Increments Ben Chugg and Vaden Masrani

Have you ever wanted to be more rich? Have you considered just working a bit harder? Welcome to part III of our libertarian series, where we discuss Part B: Social Issues of Scott Alexander's Anti-Libertarian FAQ, which critiques the libertarian view that if you're rich, you deserve it, and if you're poor, well, you deserve that too. As always, the estimable Bruce Nielson (@bnielson) helps guide is through the thorny wicket of libertarian thought.


We discuss


Do the poor deserve to be poor? Waddabout the rich?
Is dogmatism ever a good thing?
Is social mobility determined in part by parental wealth?
Is this due to genetics, culture, upbringing or something else?
The chances of escaping the lower class
Does government regulation increase social mobility?
Why progressive taxation makes sense


References


David Friedman's response
Bruce's Theory Of Anything podcast
Popperian/Deutschian FB group: Many Worlds of David Deutsch
On dogmatism:


Bruce's episode: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/episodes/Episode-51-Was-Karl-Popper-Dogmatic-e1obs0m/a-a2hb64g
Ben's blog post: https://benchugg.com/writing/dogmatism/

Vaden's blog posts on Libertarianism:


First: Is Austrian Economics the Best Explanation of Economics?
Second: Can we predict human behaviour? A discussion with Brett Hall



Quotes


The Argument:


Those who work hardest (and smartest) should get the most money. Not only should we not begrudge them that money, but we should thank them for the good they must have done for the world in order to satisfy so many consumers.


People who do not work hard should not get as much money. If they want more money, they should work harder. Getting more money without working harder or smarter is unfair, and indicative of a false sense of entitlement.


Unfortunately, modern liberal society has internalized the opposite principle: that those who work hardest are greedy people who must have stolen from those who work less hard, and that we should distrust them at until they give most of their ill-gotten gains away to others. The “progressive” taxation system as it currently exists serves this purpose.


This way of thinking is not only morally wrong-headed, but economically catastrophic. Leaving wealth in the hands of the rich would “make the pie bigger”, allowing the extra wealth to “trickle down” to the poor naturally.


The Counterargument:


Hard work and intelligence are contributory factors to success, but depending on the way you phrase the question, you find you need other factors to explain between one-half and nine-tenths of the difference in success within the United States; within the world at large the numbers are much higher.


If a poor person can’t keep a job solely because she was lead-poisoned from birth until age 16, is it still fair to blame her for her failure? And is it still so unthinkable to take a little bit of money from everyone who was lucky enough to grow up in an area without lead poisoning, and use it to help her and detoxify her neighborhood?



Socials


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Do your part to increase social mobility by sending your hard-earned money to: incrementspodcast@gmail.com
Special Guest: Bruce Nielson.
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What do you get when you mix nerds and sex research? A deep dive into the world of fetish statistics, men's calibration about women's sexual preferences, and the crazy underground world of financial domination. Stay tuned as Aella walks the boys through the world of gangbangs, camming, OnlyFans, escorting, findom, and even live-tests Vaden's wild hypothesis against her huge, thick, dataset.


We discuss


How to describe what Aella does
Aella's bangin' birthday party
The state of sex research
Conservative and neo-trad pushback and whether Aella is immune from cancellation
Are men calibrated when it comes to predicting women's sexual preferences?
The wild world of findom (financial domination)
Is findom addiction worse than other addictions?
Differences between camming and OnlyFans
Can a fetish ever be considered self-harm?
Plus some live hypothesis testing! Does Vaden's hypothesis survive...?
Aella's forthcoming journal based on Rationalist principles


References from the ep


Aella's good at sex series
Aella's website
Aella's blogpost on Fetish Tabooness vs Popularity
"I spent $3,400 in a single day on financial domination": financial-domination addict James


Clip starts at 12:25

Findom Addicts Anonymous
Fetlife bans Findom
Domme won't let me quit (unethical), addicted to findom, please help | Reddit
I don't feel bad for subs that are addicted to findom.


Findom References

(additional sources used for episode prep that weren't mention in the episode)



Random Men Pay My Bills | BBC Podcast
Interview with a Recovering Paypig - A Financial Domination Addict
FINDOM is not FEMDOM
Confessions of a 'Pay Pig': Why I Give Away Money to Dominant Women I Meet Online
Special Episode on Findoms... | The Kink Perspective Podcast
She Gets Paid Just to Humiliate Her Fans | New York Times


Socials


Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
Help us put heads in toilets and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
Click dem like buttons on youtube


Send us $500 and call us your Queen, you steaming pile of s***: incrementspodcast@gmail.com
Special Guest: Aella.
Support Increments

Back at it again, as we coerce you into listening to Part 2 of our four part series on Libertarianism, with Mr. Bruce Nielson (@bnielson01). In this episode we cover the Economic Issues section of Scott Alexander's (non-aggressive and principled) non-libertarian FAQ, and discuss his four major economic critiques of the libertarian view that free and voluntary trade between consenting, informed, rational individuals is the best possible thing ever, with no downsides at all. Also, can we interest you in buying some wasps?


