My initial reaction is to disagree mildly because 'high trust' (if I understand the usage correctly) implies more than just cooperation. A low-trust society has plenty of cooperation, as you note obliquely, it's just that the trust and cooperation flow from pre-existing relationships, most often familial or tribal. Members of a high trust society not only have high levels of cooperation but are more likely to cooperate even when they have no pre-existing relationship with the other person or group,
I'm not saying you are wrong, we should surely for careful, but your concern about "inherent" sounds like something that would come from a leftist. It reminds me a bit of complaints about Mischel's marshmallow test. Many complained he was saying people who failed were inherently inferior but as I understand it, he never made a conclusion about the cause, just the likely outcome down the road.
In this case, inherent can have multiple meanings. It can point to the individuals but it can also be about the culture, which seems like what you are saying. In this I find the swiss-italian region fascinating. The primary language in southern Switzerland is Italian yet on both sides of the border they behave more like people in German speaking Switzerland on the other side of the Alps than central and southern Italians in both work ethic (Romans are said to be lazy) and willingness to obey the rules, including paying taxes. Probably other ways too.
It would be good if Arnold could promote a “high accountability” society, because govt actions can increase or decrease accountability in a more transparent way.
The high trust, like in Japan, comes from high accountability, which is a combination of laws, enforcement, and customs &norms, with social shaming enforcement.
Arnold should link to his best older posts more often, this one’s great.
++[edit] More quick thoughts, current things, better than tweets? Maybe more on changes in thinking you’ve gone thru? I’d be happy to read more book reviews, especially Glenn Loury’s autobio & books from Thomas Sowell—have you reviewed any of his work?
Waitbutwhy [https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/07/japan-and-how-i-failed-to-figure-it-out.html] discussed high trust in Japan, and he explicitly contrasts it with the kind of environment produced by high accountability (long excerpt below, after the dashes). I don't think he's quite right about the lack of "interwoven web of reward and punishment incentives" in Japan - he sees the American web because he's native to the culture, but can't see the Japanese equivalent - but it's definitely not monetary and not directly reputational. Any culture, including the culture of "doing the right thing because you're the kind of person who does the right thing", uses such a web to maintain itself and impress itself on its members. But he did make the distinction and perhaps it's worth thinking about.
---
Second, the people are trustworthy. This is the thing I laud Japan for most and I wish my world was more like it. There’s a high level of integrity in Japanese culture—doing the right thing because you’re the kind of person who does the right thing. This is the opposite of doing the right thing because it benefits you, and that’s a key distinction.
In the US, there are plenty of good people with plenty of integrity, but an interwoven web of reward and punishment incentives is really the glue that makes things work. Sure, the auto mechanic might care about the quality of his work, but I’m assuming A) that he’ll probably overcharge me if he thinks I won’t know, and B) that he mainly wants to do good work because that helps his reputation and a good reputation is what keeps his business strong. I don’t want to think too hard about what goes on in a restaurant kitchen because I assume that they’re using cheaper, lower-quality ingredients whenever possible if they don’t think I can taste the difference, and probably being unsanitary when they know no one is watching. If a waitress goes above and beyond for me, I assume she’s doing so with her tip in mind. Yes, I’m cynical, and of course there are many exceptions, but I rarely assume a stranger will do good if there’s no personal incentive in place. And that cynicism is reinforced when I’m in a super famous restaurant like Katz’s in New York, whose success doesn’t rely on happy customers because their fame ensures business no matter what, and the staff is unbelievably rude. As soon as politeness isn’t tied to success, it disappears.
But Japan feels different. People I interacted with in Japan seemed to be intent on being honest and conscientious in their work because it was part of a cultural code of conduct. That’s just the way we do it in Japan is what it felt like to me. One piece of evidence for this is the nonexistence of tipping. In fact, when I tipped a waiter on my first day without realizing that I wasn’t supposed to, he ran after me on the street to give it back to me. Tipping, to him, seems like an insult—it suggests that he provided good service just to make a couple bucks.
