Here are some costs and risks of regulation. Regulation usually imposes costs of monitoring, enforcement, and administration. These costs tend to be larger for activities that are harder to observe, and when there are not clear bright lines separating desired from undesirable behavior. When regulation intends to discourage or encourage some activities, it usually accidentally discourages and encourages other nearby activities. Regulation is usually slow in adapting to changing conditions, and thus tends to discourage unforeseen innovation in activities. Most of these costs rise as variance in the activity context rises, and as regulators know less about typical details; these costs are usually less for more local regulation.

Regulator agencies are often captured by the industries that they regulate, and use regulations to prevent entry and competition. Regulation are also often captured to benefit some groups at the expense of others in society. Stronger regulation creates stronger desires to "rent-seek" by controlling the political process that determines regulation. With an open political system, regulation that tries to discourage competition in activities ends up creating stronger competition to control the political process. These problems tend to be less the more citizens know about activities and regulations, and the more easily they can influence the political process. So such problems tend to be less at the more local level.

There are many different scales of governments that could run regulation, from community to city to region to nation to world. There are many kinds of regulation of behavior. Some behaviors are regulated by custom and reputation. Some are regulated by liability law. Some are regulated by creating and enforcing property rights, such as to support emissions trading. Some are regulated by explicit rules constraining acceptable behavior. Sometimes governments endorse private regulatory bodies, such as medical licensing boards or bond rating organizations. Some industries self-regulate under the threat of possible government intervention. Sometimes local governments regulate and then try to coordinate regulations on larger scales.

I hope this makes it clearer why strong regulation directly by global governments is an extreme solution, and thus why it seems surprising that you always endorse this solution for all of the long list of problems you consider, These include using up finite resources, competition provoking conflict, wasteful competition, splintering of our descendants into competing factions, unequal price-based availability of innovations, and the formation of elites. Given the high costs of the regulation you favor, and the vagueness of these problems, it seems far from obvious that weaker, more local, less formal, and less governmental regulation would not be better. It isn't even obvious to me that all of these are really problems at all; we might do better to just live with them.

Fairly standard points, and I have tried to avoid broadly speaking making any particular arguments about economic socialism for these reasons, namely to avoid being bogged down.

Rent-seeking is a real issue in general, but I hope it's clear that there is relatively little scope for this for institutions designed predominantly to avoid international war. Institutions such as the UN and EU may be inefficient and sometimes act in perverse ways, but by and large they are not astonishingly expensive and have (arguably, but I will side with Pinker on this) largely prevented great power war for more than half a century. I think this is a completely different topic from economic regulation and I hope that you'll agree that at least as a minimum, institutions such as these both necessary and desirable for international peace. I'm not advocating North Korea here, I'm advocating an expansion of the scope of the existing, successful institutions in the prevention of global commons risks. The government doesn't have to control your thoughts, heaven forbid - but they do have to restrain you from nuclear war or unilateral geoengineering!

As for the self-regulation of economic activity, it seems to fly directly in the face of evidence to claim that letting individuals and corporations regulate themselves with regard to global risks has ever been effective in any way at all. The current crisis with regard to global warming, and long-term energy supply, illustrates this extremely well and it is very hard to see how anything other than international treaty can regulate such activities. Moreover on inequality, this is precisely and definitively what unregulated capitalism creates, and the current Piketty debate seems all the more remarkable because we've known this for two centuries now. If you don't want to create transhumanist inequalities, then wholly unrestrained markets are clearly a problem.

I'm very careful to avoid claiming anything about domestic politics because this really isn't the time or place and is a distraction from the topic of discussion. But in a broad sense, surely you agree that there is at least some minimal set of areas in which regulation is necessary beyond the familiar property rights. Existential threats such as great power war, resource depletion and climate change are things that we know full well cannot be addressed solely in terms of free markets, and regardless of the underlying economic system special consideration has to be given to these dangers as requiring international, independent oversight with the powers to police this.

I've tried to point out that there spectrums of possible regulation, varying in locality, formality, etc., and variations among problems in the relative costs of regulation, relative to benefits. This was to get you to see how extreme was your position to use explicit strong global regulation to deal with all the varied problems that concern you.

But instead of addressing this point, you instead ask me if I'm proposing an opposite extreme of no regulation whatsoever. For the record NO, but I don't see how anything I said could be construed to suggest that. I was arguing for considering points between the two extremes.

On rent-seeking, there has been quite a lot of variation in the type and strength of international response to activities that can be accused of risking international war. It isn't at all obvious to me that there hasn't been a lot of rent-seeking efforts to influence the actual responses within this range of variation.

Dear Mr. Pope,

You have written a terrific essay and the fact that so few of your fellow essayists have failed to rate it is criminal negligence at its most loathsome level.

With the highest of regards,

Joe Fisher

    10 days later

    Hi Benjamin,

    I enjoyed your essay! I think the basic framing and focus is a good one, and would read in-depth analyses about any of the things you touch on. A couple comments:

    First, do you have any information about how likely climate change is to be permanently civilization-hampering? It hadn't seemed to me to be a very serious concern, so I'm curious if you have any more information about it.

