Recently, I got a new book idea. After soliciting title ideas, I really liked Nathan Goodman’s Unbeatable, to which I added the subtitle The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets. Before long, I was so jazzed about the idea - and the sales potential - that I decided to rearrange my queue to try writing
If your intent is to persuade any among the unpersuaded and you immediately dismiss communism with reference to incentives and pleas to your own authority, you will fail. Those who think communism sounds good (and are not your own children) will not consider “communism is bad because no one has any incentives to produce” to be a knockdown argument. They have heard that before and considered that before.
If instead you intend to write only for the already persuaded, kudos, quality start.
I think the expected reader of the book is not an actual communist but instead someone who might believe in some of what Caplan calls our "secular religion" that they wouldn't connect to communism.
I'm certain the title will ensure that there would be so few leftwing readers of this book as to make this point irrelevant anyways. Outside of academic audiences, and his interested readers; I think those on the left would find it difficult to read through their own camps books, much less approach the oppositions.
As an elementary schooler I also thought communism good as it fit with what I'd been taught in school (including Sunday school). My dad told me that in practice it worked horribly, which appeared to be true so I went in the opposite direction. That focus on results also led me to agree with Paul Graham that I should "keep my identity small" and not even identify as a libertarian rather than just continually focus on how to get the best results.
1. Not to disagree, just honestly curious: what do they "who think communism sounds good" "consider" the proper answer to the incentive argument ? -2. And to disagree: those who think communism sounds good and is good - those are probably not a huge market. Those who feel that "society should be more just" / "the rich should pay way more tax" / "redistribution is fair" are a much bigger group. (Why that sounds good to them, I heard often enough.) - 3. First showing how Commies got it wrong seems not too bad a first step to make non-commies re-think more standard 'lefty' ideas (standard enough to be liked by the Republicans, too).
In general, I've seen a few criticisms from "communists" both criticizing the incentives that exist in a free market:
1. A lot of profitable businesses are essentially zero-sum. Both Coke and Pepsi have massive marketing budgets that mostly work on canceling each other out. In a planned economy, this budget would be reinvested in something productive.
2. Sometimes profit comes from the inability to solve coordination problems. Sometimes it's profitable to sell large SUVs to parents worried about safety in an accident. A bigger car makes them safer, but doesn't help others. This prompts others to buy larger cars so they're safer when they get in accidents with the first group, so no one ends up much safer. If you're a game theory person, you can think of this as individual incentives leading to a Nash equilibrium when there's solutions that are better for all parties.
Thank you. It's been a while; hardly understood my comment anymore ... . But a nice enough answer, I guess. (Obviously not convincing - but one can feel how after several of such examples someone inclined to be a commie might feel "incentives" are overrated. They are not. Just as nothing in biology makes sense without evolution.)
I don't think that's a good comparison. You use evolution to explain biology in a descriptive way, but you use incentives to describe society in a prescriptive way. Marxists are very aware of incentives, but believe that different people will have different incentives depending on their position. For example, capitalists will lower wages to increase profits, but low wages will keep workers from being able to buy the product without debt, which they will eventually default on, potentially causing an economic collapse.
Marxists believe that society is filled with these sorts of contradictions where incentives for different groups eventually make the entire system fail.
I don't know much about that, but I read Dan Arielly's Predictably Irrational and it made me question whether incentives always lead to optimal behavior.
Evolution leads to the plague, mosquitos and lots of other nasty things. No evolution: the universe stays dead as stones. - Incentives lead to Lenin, Beethoven and substack. No incentives: stupor. - That wiki-page seems fine to understand marxist concepts, the real economy works as: employers pay mostly just what they have to, to find the workers they need (if those wages too high for that biz., the biz. folds.). Neither Chinese nor Romanian workers got their big increases in real wages because of strong trade unions (they had none), but because companies need workers and outbid each other if supply at the old price is less than demand. (exception: Monopole-capitalism. Seen pretty much only in communist regimes.)
