Liberty

Edge of Democracy in Brazil?

Bruno Gonçalves Rosi Current Events, History, Liberty, Philosophy , , ,

The past few days Brazilian internet was packed with commentaries about The Edge of Democracy (Portuguese: Democracia em Vertigem), a 2019 Brazilian documentary film directed by Petra Costa that was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 92nd Academy Awards (and lost). To be honest, I didn’t watch this movie and I’m not planning to. My life is already quite busy as it is. However, judging by the trailer and by what people were saying, “The film follows the political past of the filmmaker in a personal and intimate way, in context with the first term of President Lula until the events leading to the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, analyzing the rise and fall of both presidents and the consequent sociopolitical crisis that swept the country. The arrest of Lula paved the way for the rise of Jair Bolsonaro and his eventual presidency” (from Wikipedia). Vox says this: “Filmmaker Petra Costa grew up in a politically involved family in Brazil, and that’s her starting point for The Edge of Democracy, in which she traces recent developments in Brazilian politics and shows how the country moved so quickly from a fledgling democracy toward far-right authoritarianism”. So, it seems to me that the movie is about how Brazil was becoming a vibrant democracy under the rule of the Workers’ Party and now it’s becoming a far-right autocracy. Judging by that, these are some thoughts on how I see democracy in recent and past Brazilian history.

Brazil was a Portuguese colony, but this was different from America being an English colony. There were not thirteen colonies in Brazil. Portugal’s oversight of Brazil was stronger than England’s over America. There was basically no space for local rule in Brazil. Therefore, Brazil came from its colonial days with basically no self-government experience.

Brazil became independent from Portugal in 1822. But again, this was different from America’s independence. In 1808 the Portuguese royal family came to Brazil, running away from Napoleon. Brazil became a United Kingdom with Portugal in 1815. Dom João VI, the Portuguese king, gave in to the court’s pressure and went back to Portugal in the early 1820s. However, he left his son Dom Pedro I as prince regent in Brazil. And at this Pedro declared Brazil’s independence in 1822.

Dom Pedro I was crowned as Emperor of Brazil and ruled until 1831. Suffering multiple pressures, he went back to Portugal like his father before him. From 1831 to 1840 Brazil was ruled by several regents. In 1840 Dom Pedro I’s son, Dom Pedro II, became emperor. He ruled until 1889, when he was deposed by a military coup.

Brazil has been a republic ever since, but not like America. We didn’t simply have presidential elections every four years. The first two Brazilian presidents were virtually military dictators. Civilians came to power in 1894 and ruled until 1930, but these were not exactly democratic times. Mostly the country was ruled by coffee oligarchs.

The last of these coffee planter presidents ruled until 1930. Then Getúlio Vargas came to power in a coup. He ruled until 1945. Vargas was deposed but continued to be a major political player. So much so, that he came to the presidency in the 1950s. He committed suicide in 1954, while still in office. Basically, the country was still under Vargas’ shadow from 1945 to 1964. And that’s when the military came to power.

Brazil was under military governments from 1964 to 1985. This is the historical period that people tend to remember and refer to the most. The military came to power because the population asked them to. There was a great fear of communism, and the army would theoretically defend Brazil against this. I am not saying that this fear was justified or that military governments was the right solution, but this is how most people thought at that time.

The last military president surrendered power in 1985. Since then, Brazil has been ruled by civilians. The Workers’ Party (or Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT, in Portuguese) became one of the most competitive political forces in Brazil in this period. Officially founded in 1980, it always had Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as one of its main leaders. The Workers’ Party always presented itself as broadly leftist, without further specification. Among its founders were sympathizers of Roman Catholic Liberation Theology, radical socialists who defended armed opposition to the dictatorship, and union workers (Lula among them).