    Second, on the "expanding colonization front": have you read Armstrong and Sandberg's "Eternity in Six Hours" paper? It seems to me that their analysis means that Darwinian frontier dynamics are less likely than was previously thought. In any case, I think it's a useful paper if you're interested in that topic.

    Best,

    Daniel

      Hi Daniel,

      Climate change as present mid-range risks have it might not be, but very rapid climate change, widespread loss of ecosystem complexity, and simultaneous depletion of fossil fuels might leave a civilization both vulnerable to collapse, and lacking crucial resources on ~ million year timescales to resume its development after such a collapse. I refer in particular to Ian Morris' arguments that there is a logistic limit on the size and complexity of a non-industrial society, and that fossil fuels were the resource that helped Britain and then the world escape this. Without this puppy fat, and with a significantly degraded environment, it may be the case that the best we can do is achieve the Roman/Song Dynasty/Elizabethan scale of complexity and technology.

      Notwithstanding Hanson's evident dislike of my arguments, I am quite convinced by at least one of his - that expansion is likely to favour a Darwinian frontier. I find it a bit hard to see why the high-fanout scenario posed by Stuart and Anders would get past internal factional disagreement in the launch phase - it really is an awful lot of effort to get going! - and I struggle to see such scenarios happening at least for humans. I do like the Fermi explanation it gives, though, so maybe there's more to it - perhaps there is some feature of economies in the space-exploration phase that does stabilize it against the perturbations that would derail such a venture; I just can't think of it at the moment.

      Cheers,

      Ben

      I really enjoyed your essay, Benjamin. I touch on many of the same themes in my own essay and am in broad agreement with your view of the major issues. I think you are right to worry that what we do and decide now may have far-reaching implications for our future.

      I'm personally not much worried that we are coming to a liberal capitalist end of history. Fukuyama is problematic for a host of empirical and philosophic reasons. Among other things Fukuyama's view--after Hegel--was that meaningful conflict was disappearing because inequality was on the verge of being eliminated. That's hard to square with Piketty's data.

      I am also not as convinced as many people that the rapid technology development of the last few hundred years represents the bottom of an indefinitely increasing exponential curve rather than a the product of a temporary phase transition (I have written about this some here if you are interested).

      The issues you expertly discuss here are precisely the kinds of issues we need to think about before it becomes too late. Good luck in the contest, Benjamin--I hope your essay does well.

      Best,

      Robert de Neufville

        Benjamin - Thanks for the well-written essay. I very much enjoyed the framing of the issues, but was disappointed with the final direction. If I understand your conclusion, you are arguing for some form of "regulatory framework imposed by a very powerful international organization or unilaterally by a military superpower", but with an eye towards "self-policed norms... imposed not merely as law but as custom." This seems like a frightening direction given the power already inherent in our institutions. Does this not risk the very stagnation / entrenchment of institutions that your essay eloquently describes?

        I think we need to look harder at the evolutionary process for social norms as the means by which we frame a "fitness landscape" for our institutions. That is the jist of my essay - The Tip of the Spear, which I invite you to read.

        Thanks for your attention - George

        and I would appreciate any commentsThere may be a different answer in the concept of "self-regulation

          21 days later

          Hi Benjamin,

          A very wide ranging essay, that emphasises the importance of institutions, universities, states, religions and languages... the many rudders for steering to the future.

          The core concept of my essay on education, was stimulated by the history of Scotland and the enlightenment, which you touched upon.

          Nice work, high marks,

          Don Limuti

          George,

          I hoped I had been clearer - I am quite in favour of liberal institutions! I do feel that institutions which prevent violent conflict or economic developments leading to irreversible damage, however, are not inconsistent with this. A world free from all regulation is a world where freedoms for most people are dependent on a few powerful lobbies, of course. When stakes are so high - where conflict could literally destroy humanity - then the internationalization and rigid imposition of deterrents against war are the only things that can preserve a liberal society in other respects, let alone an open future.

          Is that convincing?

          Kind regards,

          Ben

          I think you're right in both important respects - that inequality is a huge problem and rising (I am convinced by Piketty's arguments). The 'end of history' may not be a liberal capitalist one - but an illiberal capitalist one, in which no states or institutions ever become powerful enough to challenge capital oligarchy. This is wild speculation, however!

          The prospect of secular stagnation is a real blow to the idea of permanent exponential growth - if you do look at what has happened over the last few hundred years, the expansion of energy resources and the violent conquest of frontiers by industrial-capitalist states has driven a lot of this explosive growth. When we do reach a point of saturation of energy availability, it may be the case that however advanced new technologies become, they do not nevertheless drive the kind of economic rates of change that the last two centuries have seen.

          I do nevertheless think it will be plausible that we will attain enough control of energy and mineral resources and attendant technologies that space colonization and posthumanism for a great many people are realistic possibilities, and it is very important that we safeguard these and make sure they happen in the way we want them to!

          I do enjoy your blog and I thank you for your kind comments.

          Cheers,

          Ben

          a month later

          Hello Benjamin,

          I posted an article giving some publicity to your piece:

          http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/searle20140705

          All the best!

          Rick Searle

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