And this quickly rubs off on you. If I’m not tipping the waiter and he’s still providing perfect, friendly service and going above and beyond, that makes me feel like I owe it to everyone else to be an equally good person. By tipping, I owe nothing to anyone—after all, other people aren’t paying me to do good the way I paid the waiter to give me good service, and I already paid my debt back anyway in the form of money. But when the waiter did it just cause, it makes me feel like an asshole to be anything but a great citizen after I leave the restaurant. Within a few days in Japan, my cynicism was replaced by trust, which made me begin to feel an obligation to the society as a whole to keep within the social code of integrity.
Finally, everyone follows the rules. This goes hand-in-hand with the above item. Drivers aren’t assholes, pedestrians don’t jaywalk, people show up on time, and no one steps over the boundary line that runs along the metro track.
The good side of this is that it adds to the trust element I mentioned above, and it keeps things simple. No one is being sneaky, so you don’t have to worry about it, and you don’t have to feel like you’re at a disadvantage if you’re not being sneaky too.
On the contrary, I think that high accountability comes from high trust and not the other way around. Attempts to introduce accountability in low-trust societies crash and burn with monotonous regularity: people charged with managing accountability are not themselves sufficiently trustworthy, so the attempt ends up as just another layer of graft. In fact, one way people's behavior in "high trust" societies differs is that ceteris paribus they can do with _less_ accountability than people in "low trust" societies, where you can't rely on people to follow impersonal rules and protocols without strict and close supervision*, or to play abstract societal roles. (Of course "high vs low trust" is a spectrum rather than a binary. What's more, most countries and societies aren't uniform in this measure and may contain sub-societies with very different "trust" levels.) The terms "high/low trust" are used fairly consistently and seem to label real phenomena, but I have never seen a satisfactory explanation of what sort of trust the label refers to. So my shiny new idea is that "trust" in "high/low trust society" is properly understood as "trust that a random member of said society will follow impersonal rules and protocols even at significant inconvenience to themselves, and play abstract societal roles without too much leakage of private/family interest".
* My father likes to tell a little story about a German locksmith in ~XVI c., whose customer happened to come early to pick up his new keys and saw the locksmith at work polishing the inside of a doorlock. The customer asks the locksmith, what are you doing that for? Once you install the lock, neither the buyer nor anybody else is going to ever see if the inside is polished or not. Aren't you just wasting effort? The locksmith says, I won't see the inside, you won't see the inside, but God will see it. [i.e. God will know that I cheated]
This seems to go against the WEIRD thesis that psychological (and I would even add philosophical / religious) uniqueness of Christian societies led to openness to outsiders. My personal view is that the philosophical / religious situation differences led to a culture that valued trust and openness, and once valued, became institutionally incentivized.
Dr. Kling’s observations strike me as consistent with the work of Oliver Williamson who wrote an interesting article a few decades back entitled “Calculativeness, Trust, and Economic Organization” (The Journal of Law and Economics, 36, 453–486, 1993 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/467284 . For those without institutional journal access, a similarly named chapter by Williamson is available via google books
in https://www.google.com/books/edition/Organizational_Trust/KUV49zlhLGMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Calculativeness%2C%20trust%2C%20and%20economic%20organization&pg=PA73&printsec=frontcover ). Williamson sparked a bit of controversy and has been widely critiqued, yet, it seems the notion that “trust” exists as a consequence of accountability (calculativeness) has not been refuted. Where Kling and Williamson diverge might be that Williamson, if I read him correctly, seems to see economic organization as an active ongoing process that continually adapts at micro levels, and Dr. Kling seems to be asking for an answer to the problem of situations when calculativeness fails to provide desired levels and quality of economic interaction. Williamson’s answer might be to look at the transaction costs and weight of opportunism risk in any given situation.
Although Williamson addresses the macro institutional concerns that seem to be Dr. Kling’s concern in a way that I am not entirely sure that I understand, that question does call to mind Machiavelli’s observations on change under oligarchic governance. My attempt to paraphrase this would be that institutions are very slow to change under oligarchic conditions and meaningful change only happens when discontent explodes into some form of popular unrest.