Lula was presidential candidate in 1989, 1994 and 1998, always coming in second place with about 30% of the votes. During those years Lula and the Workers’ Party were radically opposed to the economic reforms Brazil was going through. Like in other countries, Brazil was suffering from the crumbling of years of populism. The Washington Consensus was the order of the day, but the Workers’ Party was against everything it called “neoliberalism”. “Out with FHC (Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil’s president from 1995 to 2002) and the IMF” was their usual chant. The party even defended not paying Brazil’s staggering international debts. Lula still hung out with socialist leaders, mostly Fidel Castro. However, in 2002 he presented a different platform. Advised by advertising professional and political strategist Duda Mendonça, he announced that, if elected president, he wouldn’t undo FHC’s economic reforms. Plagued by several international economic crises (Mexico, Asia, Russia, Argentina), Brazil was having a hard time entering the free-market world. The once highly popular FHC came out from office with low popularity. The combination of these factors (FHC’s low popularity at the time and Lula’s promise to pursue a less radical path) opened the way for the Workers’ Party to come to Brazil’s presidency.

In the first years of his government Lula was true to his promise. He not only maintained but deepened FHC’s economic reforms. After the initial shocks, Brazil slowly reacted to the free-market medicine and the economy started to grow. This guaranteed Lula’s reelection in 2006, although by then major corruption scandals already surrounded his presidency, centrally the Mensalão scandal. This scandal broke in 2005 when it was discovered that the Workers’ Party gave monthly payments to several deputies from other parties to vote for legislation that was favored by the ruling party. Although the investigations implicated some of Lula’s closest allies, the president himself managed to get off scot-free.

Lula’s second term in office marked a change from the first and even from his party’s historical stand up until then. The Workers’ Party since its inception always posed as a firm adversary to corruption. Political corruption is hardly something new in Brazil. Going back to the beginning of this text, one of Brazil’s historical problems has always been the difficulty of separating public and private. This was ironically famously observed by Raymundo Faoro, one of the Workers’ Party initial supporters. In Donos do Poder (Owners of the Power) Faoro observed that Brazil has always been led by ruling elites who saw public property as their property. In this scenario the very idea of corruption becomes fuzzy since ruling elites believe they are not stealing – they are simply using what is rightly theirs! It is against this scenario that Faoro and others proposed a technocrat professional bureaucracy. After the Mensalão scandal, however, the Workers’ Party became cynical towards corruption. Their usual response to it became to say that previous governments also did it, that they didn’t invent corruption or simply to say that Lula was an innocent man being politically persecuted by the elites. In sum, Workers’ Party officials and supporters were divided between those who, while not denying the veracity of the corruption scandals, tried to minimize it, and those who completely denied it.

Lula left his second term in office still high on popularity. So much so that he was able to elect his successor, Dilma Rousseff. Dilma, however, would face several difficulties in her presidency. Number one, although somewhat forgotten by the general public, the corruption scandals were still a reality that would surface every now and then. Second, Brazil was suffering the effects of the 2008 world economic crisis. Finally, Dilma was herself a shamefully inept leader.

As I mentioned before, Lula came to power in 2003 mainly because he and others in the Workers’ Party were able to (partially) come to terms with the fact that the Washington Consensus is called a consensus for a reason: as much as some things in political economy are debatable, some are not – centrally, you can’t spend money that you don’t have forever. Dilma would have none of that. Although she is famously very confused in the way she speaks, all things point to the fact that Dilma is trapped in a painfully outdated Keynesian mentality. Trapped in this mentality, she overspent – against Brazilian law. For this reason, she was impeached.

Dilma’s impeachment was followed by a short government of her vice-president, Michel Temer, and now the country is governed by Jair Messias Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro was for many years an obscure politician from Rio de Janeiro, elected mostly to corporately defend the military as workmen. Almost an unofficial union leader for soldiers. Bolsonaro, however, is also an admirer of the Brazilian army in general. He graduated from Academia Militar das Agulhas Negras, something akin to West Point. As a reformed army captain, he fiercely believes that the military did save Brazil from communism in the 1960s. As I mentioned before, that’s exactly what people in the 1960s believed. I’m not saying that they were right.

Ironically, leftists greatly benefited from the military governments of the 1960s-1980s. The guerrilla in Brazil’s countryside was crushed by the armed forces and the urban armed resistance was mostly weak and disorganized. Some important leaders in the Workers’ Party came precisely from these two. But Brazilian armed forces were shamefully unprepared to fight a cultural war. While some sectors of the left were still following Mao Zedong or Che Guevara, trying to reach power by force, others were reading Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, following a more cultural path to power.

