Maybe-Mathematical Musings

The plural -s ending forming a noun out of an adjective is a fun little corner case in English morphology. "Politics" is explicitly patterned after Aristotle's τά πολῑτῐκᾱ́, "affairs of the state." "Mathematics" is from Latin mathematica, which is singular. "Physics" is attested as "physic" in older English, which conforms with its singular declension in Greek φυσική. I'm assuming this affix develops out of the truncation of a noun phrase, or the use of adjectives as substantives? Like, "Which candy do you like? I like red ones, I like the reds," type constructions. But it's fun that in the development of the -ics ending there's an English construction that's used in a way frequently parallel to the Greek derived -ology, or the older Germanic -craft. Seems especially suitable for big, complex fields like mathematics that have lots of subfields. Like, there's more than one mathematic! That makes a lot of sense to me. Though I guess American verbal agreement patterns still prefer a singular verb here, in contrast to the Commonwealth usage.

Note on this "math" versus "maths"; the number is consistent even with abbreviation.

(Brits make fun of Americans for saying "math", since the word obviously has an 's' on it; for years I've responded that in America we only have one mathematic.)

But this does make me ask the very silly question of whether British students ever take an econs class.

Yeah I think this has been the conventional wisdom for decades.

I'm not saying the Harris campaign was perfect by any means, or that Harris was the perfect candidate, but sometimes you make no major fuckups and you still lose--there seem to be a fair number of pundits out there on twitter and bluesky who assume that because Harris lost she must have done something monumentally stupid, and I just don't know that's the case. It seems to me like she ran an effective campaign. She did comparatively well in states where she campaigned most. She might have been a suboptimal candidate but the problem there was Biden stayed in the race far too late, and I think just about any VP in her position would have faced the same strong anti-incumbent headwinds.

I think I'm convinced that she was tactically great but had major strategic weaknesses. But the thing is, sometimes you have strategic weaknesses because that's the position you start from!

Like I think it's very plausible that a radically different campaign, with a radically different platform, and a different relationship to activist groups and the base, could have done much better. (On some margin that's a truism.) But it's not clear that Kamala Harris had any decisions she could have made differently in the year 2024 that would have done that much better.

Now she probably should have made some more aggressive, high-risk high-reward moves. But those would in fact have been risky. And you can see e.g. that she did better in the battlegrounds than elsewhere, which suggests her campaign, narrowly construed, did well.

(The big miss is probably not finding a way to get a late October debate, but again it's not clear that she could actually have done that by the time it was her campaign.)

For years I've been arguing with leftists who say the system is so fucked that we have to throw it away. Because relative to most of the ways society can work, what we have right now is pretty darn good.

(It could be better, obviously, but it's pretty darn good!)

There's a real risk we're going to find out whether I was right.

Yeah I mean that was my point.

I've had conversations with radical leftists who basically said "our current system is so fucked that the only thing worth doing is undermining it". I don't think they said "it couldn't possibly get worse" but at least they nodded in that direction.

And like that's totally nuts! Things could get way worse. Shrugging and saying "the system is fucked, just gotta attack it" is either shockingly naive or clinical depression. (Honestly, mostly the latter.)

But I think a lot of the Trump vote was basically some form of (low-information) "system is fucked, so let's hit reset". You also see this in a certain strain of online leftism, which agreed Kamala would be better than Trump, but wasn't really interested in that fact because everything's terrible anyway.

And the system could be better, but the reset we're getting is unlikely to get us there.

I've determined that my core problem with wine is that I fundamentally dislike the taste of "fermented grape juice". So every time people give me a wine drink and go "oh this doesn't taste like wine!" I try it and, no, it tastes exactly like wine.

Now I'm kind of curious to try a taste testing of wines of varying level of quality and shittiness. See if I can actually discern what it is that makes some "better" to people, past the native sense of revulsion.

This is something I can definitely do with beer.

I don't like beer, basically ever. I'm pretty sure it's the malted barley; I don't like malted shakes either.

But I can definitely tell the difference between good beer and bad beer, and see why people like the ones they like.

(Putting this in a new conversation because to do otherwise would be the most blatant kind of derailing.)

