The Tullock Paradox and Viruses: The Worst Part About Being Sick Is The Taste

Leadership, bribery, and covid.

Seriously, whenever I get sick I get the worst taste in the back of my mouth. I have covid right now and It’s no exception: every time I exhale I get treated to my body’s interpretation of a rodeo clown orgy writ in volatile organics.

And it is my body. If only viruses would stop being so fucking lazy and reproduce themselves for once instead of hijacking my cellular machinery! But, once you’ve got a fox in the henhouse, it will generally assume control and attempt to maximize profits while embezzling its (un) fair share of the poultry.

Wait god damnit that’s not how foxes work! That’s not how any of this works! This was supposed to be an allegory for how leadership exposes society to the same viral effects as a cold.

Foxes are really cute as little industrialists though.

This is the most seat-of-my-pants post I’ve done yet, mainly due to the aforementioned covid. I’ve been trying to post to either EoSV or Ad Americam once daily thanks to some excellent advice I received from our friend Wendy. I missed yesterday, and I won’t miss today!

Leadership is necessary. Without centralized authority reaching consensus for every little thing would make the general pace of life much slower and more annoying, if possible. I like to think about leadership like differentiated nervous tissue: uninvolved with the labor but necessary for coordination.

In order for multiple groups to coordinate and act together they need a mechanism for communication, coordination, and decision making, this all falls to leaders. Speaking in terms of solidarity, leadership is an example of decreasing solidarity to a local minimum in order to allow for greater increased solidarity among all groups.

This is also where we start to see some problems. The Tullock Paradox describes the paradoxical situation of government bribes: someone looking to profit from beneficial legislation needs only bribe a politician at a fraction of the eventual profit they will gain. E.g. ProVen Management bribing Mohammed Nuru with a fucking tractor for millions of dollars in city contracts.

A leader is an innervation point. Individuals loan their autonomy to leaders for hope of better group (and therefore personal) benefit. There is, however, a mismatch in utility for leaders: they are still individuals. So we have individuals running around that represent massive amounts of crowdsourced authority/value but can still be swayed at the cost of an individual.

This is systemic weak point is one of the base problems with society at large. It’s also a problem for biology at large, if we look at viruses.

Viruses prey on the same principles as lobbyists: there exists a central point of control within that can be corrupted, and an organism corrupted at a control point acts indistinguishably from one corrupted at every level. So why pay to change minds when you can scrape together some spending money to change just one.

Selection for multicellular life often led evolution on suicide runs back and forth between true multicellular life and kluged unicellular cooperation. The reason for this is that when a group of individuals gets together and decides to cooperate and share resources, they derive increased utility and fitness over their non-cooperating counterparts. However, the individuals that derive by far the MOST net-benefit from cooperation are non-contributing cooperators. Individuals that take without giving anything back to the collective cause a net loss of utility for the rest of the collective, but worse than that, they are able to put all that unused energy into reproduction. So now you have a cooperating group that over time is going to experience diminishing returns on their labor as the share of the group that takes without giving increases. Eventually this comes to a crisis point and the group dies or fractures.

Over time, individual “ratcheting” mechanisms evolved that allowed for increasing group fitness but not individual fitness (e.g. locking shared resources behind proteins which are byproducts of cooperative activities).

I bring this up because modern leadership strikes me as something quite similar: a utility puzzle. Though instead of lazy cells, we have greedy politicians. I think the problem is the same: mismatched individual utility in comparison to the group. This can be solved in the same way: ratcheting.

So how do you design ratcheting mechanisms to enforce better leadership? I’m not rightly sure. It sounds like a good topic for a research paper. Here are a few thoughts anyways:

• Having a rotating chair seems to disrupt a lot of malicious action that exploits individual over group utility. This is the thinking behind term limits.

• Preventing transition of accumulated wealth during leadership could work, but would continue the arms race to hide bribes.

  • We could literally just treat people in leadership roles as a brand new citizen without a past, and act like that citizen died when the role passed on.

• I would love to suggest that we merely elect leaders that have enough solidarity with the community to seek collective rather than individual utility. However, the “bribe the community, not just a member” strategy of collective bargaining has the same issue we do now. It’s still easy to sway an individual in leadership to act against the collective good for personal gain.

• Stricter punishment for “leadership infidelity”, and more accountability in general sound good. However, that’s something to convince the people of. If politician’s children aren’t being kidnapped for betrayals, then the political will to do so wasn’t in the population.

As is always the case, there is no magical quick fix that politicians DON’T want you to know about. Just the grueling work of organizing and building solidarity the old fashioned way.

Until next time!