In any case, the left was very good at posing as victims. In the years that followed the military governments, there was a tendency to romanticize the resistance. Some people, artists and politicians, made whole careers on that. To be “persecuted by the dictatorship” became a major asset.

But the truth is that Brazilian left never fought for democracy. This isn’t meant to depreciate them. It’s just a statement of fact. Actually, what I meant in the first paragraphs was to show that Brazil has a very weak democratic tradition. Beginning very early in the 20th century, shortly after the Russian Revolution, communists tried to take power in Brazil by force. Again, this is just a statement of fact. This continued up to the early 1960s when, fueled by Cold War fear (some might say paranoia, I don’t really mind), people begged the armed forces to take power. Has it not lasted for so long, the military governments would probably have been long forgotten or taken as something positive. But because they lasted for so long, the left was able to play its cards and pose as democratic victims of an authoritarian regime.

And this is, I believe, how we come to 2020. Bolsonaro has, I believe, a wrong idea about the military governments. Even if they were truly necessary to avoid a communist coup, they shouldn’t have lasted for so long. Besides that, the military presidents had their ups and downs in how they governed the country. Bolsonaro mostly can’t see that. The left, on the other hand, romanticizes the dictatorship. Some of them seem to actually believe in the lie that they were fighting for democracy. They were not. Had they won the war against the military forces, Brazil would have become something akin to Castro’s Cuba or Mao’s China. Had the military not won against the guerrillas, Brazil would have something akin to Colombia’s FARCs.

In sum, Brazil is still trapped in things that happened in the 1960s. Socialists, of course, wanted a big state. That’s basically their ideology. Ironically, in order to fight that, the military built an equally gigantic state. Petra Costa’s family got rich, fabulously rich, during the military governments. Today her family has contracts with the Workers’ Party. Some things change, but others remain the same: some people don’t care if governments are red or blue. All they care about is the green of the dollars. And a smaller state would be bad business for this kind of people.

More campaign-finance fiction

Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty, Politics , ,

Today, Jacobin reports on Bernie Sanders’ proposal to give each American a $50-$200 voucher to spend on politicians’ political campaigns. I’m the lead counsel challenging a similar voucher program in Seattle, so I have some feelings on this subject.

The article opens with this classic ipse dixit: “Everyone knows that rich people skew our political priorities through big-money donations to candidates.” Really? I didn’t know that. But of course this is the big assumption behind so much campaign-finance hype, one that is vague and unprovable, like all good political rhetoric.

My first question here would be an attempt to resolve an ambiguity: what does “skew” mean? Where’s the magical baseline of “unskewed” political priorities? That baseline does not and never has existed. This opening line also fails to account for causation. That is, do donations influence eventual votes, or are both donations and votes attracted to candidate strength? I’ve yet to see a convincing argument that donations have ever “bought” a major federal election.

The article also seems to assume, as many do, that liberal politicians are the ones losing out in the big-donor world. This just isn’t so. Candidates from across the political spectrum receive plenty of cash. Heck, Hillary outspent Trump 3 to 1 in 2016. If she was hoping her donors would “buy” her the election, she was sorely disappointed.

The article also parrots the frequent refrain about our “broken” campaign-finance system. Again, compared to what? Where’s the unbroken system and what does it look like? At the end of the day, politicians need to figure out how to appeal to voters with all that money. How are our politics “skewed” if both parties are receiving plenty of funding with which to present a message that draws votes?

As for the actual voucher proposal, I think most Americans would rather keep their $50-$200 dollars and spend it on something other than a politician, but that’s just a hunch.

Ban on inquiries into wage history upheld

Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty

I haven’t read the decision in much depth yet, but the Third Circuit Court of Appeals this week upheld a Philadelphia ban on employer inquiries into job applicants’ wage history.

This is part of a troubling trend. More and more governments are banning inquiries into information that they don’t want people to use. Seattle and other cities have begun banning criminal background checks by landlords. Portland is set to pass a law that bans landlords from asking about a person’s immigration status. Other municipalities have passed and likely will pass more laws banning inquiries into wage history. The Third Circuit opinion will make it much harder to challenge this kind of speech restriction.

