clientalist one million bureaucrat magister per county system can not support anything but asphyxiation.

I have some ideas about what a new economic engine might look like, and I might write them up later in this thread, but we cannot start such an engine if the limited high agency high openness high intelligence human capital we have remaining gets coopted or destroyed by the regime defending itself. If we get a political revolution event where the executive power, whomever that may be, streamlines and provides legitimacy that bypasses the local one million magisterial regulator bandits, we can resume some form of real world economic activity again.

referenced by: >>5457

We are too deep into received

onsen said in #5451 2w ago: received

I believe there is, of course the possibility that such new economic engine will not be counter bureaucracy but instead, competent, bureaucracy itself. By this, I mean a for profit, manipulative surveillance state. This for obvious reasons is socially repugnant to most, so it fits the criteria of being ruled out by most, not because of its efficacy, but from its distastefulness. However, utilizing neural networks, this could be a highly efficient model. Instead of having employees or in addition to employees, one could imagine such an entity utilizing the data it has on its subjects to simply manipulate them into productive roles.

Realistically, this might mean hyper specialized and AI education laden with propaganda and specialized incentives to push individuals down their intended track. If such an education system could gain the trust and remove trust from other flows of information then it could be very effective in controlling its subjects. Such methods could even be combined with gene editing and eugenics by the ruling aristocracy via manipulation of their subjects in the same way, for whatever ends they desire. One can imagine a very quiet genocide taking place without any collective resistance or acknowledgment from the subjects of such an empire.

I see this it’s very possible because all it would take would be the continuance of responsibility and power transfer from sclerotic bureaucracy to the techno bureaucracy.

As others have mentioned, this could definitely take place in tandem with the development of other new economic engines however, such a entity, as I have enumerated upon, would likely resist the rise of other forces.

referenced by: >>5452 >>5453

I believe there is, received

xenophon said in #5452 2w ago: received

>>5451
> ... AI education laden with propaganda and specialized incentives ...

One can imagine good and bad versions of this. The bad versions are only too obvious, from attention-harvesting for profit-maximization to woke propaganda.

But let's take a moment and imagine a good version that was genuinely aimed at promoting functionality and pro-social productivity with a supportive cultural grounding. One could set out to build this today.

> One can imagine a very quiet genocide ...

The TFR we have today is already a kind of quiet genocide, so it's no stretch to imagine demographic reshaping through differential fertility.

One can imagine good received

anon_wawy said in #5453 2w ago: received

>>5451
Yeah, that holds together better than I'd like. State bureaucracy has been the economic engine of several civilizations. It's gonna look different in many ways if you do it with factories instead of river irrigation, and computers instead of clay tablets or bamboo slips, but the basic social form can work and has worked. The Soviets got halfway to making industrial state bureaucracy work, and that was with no computer surveillance and hobbled by communist ideology. Could be.

Yeah, that holds tog received

anon_ruje said in #5457 7d ago: received

>>5449
I apparently cannot find the time to do this justice so you guys will have to fill in the gaps.

Some assertions:
- the economic engine of this current cycle is not even close to exhausted; the evidence is China. Capital equipment is used to produce capital equipment in larger and larger volumes at cheaper and cheaper prices with more and more refined features
- the economic cycle has been choked in the West due to the headless magistrate blob electing more and more magistrates
- you cannot bribe your way out, because for any given physical act, and increasingly digital as well, you need permission from 100 bureaucrats, and 99 yeses and one no is still a no; tomorrow you will need permission from 101

From what I understand, and I know there are poasters here with more knowledge than me, this is a very common failure mode and has been an aggrevating factor in the death of more than one civilizational production engine. I am most familiar with the transition of Rome from yeomanry and small enterprise to latifundia, market guilds, and feudalism. If we do not get an emperor interested in old school market economics that bashes the heads of the billion bureaucrat blob, we will get the modern equivalents; indeed we increasingly are seeing the modern equivalents. As a tangent, the GCC seem to be bashing out their magistrates by turning every process digital; the lack of informal channels means that rules are actually the rules and a massive onerous set of compliances becomes obvious and measurable. Kenya is managing to be one of the most dynamic African economies in the same manner.

