
The Return of the Utopians - pepys
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/03/the-return-of-the-utopians
======
vonnik
I lived in two Utopian experiments, and am trying to create a third. The first
was Deep Springs College, a two-year free-ride all-male school founded in 1917
and still operating in eastern California. 13 students admitted per year. The
second was a zen center that operated in San Francisco and environs. The third
is a startup whose sole constraint is to survive. Like all utopias, come to
think of it. One thing you learn about utopias is that they are painful.
Because they require changes in behavior, and because you must listen to
others, and learn to live with them. It is a long process. It doesn't work if
you let the wrong people in, which means that whole nations can't attempt it.
Some must be silenced or excluded for a utopia to function.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
"Some must be silenced or excluded for a utopia to function" and "It doesn't
work if you let the wrong people in".

Powerful and brutally honest. Especially in today's political atmosphere of
"forced inclusion" and "diversity for the sake of diversity (whether racial,
religious, or thought based)". I've witnessed the same thing you're talking
about in online communities. They start out being created by one group who
adhere to a very specific set of rules (often unspoken rules) and as more
people gather the community starts to wilt and die, losing the original
cohesion it once had. Those who leave often go and start another community,
and the cycle repeats.

~~~
RangerScience
Hmm. I'm guessing at what you mean by "diversity for the sake of diversity",
but - pretty sure that's definitely something from the perspective of those,
well, on the receiving end of privilege.

Sure, diversity for diversity is a shittier reason than diversity to break the
glass ceiling, or to cover bases you don't otherwise cover ("hey let's built a
web app and never talk to dev ops!" "hey let's build something without
figuring out how to sell it!"); there's those statistics that say teams with
both men and women function better, yadda yadda...

...but like college graduation, it's not for you, or about you; it's about a
bunch of other people.

Diversity-for-diversity looks pointless when you already think you can join
those groups. It looks like realizing you have a possibility you never thought
could be yours, when you think you can't join those groups.

Does that make any sense?

With regards to what you've seen with online communities, that sounds a lot
like gentrification: you have an influx of people that, rather than trying to
adapt themselves to the existing culture and contribute to it - to actually
join what was there, try (inadvertently or deliberately) to adapt the culture
to their existing selves. On the other hand, what's the point if you have to /
end up conforming so much you can't add anything new?

~~~
yakult
"Diversity for the sake of diversity" may be better phrased as "choosing to
recruit member of ingroup Y due to government and media pressure when market
forces would have instead chosen member of outgroup X".

The problem is almost immediately obvious: advantaging Y at the expense of X,
at a 1:1 ratio, is already very bad compared to eg anti-malaria tents in
Africa. Considering the cost of intervention and the cost to market
efficiency, this ratio gets much worse.

The X-member being displaced is marginal, which means likely poor. So this is
inefficiently redistributing resources from poor people to other poor people.

There is also a natural justice angle, for which I paraphrase an old play:

"But ingroup Y has been treated like slaves for the last eight thousand years
-"

"So what, outgroup X should cop it for the next eight thousand?"

~~~
RangerScience
Ah, took me a minute, but I think I see. I can honestly say I haven't seen
this occur. Do you have any real-world examples (news, probably) you can link
do?

~~~
yakult
A certain biomed firm has in its annual report that xx% of its engineers are
female. It has a goal of increasing this to yy% by %year%.

Most of the eligible applicants are male. This is easily observed in
university graduate numbers as well as stated in their report. These are
pretty smart business people. I can't imagine they're doing this without
knowing it will impact the bottom line to potentially have to pass up on
promising candidates for not having the right sexual organ (which, unless
things go very wrong, will not be utilized in their work). Yet this is
depressingly common. I am guessing that they have weighed the cost of
inefficiency against the improved corporate image - or, put another way,
against the decreased media pressure - and chose the lesser of two evils.

Maybe an example outside of US will make it a bit easier to see:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/f...](http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/for-
affirmative-action-brazil-sets-up-controversial-boards-to-determine-race)

~~~
erikpukinskis
You are assuming without data that the old hiring process was fair and those
women will do less for that firm than other new employees.

I am assuming without data that those old hiring practices were bad predictors
of success, and those women will do more for the firm than the average new
hire.

In absence of data you rely on the assumption that hiring practices and
corporate practices in general are mostly smart.

In the absence of data I rely on the assumption that hiring practices and
corporate practices in general tend to be nepotistic and unrelated to
performance.

To me, the best affirmative action just takes demographics and uses them as
motivation to find bad performance metrics.