The Third Circuit decision held that the wage inquiry ban should be subject to the “commercial speech” test. In First Amendment jurisprudence, courts are more forgiving of restrictions on commercial speech than other types of speech. This doctrine, however, is meant to be reserved for advertisements, not any speech that happens to be related to a possible transaction. Here, the Third Circuit extended the rule to include questions asked in the context of an anticipated transaction–an employment contract. This is an unfortunate expansion of a doctrine that arguably shouldn’t exist at all. The First Amendment doesn’t distinguish between commercial and other types of speech, and neither should the courts.

The Least Empathic Lot

Joakim Book Books, Culture, Liberty, Philosophy, Politics , , , , , ,

On standard tests of empathy, libertarians score very low. Yet, the world’s “well-known libertarian bias” coupled with many people’s unwarranted pessimism makes us seem like starry-eyed optimists (“how could you possibly believe things will just work themselves out?!”).

Under the Moral Foundations framework developed and popularized by Jonathan Haidt, he and his colleagues analyzed thousands of responses through their YourMorals.org tool. Mostly focused on what distinguishes liberals from conservatives, there are enough self-reported libertarians answering that the questionnaire to draw meaningful conclusions. The results, as presented in TED-talks, podcast interviews and Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion contains a whole lot of interesting stuff.

First, some Moral Foundations basics: self-reported liberals attach almost all their moral value to two major categories – “fairness” and “care/harm.” Some examples include striving for equal (“fair”) outcomes and concern for those in need. No surprises there.

Conservatives, on the other hand, draw fairly evenly on all five of Haidt’s different moralities, markedly placing weight on the other three foundations as well – Authority (respect tradition and your superiors), Loyalty (stand with your group, family or nation) and Sanctity (revulsion towards disgusting things); liberals largely shun these three, which explains why the major political ideologies in America usually talk past one another.

Interestingly enough, In The Righteous Mind, Haidt discusses experiments where liberals and conservatives were asked to answer the questionnaire as the other would have. Conservatives and moderate liberals could represent the case of the other fairly well, whereas those self-identifying as “very liberal” were the least accurate. Indeed, the

biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.

Within the Moral Foundations framework, this makes perfect sense. Conservatives have, in a sense, a wider array of moral senses to draw from – pretending to be liberal merely means downplaying some senses and exaggerating others. For progressives who usually lack any conception of the other values, it’s hard to just invent them:

if your moral matrix encompasses nothing more than Care and Fairness, then to imagine a political opponent is to reverse one’s own position for those foundations – that Conservatives act primarily on other frequencies, on other foundations, wouldn’t even occur to them.

Libertarians, always the odd one out, look like conservatives on the traits most favoured by liberals (Fairness and Care/Harm); and are indistinguishable from liberals on the traits most characteristic of conservatives (Authority, Loyalty, and Sanctity). Not occupying some fuzzy middle-ground between them, but an entirely different beast.

Empathy, being captured by the ‘Care’ foundation, lines up well with political persuasion, argues Yale psychologist Paul Bloom in his Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Liberals care the most; conservatives some; and libertarians almost none at all. Liberals are the most empathic; conservatives are somewhat empathic; and libertarians the least empathic of all. No wonder libertarians seem odd or positively callous from the point of view of mainstream American politics.

Compared to others, libertarians are more educated and less religious – even so than liberals. Libertarians have “a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional cognitive style,” concluded Haidt and co-authors in another study; they are the “most cerebral, most rational, and least emotional,” allowing them more than any others to “have the capacity to reason their way to their ideology.”

Where libertarians really do place their moral worth is on “liberty” (a sixth foundation that Haidt and his colleagues added in later studies).  Shocking, I know. Libertarians are, in terms of moral philosophy, the most unidimensional and uncomplicated creatures you can imagine – a well-taught parrot might pass a libertarian Turing test if you teach it enough phrases like “property rights” or “don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff.”

The low-empathy result accounts for another striking observation to anyone who’s ever attended an even vaguely libertarian event: there are very few women around. As libertarians also tend to be ruthlessly logical and untroubled by differential outcomes along lines of gender or ethnicity – specifically in small, self-selected samples like conferences – they are usually not very bothered by the composition of their group (other than to lament the potential mating opportunities). The head rules, not the heart – or in this case, not even the phallus.