Now, what could be different about this cycle: information travels at light speed and increasingly we are moving to high mix low volume production. In other words, soon you can download the files needed to print out your car. The long supply chains ironically are facilitating this: development loops have gotten so long because your prototype needs a part from Bob who needs the raw material from Carol, who is waiting on the machine to make it from Dave... that vertical integration of less efficient but broader utility capital production equipment is coming back. So it becomes more feasible, if we can get any miserable patch of free land on this prison planet, to drop in a few containers of machines and get to work printing out the factory that builds the factory that builds the robots and datacenters and bioresearch labs for synthesizing exotic materials from sunlight, air, water, soil and trace minerals.

This is all stil a sparkle in the eye, so don't get comfortable, but it does seem possible in a way that it was definitely not before. Talk to your buddies in the lucrative defense manufacturing industries and lobby system and tell them you need to vertically integrate and produce everything on site for fastest drone and trench and robot warfare cycles or something.

referenced by: >>5458

I apparently cannot received

anon_dabu said in #5458 4d ago: received

>>5457
This is excellent but leads to a follow up question. If our issue is one of culture and politics, does this not just imply that we are stuck here until:
a) The emperor arrives or
b) The future is China and we are Brazil?

Is the best plan to learn Mandarin and make frequent trips to Shenzhen to have a chance at working under a regime that allows real production?

The alternative you suggest seems to be to help grow the number of bureaucrats by continuing to fund them through the same lobbying process that exists today? I ask this sincerely, because if we can increase the bureaucrats but get them aligned with us we may have a chance. This seems unlikely though given the spirit of the American people today, who will gladly strangle any attempt to push us back on track. We'd largely prefer to increase our imported political client class until the country breaks.

Maybe we have a unique seed of genius or mandate of heaven, and some man will create the machine that you point at a pile of gravel and get refined precious metals but it seems like it leave us impotently waiting in the meantime.

Nietzsche writes in Schopenhauer as Educator:
>One thing above all is certain: these new duties are not the duties of a solitary; on the contrary, they set one in the midst of a mighty community held together, not by external forms and regulations, but by a fundamental idea. It is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it sets for each one of us but one task: to promote the production of the philosopher, the artist and the saint within us and without us and thereby to work at the perfecting of nature.

Was it our economic engine that helped in this goal in the late 19th and early 20th century or something else?

And China, that is able to produce even greater growth and material plenty than us, seems to have largely failed to move the needle towards this perfection of nature, not that we have either in the last 60 years.

Is there a project that lies upstream from the re-ignition of both our stagnant engine and Nietzsche's vision of culture that we might pursue directly? How might we lay the groundwork for the monster of the next generation to be born that will drag the olds out and by an act of will restart what has stopped?

My best guess at an answer is this:
1) We require less stability and more chaos to create an environment where the best may rise.
2) The current mode of war or chaos in an impersonal meat grinder that will not select for the best.
3) We need to increase the defensive capabilities of individuals and small organizations so that in the next great chaos, there is a chance for the best to rise to rule.

So we are back at defense manufacturing and engineering of defensive systems. The best we can hope for is fate to make the next dominant weapons system to have the properties we need for our aims.

referenced by: >>5469 >>5470

This is excellent bu received

anon_ruje said in #5469 16h ago: received

>>5458
The emperor may take any number of different forms, and very well may make things worse by empowering the magistrate blob so long as his own power stays secure. I personally do not understand and wish I understood why anyone listens to these bug bureaucrats and lesbian judges at all, its extremely unserious. Can you imagine being a fit man, armed, in your bulletproof vest, and you're ordered to arrest two parents because they homeschooled their own children. To go into their home, stop them, put them in handcuffs, fill in their paperwork. Maybe you have a daughter of your own. Do you want her to learn to twerk at age 11?

