COINBASE for Crypto has come

[Clinamenic]

@padraig (u.s.) do you know if there is anything new about the neoliberal thesis that wasn't made by the liberal thesis, or if it even is as simple as a comparison of theses?

I gather reality is messier than academia, but at the same time this particular area of academia seems to enjoy especially direct influence over economic reality.

 

[vimothy]

I think if you were trying to be neutral about it you'd say that the neo in neoliberalism describes a genealogical break - its the name given to an attempt to resurrect an ideology (classical liberalism) which had then fallen out of favour. but in practice when ppl use the term its not meant to be neutral, it's usually motivated critically to describe an orchestrated pivot away from social democracy in general, and market liberalisation in "emerging markets" / "developing economies" as a kind of neocolonial enterprise.

 

[vimothy]

Does the mainstream discourse consider firms the result of cooperative motivations of individuals constituting the firm? Does it even really get into game theory, or do the main theories just assume all actors are rational and profit-maximizing by default?

afaik mainstream econ and relevant sub fields like industrial organisation take the existence of firms as a given and address themselves to topics like their behaviour, strategies, etc, and the particular market structures these create, and arent that interested in the more naive ontological questions about why they exist.

 

[vimothy]

Ferdinand braudel has a concept called "antimarkets" which taps into this apparent paradox of the subversion of the market economy at the heart of capitalism, somewhat

 

[vimothy]

theres an amazing book by a Scottish sociologist, Donald Mackenzie, which looks at how modern financial markets come into being as collective, almost collectivist, enterprises, underpinned by financial theories which claim to describe them objectively but without which they wouldnt exist

 

[Clinamenic]

I'm thinking about reading Radical Markets by Glen Weyl, you have any opinions about him?

 

[vimothy]

never heard of him tbh. what's the gist? why are you thinking of reading it?

 

[Clinamenic]

never heard of him tbh. what's the gist? why are you thinking of reading it?

There are a bunch of ideas attributed to this book and the school of thought it seems to express, a sort of communitarian, public-goods oriented direction to move capitalism into. He's been in dialogue with Vitalik Buterin about implementing some of this stuff with blockchain, like quadratic funding of public goods, but Weyl himself isn't necessarily a web3 thinker.

 

[Clinamenic]

Essentially it seems like a school of thought that prioritizes technical ways to foster public goods and "common ownership" of assets, which I don't quite understand yet. So in principle its a sort of capitalist/communist hybrid, but seemingly unlike CCP it doesn't involve a central-planning state apparatus, but I could be wrong. Weyl does seem to advocate for strong anti-trust though, especially in labor markets, IE regulation of corporations that monopolize a given labor market.

 

[Clinamenic]

In principle, blockchain could be instrumental in implementing some of these ideas. There seems to be a strong ideological thrust in web3 that is informed by the ideas of Weyl et al.

Like I'm working in the public goods sector of web3 now, and we're actively exploring areas where Weyl's ideas may squarely apply.

 

[vimothy]

dont you find this sort of stuff falls under the rubric of solutions in search of a problem? is there anything in it which could not be fulfilled by the trad financial system?

 

[Clinamenic]

dont you find this sort of stuff falls under the rubric of solutions in search of a problem? is there anything in it which could not be fulfilled by the trad financial system?

Yeah a lot of it definitely does seem like that. I think its largely an attempt to rethink (and reengineer) the whole system itself, and to uproot the dynamics of institutional trust that have left so many people alienated. Although I still think the major powers will find other ways to secure outsized positions, as if such is in the nature of wealth itself.

 

[vimothy]

the thing that I dislike most about economics is the extension of an engineering or technological approach to problems which exist within a completely different domain. like the idea that I can write a model or solve an equation which will give me the answer to a political or ethical question. crypto and web3.0 seem like rather than addressing these problems they intensify them.

 

[Clinamenic]

the thing that I dislike most about economics is the extension of an engineering or technological approach to problems which exist within a completely different domain. like the idea that I can write a model or solve an equation which will give me the answer to a political or ethical question. crypto and web3.0 seem like rather than addressing these problems they intensify them.

Yeah web3 is an extension of this analytical, systems-based mindset, in my opinion. And I agree that theories and models can only account for human psychology so well. Web3 does introduce new ways to account for and adjust the incentives of engineered social systems like twitter, but it will certainly introduce some new problems along with these new tools.

 

[vimothy]

Yeah a lot of it definitely does seem like that. I think its largely an attempt to rethink (and reengineer) the whole system itself, and to uproot the dynamics of institutional trust that have left so many people alienated. Although I still think the major powers will find other ways to secure outsized positions, as if such is in the nature of wealth itself.

I think you're right that it's a bottom up approach to redesigning the whole system, which is ironically bad from a software engineering POV (ie waterfall). I also think you're right that its motivated by a loss of faith in the current system, which is easy to understand. the problems with this imo are that it's a bottom up approach, which wont work, and that it rests on a misunderstanding of the way the current system works.

 

[Clinamenic]

Like from a web3 perspective, Twitter is almost a dead-platform walking, because it isn't a platform on which other apps can be built, largely due to the centralized data ownership. If Twitter was web3-native, anyone could integrate all of its data without permission and Twitter as a public platform could inherit the economic activity experienced by the development upon it. Of course we aren't even in the age of widely-used web3 social media yet (Orbis and gm.xyz aren't widely used, Lens protocol doesn't seem to have been widely integrated yet, etc.) so all of this is still hypothetical, as far as social media platforms are concerned.

But the point about solutions in search of problems is at once true and false, because it seems like the problem web3 is attempting to solve is the incentivizational nature of the current digital status quo itself.

 

[Clinamenic]

I think you're right that it's a bottom up approach to redesigning the whole system, which is ironically bad from a software engineering POV (ie waterfall). I also think you're right that its motivated by a loss of faith in the current system, which is easy to understand. the problems with this imo are that it's a bottom up approach, which wont work, and that it rests on a misunderstanding of the way the current system works.

Yeah it may not pan out, especially if web3 doesn't get more user friendly. The bottom-up approach seems to be rendered more feasible by permissionless app development platforms. The major downside of these platforms are the scams and grifts they tacitly invite, because nobody needs permission to build an app that uses data on the Ethereum blockchain.

 

[Clinamenic]

I think you're right that it's a bottom up approach to redesigning the whole system, which is ironically bad from a software engineering POV (ie waterfall). I also think you're right that its motivated by a loss of faith in the current system, which is easy to understand. the problems with this imo are that it's a bottom up approach, which wont work, and that it rests on a misunderstanding of the way the current system works.

And to your point, there is still a mass reckoning underway in the DAO space. Almost everyone is pushing for near total decentralization of all decisions made, which simply isn't feasible, at least not yet.

 

[Clinamenic]

More and more tools are being designed to decentralize certain decision-making processes, but there is still so much that practically requires centralized mechanisms of decision-making.

 

[vimothy]

but