Featuring Bentham’s Bulldog (a.k.a. Matthew Adelstein). While mostly not about prediction markets, I still think this was a super interesting discussion that many Supercycle readers will enjoy. A special focus on alternative forms of governance. Transcript: [00:00:10] All right, there you go. So, welcome to the podcast. We have Bentham’s Bulldog today, who’s a very prolific writer in the effective altruism and rationalism circles, who’s been [00:00:24] writing for a long time about a wide variety of different topics. I recently read your post on some fun facts about you, and I saw your writing from when you were around my age, [00:00:40] 13 and 14, about libertarianism. Yeah. Which is pretty interesting. So, the first thing I wanted to ask you is, when you were about my age, what was your argument, what was your [00:00:56] general worldview regarding libertarianism, and why has that changed? As you’ve gotten older. So, when I was your age, not a sentence I say very often, or sentence fragment, I [00:01:09] guess. So, yeah, I was quite politically libertarian. I think my views ended up oscillating somewhere between the view that basically the government should only provide [00:01:21] for police, military, and courts, and a small number of other functions, and the view that they should do that, and then also provide a relatively minimal welfare system. [00:01:33] So, now, the things that convinced me of that, I mean, I guess it was a few things. One of them was, I do think I pretty early on got a sense of the amazing efficiency of the free [00:01:44] market, where it turns out that, you know, having a free market system is a very efficient way of allocating goods and services. And so, and then you look at many government [00:01:53] policies that are imposed, and they each have their own distortive effects on the free market. So, you know, the minimum wage was one thing that I wrote about, where, like, it [00:02:03] just, if you impose a minimum wage of $15 an hour, then insofar as people’s labor is less valuable to their employer than $15 an hour, then they simply won’t be hired. And so, then [00:02:14] it seems like you have all these policies that have fairly severe distortive effects. Okay, so that was kind of one class of considerations that I found moving. Another class [00:02:23] of considerations that moved me a lot was just appreciating how the kind of magic of economic growth, where, I mean, if you have 3% economic growth, the GDP will double in [00:02:34] about 23 years. If you have 2% economic growth, it’ll take like 35 years to double. And if you have 1% economic growth, it’ll take about 70 years to double. So, with respect to GDP [00:02:45] growth, even efforts that had fairly small impacts on the GDP really, really compound over time and lead to just massively different, massive differences in quality of life. So, [00:03:04] yeah, I guess in terms of what changed my worldview on this topic, it’s so, I mean, one thing was, there were some of my arguments that I came to appreciate. So, I mean, one [00:03:17] thing is, in lots of cases, my worldview hasn’t changed that much. I’m still more libertarian than the average member of the general public. I still, like, there are lots [00:03:27] of particular solutions that libertarians are fond of to problems that I generally support as well. So, for example, I’m a lot less supportive of regulation on pollution and a lot [00:03:37] more supportive on Pigouvian taxation, where you impose taxes on negative externalities. [00:03:44] So, I don’t know that I’ve changed, I mean, well, I’ve changed a reasonable amount, but I haven’t changed a ton. I guess in some cases, I came to appreciate that my arguments were [00:03:54] bad. So, I think, for example, I think I misunderstood the effects of the minimum wage, where the minimum wage, it’s true that it produces distortive effects, but it also [00:04:03] produces wage increases. And then it’s just an empirical question, which one is more significant? And it’s not obvious to me, I mean, I think the optimal policy would not [00:04:12] include a minimum wage because of the distortive effects, and there are ways of achieving the same ends without the distortive effects. But it’s not obvious whether imposing a [00:04:22] minimum wage at the margins is good or bad, given that it has both distributive effects, which are desirable, and has distortive effects, which are undesirable. So, I realized I [00:04:31] was wrong about some particular things. There were some cases where, you know, you sort of, you try to estimate how much, how much distortion there would be from modest tax [00:04:44] increases. And it seems like, well, it will have some effect on dampening wages. It won’t be enormous. And so then, if you get sort of a lot of distribution without that much [00:04:52] distortion, then it kind of begins to look like redistributing taxes is a fairly good bet. There