Hmmm, to some extent I think Bryan and Sehon are focused on different levels of analysis. Bryan’s ideal is a system that he believes would yield good results without stipulating that anyone in particular behave in any particular way apart from some boiler plate assumptions about human nature. Sehon, I think, is taking our current democra…
Hmmm, to some extent I think Bryan and Sehon are focused on different levels of analysis. Bryan’s ideal is a system that he believes would yield good results without stipulating that anyone in particular behave in any particular way apart from some boiler plate assumptions about human nature. Sehon, I think, is taking our current democratic political systems for granted and is trying to answer the question, “what should governments do?” So he is really arguing about what policies existing governments implement and is claiming that they should care more about reducing inequality and that having more influence over domestic production to do this is fine. From Bryan’s point of view, this is cheating. He probably thinks speculating about how democratic governments ought to behave is not so useful because we have a lot of theory and evidence showing that the incentives faced by voters and politicians imply lots of bad outcomes. Though of course Bryan does have a long list of policy reforms he likes. It’s just he argues that we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for politicians to implement them.
The difficulty for Bryan is that there is no EMPIRICAL evidence that there is either a viable path to implementing his idea nor that it would be a stable equilibrium.
Actual existing political systems have empirically proven their viability as real possibilities. One can debate the merits of them using empirical data.
That is a very good point. Starting out by trying to convince someone that 10% less government spending would be good is hard enough haha. Obviously there is no way to make headway on anarcho-capitalism if people generally aren’t even sold on the benefits of reducing government influence in general. (I know this debate wasn’t actual about anarchism-capitalism.)
Hmmm, to some extent I think Bryan and Sehon are focused on different levels of analysis. Bryan’s ideal is a system that he believes would yield good results without stipulating that anyone in particular behave in any particular way apart from some boiler plate assumptions about human nature. Sehon, I think, is taking our current democratic political systems for granted and is trying to answer the question, “what should governments do?” So he is really arguing about what policies existing governments implement and is claiming that they should care more about reducing inequality and that having more influence over domestic production to do this is fine. From Bryan’s point of view, this is cheating. He probably thinks speculating about how democratic governments ought to behave is not so useful because we have a lot of theory and evidence showing that the incentives faced by voters and politicians imply lots of bad outcomes. Though of course Bryan does have a long list of policy reforms he likes. It’s just he argues that we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for politicians to implement them.
The difficulty for Bryan is that there is no EMPIRICAL evidence that there is either a viable path to implementing his idea nor that it would be a stable equilibrium.
Actual existing political systems have empirically proven their viability as real possibilities. One can debate the merits of them using empirical data.
That is a very good point. Starting out by trying to convince someone that 10% less government spending would be good is hard enough haha. Obviously there is no way to make headway on anarcho-capitalism if people generally aren’t even sold on the benefits of reducing government influence in general. (I know this debate wasn’t actual about anarchism-capitalism.)