Don't be a Warrior

Do not think of yourself as a warrior or imagine that the world is filled with enemies. It is too easy for the young soldier to declare war on the wrong target - it is surprisingly difficult to choose the right ones. Many intelligent and honest people find themselves on opposite sides of pitched battles. Frequently they even switch sides as they grow older, fighting ferociously for the position which their younger selves abhored.  

Even if you win your war, you may find that the evils caused by the excess of some thing give way to new problems caused by its deficit. 

Furthermore, the warrior is not an effective agent of change. The very nature of war is to divide people into allies and foes. An attack generates its own enemies, polarizing neutral bystanders into opposing camps. 

Rather than be a warrior, be a builder. Tell a story that appeals to the universal values cherished by human hearts. Synthesize opposing viewpoints into a new worldview that unites former enemies. A fresh story has no enemies and it spreads without resistance, like a fire through dry grass.

In all the teachings of Jesus, he spared hardly a word for the pagan religion of Rome that his religion would replace. He was not on a mission to tear down the old world, but to build a new one. His story of hope, love, and deliverance appealed to Romans surrounded by a brutal and capricious reality. As a builder, he was far more effective than any warrior. The humane, egalitarian ethic introduced by Jesus is still a potent force in the world 2,000 years later. 

That is why my I no longer think of my political activity in martial terms like a "warrior for liberty" or a "patriot". I grow tired of the eternal war between libertarian, socialist, progressive, and conservative. As I mature, I recognized the good motives and valid points of my former enemies. Instead of fighting old wars I'm focusing on building new viewpoints which can help people from all political ideologies create a better world. 

My current attempt is Structuralism. I used to call it "Structural Libertarianism", but I realized that the structuralist ideas are useful for everyone, not just libertarians. By using the term "libertarian" I imported the old conflicts as if I'm so used to fighting that I forgot how to live in peacetime. 

Charter Cities and Government Innovation

The government industry is stagnant. There are few new service providers. When a new provider of government services comes into existence, it is almost always carefully constructed by existing government entities such as the United States government or the United Nations (see Iraq and Afghanistan). 

In other industries, technological progress is made when entrepreneurs with ideas for beneficial innovation try them out. They either succeed and see their ideas have a large impact on their industry or they fail and their failed ideas dissapear. In government, there is no chance for this Darwinian process to play out. That is why structuralists support more entry into the government industry through vehicles like Seasteading and Charter cities. 

Paul Romer is pioneering the effort to make charter cities a reality. A descriptive motto for this movement would be "Let a thousand Hong Kongs bloom". Honduras has already amended their constitution to allow for land grants for the establishment of charter cities administered by outside government agencies. 

In the short term, charter cities face the barier of legitimacy. It is vital that one of the early experiments in Honduras succeed and demonstrate the value of good, agile governance. Only then can charter cities spread across the world, bringing good governance to those who badly need it. 

Charter cities can bring ideas from the best systems of government today to citizens of the third world who are by and large stuck with ineffective, counter-productive governments. City-states like Hong Kong and Singapore that combine a high standard of living with some of the lowest taxes in the world provide obvious inspiration. 

But charter cities can do more than spread the best systems of government we have today. They allow for entrepreneurs to push the envelope and push forward the state of the art in government technology. 

For example, one of the flaws in the American system of government is that the government judges whether or not its own actions are legal as defined by the Constitution, a clear conflict of interest! Nominally, the courts are separated from the other branches of government. But the other branches have pressured the courts from time to time. And due to the doctrine of stare decisis, bad court decisions can hold the power of law for centuries. Over time, this has led to court decisions which give the government more and more power while gradually narrowing the scope of the Constitutional limits which  are supposed to protect citizens from overreaching government.

What does this have to do with charter cities? A yet to be released paper by Tom Bell convinced me that charter cities could be the first sovreign entities with truly independent judiciaries. Right now, all states provide their own courts. But a charter city can contract out the court system to one or several independent arbitration corporations. The city could publish a list of arbitrators they are willing to use, and citizens could sue the city in any of those courts. The city might still have more power to influence  judges than the average citizen, but with a layer of organizational distance between the state and the courts and a system of competition, citizens might expect more fair trials on average. 

