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Blurtings and Blatherings's avatar

"The existence of any variation in income, wealth, careers, etc. between identity groups is taken as presumptive evidence of some form of unjust deprivation..."

This isn't quite right. Any variation favoring whites or males, relative to blacks or Hispanics, say, on such metrics is, of course, indisputable evidence of unjust structural privilege, but any variation favoring Jews, Asians, or women, say, relative to whites or men, is apparently no such thing. You'd be certain to be called a racist or misogynist for even mentioning this inconsistency, and be at serious risk of losing your job if you were foolish enough to broach the subject in many a professional setting. Among the problems with the Intersectional understanding of social reality is that it doesn't appeal to a consistent standard of evidence. Instead, it rests on a priori assumptions about who is privileged and who isn't. Since actual social reality is often quite different from what Intersectional Theory would predict, the theorists can only maintain the façade of credibility by threatening the livelihoods and reputations of those so impudent as to notice.

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Bart Stewart's avatar

Outstanding article. Among many other things, it reminds me that the scaling effect, especially where socialism is concerned, is something I've been curious about for many years now.

Several different kinds of human social organizing structures can work (at least reasonably well) for groups of fewer than Dunbar's Number of 150 people or so. The kibbutzim are one well-known practical example. Another is BBSs and MUDs and other small online groups from the Modem Age of social networks, which were frequently very good at self-policing into enjoyable and productive small communities. Discord servers are a similar success story today... but then there are the big social networks. These massively inflated chat groups aren't as successful, often turning incredibly toxic. Why does this happen?

Like the bar Cheers, small groups seem to work because "everybody knows your name" -- reliable personal trust can be established that lowers the predicted cost of cooperation with others in the group. (Axelrod's "Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma" remains a fantastic resource for exploring how cooperation can emerge.)

When scaled up past 100, 150 or so participants, though, many social organizations break down from exploitation. It may be that the majority of social systems don't scale up well. But there are a few social structures that somehow do (mostly) work. Why? What makes the difference? What are the structural features that enable one social organizing system to be productive even with millions of participants, while another scales up so poorly that subterfuge, or moralizing abuse, or the gun (or some combination of all these) must be used to force people to participate in it?

Capitalism in particular (mostly) does work at scale. What are its distinctive norms and institutions that allow it to be so successful at filling in for the absence of personal trust among billions of people, where the distinctive structural features of socialism do not?

Fodder for a future article, maybe. :)

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