@jadagul:

Leaving everything else aside - this is obviously insane, right?

...not that it's wrong. Empirically speaking, in a FPTP system, it's an accurate description of how things go. But it also seems like a grand sweeping indictment of democracy as a system, at the most fundamental level.

If there is literally no way to govern well enough that the voting masses will keep you in power so that you can keep on governing well - if the fickleness of the electorate will just always result in the Two Main Choices sharing power over time, such that you have to work outside the electoral system in order to keep those Two Main Choices reasonable and healthy - then what actual value is the voting providing, here? How can we possibly square this with the idea that the will of the people is producing some kind of wise guidance? How does the entire thing fail to be just a cruel farce?

(If we're on board with the idea that it's just about perceived legitimacy and quelling-of-violent-power-struggles, that's fine, but it also suggests a very different kind of rhetoric than what you normally get.)

I mean perceived legitimacy and avoiding violent power transfers is a serious benefit, right?

But also, democracy is a check against one party going too far off the rails, because they always can be evicted. Even more so if there's some inherent cyclicality; no one is going to be permanently entrenched.

But also, I think you're undervaluing the extent to which the Two Parties are reflecting and representing genuine differences of opinion in the electorate. (And part of the mechanism here is that the parties adapt to represent the things that the people care about, right?) So the point is, you don't wind up with a large rump of people who feel like they will never be represented in government. Everyone will be in power some of the time.

(Even the thing about how you need the center-right to support democracy makes sense in this frame, right? That's just to say, the system is unstable if there's a huge chunk of people who don't support it—which is obviously true!)

The Conservative Party here in Canada is going to win power in a (possibly historically large) landslide sometime in the next 11 months, Marine Le Pen is the favorite to be the President of France in a couple of years, Italy is governed by a neo-fascist party. It's not just the US, the whole "Western" world has moved sharply to the right, that trend picked up in the mid-late 2010s and then accelerated sharply after 2020.

Why this has happened is a good question, covid and the lockdowns/vaccine/mask mandates/etc clearly pushed a lot of people to the right and the worldwide inflation that followed exacerbated that, but this definitely dates back further and I want to find a way to say "social media" without sounding like a curmudgeon. I do think there's maybe something to the idea that social media has benefited right-wing political movements way more than it has benefited left-wing or liberal ones

Some vague theories on the asymmetry:

Does anyone have a link to anything on that theory linking fear of contamination/disease to (certain) right wing views?

I think you're overreading this. Britain and Australia both had major wins by the left against an incumbent right-wing government.

Basically every country had (1) a pro-incumbent surge during covid, and then (2) an anti-incumbent surge after covid. If left-wingers were in power in 2021 you're gonna get a right-wing swing; if right-wingers were, you get a left-wing swing. It turns out people really fucking hate inflations.

(The US had a much smaller swing than a lot of other countries! But we also had by far the best-performing economy among developed countries.)

That said there's also a decent argument that social media etc. favor simpler, more intuitive types of argument, which favors conservative "common sense" over intellectual liberalism. Joseph Heath was making this argument in Enlightenment 2.0 in 2014; I wrote a bit about that here.

In fairness I'm very much speaking from a place of pessimism last night/this morning.

That being said, while I don't know enough about it to speak to the case of Australia, I think that calling the UK election a victory for the left seems like a bit of a stretch. The Labour Party made great efforts after Keir Starmer took over to demonstrate to the electorate that they were reasonable centrists now that they'd rid themselves of the crazy Corbynites, and also largely accepted Conservative positions on a lot of major issues (Brexit and relations with Europe, immigration, government spending, etc.). And after all that they barely increased their popular vote over the previous election! It seems to me like they were offering voters more of the same, but more competently and pragmatically.

And to their credit it worked! But ultimately I think that Labour took power not because the British electorate moved to the left, but because after 14 years of increasingly dysfunctional and chaotic Conservative government enough people got tired of it and were willing to accept a safe and milquetoast opposition having a turn in power.

