Filip Palda's "Pareto's Republic and the New Science of Peace"

The PPE workshop today had Filip Palada presenting his book Pareto's Republic and the New Science of Peace. Palada's main concern is with the process that creates more efficient institutions and he notes that it's not an accident that better institutions seem to be associated with more peaceful states of affairs (not just less war but also less private violence). He noted that secure property rights in an evironment of rule of law are key, but he didn't give an answer as to what factors lead to such a system. Here are some of my thoughts on it.

First of all, Peter Leesom is right that the book should be called The Kaldor-Hicks Republic, as that is the concept of efficiency he seems to be using when he's assessing whether a set of institutions is better than another. This detail aside...

There were lots of discussions about how dictators and their cronies could be compensated such that they would agree to leave (compensation + a changed regime being better than no compensation + the regime). Peter Boettke mentioned that this is virtually impossible to do due to the problem of credible commitment: How would you assure the dictators and their cronies that they would really get to keep the promised goodies after they agree to leave? The amount of money necessary to compensate them for this risk is simply too much. So, the alternative is similar to what has happened in post-communist transitions: the former nomenklatura still maintains some power and the wealth that comes with it.

Of course there's also a different kind of compensation possible: You can tell them, "if you agree to leave, we agree not to kill you". I assume Gadhafi would have been wise to take such a bargain while it was still possible. This hints to what I think is missing in Palada's approach: what ultimately determines the changes in institutions is the power struggle between different actors. Formal institutions can be seen as tools used by those with a position of power to try to secure their position and the associated rents. Culture, while posing some constraints (how much bullying are people willing to take?), is not that important because people adapt to whatever the institutional environment happens to be, i.e. culture changes to reflect what's prudent to do at the individual level within the given institutional setting (more or less e.g. why don't North Koreans have more of a Guns of Brixton mentality, while the Tibetans seem to do). So, if you want to understand the way institutions change you have to track the power struggles and what factors (such as technology or international forces) change the balances of power.

It is often said that violence should be the means of last resort. For example, in the Revolt of the Masses Ortega y Gasset defined the degree of civilization of a society as the number of options or methods available in that society for solving conflicts before resorting to violence. In practice however, violence is usually the means of first resort. The microeconomics of this is something along those lines: if you are much more powerful than me, you face a very strong temptation to just take my stuff or bully me into some sort of exchange that is disadvantageous for me (and with which I wouldn't have agreed under non-threatening conditions). Morality may offer some restrained to the possible bully, but this is not a reliable long-term solution because the immoral have larger gains compared to the moral and thus gradually take over.

Consequently, an environment of (quasi-)voluntary exchanges is the result of a balance of power. Olson's story about the fact that stationary bandits (aka governments) win over roving bandits is along these lines, and this story seems to have a pretty good historical basis (see the 'From Egalitarism to Kleptocracy' chapter in Guns, Germs, and Steel).

I would say that it is even impossible to define what a voluntary exchange is, if the two agents are not of similar power. This is because violence has two uses: (1) one is predation of the powerful over the weak, (2) the other is enforcement of contracts and agreements. If you do me a service based on my promise that I would give you some money (or service) at a later date, what prevents me from abandoning my promise is the credible threat of what would happen to me if I don't deliver my part of the deal. But that threat is credible only if it is made by someone sufficiently more powerful than me (or by the possibility of lost future revenues via some reputation mechanism - like the eBay or Amazon ratings systems). The problem is that, if the deal was made with such a much more powerful agent, what assures us that the deal really was voluntary? After all, it would have been awfully generous of such an agent to restrain himself and not bully me into “agreeing” to a disadvantageous exchange. In other words, if the agreement is between two agents of very unequal power, there is no way to tell whether the powerful agent uses violence for predation or for enforcement. Thus, under such conditions, the very distinction between voluntary and involuntary agreements disappears (at least if you agree that a distinction exists only if it can be measured).