Communism is deeply rooted in our culture. Took Christianity: richs are banned from heaven (at least if we don't find a way of passing camels trough the eye of a needle).
An envy is a very powerful force in humans. Communism promise of leveling us with all the "have more than us" is truly unbeatable. Sweet revenge!
And championing comunism ideals make us feel good about ourselves at a very low individual price. Communism includes making others pay for our virtue signalling. Unbeatable too.
Communism idea is so powerful that it is embeded in a lot of "democratic" constitutions.
Abandoning communism (not a bad titlte, by the way) requires much more than good reasoning and good lessons on economic history. It is something we need to feel, not to think. We are all communist at heart
Hey Mr Kaplan. We readers know that your kids are quite bright, but someone who's never heard of you before reading these paragraphs will have a hard time believing someone had a conversation on this level with two six year olds. Plus, like the other guy said, I doubt this line of argumentation would have much of an effect on convinced socialists. Chances are, they've probably been exposed to this sort of argument before (unless you're trying to preach to the general public instead of socialist true believers, which would be a different matter).
Hey Bryan, what about a book called: "The myth of the rational communism" ... after all communist are like voters: they are what they are and behave following their own biases.
Trying to convince them to be rational is a total waste of time (you have to give some credit to a way of looking the world that survives Mao, Stalin, Castro, North Korea, Venezuela, Argentina ...). But a good "rational" analysis of the human biases that allow the total irrationality of communism/socialism survival and prevalence ...
It sure sounded good when Biden told us that he could conquer Covid so we elected him President based on his promise. It sure sounded bad when others claimed that Covid couldn't be conquered.
Not only is it often the case that good-sounding things are bad and bad-sounding things are good, when it comes to proposed policy changes, I submit to you that we should expect this to be *more and more* true over time.
The broad idea is basically that, for essentially psychological reasons, if we have a pool of candidate policy changes, we're biased to try the ones that *sound* good sooner than the ones that *sound* bad, and so eventually the only way to improve anything is likely to be with policy changes that sound bad.
If your intent is to persuade any among the unpersuaded and you immediately dismiss communism with reference to incentives and pleas to your own authority, you will fail. Those who think communism sounds good (and are not your own children) will not consider “communism is bad because no one has any incentives to produce” to be a knockdown argument. They have heard that before and considered that before.
If instead you intend to write only for the already persuaded, kudos, quality start.
I think the expected reader of the book is not an actual communist but instead someone who might believe in some of what Caplan calls our "secular religion" that they wouldn't connect to communism.
I'm certain the title will ensure that there would be so few leftwing readers of this book as to make this point irrelevant anyways. Outside of academic audiences, and his interested readers; I think those on the left would find it difficult to read through their own camps books, much less approach the oppositions.
I have personally both been convinced and convinced others from the position that "communism sounds good" by the incentives argument.
I also think it's the intellectually honest argument to use.
As an elementary schooler I also thought communism good as it fit with what I'd been taught in school (including Sunday school). My dad told me that in practice it worked horribly, which appeared to be true so I went in the opposite direction. That focus on results also led me to agree with Paul Graham that I should "keep my identity small" and not even identify as a libertarian rather than just continually focus on how to get the best results.
1. Not to disagree, just honestly curious: what do they "who think communism sounds good" "consider" the proper answer to the incentive argument ? -2. And to disagree: those who think communism sounds good and is good - those are probably not a huge market. Those who feel that "society should be more just" / "the rich should pay way more tax" / "redistribution is fair" are a much bigger group. (Why that sounds good to them, I heard often enough.) - 3. First showing how Commies got it wrong seems not too bad a first step to make non-commies re-think more standard 'lefty' ideas (standard enough to be liked by the Republicans, too).
In general, I've seen a few criticisms from "communists" both criticizing the incentives that exist in a free market:
1. A lot of profitable businesses are essentially zero-sum. Both Coke and Pepsi have massive marketing budgets that mostly work on canceling each other out. In a planned economy, this budget would be reinvested in something productive.