Looking at our current governance situation, one might well ask what approach to accountability has not been tried? The public administration literature is one long, deep, sea of frameworks and statutes, performance measures, theories, oversight bodies, inspectors, auditors, etc. etc. Largely to no good purpose other than boosting employment statistics. Back in my geologic era, we read Dwight Waldo. But there were countless scholars before and after him that took on the task of explaining and rationalizing solutions to these issues.
With Trump and Vance bending the knee to the military establishment at the Army Navy game over the weekend, it seems clear that Dr Kling is correct in his prognostication about anything of any lasting value being achieved in the next administration. However, when popular unrest fails, the remaining alternative is usually externally imposed reform. Thus Trump is probably strategically rational in proclaiming his desire to avoid military conflict and if he is successful in such regard that alone may be enough to preserve the oligarchic status quo until the national debt ends the party.
Good questions posed in this piece. “What sort of mechanisms help to insure that cheaters are detected, caught, and punished? What sorts of developments can lead to the decay of those mechanisms?“
Let me preface my comment by saying that this essay doesn’t contain the word “justice” or the word “reputation,” which it probably should.
In answering these questions I would note that we lack the ability and the language to “design a legal system.” And we cannot call our “legal system” a “justice system” because: 1) it certainly isn’t one system; 2) it isn’t a top-down order; and 3) it certainly fails at bringing about justice in too many cases.
Justice in America comes about through: 1) hybrid orders such as government-facilitated legal systems; 2) norms and beliefs driven by hybrid orders such as public schools, and public higher education; and 3) norms and beliefs driven by bottom-up orders that include churches, families, athletics, play, and other moral markets.
Certainly knowledge gained through science has eroded participation in religion; public funding of education has diminished and distorted the moral marketplace of religious schools, family “schools” and other truly private schools.
With this erosion has come the diminishing and weakening of moral standards and punishment of cheaters. We rely too much on top-down, largely government mechanisms of justice enforcement. Clearly the top-down government-facilitated legal systems cannot and will never replace the bottom-up orders that drive such enforcement.
What does economics or so called public intellectuals have to say about the bottom-up side of this equation? I would say they are largely complicit in the problem. See Rob Henderson’s book Troubled for example - luxury beliefs.
So the question is, “What can I do to bring about more justice, trust and cooperation in my community?”
I would answer that by pointing out the huge NGO sector in both Europe and the US, which seems to be all about enabling the in-groups (deep states) of many countries to conduct propaganda and psy-ops without public visibility or accountability. In this regard I recommend strongly Joe Rogan's interview of Mike Benz, https://rumble.com/v5vpq1w-joe-rogan-experience-2237-mike-benz.html .
If President Trump can succeed in shutting down these groups it will go a long way toward making the institutional foundations of our society trustworthy again.
I’ve listened to 20 minutes. Seems like an important show. Disappointing news of course. More evidence that points to a despotic federal government.
What in my comment made you think of this show? Not sure how it relates. Guessing that the legal system being created within the Executive Branch is despotic and out of control.
The show reveals that most recent US administrations, including the outgoing one, are willing to use taxpayer funding for partisan dirty tricks, and to censor both news media and forums such as Facebook, while hiding those ops from us. These actions break the social contract and make a joke of the system's purported fairness,. And there is no pushback outside of alt-media because the half of the public who still trust legacy media never hear anything but the official Pravda.
Got it. Well, at least Rogan covered it. The red team will benefit, I would think. This further delegitimizes the federal bureaucracy and brings us closer to reform. Perhaps it makes the federal government a bit more fragile, which is good since it needs reform. But this is also a symptom of a problem rooted in our culture. In the longterm, I care most about fixing things for my kids; making sure they are safe and able to thrive.
"And we cannot call our “legal system” a “justice system” because: 1) it certainly isn’t one system; 2) it isn’t a top-down order; and 3) it certainly fails at bringing about justice in too many cases."
1) a system of systems can be called a system
2) not sure what top-down has to do with it.
3) No doubt the legal system fails to bring justice in more cases than we'd like and no doubt some people are harmed by this but what is "too many"? I'd argue it creates success in the vast majority of interactions without ever being directly involved. Most of us live our lives with little or no interaction with the legal system beyond private contracts and this is the best indicator of justice.