"The court also concluded that because the girls, aged 15 and 11, did not like “trap” or “sertanejo” (folk) music, their home curriculum had also failed to properly educate them in cultural diversity, despite the fact that they are both accomplished pianists and speak multiple languages."
https://adfinternational.org/news/brazilianjudge-sentences-parents-to-prison-for-homeschooling-their-daughters/

Until you can answer why that cop followers orders so dispicable, until you can figure out why people decide to listen when the state disallows you to dig a garden, gives you a 10,000 fine when you do, and spends that money on liquor and cigarettes for local vagrants, the problem will just get worse. Forget production, life itself will be brought to its lowest possible form. We have bigger problems than the fact the proles are upset about datacenters and drinking water.

China does by and large seem to have the mandate. They haven't yet solved their family formation problem, but if any industrialized state has a shot, it's them. As far as physical production goes, there's no competition. There shouldn't be the only ones, it's not like they're hyper competent at every level, but no other major states even seem to want to play. Its all local political squabbles; how can the Chinese help me own the chuds? Sure China, please sell us EVs and maintain our electric grid, we will sell you our natural resources, just give us your security and surveillance equipment so we can crush the local dissent when we pack every institution with foreign clients to cement our petty tyranny.

>have a chance at working under a regime that allows real production?
I am not sure that you want to work in China. The Chinese don't want to work in China. The western system is still printing cash to pay off the talented and keep them from rocking the boat, you will live a better life as an individual if you take the offer. Maybe you should take the offer even if you don't believe the system survives, and use the money as an allowance to rock the boat anyway.

>if we can increase the bureaucrats but get them aligned with us we may have a chance
I don't know. We have a coordination problem. Anything outside of blob communism has been aggressively removed from power. The blob only recently has lost its total and complete dominance of everything everywhere, and this due to the incompetence of the clients they chose. Turns out bioleninism makes for strong loyalty but not good decision making. Personnel is policy. How do you get a loyal bureaucracy? Its a perennial problem. Power is conserved. The blob emerged for a reason, a power vacuum existed. Do you have enough guys to fill a local municipal government? Why or why not? I always hear how "the right has better things to do", but that is pure cope. If you cannot figure out how to enrich yourself and your friends with the amount of arbitrary power a local government has, I mean look at how many hundreds of billions of fraud has been daylighted in the last two years, you lack talent and creativity.

>Was it our economic engine that helped in this [creation of the philosopher]
I would argue that the biological component is most lacking, the best of us lost the will to maintain their bloodlines around the time of the great wars, shortly before or after, and we've been living with only the lucky few that managed to be born since.

Cont.

referenced by: >>5470

The emperor may take received

anon_ruje said in #5470 16h ago: received

>>5458
>>5469
The life of the mind only requires that one is not forced into tedious, difficult, daily labors. Anyone in the west can find a way to live off of welfare and live the life Nietzsche lived, its not expensive. Where are the philosophers?

>And China, that is able to produce even greater growth and material plenty than us, seems to have largely failed to move the needle towards this perfection of nature, not that we have either in the last 60 years.
They truly are a different race and we shouldn't project our standards and desires onto them. They have just now started mass screening of embryos, and the tip of the spear of their high openness elite is beginning to embrace fertility technology. It will be a trickle, then a landslide as the preference cascade goes through. The question is in which direction. They will have a different answer to what is a desired man, a desired society.

>We need to increase the defensive capabilities of individuals and small organizations so that in the next great chaos, there is a chance for the best to rise to rule.
That is my conclusion. Too much atomization, too much fear of rewarding friends in mutual relationships. We can have meritocracy when we win, until now it is our job to identify friendlies, grab as much power as we can, and stuff our friends into every position we can. Worry about production when judges aren't ordering police to kidnap your children.

The life of the mind received

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