Societies are made up of things that are simultaneously good and bad. I don’t mean that in the sense of different tastes, like how some art (music, movie, …) is highly rated by some and entirely panned by others. No, genuinely things that appear both good (or beneficial) and bad (not evil!) at the same time. A state of paradox. Let me give some examples.
More infrastructure reduces congestion?
Examples in city/road planning are extremely interesting examples of proposals that are both working well and not well. Going from zero highways to one highway can significantly speed up the efficiency of a journey between two points, when compared to driving through a network of small cities and local roads. The much higher speed limit allowed on a highway clearly trumps the low speeds offered by alternatives, and can handle more cars at any given time than the slower alternative roads. Congestion should in principle go down. But what to do if the roads get congested? Build more roads, such that more cars fit on the highway! If these roads get congested, build another one! This is what has happened for at least the past 60 years. Sounds obvious, right? Well, the reality is different. Despite 60+ years of building more and more roads, road congestion is not a solved problem. The problem is:
- “Mr. Bertrand Russell has noted that each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work, a century ago, must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now (by driving him to a more distant residential area) effectually cancels out the gain.” In other words, people are willing to spend a given amount of time traveling to work. This is known as Marchetti’s constant. More efficient roads just draw in people from further away, thus re-supplying roads with more traffic, leading to congestions. This latter point is known as induced traffic, where an increasing in the supply also leads to an increase in the demand. Following the article, a 42% increase of road lanes has lead to a 44% increase(!) of road congestion.
- Why? Well, “speed gains from some new roads can disappear within months, if not weeks. Sometimes, new roads help to reduce traffic jams, but in most cases, the congestion is only shifted to another junction.” This is known as the The Lewis–Mogridge position, meaning that although sometimes new roads help to alleviate congestion, the re-supply of new cars (as per the previous point) just shifts the problem elsewhere.
- More counterintuitive, perhaps, is that even without an increase in cars the addition of more lanes can decrease the efficiency of road use. In other words, adding a road can make the total journey times worse! This is known as Braess’s paradox. A good example may be seen in this YouTube video. The added efficiency in road networks leads to the under-use of alternative roads.
- As pointed out by the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes, people don’t travel via car because they are “car people”, but only because this option is just faster than the equivalent journey made with the train and/or bus. To explain what happens, assume a sufficiently large number of people that need to travel from point A to B each day, who can either use public transport or cars to make their journey. What will happen is that the car journey will take the same amount as the public transport! Why? Well, if either was more efficient, people would shift their modes of transport (shift from cars to public transport, or vice versa). The two systems arrive at some kind of equilibrium. If you improve the traffic throughput by investing in road infrastructure, you simply introduce more people on the road, until the car journey becomes even more congested, as people have shifted to the car alternative, until this method takes the same amount of time as the public transport journey again. This paradox is closely related to the previous points, but in its specific connection with an alternative mode of transport known as the Downs-Thomsen paradox. The Not Just Bikes does a good job of illustrating it. Note also that improving the public transport actually reduces the congestion. It makes sense if you think about it for a bit.
This Strong Towns article does a great job of explaining the problem from a more systems thinking approach. The real problem is the amount of centralization, which requires people to travel from such far places in the first place. If jobs and amenities can be found closer to home, we do not need to travel so far away from home, which would greatly decrease the demand placed on roads to begin with. It will be very interesting to see if COVID-19 will make a significant change in working-from-home, to the degree that road congestion will decrease. Note how the building of roads is massively expensive, and does not solve the congestion problem…
Building more roads at first sight decreases road congestion (i.e., is good), but somehow road congestion is not solved in the long run (i.e., is bad). The paradox lies in non-linear secondary effects – building more infrastructure draws in new cars that would not have driven (on those roads) otherwise, thus does not reduce the congestion. Sometimes in surprising ways!
Who can kill?
States that carry out the death penalty (or capital punishment) for murderers find themselves in a peculiar paradox: why kill people who kill people, to show that killing people is bad? (see the work of, e.g., 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham). As '’the death penalty does not add deterrent effects (i.e., preventing crimes) to those already achieved by long imprisonment’’, it is indeed questionable whether the death penalty serves any purpose beyond a sense of repairment for the people affected by the original crime.
Next to this, we must of course consider the effect of army and police violence, where casualties fall in the name of preserving peace.
“Killing people is bad; unless the state does it”. The paradox lies in the asymmetry of power, where identical behavior is judged differently, from a sense of entitlement.
Democracy serves us all?
