Nick, this was an interesting sum up of several author's thoughts, I'm curious to know your thoughts? Do you have a specific idea for how you would fix democracy using these ideas?
I wish I did. I started it hoping that I could end up with a recommendation.
As I said in reply to Albert Cory in comments, I'm convinced that, on-balance, this sort of expansion of functionality by the courts in a good thing, but it also seems so clearly like not the *best* way to solve the problems, that I'd love to figure out something better.
I'm still mulling it over, and it seemed worth posting to see if the discussion generated any additional thoughts.
I'm actually trying to finish a book that's in the space that Elle is thinking about in her columns; the main difference is that I treat my central concept as a thought experiment and conclude that as a utopian thought experiment, it demonstrates the folly of the entire idea while underscoring the need for more plausible changes. Whereas I think she is consistently arguing that the visions she advocates are possible and desirable without really assessing the political landscape involved--there are no opponents or enemies in her advocacy, and no struggle on the road to utopia other than finding the will to do it.
Hmmmm, this seems a misunderstanding of my work that perhaps I should write an essay to correct. Just to be clear, every single one of my posts is a thought experiment. Not a single one of them is an actual recommendation of something I think is possible or desirable to do. They are philosophy: intended to get people to think.
This is not unusual: none of the utopian thinkers were making a recommendation for a future they actually thought we should create (with the exception of maybe Karl Marx...). But the exercise is a valuable one: I think we need to think in hypotheticals before we can see what ideas we should become actuals.
I appreciate you showing up to correct the record. As I said, as a reader, it isn't always clear where your posts fall on that spectrum. For example this post appears to be making a claim that the proposal is practical and actionable (but you do explicitly say, "It’s worth noting that I do not necessarily think this is the “right” health plan—rather it’s “a” plan"): https://www.elysian.press/p/states-could-have-universal-healthcare
My work is all brainstorming: You come up with a bunch of outlandish ideas that lead to other outlandish ideas, but eventually you start to settle on some places where parts of that idea might actually work. The hypotheticals start to become actuals.
For instance, before that universal healthcare piece I wrote an essay saying that US states should work more like EU countries. It was entirely hypothetical. Then I gave one way in which that could actually be a reality, for example in healthcare. US states might not become their own countries, but maybe they could have their own healthcare.
Even in coming up with this idea, I'm not saying we SHOULD do it or that it's what I'd recommend we'd do. I'm just saying, here's one idea, I'm sure there are better ones out there too. That's why, the week after I published that essay I shared a link to Tina Dalton's criticisms of the Utah plan, showing the ways in which that idea might not work. https://www.elysian.press/p/a-study-of-milton-friedmans-approach
I was thinking about this thread about utopian brainstorming, and I wanted to give a longer reply. I had three thoughts.
THOUGHT 1: If it is engaging and helpful to use your substack as a sketchbook -- presenting ideas and visions and seeing what themes emerge, and how pieces fit together then by all means do that -- there's nothing wrong with that.
THOUGHT 2: Sometimes the point of a proposal depends upon an assessment of it's plausibility. For example, I really appreciated your post & discussion on Half Earth Socialism. In that case, part of their argument was, "this isn't the best outcome we could imagine, but we should work towards it because it is achievable and it's the best place that we can get to from here." I feel like your readers (including me) weren't convinced by that, but it's an important part of their argument.
Or, to take a second example, I can be convinced by both Timothy Burke (really good) post about New Mexico making tuition free for public universities and colleges in New Mexico for all residents of New Mexico, including prisoners and undocumented residents -- a impressive example of a utopian idea happening: https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-news-how-not-to-sell-public-goods
The resolution between those two isn't at the level of ideals but a recognition that, in the landscape of higher Ed there are characteristics of New Mexico that make it a good place for a policy that might not make sense nationally.
THOUGHT 3: Sometimes when I feel impatient with purely theoretical proposals it's related to the last point that I made in this post (criticizing Burke), in which I drew an analogy between a Joel Spolsky post and some discussion of politics: https://earnestnessisunderrated.substack.com/p/persistence-of-vision
Joel Spolsky argued against the yearning, among programmers, to completely re-write the systems they worked on. He argued that, yes, when you start writing something you have a clear sense of what you want and then, by the time you have something working it's acquired a great deal of messiness and complexity that you never wanted and hate having to maintain. But that messiness is there for a reason; it exists in response to some problem -- either a real world constraint or the limitations of the programmers (or programming environment) and throwing that away is often a mistake.
That isn't to argue against brainstorming or whiteboarding ideas about how a new system could function. That's valuable! But it is a good reminder to be conscious of how you go about making comparison between those ideas and the current existing systems.
