It feels to me as if the American experiment in representative democracy is coming to an unhappy end. In all of human existence and history, the norm for the masses of humans has been a hard life under a usually corrupt, immoral religious or secular authoritarian(s), limited personal liberties, poverty, bigotry, ignorance and intolerance with plenty of religious superstition mixed in. Things generally improved in the last few centuries, but it feels like the progress in America has stalled in the last 20 years or so and is now in reverse. In my opinion, America is reverting to something closer to the nasty historical mean than it has existed in America from about 1950 to about 2000 for many (not all) average citizens.
This feeling is not based just on the radicalization of America's political right, or the collapse of old-fashioned pro-democracy and pro-civil liberties conservatism. Much of the rest of the elites who mostly control our society and lives have impulses that to me feel ossified and increasingly corrupt and immoral in one or more ways.
Over at his overcoming bias blog, Robin Hanson writes about what I see as one of the dominant factors in American decline. That factor is moral cowardice and/or cynical corruption in the face of inconvenient fact, true truth and sound reasoning. From what I can tell, this is probably the dominant factor. The rich and powerful, for the most part, can either no longer face inconvenience, and/or they no longer care. Presumably that is at least significantly because they believe their wealth and/or power-fortified positions are impenetrable, even if civilization falls. Hanson writes in a post entitled Prediction Market Quotes:
A senior high quality person, who I trust, who recently spent several years trying to promote prediction markets[1], reports the following relevant quotes:
A G7 government official and advisor to their head of state:“The prediction market experiment was a success, but we will not proceed with the program as it interferes with our ability to shape the narrative around the direction of government policy.”
A leading bank CEO:“Your crowdsourced real-time risk radar is remarkable, but we will not use it here. The only person who tells my board about unexploded bombs in this bank is me and people who answer directly to me.”
A partner at a prominent US-based global management consultant:“The objective truth should never be more than optional input to any structural narrative in a social system.”
A Ivy League Management Guru:“The problem with prediction markets is that they are the irritating precocious young child, entirely unfiltered socially, and yet forever talking about the elephants in the room that it may or may not be appropriate to talk about.”
Perhaps you can see the pattern here.
I see a pattern there. If one can reasonably extrapolate from those few quotes (data points), refusal by elites to incorporate relevant data into normal operations is common, probably dominant, among elites in government, business and probably religion too.
I am biased by my belief that America is in decline. Based on that, one can argue that my extrapolation here is based on too little data. But my extrapolation is based on a hell of a lot more than just those quotes.[2] Unless I am self-deluded, e.g., applying flawed reasoning, those quotes fit very well with most of the content of most of the politics-focused content on this blog.
What Hanson reports feels absolutely right. The cluster of inconvenient fact, truth and reasoning really is a (psychologically and socially) irritating precocious young child. Research by Philip Tetlock with his discovery of superforecasters supports that characterization -- rationality is irritating and unfiltered, unless one has one's biases, social loyalties and self-interests mostly stripped away. The child is entirely, or more likely mostly, socially unfiltered. That irritating child is not just forever talking about elephants in the room that are appropriate or not. It talks about everything it believes is appropriate, unless the crowd has been deceived by the elites, e.g., lied to, manipulated and betrayed by the massively-funded, radical right propaganda Leviathan the elites run at us 24/7/365.
So when prediction markets have been corrupted by dark free speech, the elites blame the irritating child for being wrong. In fact, the child was probably right based on the garbage inputs it got. Garbage in, garbage out. Who puts out the bad garbage? The corrupt, immoral, lying elites who reject the prediction markets. Why do the elites do this? Because they believe that the irritating child gets in the way of accumulating more power and wealth for themselves at our expense. If one steps back and considers it, those closed-minded elites will be wrong sometimes. Sometimes that will hurt them personally, but usually not.
In my firm opinion, what Hanson writes about is more good evidence of the decline of the American empire and its descent to something akin to the much nastier norm of past centuries.
Footnotes:
1. Wikipedia describes prediction markets like this:
Prediction markets (also known as betting markets, information markets, decision markets, idea futures or event derivatives) are open markets where specific outcomes can be predicted using financial incentives. Essentially, they are exchange-traded markets created for the purpose of trading the outcome of events.
Before the era of scientific polling, early forms of prediction markets often existed in the form of political betting. One such political bet dates back to 1503, in which people bet on who would be the papal successor. Even then, it was already considered "an old practice". According to Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf, who have researched the history of prediction markets, there are records of election betting in Wall Street dating back to 1884. Rhode and Strumpf estimate that average betting turnover per US presidential election is equivalent to over 50 percent of the campaign spend.
Economic theory for the ideas behind prediction markets can be credited to Friedrich Hayek in his 1945 article "The Use of Knowledge in Society" and Ludwig von Mises in his "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth". Modern economists agree that Mises' argument combined with Hayek's elaboration of it, is correct.
Betting turnover is the gross amount wagered by gamblers. One source wrote that for 2020, Biden’s campaign spent about $1.01 billion, while Trump’s campaign spent about $710 million. Based on that data, the prediction market for the 2020 presidential election was more than ~$860 million.
2. A close personal acquaintance of over 40 years with intimate personal knowledge of the operations of huge banks (huge, not medium or little) and their attitudes toward risk was constantly warning of systemic failure of internal bank risk assessments. My acquaintance kept warning bank management about unexploded bombs in their banks, and they kept telling the irritating, socially unfiltered child to shut up and fuck off.
Why? Because understated risk translated into higher profits. The profit motive caused false, understated assertions of systemic risk. Naturally, that allowed risky business as usual. Also because, the ultimate accountability for risk fell on taxpayers, not the elites themselves. After the financial and housing catastrophes of 2008-2009, Obama chose not to prosecute even one crook that caused massive damage to millions of average Americans. As far as I know, not a single person went to jail for what those capitalist elites did to us. Not one.
Another group of elites in government treated another unfiltered child the same way that Obama treated the finance industry and other criminals. For that bunch, the irritating child wasn't even there at all:
Inconvenient truth, it's a bitch
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