How To Keep Voters With You Forever, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Duverger's Law

[maradydd]

So I'm a bit late to the game with this trifecta of links, and maybe what I have to say has already been said elsewhere, but what the hell:

How To Keep Someone With You Forever -- a concise guide to some extremely effective techniques for stringing someone along in a shitty job or relationship by placing them into a "sick system". There's some

Comments

[whswhs]

I think that illustrates the problem with all of these: How are they reduced to specifics? I mean, for example, in my perspective, if I offer to copy edit your next paper for $25 an hour, and you agree to pay it, that's a fair price . . . it's made fair by the fact that we both agreed to it, without coercion on either side. That is in fact the legal definition of fair market value: The price at which something passes from a willing buyer to a willing seller. In my definition, then, fairness simply reduces to liberty. But I know many people who are convinced that there is a "fair wage" for a job, a minimum amount that should be paid for it (or, often, for any job), and that anyone who is offered less is being treated unfairly, even if they willingly accept it. Those can't both be true. Yet they are both passionately adhered to by different people. We've already discussed a similar point about harm.

And those are the two that at least have versions that I endorse. I put zero value on authority and purity, as I define them. I value loyalty, but only to people I personally know; loyalty to a city, let alone a nation, strikes me as a delusion. So I find it hard to think of them as universals. (Though I suppose there are people who would point to things that I do value and say that those are, in their view, forms of authority and purity. They just don't look that way to me.) Oddly, that classifies me as a liberal-which is true only in the broadest sense of the word: an adherent of the values of the Enlightenment. (Have you read Ken MacLeod's "The First Human Literature," which talks about this?)

And I would put liberty and honesty far ahead of the five named ones. To me those are the great human values. Indeed, fairness and harm only fit into my values as applications or corollaries of liberty, as far as I can tell. Yet I know, too, that those are not universal values, and that a large number of human beings have little concern for either, or indeed actively object to one or both.

[maradydd]

That is in fact the legal definition of fair market value: The price at which something passes from a willing buyer to a willing seller. In my definition, then, fairness simply reduces to liberty. But I know many people who are convinced that there is a "fair wage" for a job, a minimum amount that should be paid for it (or, often, for any job), and that anyone who is offered less is being treated unfairly, even if they willingly accept it. Those can't both be true. Yet they are both passionately adhered to by different people.

Yep, all of it. Though what's interesting to me here is that someone who operates on the "fair wage" principle and someone who operates on the "non-coercive agreement" principle can (and often do) still come to a mutually agreeable contract, despite their differences in premises. What are the mechanisms at work which result in such negotiations succeeding, while the harm discussion that heron61 brought up falls apart?

Perhaps it's that in the job scenario, the principles involved don't come into direct opposition unless there's already institutionalised coercion in place. (If a fairness-focused copy editor insists that the fair hourly rate for copy editing is higher than a liberty-oriented paper writer is willing to pay, the paper writer can still do her own copy editing.) In, say, the health care scenario, the "liberal" says "everyone will contribute a baseline of at least $X into the system through insurance premiums or tax penalties, and the system will provide Y minimum standard of care for all persons, which is equitable treatment that reduces harm," and the libertarian says "wait, coercion!"

I mean, I don't (personally) know any libertarians who don't understand that the affordability of health care is a problem for many people, including people who can afford it themselves but would be negatively affected by outbreaks of illness nearby. (Obvious and timely parallel: parents and children affected by school closures due to pertussis outbreaks caused by other parents who won't vaccinate their kids.) They're just not willing to compromise one of their core principles, non-coercion, to solve that problem. And I can totally get behind that.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more it looks like the key difference is equality-before-the-law vs. equality-of-conditions, the classical conservative vs. liberal dispute. Haidt might argue that coercion is a form of harm, and thus this reduces to the harm/care axis, though I'm not sure I agree with that argument.

Oddly, that classifies me as a liberal-which is true only in the broadest sense of the word: an adherent of the values of the Enlightenment.

FWIW, I often describe myself as a classical liberal or Jeffersonian liberal. Or, if I'm feeling humorous, gun-toting liberal.

I have not read "The First Human Literature," though it sounds like I'll enjoy it.

Loyalty, for me, is a secondary virtue, though it's hard to put a name to what exactly it derives from. If I think a person I know is doing the right thing, I'll support them in both word and action, which is how loyalty is usually realised in practice, but if I think they're doing the wrong thing then I'll call them on it.