2. Sometimes profit comes from the inability to solve coordination problems. Sometimes it's profitable to sell large SUVs to parents worried about safety in an accident. A bigger car makes them safer, but doesn't help others. This prompts others to buy larger cars so they're safer when they get in accidents with the first group, so no one ends up much safer. If you're a game theory person, you can think of this as individual incentives leading to a Nash equilibrium when there's solutions that are better for all parties.
Thank you. It's been a while; hardly understood my comment anymore ... . But a nice enough answer, I guess. (Obviously not convincing - but one can feel how after several of such examples someone inclined to be a commie might feel "incentives" are overrated. They are not. Just as nothing in biology makes sense without evolution.)
I don't think that's a good comparison. You use evolution to explain biology in a descriptive way, but you use incentives to describe society in a prescriptive way. Marxists are very aware of incentives, but believe that different people will have different incentives depending on their position. For example, capitalists will lower wages to increase profits, but low wages will keep workers from being able to buy the product without debt, which they will eventually default on, potentially causing an economic collapse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_contradictions_of_capital_accumulation
Marxists believe that society is filled with these sorts of contradictions where incentives for different groups eventually make the entire system fail.
I don't know much about that, but I read Dan Arielly's Predictably Irrational and it made me question whether incentives always lead to optimal behavior.
Evolution leads to the plague, mosquitos and lots of other nasty things. No evolution: the universe stays dead as stones. - Incentives lead to Lenin, Beethoven and substack. No incentives: stupor. - That wiki-page seems fine to understand marxist concepts, the real economy works as: employers pay mostly just what they have to, to find the workers they need (if those wages too high for that biz., the biz. folds.). Neither Chinese nor Romanian workers got their big increases in real wages because of strong trade unions (they had none), but because companies need workers and outbid each other if supply at the old price is less than demand. (exception: Monopole-capitalism. Seen pretty much only in communist regimes.)
Communism is deeply rooted in our culture. Took Christianity: richs are banned from heaven (at least if we don't find a way of passing camels trough the eye of a needle).
An envy is a very powerful force in humans. Communism promise of leveling us with all the "have more than us" is truly unbeatable. Sweet revenge!
And championing comunism ideals make us feel good about ourselves at a very low individual price. Communism includes making others pay for our virtue signalling. Unbeatable too.
Communism idea is so powerful that it is embeded in a lot of "democratic" constitutions.
Abandoning communism (not a bad titlte, by the way) requires much more than good reasoning and good lessons on economic history. It is something we need to feel, not to think. We are all communist at heart
Good luck!
Hey Mr Kaplan. We readers know that your kids are quite bright, but someone who's never heard of you before reading these paragraphs will have a hard time believing someone had a conversation on this level with two six year olds. Plus, like the other guy said, I doubt this line of argumentation would have much of an effect on convinced socialists. Chances are, they've probably been exposed to this sort of argument before (unless you're trying to preach to the general public instead of socialist true believers, which would be a different matter).
Hey Bryan, what about a book called: "The myth of the rational communism" ... after all communist are like voters: they are what they are and behave following their own biases.
Trying to convince them to be rational is a total waste of time (you have to give some credit to a way of looking the world that survives Mao, Stalin, Castro, North Korea, Venezuela, Argentina ...). But a good "rational" analysis of the human biases that allow the total irrationality of communism/socialism survival and prevalence ...
It sure sounded good when Biden told us that he could conquer Covid so we elected him President based on his promise. It sure sounded bad when others claimed that Covid couldn't be conquered.
Not only is it often the case that good-sounding things are bad and bad-sounding things are good, when it comes to proposed policy changes, I submit to you that we should expect this to be *more and more* true over time.
The broad idea is basically that, for essentially psychological reasons, if we have a pool of candidate policy changes, we're biased to try the ones that *sound* good sooner than the ones that *sound* bad, and so eventually the only way to improve anything is likely to be with policy changes that sound bad.
I am kind of dissapointed. I have been waiting for "Poverty: Who to Blame" for a long time!!
Right? Someone needs to tell me who to blame!
Turns out it was Bryan all along ;)