Everything net
Everything relevant to the thought
... A Chinese student reflects on why her country is authoritarian—and how democracy has a chance. <em>Look for AP’s symposium on the China challenge, in partnership with the Hoover Institution, in early spring.</em> ...
224 characters.
... This part of the population is usually where the manipulation happens (i.e. politics) ...
183 characters.
... I think most Americans underestimate how much more dysfunctional our constitutional/political system could become. I think people mostly still think about the changes of the last 30 years in terms of the tone of political arguments getting nastier: annoying but ultimately not that important. ...
... But I think the governments ability to deal proactively with emerging problems has been degraded significantly. Many aspects of government are coasting along, overseen by agencies created between 1932 and 1972 but whose enabling legislation is increasingly out of date. ...
... There is a lot of room for this stuff to get much worse as congress continues ignoring festering problems and the executive is left with more and more de facto authority. ...
... Meanwhile I think we are going to continue to have more government shutdowns, 1/6 style chaos, etc. at some point this will coincide with an emergency and it will cause big problems. ...
920 characters.
... One of the worst aspects of current politics is the bipartisan consensus that America kind of sucks. On the left you have the relentless negativity of woke politics. On the right you have the relentless negativity of Trumpism. ...
452 characters.
... As inflation persists, progressive politicians and the Biden administration have been condemning corporations for abusing their market power to raise prices — leading to a barrage of criticism from center-left economists and commentators. ...
... Monopoly is a real issue and problem in the US economy. 2. It is not, however, a major reason for the acceleration of inflation in 2021, nor can a crackdown on monopoly do a lot to bring inflation down. But what does that tell us? ...
1497 characters.
... But that cheap credit hasn’t actually created any real resources, so you end up with increased spending on both capital and consumer goods. As a result, inflation starts to inch up, and central banks are forced to raise interest rates to cool things off. ...
... Society needs to produce fewer factories and machine tools and more beer and pairs of pants (or whatever). ...
... The period through the end of 2007 arguably fits the austrian model. There was arguably over investment in residential home construction. In 2006 and 2007 the home building industry was contracting while other industries were still growing. But in mid 2008, the situation changed. ...
2948 characters.
... There's a widespread view in inflation hawk circles that the BLS came under political pressure (in the 1990s and maybe before) to modify the CPI to reduced the measured inflation rate and hence reduce how much the government would have to pay in Social Security benefits. ...
1019 characters.
... At a minimum, there's no reason the US housing downturn needed to be as extreme as it was. Looser money could have produced a 10 or 20 percent price drop in housing rather than 30 percent. That would have meant a milder recession and perhaps no financial crisis in 2008. ...
2796 characters.
... As long as social groups still compete against each other, the political structure of those groups has to serve the function of competition. The so-called liberalism democracy as of now is still more like an oligarchy republic (as envisioned by the founding father). ...
... Does that mean will can have a more radical democracy? E.g. instead of voting for policies, each person simply submit their prioritization of her desires and needs. Then the government (human or AI) will simply produce a policy that maximize utility for the entire human population. ...
699 characters.
... The foundational idea of the End of History is inherited from Hegel - man's desire for recognition overriding other desires (mainly preservation) is something that transcends humans, something that proves man's freedom. ...
... This is an outdated view that sees humans as isolated individuals rather than members of social groups. This desire for recognition is probably a product of group competition and the recognition is about one's worth to the community in the context of fierce group competition between communities. ...
... For example, we don't know which desire is more prominent: the desire for equal recognition for each member or the desire for the recognition of the community as a whole. In modernity, the further is represented by liberal democracy while the latter by nationalism. ...
... In *End of History,* Fukuyama took one paragraph to dismiss nationalism as an irrational one in contrast with the desire for recognition at the individual level. This distinction, as demonstrated above, is not well-founded. ...
... It's more evident that the majority of a social group is prone to manipulation, be it religion, ideologies, etc while liberal democracy is just one of them to support elected orligarchy. And that is supported by group competition theories. ...
1815 characters.
... There are some insights from this [article](https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/dreaming-of-democracy-in-china/) by an anonymous writer - particularly the categorization of China as an egoist society. Although this is probably not due to the "Class struggle" as suggested by the article. ...
... Rather, the historical lack of rule of law explains better the dominance of the patrimonial mode of inter-person relationships in Chinese society. This theory is inspired by Fukuyama's theory that patrimonial political order is the default that humans fall back to. ...
... Personally, I think the key still lies in the power balance between society and state. It remains to be seen how the advance in information technology affects that balance but signs show that it tips the scale more towards the side of the state. ...
805 characters.
... History started when human species began to dominate the ecologic environment and started to compete for survival as social groups, it will end when the survival competition between social groups ends. ...
202 characters.
... Most of the analysis from Fukuyama's end of history would fall apart in a scenario in which state competition no longer exists. ...
127 characters.
... Hegel declared this as the end of the history and went on to claim that liberal societies were free from contradiction and would therefore bring historical dialectic to a close. ...
... My critique: can we claim absolute self-consciousness when we still don't know how evolution history formed our biological nature? Is that something attainable only after theories like EDSC is in man's consciousness? ...
... As for "liberal societies free from contradiction", is the universal equality and the need for struggling in social group competition a contradiction? ...
... A liberal society can't just focus on its own principles of equal rights, it still has to serve another survival function: to compete with other social groups, liberal or not. Isn't that a contradiction? ...
753 characters.
... But without state competition, there is no guarantee that a unified global liberalism democracy community won't fall into a totalitarian regime. Most of the analysis from Fukuyama's end of history would fall apart in a scenario in which state competition no longer exists. ...
348 characters.