Let A Thousand Nations Bloom

Timothy Lee in Ars Technica:

Some of the Silicon Valley’s most important companies, including Intel, Google, and Yahoo, were cofounded by immigrants. Yet America’s creaky immigration system makes it difficult for talented young people born outside of the United States to come to the Bay Area. There have been various proposals to make it easier for immigrant entrepreneurs to come to the United States, but they’ve made no progress in Congress.

So a new company called Blueseed is seeking to bypass the political process and solve the problem directly. Blueseed plans to buy a ship and turn it into a floating incubator anchored in international waters off the coast of California.

I’m enjoying The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. He’s a physicist who works on quantum computing at Oxford, but the book is a broad and yet brilliant discussion of the philosophy of science, the nature of knowledge, the origins of the universe, the meaning of computation, and much else besides. He works without the main concepts, but it’s remarkable that in his chapter on optimism (chapter 9), Deutsch comes close to identifying the key virtues of competitive governance without knowing what to call it:

Political philosophy traditionally centered on a collection of issues that [Karl] Popper called the ‘who should rule?’ question. Who should wield power? Should it be a monarch or aristocrats, or priests, or a dictator, or a small group, or ‘the people’, or their delegates? And that leads to derivative questions such as ‘How should a king be educated?’ ‘Who should be enfranchised in a democracy?’ ‘How does one ensure an informed and responsible electorate?’…

Ideas have consequences, and the ‘who should rule?’ approach to political philosophy is not just to make a mistake of academic analysis: it has been part of practically every bad political doctrine in history. If the political process is seen as an engine for putting the right rulers in power, then it justifies violence, for until that right system is in place, no ruler is legitimate; and once it is in place, and its designated rulers are ruling, opposition to them is opposition to rightness. The problem then becomes how to thwart anyone who is working against the rulers or their policies. By the same logic, everyone who thinks that existing rules or policies are bad must infer that the ‘who should rule?’ question has been answered wrongly, and therefore that the power of the rulers are not legitimate, and that opposing it is legitimate, by force if necessary. Thus the very question ‘who should rule?’ begs for violent, authoritarian answers, and has often received them. It leads those in power into tyranny, and to the entrenchment of bad rulers and bad policies; it leads their opponents to violent destructiveness and revolution.

Advocates of violence usually have in mind that none of those things need happen if only everyone agreed on who should rule. But that means agreeing about what is right, and, given agreement on that, rulers would have nothing to do. And in any case, such agreement is neither possible nor desirable: people are different, and have unique ideas; problems are inevitable, and progress consists in solving them.

Popper therefore applies his basic ‘how can we detect and eliminate errors?’ to political philosophy in the form of how can we rid ourselves of bad governments without violence? Just as science seeks explanations that are experimentally testable, so a rational political system makes it as easy as possible to detect, and persuade others, that a leader or policy is bad, and to remove them without violence if they are. Just as institutions of science are structured so as to avoid entrenching theories, but instead to expose them to criticism and testing, so political institutions should not make it hard to oppose rulers and policies, non-violently, and should embody traditions of peaceful, critical discussion of them and of the institutions themselves and everything else. Thus, systems of government are to be judged not for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.

Democracy is very good at removing bad leaders. But it is terrible at pruning the Amazonian overgrowth of bad policies. That is why the power to leave combined with the power of free discussion and open criticism is more effective than closed doors democracy alone. (You can see the filmmaker Jason Silva’s short film inspired by the book here.)

At Huff Po, Robert Teitelman gives seasteading and OWS the old compare and contrast:

Here’s Graeber on Rose in 2006 with his short definition of anarchism: “Anarchism is about acting as if you’re already free. … Anarchism is democracy without the government. Most people love democracy, but most people don’t like the government very much. Keep one, take away the other — that’s anarchism. Anarchism is direct democracy.” He elaborates. “Anarchism is the commitment to the idea that it is possible to have a society based on principles of self-organization, voluntary association and mutual aid. It’s not the belief that we are necessarily going to have it but that we could have it. You can’t know it’s possible. But by the same token you can’t know that it’s not possible.”