Furthermore, I do think that this right-wing shift started before inflation took off, or even before the pandemic. The Brexit referendum and Trump winning in 2016, followed the next year by all the establishment French political parties collapsing and Marine Le Pen emerging as the main opposition, might be the first signs of it; but I would take it back a little bit further and say the fact that Trump was able to win the Republican nomination in the first place, and the fact that the Tories felt they had to call a referendum on Brexit (that they never expected to lose!) in the first place to stave off growing pressure from UKIP to their right, were signs that this was already happening even before 2016.

Edit: 2017 was also the year the AfD had its first breakthrough in the German elections, and 2018 was the breakthrough election for Matteo Salvini's party in Italy.

Okay, that's a different (and more interesting) argument than the one I thought you were making!

On the narrow point, I saw this amazing graph from the FT today:

So if you want to explain an election result specifically in 2024, the baseline answer is "every governing party has lost and that's why this governing party lost".

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On the broader issue I think there are two things I'd want to say. One is that some people keep wanting a "durable victory for the left". See e.g. Freddie:

And the problem that is, in a functioning democracy, no one ever has a durable winning coalition. Parties will alternate! The left and the right should each be in power about half the time! That's why a healthy center-right party is important to functioning democracy.

But your claim, as I read it, is that the median has moved to the right, so that both the right wing and the left wing have moved right over the past ten years. I think that's true on some issues and not on others; but I first want to point out that it does basically nothing to explain election results. If the complaint is that the people and both parties have moved to the right, that should to a first approximation be neutral to whether the left or right party wins; it just means that either way you get further right-wing policies.

Now, I think over the past ten years, there's been a huge rightward shift on immigration. (In the US, at least, that reversed hard-core during Trump's presidency, but then flipped right back in Biden's; we'll see what happens in the next two years.) There's also been something of a turn against free trade, but I don't know that's a "right-wing" turn; in the US at least that has traditionally had a weird partisan split. (As has immigration, to be fair.)

Conversely, I think there's been a huge leftward swing on queer issues over the past ten years or so. (Speaking primarily about the US but I think this generalizes.) Like remember Obergefell was nine years ago; but gay marriage is pretty established now! Abortion rights are doing poorly in the US right now, but public support for abortion has surged in the past decade.

And I know it doesn't feel like it, but support for trans rights has almost certainly increased a ton in the past ten years. It's just gone from "no one fucking thinks about or supports this" to "controversial but growing"; it was so not-a-thing in 2014 that it's hard to even find polling about it. (I don't have access to this article but it seems relevant.)

(And stuff like health care and welfare just seems more mixed in general. Even within the US, and I have zero ability to generalize that. A big part of Trump's success has been moderating on entitlements!)

But specifically on immigration I think you're right there's been a significant anti-immigrant shift, and that has opened up space for radical right-wing parties and movements in political functioning.

The Conservative Party here in Canada is going to win power in a (possibly historically large) landslide sometime in the next 11 months, Marine Le Pen is the favorite to be the President of France in a couple of years, Italy is governed by a neo-fascist party. It's not just the US, the whole "Western" world has moved sharply to the right, that trend picked up in the mid-late 2010s and then accelerated sharply after 2020.

Why this has happened is a good question, covid and the lockdowns/vaccine/mask mandates/etc clearly pushed a lot of people to the right and the worldwide inflation that followed exacerbated that, but this definitely dates back further and I want to find a way to say "social media" without sounding like a curmudgeon. I do think there's maybe something to the idea that social media has benefited right-wing political movements way more than it has benefited left-wing or liberal ones

Some vague theories on the asymmetry:

Does anyone have a link to anything on that theory linking fear of contamination/disease to (certain) right wing views?

I think you're overreading this. Britain and Australia both had major wins by the left against an incumbent right-wing government.

Basically every country had (1) a pro-incumbent surge during covid, and then (2) an anti-incumbent surge after covid. If left-wingers were in power in 2021 you're gonna get a right-wing swing; if right-wingers were, you get a left-wing swing. It turns out people really fucking hate inflations.

(The US had a much smaller swing than a lot of other countries! But we also had by far the best-performing economy among developed countries.)