This means that we can talk of voluntary exchanges only when the two parties are of similar power, and there is a third party enforcer (either an agent such as a government or a network such as the reputation networks on eBay or Amazon) who is much stronger than the two. This also means that if the third party enforcer is a specified agent, there can be no real voluntary agreements between a normal agent and this much stronger enforcer. I.e. there is no such thing as a voluntary contract with the government (because there's nothing you can do if the government doesn't comply with its contractual obligations - see the current "debts restructuring" discussions in which private banks lose tons of money as states no longer pay them back - and nothing you can do if the government decides to attach some obligations to you that you don't really like and for which you are not compensated - e.g. mandated health insurance). It also means that there can be no such thing as anarcho-capitalism as it is normally construed – i.e. assuming contracts between normal people and protection agencies much stronger than them (because he who has the power to protect you, also has the power to abuse you, regardless of whether that “protector” is state or private).

So, to answer Palada's dilemma about what can be done to improve the institutional settings and increase peace, we need to focus on the way various power centers constrain each other. This is of course a very old and good idea: the concept of checks-and-balances and of federalism. But what factors lead to better checks and balances and create a larger safe space in which voluntary agreements can happen?

One way to think about it, not necessarily the best, is the Rothbardian theory of history, which assumes there are cycles of power losses due to authorities being taken by surprise by certain technological inventions that (temporarily) empower the weak. E.g. the invention of the printing press undermined the power structure, but eventually the invention was captured by government – the modern bureaucratic state would not have been possible without printing. The industrial revolution and the emergence of cities undermined the power of the land-owning aristocracy, but eventually capitalism morphed into the modern neomercantilist system as the new capitalist elites found the state useful as well. Radio was quickly captured by the state as the EM spectrum was nationalized, and it was effectively used for propaganda by the Nazi and fascist regimes. Now the internet has taken governments by surprise, and they are currently working hard to get back some sort of control (e.g. think SOPA/PIPA and ACTA).

So, from this perspective, the only truly exogenous factor is technology (in the sense that it generates surprises with wide-spread and unpredictable consequences for the existing power structure). Institutions and culture are endogenous: institutions are tools used by the current elites for (attempting) to maintain control and preserve their rents, and culture is more of an effect than a cause (i.e. culture understood from an act utilitarian point of view, and being driven by whatever is prudent for individuals to do in a given context, while somewhat constrained by our biological moral sentiments, such altruistic punishment etc.).

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 0

Inheritance rights in Russia under Peter the Great

From John Nye's review of Richard Pipes' Property and Freedom:

Peter the Great is often saluted for having modernized Russia's culture and economy. But Pipes makes clear that Peter's Westernization was primarily cultural and technological. Although receptive to Western ideas in art, literature, music, and science, Peter did little to adopt the legal institutions so crucial to English success. Rather than improving individual property rights, Peter blurred a variety of existing distinctions and endangered the long-run stability of all reforms through arbitrary confiscation. Peasant agriculture was held back by a law requiring that all holdings must be bequeathed in toto to a single heir. Though intended to stop the devolution of large holdings into small parcels through inheritance, the law had the effect of destroying the working land market that had begun to emerge in Russia.

Ashwin Parameswaran on the tradeoff between short-term stability and long-term resilience

From this, rather long, blog post:

The puzzle:

Most monetary and fiscal interventions result in a rise in the financial markets, NGDP expectations and economic performance in the short run. Yet,

• we are in the middle of a ‘great stagnation’ and have been for a few decades.
• the frequency of crises seems to have risen dramatically in the last fifty years culminating in the environment since 2008 which is best described as a perpetual crisis.
• each recovery seems to be weaker than the previous one and requires an increased injection of stimulus to achieve results that were easily achieved by a simple rate cut not that long ago.

... Similarly, when a central bank protects incumbent banks against liquidity risk, the banks choose to hold progressively more illiquid portfolios. When central banks provide incumbent banks with cheap funding in times of crisis to prevent failure and creditor losses, the banks choose to take on more leverage. ... Of course, in economic systems when agents actively intend to arbitrage such commitments by central banks, it is simply a form of moral hazard. But such an adaptation can easily occur via the natural selective forces at work in an economy – those who fail to take advantage of the Greenspan/Bernanke put simply go bust or get fired. ...

some of you may raise the following objection: so what if the new state is pathological? Maybe capitalism with its inherent instability is itself pathological. And once the safety nets of the Greenspan/Bernanke put, lender-of-last-resort programs and too-big-to-fail bailouts are put in place why would we need or want to remove them? If we simply medicate the economy ad infinitum, can we not avoid collapse ad infinitum?

