Hal Finney wrote:
>I do think that libertarianism is a natural political philosophy
>for an extropian to adopt. Extropians believe in removing limits,
>and libertarianism is that philosophy which puts the fewest limits on
>people's actions.
>Earlier I posed questions about how modern liberalism could coexist with
>an extropian philosophy. What is the meaning of a minimum wage law,
>when there is a continuum of intelligences from AI through transhuman?
>How can the basic idea of social equality exist in a world where some
>beings think millions of times faster than others? It seems to me that
>a laissez faire attitude will work best in the future we anticipate.
>... Seriously, I can't understand how you can accept the
>massive changes which the concepts above entail, while still being
>married to modern social government concepts.
The more things change, the more value we get from abstract and general,
as opposed to context-dependent and specialized, approaches.
In the quote above, I think Hal is trying to contrast a general
libertarian approach with fragile context-dependence "social government
concepts". There is some truth in this, but I think less than Hal
admits. Axiomatic (e.g. Randroid) libertarian advice often seems to me
to be rather fragile, being tied to notions of physical property and
autonomous independent humans. On the other side, many people with
socialist sympathies often base their policy proposals on relatively
general theories which can adapt quite a bit to changing circumstances.
I prefer to use standard economic theory for understanding future
societies, including politics. When things will change just a little,
then simple trend analysis or analogies to similar cases, such as is
popular in much policy analysis, will work reasonably well. When
things change a bit more, intuitive informal theory of the sort common
in the social sciences can still work reasonably well. But when things
change a lot, trends don't continue and informal categories break down,
and only the most abstract and general theory remains a reliable guide.
Standard economic theory and Paretian policy analysis is very general
and can speak to the future scenarios of interest to us. It often,
but far from always, supports the sort of policy conclusions that
libertarians come to. When they disagree, I tend to go with economic
theory.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:39:10 MDT