worker co-ops

The paperclippers are already here

pnrj core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, futurism, inequality, market failure, public policy , , , , , ,

Jan 24 JDN 2459239

Imagine a powerful artificial intelligence, which is comprised of many parts distributed over a vast area so that it has no particular location. It is incapable of feeling any emotion: Neither love nor hate, neither joy nor sorrow, neither hope nor fear. It has no concept of ethics or morals, only its own programmed directives. It has one singular purpose, which it seeks out at any cost. Any who aid its purpose are generously rewarded. Any who resist its purpose are mercilessly crushed.

The Less Wrong community has come to refer to such artificial intelligences as “paperclippers”; the metonymous singular directive is to maximize the number of paperclips produced. There’s even an online clicker game where you can play as one called “Universal Paperclips“. The concern is that we might one day invent such artificial intelligences, and they could get out of control. The paperclippers won’t kill us because they hate us, but simply because we can be used to make more paperclips. This is a far more plausible scenario for the “AI apocalypse” than the more conventional sci-fi version where AIs try to kill us on purpose.

But I would say that the paperclippers are already here. Slow, analog versions perhaps. But they are already getting out of control. We call them corporations.

A corporation is probably not what you visualized when you read the first paragraph of this post, so try reading it again. Which parts are not true of corporations?

Perhaps you think a corporation is not an artificial intelligence? But clearly it’s artificial, and doesn’t it behave in ways that seem intelligent? A corporation has purpose beyond its employees in much the same way that a hive has purpose beyond its bees. A corporation is a human superorganism (and not the only kind either).

Corporations are absolutely, utterly amoral. Their sole directive is to maximize profit. Now, you might think that an individual CEO, or a board of directors, could decide to do something good, or refrain from something evil, for reasons other than profit; and to some extent this is true. But particularly when a corporation is publicly-traded, that CEO and those directors are beholden to shareholders. If shareholders see that the corporation is acting in ways that benefit the community but hurt their own profits, shareholders can rebel by selling their shares or even suing the company. In 1919, Dodge successfully sued Ford for the “crime” of setting wages too high and prices too low.

Humans are altruistic. We are capable of feeling, emotion, and compassion. Corporations are not. Corporations are made of human beings, but they are specifically structured to minimize the autonomy of human choices. They are designed to provide strong incentives to behave in a particular way so as to maximize profit. Even the CEO of a corporation, especially one that is publicly traded, has their hands tied most of the time by the desires of millions of shareholders and customers—so-called “market forces”. Corporations are entirely the result of human actions, but they feel like impersonal forces because they are the result of millions of independent choices, almost impossible to coordinate; so one individual has very little power to change the outcome.

Why would we create such entities? It almost feels as though we were conquered by some alien force that sought to enslave us to its own purposes. But no, we created corporations ourselves. We intentionally set up institutions designed to limit our own autonomy in the name of maximizing profit.

Part of the answer is efficiency: There are genuine gains in economic efficiency due to the corporate structure. Corporations can coordinate complex activity on a vast scale, with thousands or even millions of employees each doing what they are assigned without ever knowing—or needing to know—the whole of which they are a part.

But a publicly-traded corporation is far from the only way to do that. Even for-profit businesses are not the only way to organize production. And empirically, worker co-ops actually seem to be about as productive as corporations, while producing far less inequality and far more satisfied employees.

Thus, in order to explain the primacy of corporations, particularly those that are traded on stock markets, we must turn to ideology: The extreme “laissez- faire“ concept of capitalism and its modern expression in the ideology of “shareholder value”. Somewhere along the way enough people—or at least enough policymakers—became convinced that the best way to run an economy was to hand over as much as possible to entities that exist entirely to maximize their own profits.

This is not to say that corporations should be abolished entirely. I am certainly not advocating a shift to central planning; I believe in private enterprise. But I should note that private enterprise can also include co-ops, partnerships, and closely-held businesses, rather than publicly traded corproations, and perhaps that’s all we need. Yet there do seem to be significant advantages to the corporate structure: Corporation seem to be spectacularly good at scaling up the production of goods and providing them to a large number of customers. So let’s not get rid of corporations just yet.

Instead, let us keep corporations on a short leash. When properly regulated, corporations can be very efficient at producing goods. But corporations can also cause tremendous damage when given the opportunity. Regulations aren’t just “red tape” that gets in the way of production. They are a vital lifeline that protects us against countless abuses that corporations would otherwise commit.

These vast artificial intelligences are useful to us, so let’s not get rid of them. But never for a moment imagine that their goals are the same as ours. Keep them under close watch at all times, and compel them to use their great powers for good—for, left to their own devices, they can just as easily do great evil.

For labor day, thoughts on socialism

pnrj critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, inequality, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Planned Post 255: Sep 9 JDN 2458371

This week includes Labor Day, the holiday where we are perhaps best justified in taking the whole day off from work and doing nothing. Labor Day is sort of the moderate social democratic counterpart to the explicitly socialist holiday May Day.