This argument however is flawed.

• The ability of economic players to reorganise to maximise the rents extracted from central banking and state commitments far exceeds the the resources available to the state and the central bank. ... as Minsky and many others have documented, the pace of financial innovation over the last half-century has meant that banks and financialised corporates have all the tools they need to circumvent regulations and maximise rent extraction.

• Minsky noted that "A high-investment, high-profit strategy for full employment – even with the underpinning of an active fiscal policy and an aware Federal Reserve system – leads to an increasingly unstable financial system, and an increasingly unstable economic performance. Within a short span of time, the policy problem cycles among preventing a deep depression, getting a stagnant economy moving again, reining in an inflation, and offsetting a credit squeeze or crunch."

...The structural malformation of the economic system due to the application of increasing levels of stimulus to the task of stabilisation means that the economy has lost the ability to generate the endogenous growth and innovation that it could before it was so actively stabilised. The system has now been homogenised and is entirely dependent upon constant stimulus. ...

Tainter on the importance of legitimacy for state power

From The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter (p. 26-8):

Anthropologists have had some difficulty defining the concept 'state.' It is something that seems clearly different from the simplest, acephalous human societies, but specifying or enumerating this difference has proven an elusive goal. Many anthropologists, despite this difficulty, insist that states are a qualitatively different kind of society , so that the transition from tribal to state societies represents the 'Great Divide' (Service 1975) of human history. ...

States are, to begin with, territorially organized. That is to say, membership is at least partly determined by birth or residence in a territory, rather than by real or fictive kin relations. ... The territorial basis both reflects and influences the nature of statehood ...

States contrast with relatively complex tribal societies (e.g., chiefdoms) in a number of ways. In states, a ruling authority monopolizes sovereignty and delegates all power. The ruling class tends to be professional, and is largely divorced from the bonds of kinship. This ruling class supplies the personnel for government, which is a specialized decision-making organization with a monopoly of force, and with the power to draft for war or work, levy and collect taxes, and decree and enforce laws. The government is legitimately constituted, which is to say that a common, society-wide ideology exists that serves in part to validate the political organization of society. And states, of course, are in general larger and more populous than tribal societies, so that social categorization, stratification, and specialization are both possible and necessary ...

States tend to be overwhelmingly concerned with maintammg their territorial integrity. This is, indeed, one of their primary characteristics. States are the only kind of human society that does not ordinarily undergo short-term cycles of formation and dissolution  ...

States are internally differentiated ... Occupational specialization is a prime characteristic, and is often reflected in patterns of residence ... By virtue of their territorial extensiveness, states are often differentiated, not only economicaliy, but also culturally and ethnically. Both economic and cultural heterogeneity appear to be functionally related to the centralization and administration that are defining characteristics of states ...

Despite an institutionalized authority structure, an ideological basis, and a monopoly of force, the rulers of states share at least one thing with chiefs and Big Men: the need to establish and constantly reinforce legitimacy. In complex as well as simpler societies, leadership activities and societal resources must be continuously devoted to this purpose. Hierarchy and complexity, as noted, are rare in human history, and where present require constant reinforcement. No societal leader is ever far from the need to validate position and policy, and no hierarchical society can be organized without explicit provision for this need.

Legitimacy is the belief of the populace and the elites that rule is proper and valid, that the political world is as it should be. It pertains to individual rulers, to decisions, to broad policies, to parties, and to entire forms of government. The support that members are willing to extend to a political system is essential for its survival. Decline in support will not necessarily lead to the fall of a regime, for to a certain extent coercion can replace commitment to ensure compliance. Coercion, though, is a costly, ineffective strategy which can never be completely or permanently successful. Even with coercion, decline in popular support below some critical minimum leads infallibly to political failure (Easton 1965b: 220-4). Establishing moral validity is a less costly and more effective approach.

