Thank you for this. It has helped me to put together some thoughts that were floating around in my head and develop my defense of socialism.
As I can think of few things more amusing then defending socialism in this particular forum I cannot resist posting it here.
Socialism is both inevitable and necessary. Furthermore, this fact is both consistent with and can be derived from the economic theory discussed up-thread.
The anarchist philosophy undervalues the utility of socialism. This is unsurprising because anarchism it is the antithesis of socialism. The anarchist critique focuses on the current problems of socialism in our era. Socialism today has many flaws the worst of which is the power vacuum that allows special interests to capture government and force their losses onto the collective. Indeed socialism is currently growing unrestrained. It is a system out of balance and if not brought into equilibrium it must inevitably collapse. Nevertheless, despite our current socialist excess, it must not be overlooked that some degree of socialism is needed both to find optimal fitness and improve the human condition.
The anarchist questions if socialism has any utility. Indeed any defense of socialism must show that socialism is more then simply chains on our individual ankles. Socialism at its heart involves taking from the productive/fit and giving to the less productive or less fit. What could be lost by discarding it so that individuals can optimize more freely?
The religious among us might argue that socialism is morally required. The idealist might argue that it is needed because of social justice. However, to challenge the anarchist regarding the need for socialism we must battle him on his own turf. We must show that socialism is needed using materialism and empiricism.
The need for socialism arises from the flaws in unrestrained anarchism. Anarchism if left unchecked leads to an excessively steep fitness curve (extreme survival of the fittest scenario). Why is this sub-optimal? The problem with a steep fitness curves is that it forces convergence to the nearest optimal state. This improves immediate population fitness, but it does so at the cost of long term adaptation and progress. Steep fitness curves have been shown to reduce the rate of evolutionary change (link below).
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000187The proper role of socialism is to help ensure trailblazers survive long enough to eliminate economic friction. In a landscape with a steep fitness curve these individuals may not survive or succeed (crossing these barriers involves significant cost). We can get stuck in a higher valley (of the N dimensional solution space).
In its most extreme form anarchism can drive the entropy of society past the error threshold at which point information is destroyed rather than created. This is a dark age and is indeed possible. Dark ages arise from the death throes of excessive socialism. Like a spring pushed too far in one direction a system trying to find equilibrium is likely to overshoot in the opposite direction when the unstable order dissolves. The backlash against anarchism in the industrial era lead to communism. The collapse of socialism may lead us to the next dark age.
Error threshold was developed from Quasispecies Theory by Eigen and Schuster to describe the dynamics of replicating nucleic acid under the influence of mutation and selection.
life like civilization requires entropy/anarchy to exist, but critically such entropy must be limited and contained. If life was without entropy no change would arise and evolution would cease. On the other hand, evolution is also be impossible if the entropy/error rate is too high (only a few mutation produce an improvement, but most lead to deterioration). Error threshold allows us to quantify the resulting minimal replication accuracy (ie maximal mutation/entropy rate) that still maintains adaptation.
This can be shown analytically at its clearest in the extreme example of a simple replicating organism that lives on a fitness landscape which contains a single peak of fitness x > 1 with all other variations having a fitness of 1. With an infinite population there is a phase transition at a particular error rate p (the mutation rate at each loci in a genetic sequence). This critical error rate is determined analytically to be p = ln(x)/L (where L is the chromosome length). When this mutation/entropy rate is exceeded the proportion of the infinite population on the fitness peak drops to chance levels.
The can be thought of intuitively as a balance between exploitation and exploration in search. In the limit of zero entropy/change successive generations of selection remove all variety from the population and the population converges to a single point. If the entropy/mutation rates are too excessive the evolutionary process degenerates into random search with no exploitation of the information acquired in preceding generations. Thus the optimum entropy rate should maximize the search but is subject to the constraint of not losing information already gained.
In the end our goal is congruence or harmony. We must eliminate all necessary barriers to finding global optima. Increased degrees-of-freedom in one sub-area such as the convergence forced by unrestrained anarchism is potentially sub optimal, ineffective, and perhaps counter-productive. Unrestrained anarchism does not eliminate all necessary barriers. Instead it forces conformity to the nearest local optima effectively raising barriers to distant more global optima.
Socialism and anarchism can be thought of as two opposing extremes in constant opposition. Anarchism is needed to combat the evils/suboptimal outcomes of unrestrained socialism (This is convincing demonstrated in the economic theory up-thread). However, it is also true that socialism is likewise needed to combat the evils/suboptimal outcomes of unrestrained anarchism. Neither socialism nor anarchism is superior they are simply opposing forces. The optimum result requires us to balance these forces. The solutions of the anarchist are the right ones in our time only because we live in an era of excess socialism. As human history has a tendency to repeat there will likely come a time in the future when the solutions of the socialist are superior.
References:
Eigen, M., & Schuster, P. (1979). The Hypercycle: A Principle of Natural Self-Organization. Springer-Verlag.
Ochoa G., Harvey I, Buxton, H. Optimal Mutation Rates and Selection Pressure in Genetic Algorithms. Proc. Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2000
Clune J, Misevic D, Ofria C, Lenski RE, Elena SF, Sanjuán R. Natural Selection Fails to Optimize Mutation Rates for Long-Term Adaptation on Rugged Fitness Landscapes. PLOS September 26, 2008
Edit: I wanted to post the conclusion achieved in another thread regarding how the above thoughts on socialism fit in with the economic theory discussed upthread
Is a Madmax outcome coming before 2020? Thus do we need anonymityI posit that socialism is both inevitable and necessary.
I posit socialism is a relic that will no longer be needed
We have both thesis and antithesis. Lets see if synthesis can be achieved.
I agree with your economic analysis above.
We also agree that failure to converge to an optima will occur if a dynamic system is entirely unconstrained.
You state that socialism cannot provide this constraint because of the power vacuum. You likewise argue that for similar reasons socialism cannot be used to smooth the fitness curve.
However, I contend that you have already proposed a working solution to the power vacuum (anonymous cryptocurrency). The iron law of political economics aka power vacuum breaks down once governments lose the ability to debase the currency.
In a post fiat Knowledge Era government would be forced to live on a fixed income (taxation of the physical economy). Government can try to increase taxes on the physical economy but this would be self limiting once the ability to debase the currency is lost. Socialism would thus be limited in size to a portion of the physical economy. With the power vacuum solved socialism is freed to play its proper role of required constraint on the dynamic system and smoothing of the fitness curve.
Nothing in your analysis presented so far demonstrates that the physical economy must shrink in absolute size. You have only shown that it must progressively shrink in relative size. It is entirely possible that both the physical economy and the resources consumed by socialism will continuously grow while simultaneously fading into insignificance.
If you argue for the complete death of socialism then some other model/social contract will be needed to provide our required constraint. Any system developed is likely to look a lot like socialism.
As this is your fundamental insight we are exploring it is only polite not to claim the last word. I will now bow out and leave it to you.
CoinCube, excellent summary. We are now entirely in agreement.
However, note it appears that the socialism will attempt to overshoot before it stabilizes in diminishing role. I don't know if anonymity will rise sufficiently fast enough to provide extensive relief from (and thus limit) this overshoot.
I recently had the epipheny upthread (see quote below) that the
coming world government and world currency are a way to increase the economy-of-scale of the diminishing socialism component, so it can survive and be more efficient. This insight is similar to the
logic I applied in 2010 to predict the European Union would not disintegrate. Note the developing world is still predominately physical (not knowledge) economies.