We discuss


Loose ends from last episode - coercion and the Non-Aggression Principle
What distinguishes a conservative like Bruce from a libertarian?
Externalities
Boycotts and Coordination Problems
Irrational Choices
Lack of Information


References


The Non-libertarian FAQ
Planet Money on the Porcupine Freedom Festival


Vaden's blog posts on Libertarianism / Austrian Economics / Anarcho-Captialism / Whateveryawannacallit


First: Is Austrian Economics the Best Explanation of Economics?
Second: Can we predict human behaviour? A discussion with Brett Hall


Quotes


The Argument:


In a free market, all trade has to be voluntary, so you will never agree to a trade unless it benefits you.


Further, you won’t make a trade unless you think it’s the best possible trade you can make. If you knew you could make a better one, you’d hold out for that. So trades in a free market are not only better than nothing, they’re also the best possible transaction you could make at that time.


Labor is no different from any other commercial transaction in this respect. You won’t agree to a job unless it benefits you more than anything else you can do with your time, and your employer won’t hire you unless it benefits her more than anything else she can do with her money. So a voluntarily agreed labor contract must benefit both parties, and must do so more than any other alternative.


If every trade in a free market benefits both parties, then any time the government tries to restrict trade in some way, it must hurt both parties. Or, to put it another way, you can help someone by giving them more options, but you can’t help them by taking away options. And in a free market, where everyone starts with all options, all the government can do is take options away.


The Counterargument:


This treats the world as a series of producer-consumer dyads instead of as a system in which every transaction affects everyone else. Also, it treats consumers as coherent entities who have specific variables like “utility” and “demand” and know exactly what they are, which doesn’t always work.
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/


What is an externality?


1.1: What is an externality?



An externality is when I make a trade with you, but it has some accidental effect on other people who weren’t involved in the trade.



Suppose for example that I sell my house to an amateur wasp farmer. Only he’s not a very good wasp farmer, so his wasps usually get loose and sting people all over the neighborhood every couple of days.


This trade between the wasp farmer and myself has benefited both of us, but it’s harmed people who weren’t consulted; namely, my neighbors, who are now locked indoors clutching cans of industrial-strength insect repellent. Although the trade was voluntary for both the wasp farmer and myself, it wasn’t voluntary for my neighbors.


Another example of externalities would be a widget factory that spews carcinogenic chemicals into the air. When I trade with the widget factory I’m benefiting – I get widgets – and they’re benefiting – they get money. But the people who breathe in the carcinogenic chemicals weren’t consulted in the trade.


2.3: How do coordination problems justify regulation of ethical business practices?


... Let’s say Wanda’s Widgets has one million customers. Each customer pays it $100 per year, for a total income

Liberty! Freedom! Coercion! Taxes are theft! The State is The Enemy! Bitcoin! Crypto! Down with the central banks! Let's all return to the Gold Standard!


Have you encountered such phrases in the wild? Confused, perhaps, as to why an afternoon beer with a friend become an extended diatribe against John Maynard Kaynes? Us too, which is why we're diving into the ideological source of such views: Libertarianism.


Welcome to Part 1 of a four part series where we, with Bruce Nielson (@bnielson01) as our battle-hardened guide, dive into Scott Alexander's non-libertarian FAQ. Ought George help, or ought George respect the government's property rights? Let's find out.


And make sure to check out Bruce's excellent The Theory Of Anything podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-theory-of-anything/id1503194218


We discuss


Varieties of libertarianism
Why are some libertarians so ideological?
Is taxation theft?
The problem of public goods
"Proprietary communities" and the perfect libertarian society
Why the perfect libertarian society doesn't escape taxation
Are we living in the libertarian utopia right now?
Taxes as membership fees


References


The Non-libertarian FAQ
George ought to help
The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman


Vaden's blog posts on Libertarianism / Austrian Economics / Anarcho-Captialism / Whateveryawannacallit


First: Is Austrian Economics the Best Explanation of Economics?
Second: Can we predict human behaviour? A discussion with Brett Hall


Quotes


0.2: Do you hate libertarianism?
No.


To many people, libertarianism is a reaction against an over-regulated society, and an attempt to spread the word that some seemingly intractable problems can be solved by a hands-off approach. Many libertarians have made excellent arguments for why certain libertarian policies are the best options, and I agree with many of them. I think this kind of libertarianism is a valuable strain of political thought that deserves more attention, and I have no quarrel whatsoever with it and find myself leaning more and more in that direction myself.