Complex societies are focused on a center, which may not be located physically where it is literally implied, but which is the symbolic source of the framework of society . It is not only the location of legal and governmental institutions, bur is the source of order, and the symbol of moral authority and social continuity . The center partakes of the nature of the sacred. In this sense, every complex society has an official religion (Shils 1975 : 3; Eisenstadt 1978: 37; Apter 1968: 2 18).

The moral authority and sacred aura of the center not only are essential in maintaining complex societies, but were crucial in their emergence. One critical impediment to the development of complexity in stateless societies was the need to integrate many localized, autonomous units, which would each have their own peculiar interests, feuds, and jealousies. A ruler drawn from any one of these units is automatically suspect by the others, who rightly fear favoritism toward his/her natal group and locality, particularly in dispute resolution (Netting 1972: 233-4). This problem has crippled many modern African nations (cf. Easton 1965b: 224). The solution to this structural limitation was to explicitly link leadership in early complex societies to the supern a tural. When a leader is imbued with an aura of sacred neutrality, his identi fi c ation with natal group and territory can be superseded by ritually sanctioned authority which rises above purely local concerns . An early complex society is likely to have an avowedly sacred basis of legitimacy, in which disparate, formerly independent groups are united by an over arching level of shared ideology, symbols, and cosmology (Netting 1972: 233-4; Claessen 1978: 557; Skalnik 1978: 606).

Supernatural sanctions are then a response to the stresses of change from a kin-based society to a class-structured one. They may be necessitated in part by an ineffective concentration of coercive force in emerging complex societies (Webster 1976b: 826). Sacred legitimization provides a binding framework until real vehicles of power have been consolidated. Once this has been achieved the need for religious integration declines, and indeed conflict between secular and sacred authorities may thereafter ensue (see, e.g. , Webb 1 965). Yet as noted, the sacred aura of the center never disappears, not even in contemporary secular governments ( Shils 1975: 3-6). Astute politicians have always exploited this fact. It is a critical element in the maintenance of legitimacy.

Despite the undoubted power of supernatural legitimization, support for leadership must also have a genuine material basis. Easton suggests that legitimacy declines mainly under conditions of what he calls 'output failure' ( 1965b : 230). Output failure occurs where authorities are unab l e to meet the demands of the support population, or do not take anticipatory actions to counter adversities. Outputs can be political (Eisenstadt 1963: 25) or material. Output expectations are continuous, and impose on leadership a never-ending need to mobilize resources to maintain support. The attainment and perpetuation of legitimacy thus require more than the manipulation of ideological symbols. They require the assessment and commitment of real resources, at satisfactory levels, and are a genuine cost that any complex society must bear. Legitimacy is a recurrent factor in the modern study of the nature of complex societies, and is pertinent to understanding their collapse.

Dennett - Free-floating rationales and the reason why law exists

From Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (1984).

Free-floating rationales (pp. 24-25):

a set of reasons that were appreciated by, thought out by, and rendered explicit by no one. The subtlety and deviousness of this thinking-without-a­-thinker is often more than a match for the thinking we thinkers do. ...

explain  as little as possible and tell one's field operatives only what they abso­lutely need to know to perform their roles. Mother Nature is similarly stingy when she apportions comprehension, it appears. When larger "goals" can be achieved by cleverly organized armies of uncomprehend­ing agents, such as ants, the "Need to Know" rule is ruthlessly invoked. ...

Mother Nature abides by the "Need to Know" principle, but we appreciate a contrary principle: our ideal is to be completely savvy, to be  able to notice all the reasons that concern us, to be in the dark about  nothing of relevance to us, to be the completely and perfectly informed guardians of our own interests. That is what it would be to be able to choose one's course of action always as reason dictated. We often say that "reason dictates" a certain course of action to an actor in a certain circumstance.  ... we mean that a certain problem (abstractly considered-that is, whether or not any creature has explicitly expressed and addressed it) has a certain (optimal) solution. The problem is defined by the circumstances and interests of the actor in question. ...