~~~
yakult
Eligible candidates for most jobs are not 50:50 in gender. For some fields it
may be 90:10. This means a perfectly fair selection process will select 90 men
and 10 women for every 100 jobs, or at least in this ballpark.

Affirmative action is mostly policed by media pressure. The media does not
give a shit about the above math. They will read the line in the annual report
that says '90% of our engineers are male' and name and shame you on twitter.
Alternatively, being more politically correct than your peer competitors is a
way to virtue-signal and you get little award badges to put on your website.

The politically correct ratio is 50:50. Let's say you have 100 available jobs
and 1000 candidates, 900 men and 100 women. To enforce 50:50, you choose the
best 50 men out of 900 and best 50 women out of 100.

Your hypothesis is that affirmative action unlocks economic benefits. This is
asserting that the marginal female engineer who is better than 50% of her
peers is superior to the marginal male engineer, who is better than 94% of his
peers. Additionally, the difference must be large enough to overcome the
inefficiency of messing with market mechanisms.

This is an extraordinary claim and would require extraordinary evidence.

What about the effect of nepotism? Let's say the hiring manager really doesn't
like women, and the selection ends up 95:5. Five marginal female engineers are
replaced by five marginal male engineers. Compared to the huge skewing above,
this is a blip on the radar. Note I am not saying it is not a problem, I am
saying the current solution is on average much worse.

I do not doubt that for some pathological cases affirmative action actually
does have a positive effect on the bottom line. But this will only happen when
the company is badly screwing up recruitment. On the other hand, companies
with saner, optimized hiring processes are penalized with an arbitrary ratio.

The effect here is to boost inefficient businesses and penalize relatively
efficient ones.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> This means a perfectly fair selection process will select 90 men and 10
> women for every 100 jobs, or at least in this ballpark.

How does one know what the correct target ratio is for their field?

You have blind faith in market mechanisms. I have blind faith in the general
equality of the sexes. I'm not saying I'm right, I fully acknowledge it's an
article of faith. I'm just hoping I can get to acknowledge that your belief in
male superiority in certain fields is also an article of faith.

~~~
yakult
>How does one know what the correct target ratio is for their field?

One can look at the distribution of m:f in the list of eligible applicants, or
more generally in university graduate numbers. It will be subject to noise,
but the 'natural' outcome should be at least in the same ballpark.

>I have blind faith in the general equality of the sexes. I'm not saying I'm
right, I fully acknowledge it's an article of faith.

Blind faith is not necessary here. Nor is a belief in 'male superiority in
certain fields'. I agree that given equal qualifications, gender should not
affect performance to a great degree, yet affirmative action vastly skews
recruitment to one side in this case and only makes sense if it turns out
gender _does_ affect performance and women are somehow vastly better (without
this effect being picked up and accounted for by the market).

------
Radim

      Ever tried. Ever failed.
      No matter. Try Again.
      Fail again. Fail better.
      -- Samuel Beckett
    

I see this as "two steps forward, one step back" kind of progress. Something
you'd expect from an evolutionary process -- which the evolution of social
structures clearly is.

So the fact that there's perceived progress, which is then overdone to the
point the structures in question collapse, then people pull back (too far in
the opposite direction?) and are apprehensive for a while, but then try again,
differently, having (hopefully) learned a lesson.

 _One interesting observation_ : the "pull back" phase is not uniformly
distributed across societies. For us in Eastern Europe, we observe West's
cheerful march into deep Socialism with despair (our collapse being too
recent). Apparently, in the West, it's a distant memory or never really
happened, and the societies there are ready to give these utopias another shot
(again, hopefully, having learned their lesson...).

~~~
aetherson
If social structures are "clearly" in an evolutionary process, what's the
fitness function, and what's the unit of selection?

This is an honest question. I can see plausible answers, but I don't think
that the plausible answers suggest that fitness = utopia.

------
pipio21
I believe we live in Utopia of someone else. For instance Central Banks were
created as a response to small banks bankruptcies, in order to make a "perfect
world" in which banks could not fail.

Everybody knows the consequence, there are companies that are "too big to
fail", people in power "too big to jail", and at the end saving institutions
with public money not only do not improve the banks but makes them feel
entitled.

At the end we have the entire society collapsing, like it is happening in
Japan, or with Deutsche Bank because in a society when nobody can fail you are
rewarding bad behavior and making everybody fail.

The Banks that made enormous bets were rewarded with enormous profits but then
are rewarded when those profits turned to be completely fictional, and loses
were socialized.