1) System of systems yes, but do you realize how many systems you’re talking about? Do you realize how little interaction there is between them? Further, systems are designed. Legal orders are neither fully designed, nor fully emergent.
2) Top-down refers to things that are designed. Bottom-up refers to things that emerge. Legal orders do both. They emerge from the bottom up and are designed from the top down. Are you familiar with Hayek’s three volume series Law, Legislation and Liberty?
3) Have you ever been involved in a lawsuit? How many times? How many lawyers have you hired? How did it go?
To make things clear, I use the following language: systems are designed; orders emerge. This is Hayekian terminology and perspective. This is not colloquial. You’re using the concept of “system” in a colloquial way and standard intellectual way.
The Hayekian perspective is that systems can be designed, understood, maintained and fixed. This is similar to an engineer designing a system. It is also the ideology of the socialist economist.
Emergent orders are not designed. The forest, the human eye, culture, the body, nature, language, morals, the universe, the sun, etc.
If you want to define a system as emergent go ahead, but be careful not to be fooled into believing that you can fix humans, the human brain, the economy, beliefs, culture, the climate, language, law, morals, and norms that factor into justice.
“Going forward, I would like to hear less about a ‘high-trust society.’ Instead, tell me about what makes for a high-accountability society. What sort of mechanisms help to insure that cheaters are detected, caught, and punished? What sorts of developments can lead to the decay of those mechanisms?”
I’m explaining that law, trust, accountability, and justice are emergent orders. They emerge from the bottom up based on belief norms of what works best.
Referring to justice as a single system can be misleading because it implies that the system can be understood by a single mind. Justice cannot be fixed by the public intellectual as if it were a broken machine system.
My initial reaction is to disagree mildly because 'high trust' (if I understand the usage correctly) implies more than just cooperation. A low-trust society has plenty of cooperation, as you note obliquely, it's just that the trust and cooperation flow from pre-existing relationships, most often familial or tribal. Members of a high trust society not only have high levels of cooperation but are more likely to cooperate even when they have no pre-existing relationship with the other person or group,
I'm not saying you are wrong, we should surely for careful, but your concern about "inherent" sounds like something that would come from a leftist. It reminds me a bit of complaints about Mischel's marshmallow test. Many complained he was saying people who failed were inherently inferior but as I understand it, he never made a conclusion about the cause, just the likely outcome down the road.
In this case, inherent can have multiple meanings. It can point to the individuals but it can also be about the culture, which seems like what you are saying. In this I find the swiss-italian region fascinating. The primary language in southern Switzerland is Italian yet on both sides of the border they behave more like people in German speaking Switzerland on the other side of the Alps than central and southern Italians in both work ethic (Romans are said to be lazy) and willingness to obey the rules, including paying taxes. Probably other ways too.
It would be good if Arnold could promote a “high accountability” society, because govt actions can increase or decrease accountability in a more transparent way.
The high trust, like in Japan, comes from high accountability, which is a combination of laws, enforcement, and customs &norms, with social shaming enforcement.
Arnold should link to his best older posts more often, this one’s great.
++[edit] More quick thoughts, current things, better than tweets? Maybe more on changes in thinking you’ve gone thru? I’d be happy to read more book reviews, especially Glenn Loury’s autobio & books from Thomas Sowell—have you reviewed any of his work?
Waitbutwhy [https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/07/japan-and-how-i-failed-to-figure-it-out.html] discussed high trust in Japan, and he explicitly contrasts it with the kind of environment produced by high accountability (long excerpt below, after the dashes). I don't think he's quite right about the lack of "interwoven web of reward and punishment incentives" in Japan - he sees the American web because he's native to the culture, but can't see the Japanese equivalent - but it's definitely not monetary and not directly reputational. Any culture, including the culture of "doing the right thing because you're the kind of person who does the right thing", uses such a web to maintain itself and impress itself on its members. But he did make the distinction and perhaps it's worth thinking about.