Kant draws our attention to the distinction between merely doing what reason dictates and doing what reason dictates because reason dictates it. One might, in the first instance, just happen to do "the right thing," or be caused by extraneous and irrelevant factors to do the right thing. However fortunate one might be to fall into such a circumstance, this is to be distinguished from the good fortune enjoyed by one who has the marvelous further power to be moved by reasons.

Intermediate between the actor who purely coincidentally "does the right thing" and the actor who is moved by the right reasons to do the right thing is the actor who tends to do the right thing (because the actor was designed to tend to do the right thing), but nevertheless does the right thing (when it does) unwittingly. This intermediate actor, it seems, does not attend to the wise voice of Reason directly, cannot itself actually hear and comprehend Reason's dictates; however, it seems as though the process (or agent) that designed the actor was thus responsive to Rea­son's dictates.

Diminished Responsibility and the Specter of Creeping Exculpation (pp. 158-164):

Why do we want to punish people who "commit crimes"? ... We can readily identify sorts of harms we would like to see minimized in our society, and we have reason to believe that if we prohibit the causing of these harms, and give force to the prohibition by threatening sanctions, we will thereby I, diminish the frequency of those harms. We believe this institution is at least somewhat effective, and we believe this for good reasons. First, it  follows from our conception of rationality that if the members of society are even approximately rational, they will see that it is not at all in their interests to be caught having committed the prohibited deeds, and will hence in general be deterred. And we have plenty of empirical evidence that the citizenry, taken as a whole, is appropriately sensitive to such institutions. Laws (backed by sanctions) do make a difference, and in the desired direction. But we recognize that these desirable effects fall short of the ideal. ...

this system of laws would deter perfectly, because (unlike us) everyone would be so rational. People-all people-would see as plain as the noses on their faces that crime didn't pay, and hence would all abstain from it. Judges and policemen and jailers would be appointed and trained, and would sit around, like the Swiss Army, waiting to be called into action, but rather doubting that it would ever happen in their lifetimes. Why isn't that the situation we find ourselves in? If we're really homo sapiens, the "rational animal," why are our prisons overcrowded and our judges overworked? One reason seems to be that we skimp on our institutions of enforcement, and hence people, being rational indeed, see that under certain conditions crime does  pay, or at any rate is likely enough to pay to be worth the risk. The deterrent power of laws is (ideally) a function of people's perception of the likelihood of their being apprehended and the severity of the penalty that might be inflicted. Increasing either factor increases deterrence. ...

Since rapidly diminishing returns would be the result of any further investment in strengthening our enforcement, the optimal institution will be one in which a certain amount of lawbreaking, apprehension, and conviction is "tolerated." That is not to say our present system needs no serious reform, but-runs this argument-it would be irrational to hold out any hope of devising a system of perfect deterrence. So lawbreakers will always be among us; the jailer will never have-should never have­ an entirely ceremonial position. ...

Deterrence depends on several factors, and one is "publicity": deterrence has a chance to succeed only with people who know the law and understand the conditions and sanctions. There may be individuals, we recognize, who fail to meet these conditions, and hence may commit the prohibited deed because the deterrent effect of the law never reaches to them. That is why a part of the cost of the institution of laws is public education; secret laws are useless as deterrents. The cost-effective way of achieving a suitably high level of knowledge is to combine a sufficiently energetic public information program with a somewhat peremptory (and hence bracing) legal wrinkle: ignorance of the law is no excuse. This latter condition provides a motivation to all to maintain a state of mild inquisitiveness about the law and any new changes in it. ...

There is a tacit requirement that laws be made as straightforward and comprehensible as possible, so that it is not asking too much to suppose people under their jurisdiction can comprehend them, but for some people this is asking too much. These are, paradigmatically, the mentally incompetent and insane. We excuse them from criminal liability because they manifestly do not meet the minimal conditions for deterrability, and the attempt to educate them, to bring them up to the knowledge and comprehension threshold, would be fruitless-or at least too costly. To punish them as if they were responsible citizens would be to undermine the very institution of pun­ishment (which depends on its credibility) by undermining its rationale. It would be as outrageous-as offensive to the rationality of the citizenry at large-for the law to refuse to distinguish these people as nonrespon­sible, as it would be for the law to maintain its "ignorance is no excuse" rule while passing and enforcing secret laws. So in order to preserve the credibility and defensibility of the system, we add explicit provisions excluding various types of people from legal responsibility.