Society and companies that do the right thing are punished with hardships like
high taxes while those that created misery retire with Golden Parachutes.
Nobody wants to work anymore, and everybody wants to speculate.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Central Banks were made flesh in the form of the Bank of England. The US (
rather belligerently ) avoided this model for a variety of reasons, but mainly
because it was England, back when that was a marque of corruption ( the last
President who was also more or less in the Revolution was roughly Jackson ).
Jackson also used this strategically to stab at his enemies, who were of
considerable number.

The Panic of 1907 was no joke; the Fed is Our Robotic JP Morgan, who forced
the network of haircuts and liquidity support needed to end that.

It's not clear to me that the accusations of moral hazard hold that much
water. Calomiris and Haber wrote the excellent "Fragile by Design", which
examines the difference between the Canadian and US financial systems.

I'm far from an expert, but this seems the most fruitful examination so far -
_everybody_ was operating on towers of just-so stories. "Break the banks up"
and "jail them" most likely would have accomplished very little. It's less
corruption than it is Dunning-Kruger, less Mr. Burns than it is Homer Simpson.

Socializing the losses has little actual cost - no matter how fictional you
think this is, it's even moreso - and the big profits in the end were made by
Micheal Burry and the others who shorted those markets. If money is a
convenient fiction, then the Fed balance sheet is five degrees of separation
from _that_ fiction.

Japan? Demographic collapse. Deutsche bank? Uh, Euro problems. What _has_ gone
well with the Eurozone?

IMO? The US used to be planted thick with $10, $20, $40M per year topline
companies. They went the way of the dodo bird because who wants _that_? Just
making a living? Nah, we wanna make a _killing_. Make a better product? No,
use finance to edge the competition out, even ( perhaps especially ) if it
cripples the company doing it.

That's culture rot. People did this sort of thing in, say 1950. Just not
everybody.

I _do_ want to work. This is widely disbelieved; it's probably cost me jobs,
incredibly. After all, we're supposed to use real work as prep for the rent-
seeking Olympics, right? If you're still doing Real Work(tm) at 30, you're a
looser ( sic ). Oh, and we're going to dumb Real Work down for you because we
don't trust you.

But even more profound is the observation that _actual_ production,
distribution, sales and support are on rails. Stuff costs ( in cases, way )
less than it used to. There are no bears to eat us, so we make up methods and
practices to stroke our narcissism.

My daughter the evolutionary biologist has a slightly dissonant phrase for
this - "not enough lions."

------
eli_gottlieb
I don't think you get to just label every regime you don't like as a "utopia",
say "utopianism is bad", and leave it there. After all, many people would say
that the status quo today is _also_ someone's utopia, with the important
question being _whose_.

Societies are always and have always been creatures of intentional design. The
design might be good or might be bad, but to try to cordon off via, "Designed
societies are bad" just amounts to denying the design of your preferred
actually-existing society.

~~~
ideonexus
Thank you. This is exactly what I got from the article. I think Bernie Sanders
went too far in some of his policy proposal, but I wouldn't characterize him,
or progressives in general, as promoting a utopian Marxist vision. I think
this kind of intellectual laziness, where people project every political
position out into some cartoonish slippery slope instead of tackling the
complexity and nuance of public policy, is one of the most detrimental and
pervasive logical fallacies in our political discourse.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>I think Bernie Sanders went too far in some of his policy proposal, but I
wouldn't characterize him, or progressives in general, as promoting a utopian
Marxist vision.

Very much agreed. From the point of view of _actual_ radical leftists (for
instance, the ones I grab beer with once or twice a month), Bernie Sanders is
very much a moderate, even a kind of conservative. In trying to expand the
sphere of public goods back towards where it has previously been (in some
places and times) and a bit past that, he's just trying to turn our market
society[1] back into a market _economy_ subservient to a democratic _society_.

 _Correspondingly_ , we also need to consider the degree to which, while we
don't live in Friedrich von Hayek's or Milton Friedman's _ideal_ society,
their ideas now exercise far, _far_ more influence over our society than they
did at the inauguration of the Mont Pelerin Society[2]. These men plotted
utopia, and to a great degree, they've achieved it, _exactly insofar_ as the
social democrats whose hegemony they wanted to destroy are now seen as
unthinkable radicals dreaming of utopia.

[1] -- [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/03/q-a-with-
mi...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/03/q-a-with-michael-
sandel-from-market-economy-to-market-society.html)

[2] --
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society)

~~~
rayiner
> Correspondingly, we also need to consider the degree to which, while we
> don't live in Friedrich von Hayek's or Milton Friedman's ideal society,
> their ideas now exercise far, far more influence over our society than they
> did at the inauguration of the Mont Pelerin Society[2].