One of the most well-established (and under-appreciated) facts in the scientific community is the male-female divide along Simon Baron-Cohen’s Empathizing-Systemizing scale. The observation here is that males more often have an innate desire to understand entire systems rather than individual components – or the actions or fates of those components: “the variables in a system and how those variables govern the behaviour of that system,” as Haidt put it in a lecture at Cato. Examples include subway maps, strategy games, spreadsheets, or chess (for instance, there has never been a female world champion). Women, stereotypically, are much more inclined to discover, understand, mirror and even validate others’ feelings. Men are more interested in things while women are more concerned with people, I argued in my 2018 Notes post ‘The Factual Basis of Political Opinion’, paraphrasing Jordan Peterson.

The same reason that make men disproportionately interested in engineering – much more so than women – also make men more inclined towards libertarianism. A systemizing brain is more predisposed to libertarian ideology than is the empathizing brain – not to mention the ungoverned structure of free markets, and the bottom-up decentralized solutions offered to widespread societal ills.

Thus, we really shouldn’t be surprised about the lack of women in the libertarian ranks: libertarians are the least empathic bunch, which means that women, being more inclined towards empathy, are probably more appalled by an ideology that so ruthlessly favours predominantly male traits.

As I’ve learned from reading Bloom’s book, empathy – while occasionally laudable and desirable among friends and loved ones – usually drives us towards very poor decisions. It blinds us and biases us to preferring those we already like over those far away or those we cannot see. The “spotlight effect” that empathy provides makes us hone in on the individual event, overlooking the bigger picture or long-term effects. Bloom’s general argument lays out the case for why empathy involves in-group bias and clouds our moral judgements. It makes our actions “innumerate and myopic” and “insensitive to statistical data.” Empathy, writes Bloom:

does poorly in a world where there are many people in need and where the effects of one’s actions are diffuse, often delayed, and difficult to compute, a world in which an act that helps one person in the here and now can lead to greater suffering in the future.

In experiments, truly empathizing with individuals make us, for instance, more likely to move a patient higher on a donation list – even when knowing that some other (objectively-speaking) more-deserving recipient is thereby being moved down. Empathy implores us to save a visible harm, but ignore an even larger (and later) but statistically-disbursed harm.

Perhaps libertarians are the “the least empathic people on earth.” But after reading Bloom’s Against Empathy, I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. Perhaps – shocker! – what the world needs is a little bit more libertarian values.

Sunday Poetry: Hermann Hesse’s Stages

Alexander Albrecht Books, Culture, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , ,

Not much to say about this one. Helps me to take the edge off stressful times.

Phases

As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavour,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.
 
Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence.
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking
Or else remain the slaves of permanence.
 
Even the hour of our death may send
Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races.
So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.
 
I wish you all a pleasant Sunday.

The problem of value in regulatory takings

Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty , , ,

Regulatory takings law is a mess. The Fifth Amendment promises: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” This constitutional mandate encompasses direct acquisition of property, government action that damages or restricts property, and regulation of property that effectively results in a taking. Defining what constitutes a regulatory taking has vexed the courts for decades.

I believe much of the trouble comes from the Supreme Court’s fixation on loss of value. The primary test for a regulatory taking looks to reasonable investment-backed expectations dashed by the regulation (i.e., I’d amassed resources and did a lot of footwork to build a house, but a new shoreline buffer prohibits construction), the resulting economic loss, and the character of the government action.

Examining value creates intractable line-drawing problems and fails to establish a predictable rule. How much loss of value is too much? As one might expect, courts come out with wildly different answers, though all of them tend to lean toward not requiring compensation. A Massachusetts court, for example, recently held that a regulation that forbade any development on a parcel of land and resulted in a 91.5% loss of property value was not a taking that requires the government to compensate the property owner.

Hence, no one going into court with a takings claim really has any way to predict what a court might do, though it’s safe to guess that the result will be bad. Courts are reluctant to draw a line in the sand, so they just hand wins to the government. This is not to say that loss of value is wholly irrelevant, of course, but it’s more relevant to the question of how much compensation is due, not whether a taking has occurred in the first place.

Takings law doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, nineteenth-century takings law took a totally different approach. Early courts looked to the burden on the property interest, not the loss of economic value. Most fledgling regulatory takings law developed in the state courts, for two reasons: the Fifth Amendment wasn’t applied against the states until the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, and the federal government in the nineteenth century wasn’t much in the business of regulating land.