However, there’s a certain more aggressive, very American strain of libertarianism with which I do have a quarrel. This is the strain which, rather than analyzing specific policies and often deciding a more laissez-faire approach is best, starts with the tenet that government can do no right and private industry can do no wrong and uses this faith in place of more careful analysis. This faction is not averse to discussing politics, but tends to trot out the same few arguments about why less regulation has to be better. I wish I could blame this all on Ayn Rand, but a lot of it seems to come from people who have never heard of her. I suppose I could just add it to the bottom of the list of things I blame Reagan for.
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/



Socials


Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
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How do you summon libertarians at a party? Finish the punchline and tell us over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com
Special Guest: Bruce Nielson.
Support Increments

Close your eyes, and think of a bright and pristine, clean and immaculately run recycling center, green'r than a giant's thumb. Now think of a dirty, ugly, rotting landfill, stinking in the mid-day sun. Of these two scenarios, which, do you reckon, is worse for the environment?


In this episode, Ben and Vaden attempt to reduce and refute a few reused canards about recycling and refuse, by rereading Rob Wiblin's excellent piece which addresses the aformentioned question: What you think about landfill and recycling is probably totally wrong. Steel yourselves for this one folks, because you may need to paper over arguments with loved ones, trash old opinions, and shatter previous misconceptions.
Check out more of Rob's writing here.


We discuss


The origins of recycling and some of the earliest instances
Energy efficiency of recycling plastics, aluminium, paper, steel, and electronic waste (e-waste)
Why your peanut butter jars and plastic coffee cups are not recyclable
Modern landfills and why they're awesome
How landfills can be used to create energy
Building stuff on top of landfills
Why we're not even close to running out of space for landfills
Economic incentives for recycling vs top-down regulation
The modern recycling movement and its emergence in the 1990s
> - Guiyu, China, where e-waste goes to die.
That a lot of your "recycling" ends up as garbage in the Philippines


Error Correction


Vaden misremembered what Smil wrote regarding four categories of recycling (Metals and Aluminum / Plastics / Paper / Electronic Waste ("e-waste")). He incorrectly quoted Smil as saying these four categories were exhaustive, and represented the four major categories recycling into which the majority of recycled material can be bucketed. This is incorrect- what Smil actually wrote was:



I will devote the rest of this section (and of this chapter) to brief appraisals of the recycling efforts for four materials — two key metals (steel and aluminum) and plastics and paper—and of electronic waste, a category of discarded material that would most benefit from much enhanced rates of recycling.
- Making the Modern World: Materials and De-materialization, Smill, p.179



A list of the top 9 recycled materials can be found here: https://www.rd.com/list/most-recyclable-materials/


Sources / Citations


Share of plastic waste that is recycled, landfilled, incinerated and mismanaged, 2019

Source for the claim that recycling glass is not energy efficient (and thus not necessarily better for the environment than landfilling):



Glass bottles can be more pleasant to drink out of, but they also require more energy to manufacture and recycle. Glass bottles consume 170 to 250 percent more energy and emit 200 to 400 percent more carbon than plastic bottles, due mostly to the heat energy required in the manufacturing process. Of course, if the extra energy required by glass were produced from emissions-free sources, it wouldn’t necessarily matter that glass bottles required more energy to make and move. “If the energy is nuclear power or renewables there should be less of an environmental impact,” notes Figgener.
- Apocalypse Never, Shellenburger, p.66


Cloth bags need to be reused 173 times to be more eco-friendly than a plastic bag:

Source for claim that majority of e-waste ends up in China:



Puckett’s organization partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put 200 geolocating tracking devices inside old computers, TVs and printers. They dropped them off nationwide at donation centers, recyclers and electronic take-back programs — enterprises that advertise themselves as “green,” “sustainable,” “earth friendly” and “environmentally responsible.” ...
About a third of the tracked electronics went overseas — some as far as 12,000 miles. That includes six of the 14 tracker-equipped electronics that Puckett’s group dropped off to be recycled in Washington and Oregon.


The tracke

Vaden has selfishly gone on vacation with his family, leaving beloved listeners to fend for themselves in the wide world of epistemological confusion. To repair some of the damage, we're releasing an episode of The Theory of Anything Podcast from last June in which Vaden contributed to a roundtable discussion on the principle of optimism. Featuring Bruce Nielson, Peter Johansen, Sam Kuypers, Hervé Eulacia, Micah Redding, Bill Rugolsky, and Daniel Buchfink. Enjoy!


From The Theory of Anything Podcast description: Are all evils due to a lack of knowledge? Are all interesting problems soluble? ALL the problems, really?!?! And what exactly is meant by interesting? Also, should “good guys” ignore the precautionary principle, and do they always win? What is the difference between cynicism, pessimism, and skepticism? And why is pessimism so attractive to so many humans?


Socials


Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
Help us solve problems and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
Click dem like buttons on youtube


Which unsolvable problem would you most like to solve? Send your answer via quantum tunneling to incrementspodcast@gmail.com
Special Guests: Bruce Nielson and Sam Kuypers.
Support Increments