Thread by @eriktorenberg

Here's another try at articulating Glen Weyl's ideas / quotes:

https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1206382259520983040

You can think of all the social circles that you're a part of in pre modern society—your work circle, your family circle, your friend circle, all these overlap heavily.

So you're not really an individual b/c there's so many other people who's their circles are the same as yours

And then what starts to happen in modernity is these things start to separate out.

So maybe you only have two people who are in both your work and home circles.

So then you end up being the unique intersection of all these different like social groups that gives you meaning.

So you can then think of yourself as having a mimetic code, which is made up of precisely these quantitative measures of your commitment to these different communities

And what makes you unique is the fact that that mimetic code is not the same as anyone else's mimetic code.

So we only get to individual humans, like in the modern era. And the way we get to individual humans is not by like removing social structure, but by adding more social structure

What actually creates the potential of being an individual is the plurality of human organizations.

What's wrong about the libertarian view is that it fails to realize that it's the combination of private property or extreme individualism w/ the fact that we live in a society that's fundamentally social that creates the conditions that the libertarians are objecting to.

So anything that tries to strip away community & reveal the true individual is fundamentally confused

On the contrary, it's by creating a diverse range of communities--and fluid overlapping emergent identities-- that we actually enable people to be individuals in the first place

Economics tries to do this, but it's confused

We consume things in a family--most of the things that like make it nice to be in San Francisco or not like features of my individual home, but features of the ambient environment around there that make it desirable to live there

We are massively overdetermined. Two thirds of income inequality is across country

There's just like no possible way that we can in this linear way that private goods wants to attribute it back to the individual.

Once you move past that, then like the whole edifice that lies behind utilitarian economics based justifications o f market capitalism goes away, and you start realizing the enormous complexity of the system that we're actually dealing with

the fundamental problem of economics is not how do you reconcile the individual self interest with the common good, the fundamental problem should be, how do we have cooperation under conditions of diversity?

selfishness is not even meaningful, b/c given that nearly all of what we consume is consumed in groups, all there really is is either I'm super aligned with you & there's no conflict of interest btw us at all, or we're distant like, really socially distant & thus there's conflict

Mechanisms like markets that treat symmetrically the interactions btw two people who are very close to each other, & two people are very far from each other will lead to issues b/c they don't actually overcome the key challenge, which is how to live under conditions of difference