This is very true. It's a very interesting exercise to go back and read old
copies of the Congressional Reports and compare them to ones from today. Back
in the 1940s, Republicans would say things as lip service to prevailing views
about labor that democrats wouldn't say today. Big sweeping appeals to the
public interest in the way today people make narrow pointed arguments about
efficiency and cost-benefit analysis.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Surprisingly, the "American Experience" bio of George HW Bush does a workman's
job of explaining this. But it was really the demise of Nelson Rockefeller
that ended the Liberal and Moderate Republican as a thing. After all, he was
_divorced_.

Topologically, the Left pulled farther and faster, and there was also a
reaction to that.

Industry became fragmented, and that's much harder to organize into unions. It
was different when there were a small number of large monolithic firms.

------
Kadin
Utopian communities are useful, in the sense that they're social petri dishes
that let us run experiments that would be unbelievably destructive to attempt
in the wider world.

It is through the failure of various communities that we know, to a decent-
enough approximation, how far you can scale egalitarian labor schemes. It's
how we know how communal living arrangements tend to fail. Dunbar's Number [1]
and similar ideas were largely derived based on real-world experience in
nontraditional social structures (some of which were companies, e.g. Gor-Tex,
not communes).

I think it's important to look at even "failed" attempts at utopian living
through the lens of an experiment. Even if the outcome wasn't what was
intended, we still learn something in the process, and that knowledge is
valuable in the wider world as we work more incrementally.

The danger is when we allow people to run their social experiments _in vivo_
instead of _in vitro_. A few dozen people choosing to share property and
responsibilities and income based on a fringe socio-political philosophy is
fine, assuming they're all consenting adults, and might lead to valuable
knowledge. A few dozen people attempting to force that same model on an entire
population is worth killing them all in order to prevent.

Utopianism in the context of people freely choosing how they want to live is a
great thing; it is the cooption of putatively "utopian" ideas by violent
revolutionaries, and their use of those ideas to gain followers who ought to
know better, that has been an extremely deadly combination.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)

------
panic
_Our contemporary climate is only fully understood by surveying who has power
today; the dominance of finance and the enthusiastic redundancy of politicians
in thrall to the markets and the deep state have resulted ultimately in a
catastrophic erosion of democracy. Without examining these deliberate shifts,
attempts to rectify them architecturally will be tokenistic at best. Dubai is
the obvious example of somewhere where the paradise of a few is propped up by
the misery of many. This model is being replicated to varying degrees
throughout the world. All utopias are dystopias, we have been endlessly told.
They neglect to tell us the reverse is also true._

 _Utopias become dystopias by how they deal with those who do not fit into the
plans.…_

("On Utopia" by Darran Anderson, page 39 of
[http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2016/06/BF...](http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2016/06/BFOI-Festival-of-the-Future-City-Book-Text-Pages-
SOFT.pdf) \-- the whole thing is worth reading!)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
"Error, the requested file could not be retrieved."

------
blimey74
More wrote his book as a satire, there is no contradiction between his actions
in life and his book.

~~~
3pt14159
Lafferty said that, but has this been confirmed by academics? He was awarded
something by the Soviets for Utopia, and I doubt that they'd do that
ironically.

~~~
ChoHag
But they might do it naïvely and then pretend they didn't.

------
catscratch
Hoping everyone here has read Brave New World. Utopia and dystopia only differ
by a few letters.

The only Utopia I expect is the one of my religion. I don't expect to create
one.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
The thing that bugs me about Brave New World is that the world it describes
actually appears to provide a much better life for the large majority of its
citizens than our own. It has a lot of serious problems, but so do we; it's
just that BNW's problems are weird and unfamiliar, where we've gotten used to
our own problems and no longer truly see them.

~~~
david-given
BNW's society does make a concerted effort to maximize happiness for all of
its members --- it does so in ways which we find abhorrent, but it does do so.
It values empathy and individuality, too; people who obviously won't fit in in
the World State hive culture are sent to the islands, partly because they're a
destabilising influence, but also because they'll just be _happier_ there. The
society is reach enough to support them, so why not? And now there's a pool of
talent the World State can draw on if it ever needs it.

So, yeah, simply branding it a dystopia is an oversimplification. It's much
more nuanced than that. Fascinating book, and great fun to read too.

(I do have a few problems with the worldbuilding, which I think falls apart in
a few places, but that shouldn't dissuade anyone from reading it. It is one of
the great books of all time.)

