My Debate with Curtis Yarvin
Hypothetically, that is
The real lesson from markets is not to create monarchs but to design systems that create choice and competition and allow citizens to remove leaders when they fail.
This is in response to reading what some of you may have watched: Curtis Yarvin interviewed by a NYT reporter, David Marchese. I think I could have been tougher on Yarvin. The reporter’s idea of toughness was, “Curtis, you ignorant slut!”1
So here is my debate with a hypothetical Curtis Yarvin (HCY). My version of him gets to the point more quickly than he does, by the way.
HCY: Arnold, you recently wrote a post in which you said that California needs to have its water, fire department, and public employee compensation rules taken over by the Federal government. That’s as crazy and radical as anything I’ve ever said. And what makes you think that the Feds would do a better job?
AK: Well, I didn’t mean for a Federal bureaucracy to take over. I guess I had in mind a small oversight board for each function, maybe with a powerful CEO. Something closer to Yarvinism in this case.
HCY: OK, then we agree that California’s so-called democracy is not a good form of government. I like to say that if California’s government were in charge of Apple, we wouldn’t have iPhones, and if California had a CEO who was as good as Apple, and he or she were an Absolute Monarch, then California would be a much better place.
AK: But would California be better off if Gavin Newsom were an Absolute Monarch? Maybe if he didn’t have to answer to the teachers’ union he’d do a better job. But I bet he still would be pretty bad.
HYC: I’ll concede that’s possible. But I’m not advocating Newsom. I would put names of the CEOs of each of the 500 biggest companies in America in a hat, and pick one.
AK: So the selection process is that Curtis Yarvin draws a name from out of a hat. I might go along with that, but historically that is not how absolute monarchy has worked. I picture of it as kind of the kids’ game of King of the Hill, in which you get to the top by shoving everyone else aside. The real-life shoving often took the form of assassinations and civil wars. To prevent that, you need a process for orderly transfer of power. To me, that is what democracy accomplishes.
HYC: But look at all the nonsense that comes with democracy. Popular elections don’t pick good CEOs, so you end up having all of these mechanisms in place to weaken the CEO. You end up with this kludgy distributed oligarchy.
AK: But I go back to the selection problem. I think of it as really difficult. Suppose you set up a position in society called Absolute Monarch. If you just think of who would most want that position, it’s pretty scary. It would appeal most of all to a psychopath. You could start out with George Washington, but then Hitler or Stalin maneuvers to succeed him.
HYC: But that doesn’t happen in the corporate world.
AK: In the corporate world, the CEO you start out with is the founder. If the founder is no good, then the company fails, and that’s that. If you have a good founder, and the company gets big, then you end up with a board, and a succession plan. The board manages the succession plan.
HYC: You could run California that way. You could have a board that has the authority to remove the CEO and the ability to approve or veto his or her chosen successor.
AK: So you’re already making the CEO a bit less of an absolute monarch. He or she has to stay in good graces with the board.
HYC: Does that bother you?
AK: Not really. But you also have the problem of how to select the board. In the corporate world, the shareholders vote on that, but they are relatively passive and pretty much let the CEO pick the board, subject to government regulations. But you couldn’t have any regulatory oversight for the board that picks the Absolute Monarch.
HYC: The public would be pretty passive about the board that deals with monarchical succession, as long as the government is doing a good job.
AK: So the risk is: a psychopath maneuvers his way into being Absolute Monarch, then before the board realizes he’s a psychopath he replaces it with cronies, and then he proceeds to install a reign of terror. Or even if the board realizes he’s a psychopath and orders him to step down, he refuses, saying “The board? How many divisions do they have?” Then you need a civil war or a revolution to get rid of him.
You judge the debate
Did I win? The real Curtis Yarvin probably wouldn’t say so. Maybe he would claim that the current government of California is operating as if it were in the hands of a psychopath Absolute Monarch—it’s just that it’s an emergent outcome, not a single person that you can try to dislodge.
Those of you who watched Saturday Night Live in the early days will get this reference. The rest of you can just look it up.
I think you win, but then I have a lot of problems with Yarvin's ideas, right down to the notion that absolute monarchs have some ability to avoid oligarchy in a large state.
My only quibble with you is: What makes you think psychopaths don't jockey for positions within corporations? I think that same lack of responsibility to power ratio that makes government positions desirable for psychopaths make corporate level positions desirable. Empirically, at least my casual empirics, show that many are vastly under capable of anything other than dissimulation. That said, government power is much worse than corporate power, so it is less damaging; I mainly bring this up when people say they are hoping to have government protect from evil businesses. If you dislike big business, you should really dislike big government!
Think of Yarvin's argument like this: At some point around, say 1800, we stopped trying new forms of government.
Since then there has been a revolution in corporate governance in the private sector. A CEO (a monarch, in political science terms) with a relatively uninvolved Board of Directors has become the dominant market solution. The market has spoken and at this point there are no realistic alternative contenders with respect to corporate governance. We have complete free market domination for this form of organization in the corporate world.
Is it really so crazy to suggest that the type governance that has come to completely dominate the private sector should be tried in the public sector as opposed to relics from a couple centuries ago? Put this way, isn't it super obvious that some country should try it?