The early state cases didn’t even consider economic loss in their approach to what constitutes a taking. For instance, in Woodruff v. Neal, an 1859 Connecticut case, a government granted ranchers licenses to graze their cattle on public rights of way that crossed over private land. The private landowners sued for a taking and won because their property rights included rights over the “herbage” that the cows ate. The economic loss had to have been puny, but the court didn’t even bother addressing this, probably because they saw economic loss as pertinent only to the question of compensation due.

Most of the other regulatory takings cases of that time period involved riparian rights–wharfage rights and so on. So it was with one of the United States Supreme Court’s early forays into regulatory takings–a case where, like the state cases that preceded it, did not even bother to mention loss of value. The case was Yates v. Milwaukee (1870). Yates owned land adjacent to a river and had built a wharf that extended out into the water. The city didn’t like his wharf, so they declared it a nuisance and sought to tear it down. Yates argued this was a regulatory taking, and the Supreme Court agreed. They didn’t bother to mention how much the loss of the wharf would cost Yates. They just held that access to a river was among the rights held by owners of a riverbank. The city had destroyed that right, so a taking occurred and compensation was due.

Strangely, seven years later, the Supreme Court started to retreat from regulatory takings altogether and didn’t really return to the doctrine until the early twentieth century. Much later, when the Supreme Court thought up its value-based regulatory takings test in a 1978 case called Penn Central v. City of New York, the Court completely ignored Yates and all the many non-value-based takings cases in the state courts of the nineteenth century. In fact, the Court seemed to believe that regulatory takings law was a twentieth-century creation that began with a 1920 case called Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon. This bizarre blindness to the real history of regulatory takings law has resulted in an incomprehensible labyrinth of takings jurisprudence. The Supreme Court could learn a few lessons from the state courts of two centuries ago.

Second Nature

Rick Weber Liberty , ,

Michael Pollan gets me. Highly edumacated middle class white guy whose in to food and gardening. Last year I read Omnivore’s Dilemma and became convinced that Pollan occupies essentially the same position as me (challenging my preconceptions): the humble anarchist. Pollan has a sense of emergence, and skepticism of the beneficiaries of government policy. He might not take public positions as an anarchist, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see Ol’ Spooner’s ghost whispering in his ear.

This Christmakwanzakkah I read an older book of his. Second Nature is his record of the same experiences I’m currently going through as a gardener. This is from way back in 1991, and in it gives some evidence that he might be an epistemological anarchist:

As it happens, the etymology of the word true takes us back to the old English word for “tree”: a truth, to the Anglo-Saxons, was nothing more than a deeply rooted idea.

p. 159

Here he is appreciating emergent order in markets:

More than a work of art, I like to think of the garden as if it were a capitalist economy, inherently unstable, prone to cycles of boom and bust. Even the most prosperous times contain the seeds of future disaster. A flush year in the perennial border usually means lean times ahead; now spent, the perennial need dividing and won’t peak again for two years. Unless pruned in spring, my asters, phlox, and delphinium willput out way too many shoots, a form of herbaceous inflation that will cheapen all their blooms come summer. Wealth is constantly being created and destroyed in the garden, but the accounts never blanace for very long–a shortage of nutrients develops in this sector, a surplus in that one, the value of water fluctates wildly. Who could hope to orchestrate, much less master, so boisterous an assembly of the self-interested? The gardener’s lot is to try to get what he wants from his plants while they go heedlessly about getting what they want. …

The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist. Too much stands beyond our control here, and the only thing we can absolutely count on is eventual catastrophe. Success in the garden is the moment in time, that week in June when the perennials unanimously bloom and the border jells, or those clarion days in September when the reds riot in the tomato patch–just before the black frost hits. It’s easy to get discouraged, unless, like the green thumb, you are happier to garden in time than in space; unless, that is, your heart is in the verb. For the garden is never done–the weeds you pull today will return tomorrow, a new generation of aphids will step forward to avenge the ones you’ve slain, and everything you plant–everything–sooner or later will die. Among the many, many things the green thumb knows is the consolation of the compost pile, where nature, ever obliging, redeems this season’s deaths and disasters in the fresh promise of next spring.

p. 131-2

Pollan is showing as a great an ability to appreciate the market as a process as any Austrian economist.