But even the utopian writers are often misunderstood as advoating for their plans, so it's worth remembering that I need to make this more explicit in my work. Thanks for the reminder!
I should be more precise: I think you think in terms of utopian projects in ways that skirt around some important "why" and "why nots", most particularly questions about why the world is the way that it is now and not the way you are thought-experimenting about--you are very determined to be optimistic and upbeat, which I think makes thought-experimenting a bit too weightless. Many utopian thought-experiments use that activity as a way of uncovering something about our present dispensation, or human nature more generally, that explains why we don't live in a better world. (In that sense, the activity is a rhetorical variation on Enlightenment-era social theory's conjecturing about the "state of nature" that preceded the establishment of human societies.)
Yes, that is true. I'm intentionally not focused on our present realities in favor of imagining speculative futures. In my mind there are plenty of writers asking "what could we do with what we have?" and not enough asking "what kind of future would we create if we weren't limited to the one we already have?"
To you this might feel "weightless" but I'd rather start with what we want and then work backward to see if we can get there from here, rather than start with what we have here and just see where it leads. A lot of utopian thinkers were this way including political thinkers like Thomas More and Francis Bacon and Alexander Hamilton. They all had some crazy ideas that were not rooted in reality, but they slowly figured out how parts of them could be.
“Instead of a single Europe with recognized and contiguous boundaries,” he said at the time, “there would be many Europes: a trading Europe, an energy Europe, an environmental Europe, a social welfare Europe, even a defense Europe, and so forth. Instead of one ‘Eurocracy’ that coordinated all the distinct tasks involved in the integration process, there would be multiple regional institutions acting autonomously to solve common problems and produce different public goods.”
----end----
I think that's an interesting idea that, like many things, would deform as you try to put more weight on it, and I'm not entirely sure how that would work. One thing that I would say, following this post, is that you should expect each of those institutions to evolve a court (see, for example the WTO court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body ), and that will be have a huge impact on how it plays out (and how the different institutions interact with each other.
The easiest summary of my post is that, within many people's lifetime we've seen a shift in the role of courts, and there are good reasons for that shift, but it's worth taking a moment to recognize it and assess where to go from here.
"it's worth taking a moment to recognize it and assess where to go from here." -- OK. Who is going to be charged with that task? Ivy League-educated professors? Bureaucrats? Politicians?
And when they complete it, who gets to vote on the result? The two new Constitutions that Chile rejected shows you what happens then.
If it's purely an intellectual exercise, I have no objections.
Sure, I have no power and, trust me, a post like this one is not going to rouse mass support for any changes.
But I do encourage you to think about the story I'm telling in this post which is, one hand, the idea that the expansion of courts is a positive function that accompanies and supports increasing exchange of goods and ideas and, on the other hand, that Argentina was shut out of the international bond market because of a decision by a New York court in a case which, I believe, the court would not have taken half a century ago.
I think that one way in which government function has changed is not because of Ivy League academics, or Politicians but because, over time courts have agreed to adjudicate all sorts of disputes -- in many cases with no alternative path to adjudication available.
That has happened, my questions are, "was that inevitable", "is that on-balance good" and, "now what?"
(I think it was, if not inevitable, highly likely, that it is probably on-balance good, but not without costs and we should try to figure out if there are ways to keep the benefits and reduce the costs).
"over time courts have agreed to adjudicate all sorts of disputes" -- you're 100% right.
Unfortunately, "judicial activism" has itself become a political slogan and any time a court does ANYTHING that pleases one side, the other side accuses it of that sin.
I have to admit I've only heard of that New York decision, without any details, but wasn't Argentina shut out of the bond market because of multiple defaults?
Yes, Argentina had multiple defaults and the vast majority of bond holders accepted them except for one "vulture capital" firm which took them to court and won. As I understand it that court decision, not the multiple defaults, was the reason they were excluded from the bond market (but, you can and should read the links).
Weren't the vulture capitalists refusing to accept the haircut that the rest of the bondholders took? In other words, "pay me back all you borrowed from me" was their position.
I do accept the argument that they might have been in the right, but it wasn't the court's right to adjudicate it. On the other hand, international contract disputes are difficult unless the contract explicitly lays out how a dispute will be settled.
At this point, I'll go and read up, and not make you repeat what you already said.
Nick, this was an interesting sum up of several author's thoughts, I'm curious to know your thoughts? Do you have a specific idea for how you would fix democracy using these ideas?
I wish I did. I started it hoping that I could end up with a recommendation.
As I said in reply to Albert Cory in comments, I'm convinced that, on-balance, this sort of expansion of functionality by the courts in a good thing, but it also seems so clearly like not the *best* way to solve the problems, that I'd love to figure out something better.