~~~
catscratch
At the time that I read it, by the end of the book, it was clear to me
personally that the large disconnect between the Utopian world and the world
of the "natives" was the same disconnect that I felt at the time with the
described Utopian world. People grown in test tubes, bred to do and believe
specific things, using various levels of oxygen to control their intelligence,
orgies and perfume water in sinks being a normal thing- these were disgusting
to me. If that sounds like Utopia to anyone, then something is seriously
wrong.

~~~
golergka
But it's only disguisting to you because you haven't been created for this
world.

~~~
catscratch
But see, you had the intelligence to read what I wrote and write that.

What if someone were to have reduced the oxygen to your embryo so that you
were an idiot and were happy but had no idea what I was talking about? That's
ok to you?

BNW was not meant to be a template for a future society. It's a story to get
the reader to try to adjust to the norm of morally reprehensible behavior and
then at the end smack them back to cold, hard reality.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>What if someone were to have reduced the oxygen to your embryo so that you
were an idiot and were happy but had no idea what I was talking about? That's
ok to you?

You mean kinda like how they put lead in the water in Flint, Michigan?

~~~
catscratch
No, I was just stating part of the story from the book. Man, there are a lot
of people here that haven't read BNW!

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I've read the book. I was just comparing it to real life a bit.

------
Animats
Something is fundamentally wrong with capitalism. The median standard of
living in the US has leveled off, despite increasing productivity. Nobody
really knows what to do about this. It has a name now: "secular stagnation".

The US economy is limited by individual buying power. Most Americans are maxed
out. It's not like people are saving too much. There's plenty of capital
available; too much, in fact, which is why interest rates are so low. But
there are few good ways to use it.

There's a broad feeling that something has gone wrong. Some of this drives a
desire for new Utopian movements. (Some of this drives Trump supporters, but
ignore that for now.) The article doesn't list any successful new ones,
though. If anything, growth is in deliberately dystopian communities - the
"prepper" movement.

Small Utopian communities don't get economies of scale. Local, artisanal stuff
just takes too much labor to make. So, in practice, that's a dead end.

[1] [http://www.thenews.coop/49090/news/general/view-
top-300-co-o...](http://www.thenews.coop/49090/news/general/view-top-300-co-
operatives-around-world/)

~~~
throwaway7312
Capitalism has the same problem all economic systems have, and that is a
unidirectional drive toward more regulation. More regulation benefits
entrenched companies and creates barriers to entry to new ones, who have
increasingly bigger hurdles to overcome and a rapidly expanding list of ways
they can be sued or regulated out of existence.

Regulation always increases; it never declines (except for small, select bits
in little deregulation burps here and there). So long as a government endures,
you can expect there will continue to be more and more laws and regulations,
not fewer. Eventually the system ties itself up with too much red tape, like
one of those old cartoons where the character becomes tangled in a ball of
yarn.

Which is not to say total deregulation is a good thing. You need regulations
in place to protect individuals, who often lack power and information, from
suffering by decisions made by corporate super organisms with significant
advantages in power and information.

The problem with the national movement toward ever more regulation is it
enables the successful to do the same thing they do in every other
socioeconomic model, which is to build firewalls aimed at preserving their
class and wealth and keeping out competitors.

I say this as a diehard capitalist who sees it as the best economic model
we've happened upon yet. Particularly in the early days of a well-regulated
capitalist society, there's immense potential for anyone to reach the top.
However, the longer the society continues, the more it stifles itself with
labyrinthine laws, credentialism, certifications, and 10,000 rules to operate
legally in any established industry (e.g., finance, automotive, utilities,
etc.).

~~~
Kadin
There is, pretty clearly, a sort of "Goldilocks Problem" with regards to the
optimal amount of regulation: you need _some_ level of regulation, or you get
monopolization by first-movers who then use their advantage to prevent the
emergence of competitors and extract rents. On the other extreme, too much
regulation is typically associated with regulatory capture, and protection of
entrenched participants ... such that they can prevent competitors and extract
rents. You can end up at the same end-state (small number of very large market
participants, little competition, huge barriers to entry) via either route.

I do not think that it is fair to say that regulation always increases and
never declines; in the U.S. we have seen regulation swing back and forth over
time. The early U.S. was a largely deregulated economy, which became regulated
due to demands by citizens that companies be controlled; the tide turned in
the later 20th century, with widespread utilities and transportation
deregulation, fewer union-favoring labor rules, the repeal of Glass-Steagall,
etc.; I think it's still unclear whether the tide has turned again today.