This has the effect of diminishing the pool of eligible punishees, the genuinely responsible and guilty-as-charged. But we recognize that per­haps the principles used to demarcate this class are crude, and the ques­tion arises whether the law's credibility and acceptability (its justice, in short) could be further improved by making finer-grained distinctions. ...

So we must get arbitrary again, and draw the line-exactly where is no more impor­tant in this case than it is in the case of setting a legal age for drinking or driving. We must set up some efficiently determinable threshold for legal competence, never for a moment supposing that there couldn't be intui­tively persuasive "counterexamples" to whatever line we draw, but de­claring in advance that such pleas will not be entertained. We mustn't look too closely at the particular micro-details of the accused's circum­stances, but just try to establish (crudely and swiftly) that in general this agent is deterrable, even though he was not deterred on this occasion. ...

We cannot conclude from the fact that a wager was lost that it was irrationally made. So long as the risk was taken in full knowl­edge of the consequences of the loss, the agent can hardly complain that the sanctions now imposed are unfairly applied to him.

We're 7 billion

Jack Goldstone at NewPopulationBomb:

For the two hundred years from 1750 to 1950, the fastest population growth took place in the world’s most advanced economies. Their rising productivity and improving governance ushered in previously unseen prosperity, and fuels optimism for the future. 

But in the next century, the fastest population growth will take place in the world’s least advanced economies and some of its worst-governed countries. A global effort to improve governance and education in those countries, allowing the world to benefit from the human potential of billions of additional people, could again usher in a new stage of global prosperity. But failure to meet this challenge may consign billions of people to live in countries with failing states, brimming with angry and frustrated youth, prone to high levels of violence, and recurrent humanitarian disasters on ever-larger scales. There is still time to build partnerships and make investments to respond to this challenge, but every week, another three million children are born in the poorest countries, and the clock ticks on.

Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist:

The peak is in sight. Even as the population passes seven billion, the growth rate of the world population has halved since the 1960s. The United Nations Population Division issues high, medium and low forecasts. Inevitably the high one (fifteen billion people by 2100) gets more attention than the low one (six billion and falling). But given that the forecasts have generally proved too high for the past few decades, let us imagine for a moment what might happen if that proves true again.

Africa is currently the continent with the highest birth rates, but it also has the fastest economic growth. The past decade has seen Asian-tiger-style growth all across Africa. HIV is in retreat, malaria in decline. When child mortality fell and economic growth boomed like this in Europe, Latin America and Asia, the result was a rapid fall in the birth rate. For fertility to fall, contraception provides the means, but economic growth and public health provide the motive. So the current slow decline in Africa’s birth rate may turn into a plummet.

If that happens, the low UN estimate could prove more accurate with the world population peaking a little above eight billion and falling to a billion less than today by the end of the century.

Good things might happen: "agricultural productivity continues to rise", "EU tariff barriers against African produce are lifted and America’s crazy policy of diverting food into motor fuel is reversed", "with more people able to afford fossil fuels, fewer will depend on forests for cooking fuel", "water use grows steadily more efficient with the spread of drip irrigation". So:

It is quite possible that your great grandchildren will not only be fewer in number, but will live in a world with huge nature reserves, vast forests and rich seas. 

Prospects for virtual life: Is Java a Wittgensteinian language?

Several years ago I wrote an article saying that Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) looked a lot like the Platonic vision of the world and wondered whether a Wittgensteinian programming language could be created. From the article:

...although at ground level OOP is still actually made of loops and conditions, it sure looks different from a programmer's point of view. In case of OOP you have to deal with so called objects (such as a button or a window or a menu or whatever you invent) and these objects have properties, events and methods.