The open secrets of what medicine actually helps

Kevin Kallmes Current Events, Liberty , , , ,

One of the things that I was most surprised by when I joined the medical field was how variable the average patient benefit was for different therapies. Obviously, Alzheimer’s treatments are less helpful than syphilis ones, but even within treatment categories, there are huge ranges in actual efficacy for treatments with similar cost, materials, and public conception.

What worries me about this is that not only in public but within the medical establishment, actually differentiating these therapies–and therefore deciding what therapies, ultimately, to use and pay for–is not prioritized in medical practice.

I wrote about this on my company’s blog, but its concept is purely as a comment on the most surprising dichotomy I learned about–that between stenting (no benefit shown for most patients!!) vs. clot retrieval during strokes (amazing benefits, including double the odds of good neurological outcome). Amazingly, the former is a far more common procedure, and the latter is underprovided in rural areas and in most countries outside of the US, EU, Japan, and Korea. Read more here: https://about.nested-knowledge.com/2020/01/27/not-all-minimally-invasive-procedures-are-created-equal/.

Climate crisis or censorship crisis?

Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , ,

Yesterday, the Chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis wrote an ominous letter to the CEO of Google. For the second time, the Chair is leaning on Google to police and remove “dangerous climate misinformation” on YouTube. The letter doesn’t threaten direct legal action against Google, but it nonetheless raises serious concern because it runs so counter to the free speech tradition and the value of a robust internet.

According to the Chair, “YouTube has been driving millions of viewers to climate misinformation videos every day, a shocking revelation that runs contrary to Google’s important missions of fighting misinformation and promoting climate action.” The Chair states her own unequivocal commitment to “promoting ambitious federal policy that will … eliminate barriers to action, including those as pervasive and harmful as climate denial and climate misinformation.” It’s hard not to see the veiled threat here.

Note the letter’s subtle casting of the consumers of information as passive actors that must be protected, rather than rational actors who choose what information to consume, a choice they’re entitled to make. She says “YouTube has been driving millions of viewers to climate misinformation” and that Google should “correct the record for millions of users who have been exposed to climate misinformation.” This language strips accountability and action from the viewers, as if they are a captive audience held down and forced to view climate denial videos with eyelid clamps like a scene from A Clockwork Orange. But if that content is promoted and viewed, that’s because there’s a consumer demand for it. The passive language used in the letter exemplifies the paternalism that often lurks behind censorship: for their own welfare, we must protect the public from information they wish to consume.

Note also the absolutism woven into the letter. Google cannot both be committed to climate action and committed to an open culture of public discourse. In the war for humanity’s survival, one priority must dominate above all others.

The letter also relies on the tired tactic of impugning speakers’ motives. Anyone who expresses “climate misinformation” on YouTube just wants “to protect polluters and their profits at the expense of the American people.” It’s impossible for an absolutist to consider that views opposed to her own might be sincerely held. Plus, research has shown that political views frequently do not line up with individual self-interest. Only a shallow thinker or someone with an agenda assumes a political viewpoint is rooted in a selfish motive.

As for the constitutional implications of the letter, there is no question that the federal government cannot impose on Google the duty to remove “climate misinformation” or “climate denial” content. False speech is not exiled from the sanctuary of First Amendment protection. Of course, some false speech can be penalized, such as libel, slander, or fraud. But these are circumstances where there’s some other legally cognizable harm associated with the false statement for which recovery is warranted. There is no general rule that false speech is unprotected.

Government should never be in the position of arbitrating truth. Particularly in the context of hotly debated political controversies, allowing government to label one side as gospel and penalize dissidents opens the door to legally enshrined orthodoxy. As Justice Robert Jackson said 80 years ago: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” That’s what the power to ban “climate misinformation” entails.

Indeed, government refereeing of truth will almost always shade toward discrimination against disfavored viewpoints. For example, there is “misinformation” out there on both sides of the climate debate. Those who peddle wild doomsday predictions are just as unhinged as those denying the realities of climate change. Yet the Chair does not propose to censor such misinformation.