were some other things where, for example, with respect to health care, I mean, I [00:05:07] think I’m broadly in favor of something Obamacare-ish. Because, I mean, in a civil society, we basically can’t, we don’t want to have it be the case that people are, like, [00:05:17] going into the hospital, and then they’re just not being treated, you know, for a bullet wound, even if they don’t have insurance. And so then, the system that you incentivize if [00:05:25] you don’t have people buy-in, is you incentivize people to, like, not get health insurance, and then they get treated for free if they get really sick, and then they have [00:05:35] an incentive not to get preventative care. And it’s like, this doesn’t seem like a great system. So I became more sympathetic to something Obamacare-ish. [00:05:47] And then there was one other, I guess there was some kind of major respect in which my political sensibilities changed, which didn’t necessarily change my view on any particular [00:05:58] issue, but it changed my view on, like, kind of my ideology a bit more broadly, where, when I was a libertarian, I kind of thought of the world, like, like, I thought of the [00:06:11] consequential errors that are made as much more being about, sort of, mistakes that lead to inefficiency, rather than, kind of, serious moral errors. So, you know, I would think [00:06:24] of, like, you know, the really severe cases of errors that we’re making are, like, we have, you know, burdensome land regulation that makes it hard to build houses, and then [00:06:34] this drives up the price of housing. I mean, I still believe that. I think that’s really bad policy. You know, I’m a big yinni. But it ended up, over time, you know, reading about [00:06:46] factory farming and existential threats and so on, seeming like many of the most serious problems, errors that we make as a society, are distinctly moral and distinct, and come [00:06:55] from neglecting the interests of large classes of entities. And so then, at the, so then if you’re deciding between political parties, then if you think the Democratic Party is [00:07:07] sort of more supportive of these entities, and the libertarians, they might be better economically, but then they’re worse on these most important issues. So, for example, they [00:07:17] would probably, on average, be less supportive of animal welfare laws. They’re, in general, less supportive of foreign aid, which I think is a really, really good thing. [00:07:24] They’re less supportive of cases where U.S. intervention can do a lot of good. Then it began to seem like my worldview was increasingly unward from libertarianism. So, sorry, [00:07:34] that was a kind of long answer, but... No, no, no, don’t worry about it. What do you think about, specifically, like, Brian Kaplan’s views on anarcho-capitalism, and kind of that we [00:07:45] should be basically just privatizing all public government services, just because, as you were saying, that the free market is a lot more efficient in that regard? [00:08:02] But I guess, I mean, so I’m not an anarcho-capitalist for kind of a number of reasons. So one of them is just, I don’t think that the optimal level... So I think anarcho-capitalism [00:08:10] starts to look a lot more plausible as being the kind of government or absence of government that we want if you think that the optimal size of government is extremely [00:08:20] small. So if you’re, like, a minarchist, and then you realize that we can shift, that we can accomplish most of the things that the government does, without needing to... [00:08:37] That we can sort of... That sort of most of the things that the government does, you might be able to do without a government through private security firms, this... It starts to [00:08:50] seem more plausible that it could do that. But insofar as you think the optimal size of the government is actually pretty large. Like, we want a government with an expansive [00:08:59] welfare state. We want a government with... That, you know, ensures that when people are sick and when people are old, they’re adequately taken care of. Then, certainly, you won’t [00:09:11] get that. So I don’t think I’m sort of the target audience for anarcho-capitalism. Then, with respect to the claim that basically... So, you know, the... So I haven’t read as much [00:09:24] of what Brian Kaplan said on the matter. I’ve read David Friedman’s book, The Machinery of Freedom. It’s been a bunch of years. I think I was around your age, in fact, when I read [00:09:33] it. So, what David Friedman says is basically that what you’d get is you’d get people being incentivized to purchase private security firms. And then they would... And then you [00:09:50] wouldn’t get the private security firms fighting because violence is costly. So they would have an incentive to work out optimal deals. And they’d have an incentive. And then you’d [00:10:02] have th