---
Second, the people are trustworthy. This is the thing I laud Japan for most and I wish my world was more like it. There’s a high level of integrity in Japanese culture—doing the right thing because you’re the kind of person who does the right thing. This is the opposite of doing the right thing because it benefits you, and that’s a key distinction.
In the US, there are plenty of good people with plenty of integrity, but an interwoven web of reward and punishment incentives is really the glue that makes things work. Sure, the auto mechanic might care about the quality of his work, but I’m assuming A) that he’ll probably overcharge me if he thinks I won’t know, and B) that he mainly wants to do good work because that helps his reputation and a good reputation is what keeps his business strong. I don’t want to think too hard about what goes on in a restaurant kitchen because I assume that they’re using cheaper, lower-quality ingredients whenever possible if they don’t think I can taste the difference, and probably being unsanitary when they know no one is watching. If a waitress goes above and beyond for me, I assume she’s doing so with her tip in mind. Yes, I’m cynical, and of course there are many exceptions, but I rarely assume a stranger will do good if there’s no personal incentive in place. And that cynicism is reinforced when I’m in a super famous restaurant like Katz’s in New York, whose success doesn’t rely on happy customers because their fame ensures business no matter what, and the staff is unbelievably rude. As soon as politeness isn’t tied to success, it disappears.
But Japan feels different. People I interacted with in Japan seemed to be intent on being honest and conscientious in their work because it was part of a cultural code of conduct. That’s just the way we do it in Japan is what it felt like to me. One piece of evidence for this is the nonexistence of tipping. In fact, when I tipped a waiter on my first day without realizing that I wasn’t supposed to, he ran after me on the street to give it back to me. Tipping, to him, seems like an insult—it suggests that he provided good service just to make a couple bucks.
And this quickly rubs off on you. If I’m not tipping the waiter and he’s still providing perfect, friendly service and going above and beyond, that makes me feel like I owe it to everyone else to be an equally good person. By tipping, I owe nothing to anyone—after all, other people aren’t paying me to do good the way I paid the waiter to give me good service, and I already paid my debt back anyway in the form of money. But when the waiter did it just cause, it makes me feel like an asshole to be anything but a great citizen after I leave the restaurant. Within a few days in Japan, my cynicism was replaced by trust, which made me begin to feel an obligation to the society as a whole to keep within the social code of integrity.
Finally, everyone follows the rules. This goes hand-in-hand with the above item. Drivers aren’t assholes, pedestrians don’t jaywalk, people show up on time, and no one steps over the boundary line that runs along the metro track.
The good side of this is that it adds to the trust element I mentioned above, and it keeps things simple. No one is being sneaky, so you don’t have to worry about it, and you don’t have to feel like you’re at a disadvantage if you’re not being sneaky too.
On the contrary, I think that high accountability comes from high trust and not the other way around. Attempts to introduce accountability in low-trust societies crash and burn with monotonous regularity: people charged with managing accountability are not themselves sufficiently trustworthy, so the attempt ends up as just another layer of graft. In fact, one way people's behavior in "high trust" societies differs is that ceteris paribus they can do with _less_ accountability than people in "low trust" societies, where you can't rely on people to follow impersonal rules and protocols without strict and close supervision*, or to play abstract societal roles. (Of course "high vs low trust" is a spectrum rather than a binary. What's more, most countries and societies aren't uniform in this measure and may contain sub-societies with very different "trust" levels.) The terms "high/low trust" are used fairly consistently and seem to label real phenomena, but I have never seen a satisfactory explanation of what sort of trust the label refers to. So my shiny new idea is that "trust" in "high/low trust society" is properly understood as "trust that a random member of said society will follow impersonal rules and protocols even at significant inconvenience to themselves, and play abstract societal roles without too much leakage of private/family interest".
* My father likes to tell a little story about a German locksmith in ~XVI c., whose customer happened to come early to pick up his new keys and saw the locksmith at work polishing the inside of a doorlock. The customer asks the locksmith, what are you doing that for? Once you install the lock, neither the buyer nor anybody else is going to ever see if the inside is polished or not. Aren't you just wasting effort? The locksmith says, I won't see the inside, you won't see the inside, but God will see it. [i.e. God will know that I cheated]
Can’t ‘high trust’ simply mean, or at least include, that the rule of law is robust?