Churchill: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” If you (1) will never settle for anything less than a democracy, and (2) think that voting for the other party destroys that democracy, you can get a good sense of the trouble that democracies still carry with them. Storming the US Capitol to restore democracy is a logical (but stupid) embodiment of this frustrating situation. Democracy is a great good, but only when everyone plays the game fairly, and leading to a greater good for everyone. There are many ways with which one could (correctly) characterize the game of democracy. One that is insightful way to look at is is through the view of the Overton Window, which shows what kind of political views are acceptable at any given time. As the spectrum moves or expands, an idea may become more or less politically acceptable (e.g., slavery was once thought to be acceptable, but is no longer acceptable).
In my view, the game of democracy is like an Overton-tug-of-war. The overal tug of war determines where a country moves to (e.g., to the “left” or to the “right”), so they move the Overton window of mainstream policy ideas. But the tug of war can also be played to broaden the spectrum – for example, we may envision this by fraying the rope. As radical ideas are introduced (e.g., the deportation of minorities from a certain country), then the less radical versions of such ideas don’t seem so bad anymore (e.g., stopping any further immigration from this country).
I have the feeling that the Overton-tug-of-war has gone so far in the US that the rope is at risk of breaking; with both sides having normalized radical ideas within their own ranks, without being properly able to express these ideas as mainstream policy that serves “the other side”. I would certainly be afraid that such things eventually happen in many other developed countries.
I think that many people will agree that democracy (as a political system in which ideas are introduced and voted on) works well when the Overton Window moves, meaning that the window of universally acceptable policy ideas remains relatively tight. People are dragged along with the times. Democracies do not work as well when the Overton Window expands, as people just find themselves further and further away from each other. The paradox, then, is that democracy is the greatest good; but only gives acceptable policy results if “my” party wins. The paradox (the democratic and anti-democratic view) lies in the differences between the present and past – with social media, advertised news, etcetera, having changed the political landscape and polarization considerably.
Is capitalism helping society?
I think it is clear that capitalist societies have lead to increases in prosperity and living standards in ways that no other organized society has. The “invisible hand” of the market has created an excellent way of matching resources (capital) to output (labor), at the best price, for the best products. The bundling of money from investors (e.g., investing in East India Trade Company expeditions) means that these investors will only lose a little bit of money if the investment doesn’t return money, but provides a potential upside in not only the money owned by the investors, but also in the “greater good” of the society that may benefit from the enterprise.
At the same time, capitalism has come under heavy criticism (often with the word ‘neoliberalism’), in many forms. See, for example, https://wtfhappenedin1971.com. See the yellow vests movement. See the rise of populism. See the inability of rampant campitalism to address externalities, leading to no way to limit climate change. See the multiple economic crises in the past few decades. See decreasing life expectancy rates in the US (due to an increase in substance abuse and despair). See the rising inequality. See the fact that people applying to work are hired through the “human resources” department, like oil and gas are, with the need to “sell” yourself constantly. See the number of MBAs running companies. See “Wall Street destroyed Main Street”. See Thomas Piketty and his “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. The trickle-down assumption does not apply (i.e., fifty years of tax cuts for the rich did not promote jobs or growth, and raising taxes on the rich will not harm economies).
Clearly, there is a paradox. Capitalism has led to freedom and well-being. And at the same time, our current capitalist societies are not reaping such benefits at all. The average person does not benefit from capitalism currently. Indeed, well-being generally is dipping lower (rather than higher) in many developed countries. The way out of this paradox, according to Bas van Bavel, is to look at capitalism as a system whose effects are not identical over time. By analysing seven other capitalist societies through the ages (they have existed since 500 AD!), the author finds that “an originally positive feedback cycle -— between increasing freedom, growing factor markets, and economic growth -— turns into a negative one, with increasing social polarization, institutional sclerosis, markets that become increasingly skewed towards the interests of market elites, and economic growth stagnating and turning into relative or absolute decline.” More specifically, each case goes through 4 steps: social revolts, followed by dominant markets + growth, followed by rising inequality, followed by decline. Treating the (stock/labor/capital/…) market as a way to make money without producing anything turns out to be much more economically interesting. See the rise of high-frequency trading for example, which is an extremely profitable way of trading stocks on the market, without adding any economic value.
Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.
To use an analogy: when you’re young, it helps to cry all the time to get attention from your parents as well as food or other needs met. When you’re older, you’re not expected to cry whenever you want to eat or just want some attention – and when you do, you’re quite frankly annoying. Capitalism worked well once, but doesn’t anymore. The only question remaining is: how to continue, and which parts of the capitalistic system do we keep? I think that this is one of the fundamental questions of today. A related question is that religion is completely outdated (e.g., we do not stone someone that is not a virgin at marriage), thus leading to the question: what parts of religion do we keep that are still useful, versus which parts should we throw out to move forward as a society?
Capitalism has been a source of good and a source of bad. The paradox lies in the fact that these different aspects were valid at different times. A strategy that used to be beneficial in the past is not necessarily beneficial today.