That said there's also a decent argument that social media etc. favor simpler, more intuitive types of argument, which favors conservative "common sense" over intellectual liberalism. Joseph Heath was making this argument in Enlightenment 2.0 in 2014; I wrote a bit about that here.

Any specific game state resolves regardless of whether the two prime conjecture is true. But Alice has a guaranteed winning strategy if and only if the conjecture is true.

You're right that the players both pick specific numbers. But the order is important. Bob picks a number first, and he can pick any number he wants. Alice picks a number second, and she needs a number that is larger than Bob's number, but also a twin prime.

So if the twin prime conjecture is false, then Bob can just pick a number larger than the largest twin prime, and he wins. But if the twin prime conjecture is true, then Bob doesn't have a winning move. Whatever number he picks, Alice can pick a number that's even larger, and still a twin prime.

Now @d007ization is right that Alice doesn't have a useful way to find that prime at the table. In practice, if I'm Alice and Bob says a million, I don't actually know what number I need to pick, even though there are definitely twin primes bigger than that. But if TPC is true, then Alice has a winning move, even if she can't figure it out at the table.

(but of course it's trivial to write down an algorithm that generated arbitrarily large twin primes, if they exist. Just try every number in order! It's just Very Slow.)

Just to add to this since you do see it a bunch (I have discussed this before I am sure), this idea is absolutely a "19th century" concept, the idea of the wealth of pre-WWI Europe being built on the back of imperial extraction. But that wasn't really true then either! It was more true, sure, but the 19th century colonial empires were, from the standpoint of the living standards and economies of their centers, on average neutral or actual money losers. Most imperial holdings were fiscal drains that costs more to support than they ever brought in; they were pursued not in order to become rich, but because the European countries became rich and so spent that newfound wealth on prestige and military might. (Or maybe more pathetically, they were welfare for the tiny European elites who lived in those colonies - those folk were better off!)

Meanwhile, the 19th century was an era of booming global trade - but most of that trade was with free countries or European settler states and their adjacencies. Australia, Canada, Argentina, these places exported far more goods to Europe than Africa did, and ofc America was the world driver in trade surpluses at the 1900's peak. All of this was driven by internal growth in the inherent productivity of the economies of these nations - which is pretty much always the case, there just isn't a way around that when it comes to actually developing modern economic wealth. People debate it still but I think the consensus is that even highly extreme systems like slavery made the nations that practiced it worse off in this era - some individuals benefited of course but the broad free masses did not.

Pre-modern economic growth the paradigm can track, you definitely saw more things like mass-scale slavery and tributary empires and stuff. But even that tended to be elites skimming elites and all that - you would rarely see a society where the median person was much richer due to it. Still, it is where the idea comes from, but it normally isn't the right frame to use in the modern era even going back to ~1900.

I know overseas empires were money losers for states to an extent (I wonder about specific cases like Spain and new world gold and silver), but were they money losers for companies? Resource extraction in colonies was a thing, Britain shifted to Bengal cotton over American cotton for a reason, and my impression was that empire building was indeed often driven by political pressure from commercial interests—that it was in effect the state subsidizing private industry.

I definitely drew the "19th century" line quite intentionally, because yeah earlier empires due to how pre-modern economies worked had different dynamics - Spain as a state absolutely profited off its new world colonies (though the median Spanish peasant didn't notice besides the endless wars it all funded!) And ofc things vary; British India was often profitable, Japan'a brief foray into Manchuria was complicated but economically quite optimistic, etc. But I stand by the trendline.

On companies things are certainly more mixed - I have done much research on state revenues and the wider trade & growth picture, but I won't overstep on the corporate grounds where I know less. I definitely know some companies made a ton of money, and I agree with you that the political forces were being driven by commercial interests ("welfare for colonial elites" included business elites!).

But take that example of Britain cultivating Indian cotton to split away from American cotton around the Civil War. They did do that, but this is what US cotton did at the same time on the export market:

It exploded pretty handily up to WW1! And you can see US/UK cotton ratios:

So yeah the UK is diversifying but it wasn't because US cotton was like "too expensive", it was just part of a wider competitive rivarly between the two nations. The counterfactual if the UK lacks India is just more dependence on US markets, or greater cultivation of other market sources.