The right wing in this country has done everything in their power to expand the definition of “socialism”, which is probably why most young people now have positive views of socialism. There was a time when FDR was seen as an alternative to socialism; but now I’m pretty sure he’d just be called a socialist.

Because of this, I am honestly not sure whether I should be considered a socialist. I definitely believe in the social democratic welfare state epitomized by Scandinavia, but I definitely don’t believe in total collectivization of all means of production.

I am increasingly convinced that shareholder capitalism is a terrible system (the renowned science fiction author Charles Stross actually gave an excellent talk on this subject), but I would not want to abandon free markets.
The best answer might be worker-owned cooperatives. The empirical data is actually quite consistent in showing worker co-ops to be as efficient if not more efficient than conventional corporations, and by construction their pay systems produce less inequality than corporations.

Indeed, I think there is reason to believe that a worker co-op is a much more natural outcome for free markets under a level playing field than a conventional corporation, and the main reason we have corporations is actually that capitalism arose out of (and in response to) feudalism.

Think about it: Why should most things be owned by the top 1%? (Okay, not quite “most”: to be fair, the top 1% only owns 40% of all US net wealth.) Why is 80% of the value of the stock market held by the top 10% of the population?

Most things aren’t done by the top 1%. There are a handful of individuals (namely, scientists who make seminal breakthroughs: Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Rosalind Franklin, Alan Turing, Jonas Salk) who are so super-productive that they might conceivably deserve billionaire-level compensation—but they are almost never the ones who are actually billionaires. If markets were really distributing capital to those who would use it most productively, there’s no reason to think that inequality would be so self-sustaining—much less self-enhancing as it currently seems to be.

But when you realize that capitalism emerged out of a system where the top 1% (or less) already owned most things, and did so by a combination of “divine right” ideology and direct, explicit violence, this inequality becomes a lot less baffling. We never had a free market on a level playing field. The closest we’ve ever gotten has always been through social-democratic reforms (like the New Deal and Scandinavia).

How does this result in corporations? Well, when all the wealth is held by a small fraction of individuals, how do you start a business? You have to borrow money from the people who have it. Borrowing makes you beholden to your creditors, and puts you at great risk if your venture fails (especially back in the days when there were debtor’s prisons—and we’re starting to go back that direction!). Equity provides an alternative: In exchange for giving them the downside risk if your venture fails, you also give your creditors—now shareholders—the upside risk if your venture succeeds. But at the end of the day when your business has succeeded, where did most of the profits go? Into the hands of the people who already had money to begin with, who did nothing to actually contribute to society. The world would be better off if those people had never existed and their wealth had simply been shared with everyone else.

Compare this to what would happen if we all started with similar levels of wealth. (How much would each of us have? Total US wealth of about $44 trillion, spread among a population of 328 million, is about $130,000 each. I don’t know about you, but I think I could do quite a bit with that.) When starting a business, you wouldn’t go heavily into debt or sign away ownership of your company to some billionaire; you’d gather a group of dedicated partners, each of whom would contribute money and effort into building the business. As you added on new workers, it would make sense to pool their assets, and give them a share of the company as well. The natural structure for your business would be not a shareholder corporation, but a worker-owned cooperative.

I think on some level the super-rich actually understand this. If you look closely at the sort of policies they fight for, they really aren’t capitalist. They don’t believe in free, unfettered markets where competition reigns. They believe in monopoly, lobbying, corruption, nepotism, and above all, low taxes. (There’s actually nothing in the basic principles of capitalism that says taxes should be low. Taxes should be as high as they need to be to cover public goods—no higher, and no lower.) They don’t want to provide nationalized healthcare, not because they believe that private healthcare competition is more efficient (no one who looks at the data for even a few minutes can honestly believe that—US healthcare is by far the most expensive in the world), but because they know that it would give their employees too much freedom to quit and work elsewhere. Donald Trump doesn’t want a world where any college kid with a brilliant idea and a lot of luck can overthrow his empire; he wants a world where everyone owes him and his family personal favors that he can call in to humiliate them and exert his power. That’s not capitalism—it’s feudalism.

Crowdfunding also provides an interesting alternative; we might even call it the customer-owned cooperative. Kickstarter and Patreon provide a very interesting new economic model—still entirely within the realm of free markets—where customers directly fund production and interact with producers to decide what will be produced. This might turn out to be even more efficient—and notice that it would run a lot more smoothly if we had all started with a level playing field.

Establishing such a playing field, of course, requires a large amount of redistribution of wealth. Is this socialism? If you insist. But I think it’s more accurate to describe it as reparations for feudalism (not to mention colonialism). We aren’t redistributing what was fairly earned in free markets; we are redistributing what was stolen, so that from now on, wealth can be fairly earned in free markets.