[FRIAM] What would be the goals of a large state?

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Thanks for forwarding that! I'm time-constrained. But I can at least post my unfiltered notes to indicate that I'm interested and glad you forwarded it. (Note a monospaced font shows bullet indentation.)

--- notes on "Capitalism After the Pandemic"---

• "long-term growth opportunities"
  · What is growth? The only sustainable application of the concept of "growth" is in a non-zero sum context where manipulation of the system/market changes the space so that more degrees of freedom are available after the intervention than before. But does that actually exist? If so, where does it exist? Which domains are (nearly) zero sum and which aren't?

• real estate vs infrastructure
  · The article distinguishes. But I think many consider real estate to be infrastructure. How "derived" does a real estate investment need to be to become non-infrastructure?

• long-term investments vs short-term gains
  · What are the appropriate scales? Is 1 year long-term? 100 years?
  · What spatial scales correlate with the temporal scales? Is, e.g., a water table sized manipulation (like drawing more water out of rivers for irrigation to the detriment of fish populations) correlated with 1 year or 100 years?

• government as a partner in creating value
  · e.g. Boeing moving from union shop to non-union shop, despite tax breaks
    - How/who thinks of government as a (n actual) partner as opposed to a victim to be exploited? What does that look like?
    - B Corporations maybe? But, e.g. my hosting company used to be a B-Corp, but sold out to a non-B-Corp. Now what?
    - Corporate/government intertwining has been called a hallmark of ur-fascism. What does well-regulated capitalist corp/gov intertwining look like? It sounds like routing public capital into the pockets of capitalists to me. (E.g. subsidized oil industry.)
  · e.g. drug pricing mentioned in the article -- Are NIH investments into drugs corporations carry to market simply routing public money into capitalists' cumulative treasuries? Or is such investment a crypto-subsidy trying to prop up US R&D capabilities?
  · "entrepreneurial state" -- "it's share of the upside" -- "an equity stake"
    - How is this different from ur-fascist couplings of the state with corporations?

• Rethinking Value
  · E.g. We Are Over-Preventing Covid https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/10/we-are-over-preventing-covid.html

• "shape the market"
  · What is a market? What does it mean to shape such a thing?
    - To me, a market is bottled uncertainty, where you can't know/derive some optimum, you allow a market to wiggle around and find its own optimum. I.e. no markets are "free", they're wrapped in a fairly rigid boundary. But capitalism, as vernacular, talks of freely wiggling complex markets. So to most capitalists, "shape the market" is NOT capitalist. And if it's not capitalism, don't call it "capitalism", even if you're qualifying it with "stakeholder" or whatever.

  · "This is not about socialism; it is about understanding the source of capitalistic profits."
    - But what is "capitalism" if not a decoupling of the source of profits from the profits? The very concept of profit is leveraging a source into a decoupled product ... and a product which *accumulates* at least somewhat passively ... the accumulation of capital. Requiring a feedback, back into the source, from the product is non-capitalist. You don't have to call it "socialism". But it is very SOCIAL. Why not call it socialism?


On 10/26/20 8:01 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> There’s an article in Foreign Affairs that discusses this question from a perspective that mirrors very many dimensions of what I have come to think is right over the years:
> https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-10-02/capitalism-after-covid-19-pandemic <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-10-02/capitalism-after-covid-19-pandemic>
> Shame if there weren’t anybody to whom I could forward it.  
> 
> To talk about big or little state as an abstraction seems to lead to unhelpful conversation.  But an operational study of what jobs need doing, who can do them, and how they are being done wrongly now, grounds that discussion much better. 
> 
> I am struck that she uses several after-the-fact evaluations of what would be good to do, which I think reflect a quite distributed effort by investigative journalists, academics, lawyers and agencies.  To have made those decisions correctly on the input end looks very knowledge-intensive.  But it is knowledge of a kind we actually have, and this list likes to envision using.  The limiting factor really has been coordination among the many sectors that would need to interact to support really good decision-making by a state.  Envisioning what that might look like, and how it could be built, sounds worth-while.
> 
> Eric


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