So charter cities can help solve one problem that leads to long term instability in tradional states: the difficulty of precommitting to limit state power and abide by a charter. All states drift towards absolute power over time, punctuated by sudden, violent resets. Charter cities will be better at credibly binding their own hands. This will attract business investment by executives who will appreciate the stability and save the state the administrative burden of building their own court system. 

Elsewhere

I have a new post up at my tech blog about Product Management: The Will to Product

The Courtship of the Philosopher

I can no more mix with you
than stone can mix with air.
Like stone I am, and feel so low
and hard and strong and rare.

Were you with arms to lift me up
my nature would show true.
I was born to scorn the sky
and seek out earthy truth.

Were I made of softer stuff
I too would dance days past,
drifting each from place to place
each moment like the last.

But I find my joys in heavy things -
filling soul at wisdom's feast.
Come here! Feel your weight as well with me
substance, knowledge, lasting peace!

But rock leaves no mark on wind
and soon you fly away.
Chance meet, chance part, and parting goes
each back to natures' place.

The Hunger Games - Book Review

I started and finished “The Hunger Games” trilogy this weekend. It has the gritty teenage violence that fans of “Ender’s Game” will love and an improbable love triangle that “Twilight” fans will obsess over. It is written in a breezy style that nobody should find challenging. In other words, it was engineered to be a blockbuster. And popular it is - a big-budget movie adaptation is hitting screens less than four years after the first volume was published.

From the perspective of a young male reader, the action too often halts for a rehashing of the love triangle. When we embark on yet another trip around the hamster wheel which is Katniss Everdeen’s brain running in circles over boys my eyes automatically shift into skim mode. But the author’s sense of pacing saves the day. When my patience starts to wear out, Katniss snaps out of her romantic stupor long enough to put an arrow through somebody’s throat. Suzanne Collins is mindful of serving her bimodal audience consisting of action-craving boys and boy-crazed girls.

The books are incredibly gory. Contestants in the games are killed by an endless array of explosion, electrocution, trident, arrow, axe, sword, bee sting, poison, fire, drowning, acid, beast, and too many other ways to remember. It's fun and disturbing to cheer on the shy Katniss as she grows into a killer. The movie budget must have a eye-popping line item devoted to buckets of blood and rancid flesh. And it is a relentlessly bleak story. Katniss is repeatedly disillusioned and abused. All her supports prove to be ephemeral as her friends betray her with a hidden dark side or otherwise are killed without ceremony. By the end of the series, I was forced to like the protagonist out of sheer pity. The Hunger Games contain the most abuse of a main character since Elie Wiesel's “Night”.

Politics and culture in The Hunger Games is shallow. The political system underlying the world of the Hunger Games is self-evidently evil and designed to be so. When she’s not in the world of kill-or-be-killed that is the eponymous games, the system that created and supports the hunger games is Katniss’s major enemy. There is little nuance or food for thought in the political realm but this is dystopia, after all. The most provocative scenes show ordinary citizens of the capitol who are fans of the bloody games without being conscious the moral evil they are supporting. People in many historical nations have been  complicit in similar evils, and it is easy to do so today if we are not careful.

The first book is clearly the best of the three - it most purely captures the creative vision behind The Hunger Games. But the series doesn’t die to sequel syndrome as it could. The second and third books wander for a bit, but they ultimately culminate in a satisfying ending.

Fans of dystopian sci-fi should pick up “The Hunger Games” to read on a long plane flight. It is a mass-market book and it shows, but it has many redeeming qualities.

Oh, and count me on team Peeta!

Like a City with no Children in it

There is a pervasive hostility to the idea of having children among people in my peer group (urban yuppies, mostly). I blame it on the culture of short-sighted hedonism we live in. It’s true that raising young children is a chore, but having children increases happiness in the long run, and the more children the better.

More importantly, what kind of society are we building when the most educated and successful among us, people who make great parents, refrain from having children and passing on their values? When creating the next generation is left to impulsive people who are poor providers and poor sources of wisdom?

What happened to the ideal of leaving the world a better place than you found it?

If you're a sensible, smart person without a criminal record, please consider contributing to the next generation. It's a public good, and you'll eventually be happy you did it.

Links of the day

A TED talk on the power of the Paleo diet.

Sarah Blakely, the inventor of Spanx hosiery, is an Atlanta legend. All entrepreneurs will find her story of hustle inspiring.