I'm still mulling it over, and it seemed worth posting to see if the discussion generated any additional thoughts.
I'm actually trying to finish a book that's in the space that Elle is thinking about in her columns; the main difference is that I treat my central concept as a thought experiment and conclude that as a utopian thought experiment, it demonstrates the folly of the entire idea while underscoring the need for more plausible changes. Whereas I think she is consistently arguing that the visions she advocates are possible and desirable without really assessing the political landscape involved--there are no opponents or enemies in her advocacy, and no struggle on the road to utopia other than finding the will to do it.
Hmmmm, this seems a misunderstanding of my work that perhaps I should write an essay to correct. Just to be clear, every single one of my posts is a thought experiment. Not a single one of them is an actual recommendation of something I think is possible or desirable to do. They are philosophy: intended to get people to think.
This is not unusual: none of the utopian thinkers were making a recommendation for a future they actually thought we should create (with the exception of maybe Karl Marx...). But the exercise is a valuable one: I think we need to think in hypotheticals before we can see what ideas we should become actuals.
I appreciate you showing up to correct the record. As I said, as a reader, it isn't always clear where your posts fall on that spectrum. For example this post appears to be making a claim that the proposal is practical and actionable (but you do explicitly say, "It’s worth noting that I do not necessarily think this is the “right” health plan—rather it’s “a” plan"): https://www.elysian.press/p/states-could-have-universal-healthcare
My work is all brainstorming: You come up with a bunch of outlandish ideas that lead to other outlandish ideas, but eventually you start to settle on some places where parts of that idea might actually work. The hypotheticals start to become actuals.
For instance, before that universal healthcare piece I wrote an essay saying that US states should work more like EU countries. It was entirely hypothetical. Then I gave one way in which that could actually be a reality, for example in healthcare. US states might not become their own countries, but maybe they could have their own healthcare.
Even in coming up with this idea, I'm not saying we SHOULD do it or that it's what I'd recommend we'd do. I'm just saying, here's one idea, I'm sure there are better ones out there too. That's why, the week after I published that essay I shared a link to Tina Dalton's criticisms of the Utah plan, showing the ways in which that idea might not work. https://www.elysian.press/p/a-study-of-milton-friedmans-approach
https://tinamarshdalton.substack.com/p/big-dreams-and-big-questions-in-utah
I was thinking about this thread about utopian brainstorming, and I wanted to give a longer reply. I had three thoughts.
THOUGHT 1: If it is engaging and helpful to use your substack as a sketchbook -- presenting ideas and visions and seeing what themes emerge, and how pieces fit together then by all means do that -- there's nothing wrong with that.
THOUGHT 2: Sometimes the point of a proposal depends upon an assessment of it's plausibility. For example, I really appreciated your post & discussion on Half Earth Socialism. In that case, part of their argument was, "this isn't the best outcome we could imagine, but we should work towards it because it is achievable and it's the best place that we can get to from here." I feel like your readers (including me) weren't convinced by that, but it's an important part of their argument.
Or, to take a second example, I can be convinced by both Timothy Burke (really good) post about New Mexico making tuition free for public universities and colleges in New Mexico for all residents of New Mexico, including prisoners and undocumented residents -- a impressive example of a utopian idea happening: https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-news-how-not-to-sell-public-goods
And also Harry Brighouse arguing against free public college: https://crookedtimber.org/2024/02/05/whats-wrong-with-free-public-college/
The resolution between those two isn't at the level of ideals but a recognition that, in the landscape of higher Ed there are characteristics of New Mexico that make it a good place for a policy that might not make sense nationally.
THOUGHT 3: Sometimes when I feel impatient with purely theoretical proposals it's related to the last point that I made in this post (criticizing Burke), in which I drew an analogy between a Joel Spolsky post and some discussion of politics: https://earnestnessisunderrated.substack.com/p/persistence-of-vision
Joel Spolsky argued against the yearning, among programmers, to completely re-write the systems they worked on. He argued that, yes, when you start writing something you have a clear sense of what you want and then, by the time you have something working it's acquired a great deal of messiness and complexity that you never wanted and hate having to maintain. But that messiness is there for a reason; it exists in response to some problem -- either a real world constraint or the limitations of the programmers (or programming environment) and throwing that away is often a mistake.
That isn't to argue against brainstorming or whiteboarding ideas about how a new system could function. That's valuable! But it is a good reminder to be conscious of how you go about making comparison between those ideas and the current existing systems.
But even the utopian writers are often misunderstood as advoating for their plans, so it's worth remembering that I need to make this more explicit in my work. Thanks for the reminder!
It's true; that's one of the challenges of working in a utopian style . . .