Graeber’s description of the anarchist impulse, as an experiment without government, veers awfully close to Ron Paul-like “End the Fed” libertarianism. Venture capitalist and libertarian Peter Thiel, for instance, has helped fund The Seasteading Institute, whose “mission is “to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems to sell structured settlement.” One of the founders of the institute is Patri Friedman, a grandson of Milton Friedman, and a former engineer at Google. What is the difference between Zuccotti Park and a free, autonomous and sovereign community located in (presumably warm) international waters? Well, the seasteading idea remains theoretical, while OWS exists, albeit with the fragile and ironic permission of the police and city. The emphasis of a Thiel or a Paul (who Thiel has endorsed for president) involves a far more profound belief in markets than the anarchist belief in direct democracy, which has its market-like aspects but which is no fan of the wisdom of markets. Paul and Thiel-style libertarianism has an Ayn Randian edge — meaning a kind of Nietzschian belief in supermen dragged down by the demons — that is utterly lacking in the consensus style of Graeber and anarchist theory. The OWS crowd, naively or not, seem to believe it can transform the larger community by example, like medieval monks praying for our souls in giant monasteries; the steasteading crowd seems to argue that they can only carve out their free space outside the oppressive shadow of the nation-state.

An ancient Andean people thrives in fragile, reed-built floating villages on Lake Titicaca, practicing dynamic geography–From the FT:

The tall totora reed grows in the shallow waters near the shores of the lake.  The roots of these reeds are cut into chunks and when dried, roped together  until they form a large mass. They are then anchored with poles driven into the  bed of the lake. Layers of reeds are stacked one on top of the other across the  surface to create a base upon which the Uros construct their small homes and  communal buildings.

The platforms feel sponge-like underfoot but these islands have a lifespan of  around 20 years. Should there be disputes between families living on the same  island it is easy to cut a single home off and float it to another island.

Hat tip, MR.

• Blueseed gets coverage in CNET: “A recently formed company called Blueseed is planning an oceangoing hub for foreign entrepreneurs who have difficulty obtaining visas that would allow them to live in this sprawling megalopolis that so many venture capitalists and technology companies call home.”
• A fascinating history of Hong Kong with a profile of John James Copwerthwaite: “When the last governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, took over in 1993 he was introduced to Sir John Cowperthwaite and as he shook his hand he said, ‘So, you are the architect of all this?’ “I did very little,’ Cowperthwaite said. ‘All I did was to try to prevent some of the things that might undo it.’”

Unfortunately he has no imagination, but that myopic stupidity speaks to how unaware the mainstream world is to stagnation in governance, or quite simply, to creating new frontiers. I don’t know how many times we have to shout that this isn’t about libertarian paradise as it is about community and variety. Most feckless of all is his line about immigrant aqua-dolphins. The repugnance of his own shabby views on immigration are reflected in his misunderstanding.

Video here.

TSI responds here.

The Harvard econ prof in City Journal on how sclerosis motivates firms to pack up shop and leave:

Seeking to reduce costs and fleeing the powerful Michigan unions, auto companies started building factories in lower-cost areas soon after World War II. (Comparing the industrial growth of adjacent counties in states with differing union rules, economist Thomas Holmes has found that between 1947 and 1992, manufacturing grew 23 percent faster on the antiunion side of the state line.) By the late 1970s, the car companies were also struggling to compete with a new set of foreign firms offering attractive prices, quality, and fuel efficiency.

As conditions deteriorated, people voted with their feet:

The scale of Detroit’s decline is breathtaking: a city of 1.85 million residents in 1950 has fewer than 720,000 today.

The skeptic of competitive government would use this as evidence to show how weak exit is as way to improve governance. Detroit, despite losing over half its population, is still in decline. It is now even more in thrall to legislating regulations that thwart entrepreneurs than it used to be. What gives? The pessimistic answer is that these things take time. Eventually conditions will bottom out and only then can the city regroup with better laws amenable to civilization and growth. The more pessimistic answer is that even though living in Detroit became a losing proposition and people fled, company men have called in the feds again and again to buttress dead businesses, keeping moribund institutions intact. Bailouts become lifelines for socialist decadence. This gruel slows the necessary decline down, but had the feds kept their hands tied, it could have proceeded apace. Alas, they did not. Glaeser wonders what might have been:

the Big Three were synonymous with industrial stagnation; for all we know, a dissolution of General Motors would have led to a cluster of smaller, more nimble companies. Some might have failed, but others might have been innovative enough to start adding employment. What we do know is that we haven’t produced a world-beating car industry that will be a future jobs machine. These companies will probably keep sputtering along, making money in good years and requiring more bailouts in bad.

Yesterday, Angel Clark’s radio show featured a segment on Seasteading. It covers the basic ideas and the host is amenable to the concept.

Thanks to commenter Mike1200874 for the tip.