Or even more accurately it is just...cotton in India but as foreign investment! That is how the East India Compamy started after all. Which is the rub, right - Australia and the US were not immerserated exporting staple goods abroad, they benefited heavily from it, Free India would have too. Some dudes in the East India Company got rich off the imperialism, but I dont see the case for why that was core to the dynamic - Japan integrated almost immediately into the trade system as a free producer of silk for example, and did fine, did *better* per capita than colonies did at giving Europe goods. The colonies were perpetually outcompeted by non-colonies because colonialism sucked.

Which is in a way one of the deep tragedies of the 19th century - if Europe was "getting rich" off the back of their empire in sone mass way then it would be evil but, like, understandable. But outside of some short term "pilfering bonuses" they were probably making themselves *poorer* while inflicting harsh pain on others due to Great Game+ cultural fixations. In the pointlessness it is particularly depressing.

I mean it seems like the question here is something more like "in these counterfactuals where Britain doesn't do the cotton imperialism stuff, how does this impact their long-run GNP", right? Except not just for that specific thing but for everything. It feels like a bit of a reach that unilaterally opting out of this sort of venture would lead to these countries being richer today, but that also seems like broadly what's required for the thesis to be true, right? Like I don't think anyone seriously thinks that countries go out and extract wealth at gunpoint directly in order to support welfare at home, the idea is more that they do that because they consider being rich (nationally, or via a shot-calling elite) intrinsically good, and then because they're rich it gives them options for throwing money at major civic unrest, later on. (By this I'm mostly talking about governments enriched by revenues, but the capitalist barons of this era also just handed out a lot of money, if it comes to that.)

This reading also keeps emphasis on the "wins of leftism" aspect that @tanadrin mentions at the start: belonging to a rich country does not just get you better welfare "for free", you need to muster a muscular pro-welfare movement for that, and this is typically not done by the same people who did the imperialism and gunboat diplomacy. But it's easier to extract such concessions from a very rich country simply because they can more readily afford it.

So the real question ends up being to what extent the policy was enriching to the country (not to the world, it doesn't matter if it's globally negative-sum) relative to not doing any of that stuff. And, ehh, I don't know? It seems broadly true that there's an "overhang" effect by which people kept doing stuff that had worked for them in the past after it stopped being effective, and that countries wasted a ton of their wealth on dubious wars, but it also seems reasonable to say that this process continues today, that for instance America uses its military and its sanctions regime and its security council veto and its treaty clout to make itself wealthier than it would be otherwise, and that while this money is in no sense going directly into the pockets of average Americans, it is on the balance better for Americans if America is a richer country.

Like it seems uncontroversial that richer countries tend to have better welfare (at least for citizens -- rich countries like to import subaltern labour, too). The mechanism for this is not mysterious! So the only real question is whether a country that did imperialism and gunboat diplomacy would have had less money overall, in the medium to long term, than if it hadn't done that, and if this is an across-the-board thing rather than "do the stuff that worked but skip the stuff that didn't work" then, I don't know, that feels like a reach to me? It's certainly not self-evident.

Of course the ask in OP is about whether this means that the western proletariat has a hand in imperialism and would be harmed by (presumably, exhaustive and across-the-board) anti-imperialism, and this seems, like, totally beyond doubt? There are lots of win-win improvements that involve a reduction in imperialism, but on the whole it hardly needs to be said that you can't get the lion's share unless you're the lion, and the proletariat "has a hand" in imperialism in the straightforward way that these are democracies, they're the bulk of voters, and there are lots of very popular imperialist policies and very unpopular anti-imperialist ones. I don't think this is that interesting a statement, though -- it's not great for assigning blame since the formula for culpability here is just normal people plus luck, and, and as a thesis about how effective "anti-imperialism" will emerge in subject states rather than hegemons, it doesn't really address the fact that they'll still be largely motivated by nationalist self-interest, and that if improving their well-being by extracting wealth from others really is a viable approach, they'll probably want to get into that after a long enough win streak.

Like in the modern world the western proletariat doesn't have a hand in imperialism because western countries aren't doing any imperialism for them to have a hand in.