This seems to go against the WEIRD thesis that psychological (and I would even add philosophical / religious) uniqueness of Christian societies led to openness to outsiders. My personal view is that the philosophical / religious situation differences led to a culture that valued trust and openness, and once valued, became institutionally incentivized.
Dr. Kling’s observations strike me as consistent with the work of Oliver Williamson who wrote an interesting article a few decades back entitled “Calculativeness, Trust, and Economic Organization” (The Journal of Law and Economics, 36, 453–486, 1993 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/467284 . For those without institutional journal access, a similarly named chapter by Williamson is available via google books
in https://www.google.com/books/edition/Organizational_Trust/KUV49zlhLGMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Calculativeness%2C%20trust%2C%20and%20economic%20organization&pg=PA73&printsec=frontcover ). Williamson sparked a bit of controversy and has been widely critiqued, yet, it seems the notion that “trust” exists as a consequence of accountability (calculativeness) has not been refuted. Where Kling and Williamson diverge might be that Williamson, if I read him correctly, seems to see economic organization as an active ongoing process that continually adapts at micro levels, and Dr. Kling seems to be asking for an answer to the problem of situations when calculativeness fails to provide desired levels and quality of economic interaction. Williamson’s answer might be to look at the transaction costs and weight of opportunism risk in any given situation.
Although Williamson addresses the macro institutional concerns that seem to be Dr. Kling’s concern in a way that I am not entirely sure that I understand, that question does call to mind Machiavelli’s observations on change under oligarchic governance. My attempt to paraphrase this would be that institutions are very slow to change under oligarchic conditions and meaningful change only happens when discontent explodes into some form of popular unrest.
Looking at our current governance situation, one might well ask what approach to accountability has not been tried? The public administration literature is one long, deep, sea of frameworks and statutes, performance measures, theories, oversight bodies, inspectors, auditors, etc. etc. Largely to no good purpose other than boosting employment statistics. Back in my geologic era, we read Dwight Waldo. But there were countless scholars before and after him that took on the task of explaining and rationalizing solutions to these issues.
With Trump and Vance bending the knee to the military establishment at the Army Navy game over the weekend, it seems clear that Dr Kling is correct in his prognostication about anything of any lasting value being achieved in the next administration. However, when popular unrest fails, the remaining alternative is usually externally imposed reform. Thus Trump is probably strategically rational in proclaiming his desire to avoid military conflict and if he is successful in such regard that alone may be enough to preserve the oligarchic status quo until the national debt ends the party.
Good questions posed in this piece. “What sort of mechanisms help to insure that cheaters are detected, caught, and punished? What sorts of developments can lead to the decay of those mechanisms?“
Let me preface my comment by saying that this essay doesn’t contain the word “justice” or the word “reputation,” which it probably should.
In answering these questions I would note that we lack the ability and the language to “design a legal system.” And we cannot call our “legal system” a “justice system” because: 1) it certainly isn’t one system; 2) it isn’t a top-down order; and 3) it certainly fails at bringing about justice in too many cases.
Justice in America comes about through: 1) hybrid orders such as government-facilitated legal systems; 2) norms and beliefs driven by hybrid orders such as public schools, and public higher education; and 3) norms and beliefs driven by bottom-up orders that include churches, families, athletics, play, and other moral markets.
Certainly knowledge gained through science has eroded participation in religion; public funding of education has diminished and distorted the moral marketplace of religious schools, family “schools” and other truly private schools.
With this erosion has come the diminishing and weakening of moral standards and punishment of cheaters. We rely too much on top-down, largely government mechanisms of justice enforcement. Clearly the top-down government-facilitated legal systems cannot and will never replace the bottom-up orders that drive such enforcement.
What does economics or so called public intellectuals have to say about the bottom-up side of this equation? I would say they are largely complicit in the problem. See Rob Henderson’s book Troubled for example - luxury beliefs.
So the question is, “What can I do to bring about more justice, trust and cooperation in my community?”