Traditional programming was causal, while OOP is intentional. Traditionally, you would tell the computer something like: "Do this, then that, if the user does that go that way, if (s)he does that other thing go the other way, then enter this loop and continuously check and check and check whether the user has done anything you have plans for, and God forbid (s)he does something unexpected, and so on." Usually, you would have to predict any possible action the user could do and devise a certain response.

In OOP you are not programming in such a causal manner, you are actually setting various purposes or functions to various objects. You say "The purpose of this button over here is to open up that window", "The purpose of this text box is to get some text from the user." And so on. This allows you to create much more complex programs in a more bug-free manner.

A property is how the object looks like. For example, it has a certain color, or a certain text imprinted on it, or has a certain position inside a window and so on. When you change the value of some property, the object miraculously changes its appearance. You're just saying "I want you to be like that", and it becomes like that.

An event is something that can happen to the object. For example a button can be clicked. Or the mouse can go over it. A text can be changed. Etc. You, as a programmer, can say to an object: "If this event ever happens to you, this is how I want you to react."

A method is something that the object can do. While events are things inflicted on objects, methods are the things the objects themselves do. For instance, a text box can undo a text change or can copy the selected text to Clipboard.

What's fun from a philosophical point of view is that this OOP creates a very platonic virtual world. Plato's most famous idea is that everything in the real world, everything that we see and ourselves included, is only a sort of copy of some "archetypal" or ideal object. In the same way, every object OOP deals with is created from a so-called class. A class is the ideal, platonic object. A class consists in a set of properties without a specified value, having empty events and methods. To create a particular virtual object (that you can actually see on screen or with what you can actually do anything) you assign certain values to the ideal object (to the class), and write some code for its events and methods.

The class defines in a sort of abstract manner what all the possible objects of that type could be like. A class doesn't define a particular button, but defines the concept of any button. Translating Plato into OOP language: he believed the true world is the world of classes only, while the world of objects is only apparent (he used the following metaphor: objects are like the shadows of the classes, and we are only seeing these shadows, wrongfully taking them for real). In other words, he believed God was a computer programmer that did the job in a divine Visual Basic.

The philosopher most famous for debunking Plato's vision of the world is Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's most famous idea is that objects in the real world are not the outcome of some platonic classes, but that they come in "families". A family is a set of real objects that resemble each other from various points of view. For example, the family "chair" is a set of all the objects that we call by that name. But we group together these objects in one single family, not because they share some common essence, but out of historic accidents. For example, in Romanian a toilet seat is called a "toilet chair" (because Romanians read sitting on the toilet more often than the English). To Romanians the toilet seat is part of the "chair" family, while the English have a more restrictive concept of "chair".

For describing his idea, Wittgenstein used the metaphor of a rope: a rope is made of many fibers, but there's no fiber that has the same length as the entire rope. In the same way, object A resembles object B, which resembles object C, and which, in turn, resemble object D, and all these objects may be part of the same family, but nonetheless, object A may not resemble object D in any dramatic manner. In other words, there's no common thread through all the objects called by a certain name - i.e. belonging to a certain family.

I've been wondering how a Wittgensteinian programming language would look like. Suppose the buttons and all the windows you could encounter in this virtual world would not arise from certain classes, but they would belong to a family. I think the virtual world would be much more diverse and fun, and, probably, any programmer's nightmare.

In order to create a new object, you would have to take an existing object and modify it in various ways. But there would not be any predetermined class to tell you in what ways you may modify it - a predetermined concept of "all" objects of that type. I guess such a Wittgensteinian standard would be great for the open source programs.

I've noticed now that someone made an interesting comment that Java can be seen as an example of such a Wittgensteinian language:

Maybe JavaScript is more of a Wittgensteinian language. It has three big differences compared to C++, C# and Java: First, there's no distinction between objects and classes; new objects are created not by instantiating classes but by copying existing objects. Second, it uses duck typing -- instead of checking whether an object is derived from a particular class, you check whether it has a given property or method. Third, there's no enforced encapsulation; properties and methods can be added or changed from without.