I should be more precise: I think you think in terms of utopian projects in ways that skirt around some important "why" and "why nots", most particularly questions about why the world is the way that it is now and not the way you are thought-experimenting about--you are very determined to be optimistic and upbeat, which I think makes thought-experimenting a bit too weightless. Many utopian thought-experiments use that activity as a way of uncovering something about our present dispensation, or human nature more generally, that explains why we don't live in a better world. (In that sense, the activity is a rhetorical variation on Enlightenment-era social theory's conjecturing about the "state of nature" that preceded the establishment of human societies.)
Yes, that is true. I'm intentionally not focused on our present realities in favor of imagining speculative futures. In my mind there are plenty of writers asking "what could we do with what we have?" and not enough asking "what kind of future would we create if we weren't limited to the one we already have?"
To you this might feel "weightless" but I'd rather start with what we want and then work backward to see if we can get there from here, rather than start with what we have here and just see where it leads. A lot of utopian thinkers were this way including political thinkers like Thomas More and Francis Bacon and Alexander Hamilton. They all had some crazy ideas that were not rooted in reality, but they slowly figured out how parts of them could be.
Right, she's touching on a broad range of ideas that range from plausible to implausible, and it's not always clear where that line falls.
Part of what prompted me to respond was her subsequent post on, "democratizing those government functions across several jurisdictions. ": https://www.elysian.press/p/city-states-should-choose-federal-governments
----quote----
“Instead of a single Europe with recognized and contiguous boundaries,” he said at the time, “there would be many Europes: a trading Europe, an energy Europe, an environmental Europe, a social welfare Europe, even a defense Europe, and so forth. Instead of one ‘Eurocracy’ that coordinated all the distinct tasks involved in the integration process, there would be multiple regional institutions acting autonomously to solve common problems and produce different public goods.”
----end----
I think that's an interesting idea that, like many things, would deform as you try to put more weight on it, and I'm not entirely sure how that would work. One thing that I would say, following this post, is that you should expect each of those institutions to evolve a court (see, for example the WTO court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body ), and that will be have a huge impact on how it plays out (and how the different institutions interact with each other.
A simple rule that I use for questions like this:
Who are the intellectual giants with the wisdom to get something like this right?
If you're stuck for an answer: well, there you go. They don't exist. So leave it alone.
"We need to reimagine <something>"
"No, we don't. Not if 'we' includes you. Or, actually, anyone now alive."
I'm not quite sure what your point is.
The easiest summary of my post is that, within many people's lifetime we've seen a shift in the role of courts, and there are good reasons for that shift, but it's worth taking a moment to recognize it and assess where to go from here.
The point is spread throughout your reply.
"it's worth taking a moment to recognize it and assess where to go from here." -- OK. Who is going to be charged with that task? Ivy League-educated professors? Bureaucrats? Politicians?
And when they complete it, who gets to vote on the result? The two new Constitutions that Chile rejected shows you what happens then.
If it's purely an intellectual exercise, I have no objections.
Sure, I have no power and, trust me, a post like this one is not going to rouse mass support for any changes.
But I do encourage you to think about the story I'm telling in this post which is, one hand, the idea that the expansion of courts is a positive function that accompanies and supports increasing exchange of goods and ideas and, on the other hand, that Argentina was shut out of the international bond market because of a decision by a New York court in a case which, I believe, the court would not have taken half a century ago.
I think that one way in which government function has changed is not because of Ivy League academics, or Politicians but because, over time courts have agreed to adjudicate all sorts of disputes -- in many cases with no alternative path to adjudication available.
That has happened, my questions are, "was that inevitable", "is that on-balance good" and, "now what?"
(I think it was, if not inevitable, highly likely, that it is probably on-balance good, but not without costs and we should try to figure out if there are ways to keep the benefits and reduce the costs).
"over time courts have agreed to adjudicate all sorts of disputes" -- you're 100% right.
Unfortunately, "judicial activism" has itself become a political slogan and any time a court does ANYTHING that pleases one side, the other side accuses it of that sin.
I have to admit I've only heard of that New York decision, without any details, but wasn't Argentina shut out of the bond market because of multiple defaults?
Yes, Argentina had multiple defaults and the vast majority of bond holders accepted them except for one "vulture capital" firm which took them to court and won. As I understand it that court decision, not the multiple defaults, was the reason they were excluded from the bond market (but, you can and should read the links).
Weren't the vulture capitalists refusing to accept the haircut that the rest of the bondholders took? In other words, "pay me back all you borrowed from me" was their position.
I do accept the argument that they might have been in the right, but it wasn't the court's right to adjudicate it. On the other hand, international contract disputes are difficult unless the contract explicitly lays out how a dispute will be settled.
At this point, I'll go and read up, and not make you repeat what you already said.