I would answer that by pointing out the huge NGO sector in both Europe and the US, which seems to be all about enabling the in-groups (deep states) of many countries to conduct propaganda and psy-ops without public visibility or accountability. In this regard I recommend strongly Joe Rogan's interview of Mike Benz, https://rumble.com/v5vpq1w-joe-rogan-experience-2237-mike-benz.html .
If President Trump can succeed in shutting down these groups it will go a long way toward making the institutional foundations of our society trustworthy again.
I’ve listened to 20 minutes. Seems like an important show. Disappointing news of course. More evidence that points to a despotic federal government.
What in my comment made you think of this show? Not sure how it relates. Guessing that the legal system being created within the Executive Branch is despotic and out of control.
The show reveals that most recent US administrations, including the outgoing one, are willing to use taxpayer funding for partisan dirty tricks, and to censor both news media and forums such as Facebook, while hiding those ops from us. These actions break the social contract and make a joke of the system's purported fairness,. And there is no pushback outside of alt-media because the half of the public who still trust legacy media never hear anything but the official Pravda.
Got it. Well, at least Rogan covered it. The red team will benefit, I would think. This further delegitimizes the federal bureaucracy and brings us closer to reform. Perhaps it makes the federal government a bit more fragile, which is good since it needs reform. But this is also a symptom of a problem rooted in our culture. In the longterm, I care most about fixing things for my kids; making sure they are safe and able to thrive.
"And we cannot call our “legal system” a “justice system” because: 1) it certainly isn’t one system; 2) it isn’t a top-down order; and 3) it certainly fails at bringing about justice in too many cases."
1) a system of systems can be called a system
2) not sure what top-down has to do with it.
3) No doubt the legal system fails to bring justice in more cases than we'd like and no doubt some people are harmed by this but what is "too many"? I'd argue it creates success in the vast majority of interactions without ever being directly involved. Most of us live our lives with little or no interaction with the legal system beyond private contracts and this is the best indicator of justice.
1) System of systems yes, but do you realize how many systems you’re talking about? Do you realize how little interaction there is between them? Further, systems are designed. Legal orders are neither fully designed, nor fully emergent.
2) Top-down refers to things that are designed. Bottom-up refers to things that emerge. Legal orders do both. They emerge from the bottom up and are designed from the top down. Are you familiar with Hayek’s three volume series Law, Legislation and Liberty?
3) Have you ever been involved in a lawsuit? How many times? How many lawyers have you hired? How did it go?
1 Systems are designed? So you are an intelligent designer believer? Ever heard the term emergent systems? How about a market system?
2 What's your point? I don't see a problem.
Hayek's three volumes? No.
3 Small things. But that's my point. Most people haven't. More often than not it works by simply being there and playing no active part.
To make things clear, I use the following language: systems are designed; orders emerge. This is Hayekian terminology and perspective. This is not colloquial. You’re using the concept of “system” in a colloquial way and standard intellectual way.
The Hayekian perspective is that systems can be designed, understood, maintained and fixed. This is similar to an engineer designing a system. It is also the ideology of the socialist economist.
Emergent orders are not designed. The forest, the human eye, culture, the body, nature, language, morals, the universe, the sun, etc.
If you want to define a system as emergent go ahead, but be careful not to be fooled into believing that you can fix humans, the human brain, the economy, beliefs, culture, the climate, language, law, morals, and norms that factor into justice.
Re 3) How old are you stu?
I have no idea what we are talking about any more.
And if you are talking about a Hayekian system and not a system, don't not you think you should make that clear?
See Arnold’s last paragraph:
“Going forward, I would like to hear less about a ‘high-trust society.’ Instead, tell me about what makes for a high-accountability society. What sort of mechanisms help to insure that cheaters are detected, caught, and punished? What sorts of developments can lead to the decay of those mechanisms?”
I’m explaining that law, trust, accountability, and justice are emergent orders. They emerge from the bottom up based on belief norms of what works best.
Referring to justice as a single system can be misleading because it implies that the system can be understood by a single mind. Justice cannot be fixed by the public intellectual as if it were a broken machine system.