Like, the US does a moderate amount of foreign adventuring (though we're currently at, like, an 80-year low), but that's not imperialism; it's not intended to extract resources! If anything, currently a decent chunk of the world is free-riding on our military and institutions.

A lot of leftists resist believing things, but it's just...clearly true? Our economic engagement is pretty universally win-win, and our military engagement doesn't generate resources and is a net loser except insofar as it underwrites extremely value international institutions and infrastructure. Trump is trying to change that---his 19th-century semi-imperialist tendencies are underrated---but as of now we're just not doing any imperialism to support.

The supposed efficiency and effectiveness of fascism was always propaganda: in reality, fascist regimes were deeply inefficient, hobbled by interpersonal rivalry, had institutions weakened or totally subverted by the personalist nature of leadership, and were deeply corrupt and lawless.

So it really, really bugs me how so much speculative fiction and even casual discourse since has taken WW2 era propaganda about fascism at face value, and depicted authoritarianism generally and fascism in particular as an intrinsic tradeoff between the chaos and disorder of liberty and the order of repression. Fascism is not orderly! That was always a lie. There is a reason right-wing authoritarian regimes have mid performance at best and at worst collapse due to infighting and military defeat—they suck at running states!

Democracy is the ideology of order and stability. Democracy provides for stable succession and can sustain rule of law in ways personalist rule cannot. Democracy can create avenues of accountability to reduce corruption that authoritarian (or even one-party rule) could never contemplate. “Democracy is chaos” is a lie invented by fascists to try to discredit liberal principles, and the apparent “chaos” of interwar democracies was often caused by the fascists themselves because they did not believe in liberalism.

I think of this most often in the context of video games about politics where it is assumed that authoritarian governance gives you efficiency bonuses at some cost to happiness or freedom—but I think these mechanics are backward. Fascism and authoritarianism are good for the narrow ruling clique at the top, the people they personally enrich, but they make for brittle and weak states, and they often fuck over even the narrow ethnic group or core citizenry whose will they are supposed to be channeling. Starting World War II was very bad for almost all Germans and Italians!

By contrast political scientists debate if a consolidated liberal democracy has ever deconsolidated, and the biggest challenges to democratic systems of government have tended to come when those systems are illiberal (as before the American Civil War), or being sabotaged by most participants (as Weimar Germany, where neither the left nor the right were really interested in democracy).

The reason they seem that way is that they usually catastrophically implode before the money they stole from their own minorities runs out.

I like how Wolfenstein handles the Nazis. They're incompetent buffoons who only managed to win by cheating with magic (that they stole from Jews)

I mean this is the problem with Nazis-won-the-war dystopia in general, right? Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito were dumbasses who got themselves into an unwinnable war because their ideologies required them to do that, and the only way games like Hearts of Iron (for instance) can make them competitive in a military context is to ahistorically rebalance the stats—or, in the case of althist narratives like Wolfenstein, to give them magic weapons. Similar problem to Confederates-win-the-Civil-War actually.

Which is not necessarily a dig at alt history—in fact I think making the fudge obvious like Wolfenstein does is probably more honest, because you don’t have to bullshit your audience into thinking Germany could have somehow made Operation Sea Lion could have worked.

This is basically the explicit thesis of David Brin's "Thor Meets Captain America", right?

(The story is pretty good and you can read it here.)

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On the video game balance thing: I think you can make this work if you interpret it as how many resources are available to the state. Fascism is much less efficient and has less industrial capacity, but it's better at mobilizing its whole society onto a war footing. (At gunpoint.) So by and large, democracies have happier citizens but fewer resources available for major state projects and total war.

Of course the issue is that sometimes you do provoke a democracy into total mobilization, and then you get stomped. So what you want is something like a deeper economy, but with penalties for engaging in combat, declaring wars, and prolonged mobilizations.

Oddly, original-flavor Civilization works along this track. (Or maybe not oddly, since it was concerned as much with simulation as with balance.) Democracy is better at producing absolutely everything; but you can't declare war, have to accept peace treaties when offered, and get major happiness penalties for all troops that are deployed. Clunkily-implemented (it was 1991), but on the right track!