It seems to me that this is an important threshold, much more important than the transition from traditional programming to OOP. The reason is that evolution by natural selection works in a Wittgensteinian language. For instance, all living beings form a large Wittgensteinian family created by biological evolution - different species exist because extinction has created gaps in the threads of family resemblances that link living beings one to another, and not because members of a species are instantiations of an abstract class (this was Darwin's main insight, see Dennett 1995, chapter 2 for details). Once a Wittgensteinian programming language is available (e.g. Java), one can develop genuine evolution by natural selection in the virtual world. Java would be the equivalent of DNA.

I'm thinking of the following thing. Right now all programs are the result of intelligent design, i.e. each new program is the result of some human programmer making the changes in order to achieve some desired goal (such that the program serves some desired function). However, with a Wittgensteinian language it is possible in principle to eliminate the programmer entirely, and just let programs evolve under the selection pressure of users' demands. For example, right now many programs collect crash reports and improvement suggestions from users, but actual human programmers need to sift through all these reports and decide what changes to make. An Darwinian alternative to this system would involve an automatic meta-program sift through the reports, operate changes in the program and test the program (the alpha version) against a set of users willing to serve as testers (as it commonly already happens).

Biological evolution provides another important suggestion: the meta-program can be written in the same language as the program. In case of life, DNA is not enough to make a living being, DNA has to be transcribed into the proteins that actually make up the creature by some enzymes - but these enzymes are themselves proteins, and, as such, the information about how to make them is also coded in the DNA. This is a loop. The consequence of this loop is that not only life forms change, but also the mechanism for building life forms can change (and it did change - these are known as the "major transitions in evolution", see Maynard Smith & Szathmáry, Carroll, or Kirschner & Gerhart).

Applied to the virtual world of computer programs, this idea would mean that the program that sifts through user reports and which operates the changes in existing programs developing new versions can itself be written in Java (or in some other Wittgensteinian language), and, as such, can also be subjected to evolution by natural selection. This would thus become a self-contained system for developing better and better (i.e. in line with users' demands) computer programs without any need for human computer programmers.

Lenin on state capitalism

From "Session of the All-Russia C.E.C.", 1918:

When I read these references to such enemies in the newspaper of the Left Communists, I ask: what has happened to these people that fragments of book-learning can make them forget reality? Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism in Russia, that would be a victory.

How is it that they cannot see that it is the petty proprietor, small capital, that is our enemy? How can they regard state capitalism as the chief enemy? They ought not to forget that in the transition from capitalism to socialism our chief enemy is the petty bourgeoisie, its habits and customs, its economic position. The petty proprietor fears state capitalism above all, because he has only one desire—to grab, to get as much as possible for himself, to ruin and smash the big landowners, the big exploiters. In this the petty proprietor eagerly supports us.

Here he is more revolutionary than the workers, because he is more embittered and more indignant, and therefore he readily marches forward to smash the bourgeoisie—but not as a socialist does in order, after breaking the resistance of the bourgeoisie, to begin building a socialist economy based on the principles of firm labour discipline, within the framework of a strict organisation, and observing correct methods of control and accounting—but in order, by grabbing as much as possible for himself, to exploit the fruits of victory for himself and for his own ends, without the least concern for general state interests and the interests of the class of working people as a whole.

What is state capitalism under Soviet power? To achieve state capitalism at the present time means putting into effect the accounting and control that the capitalist classes carried out. We see a sample of state capitalism in Germany. We know that Germany has proved superior to us. But if you reflect even slightly on what it would mean if the foundations of such state capitalism were established in Russia, Soviet Russia, everyone who is not out of his senses and has not stuffed his head with fragments of book learning, would have to say that state capitalism would be our salvation.

I said that state capitalism would be our salvation; if we had it in Russia, the transition to full socialism would he easy, would be within our grasp, because state capitalism is something centralised, calculated, controlled and socialised, and that is exactly what we lack: we are threatened by the element of petty-bourgeois slovenliness, which more than anything else has been developed by the whole history of Russia and her economy, and which prevents us from taking the very step on which the success of socialism depends. Allow me to remind you that I had occasion to write my statement about state capitalism some time before the revolution and it is a howling absurdity to try to frighten us with state capitalism.

First principles

God:

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Lao-tzu:

When everyone knows good as goodness, there is already evil.