When I see such zealous effort to shut someone up, I can’t help but ask myself why the censor is so afraid. The targeting of this speech is likely only draw attention to it. Why worry about the hacks? I’ve always believed what John Milton expressed centuries ago in the Areopagitica: “Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” Of course, that doesn’t mean that falsehoods lack convincing power, but truth in the end has the edge. Rather than pick the winner in advance, we do much better by letting truth emerge through open debate, bloodied but victorious.

Chinese government idolatry in a time of the coronavirus

Chhay Lin Lim Current Events, Liberty ,

I just found this video about some people’s initial responses to the coronavirus in China. The idolatry for the Chinese government, within China, is very remarkable: “Not afraid! We have our government, government can protect us!”

Protecting your privacy: asymmetric cryptography (part 2)

Chhay Lin Lim Liberty, Politics , , , ,

This is the second of four posts in which I discuss cryptography. If you read all four posts, you will understand the differences between symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, why the US government were against the spread of modern cryptography, how it has resulted in the first crypto war between code rebels (techno-libertarians) and the US government, and how you can easily protect your privacy using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP).

The topics of the four posts are:

  1. What is symmetric cryptography;
  2. What is asymmetric (public key) cryptography;
  3. The first crypto war between code rebels and the government;
  4. How to easily use PGP to protect your e-mail communication.

What is asymmetric (public key) cryptography

In my previous post, I mentioned four disadvantages of symmetric cryptography. These disadvantages are:

  1. The secret key must be shared between sender and receiver, before messages can be exchanged safely, preferably over a secure channel.
  2. The secret key is in two separate places.
  3. The sender of the message must trust the receiver that he will not steal or copy the secret key.
  4. It is not scalable for, for example, e-commerce.

Soon after the publication of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), asymmetric (public key) cryptography was invented by the Stanford graduate student, Whitfield Diffie, and Stanford Professor, Martin Hellman. This was a huge revolution within cryptographic research, because up until then it was thought that there should always be a shared secret key for the communication between the sender and receiver. The main question that Diffie and Hellman were trying to solve was: how can you create secure communication over a unsecure channel, when two corresponding people have never had contact with one another and therefore have not yet been able to share secret keys with each other.

The solution, public key cryptography, was introduced by Diffie and Hellman in their paper, ‘New Directions in Cryptography’ (1976). It inspired more cryptographic research outside the circles of secret agencies. Soon after the first publication on public key cryptography, three young Professors at MIT, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, developed the now famous RSA public key cryptosystem in 1977.

Merkle Diffie Hellman
Ralph Merkle, Martin Hellman, and Whitfield Diffie. Merkle is known for his invention of Merkle trees, which is a tree-like structure of cryptographic hashes that organizes for example Bitcoin transactions. The public key cryptosystem, as published in ‘New Directions in Cryptography’, is mostly known as the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Hellman, however, recognizes the contributions of Merkle for the Diffie-Hellman key exchange.

RSA
Adi Shamir, Ron Rivest, and Len Adleman. Inventors of the RSA cryptosystem.

Public key cryptography works as follows. There are two separate keys that correspond mathematically with one another: the public key and the private key. The public key is used to encrypt a message, and can be shared to other people. The private key is used to decrypt a message, and should be kept secret. Public key cryptography is hence a two way function. Just by knowing someone’s public key, it’s not possible to find out the person’s private key.

In our below example,

  1. Alice would like to send a secret love message to Bob.
  2. Bob has a corresponding public an private key, and sends the public key over a unsecure channel to Alice.
  3. Alice uses Bob’s public key to encrypt her secret love message.
  4. Alice sends the secret love message to Bob.
  5. Bob uses the corresponding private key to decrypt the message and finds out that Alice loves him.

Public Key cryptography
Alice and Bob use public key cryptography to exchange secret messages.

Doing so, you can have private correspondence over an unsecure channel. Actually, we’re using public key cryptography all the time. Whenever you see a green padlock in front of the URL bar, it means that the data you enter on the website is first encrypted before it’s sent out.

Digital Signatures

Public key cryptography is not only used for the encryption and decryption of messages, but also for message authentication. If Alice would not have encrypted her message with Bob’s public key, but with her own private key, then the encrypted message can be decrypted with her public key. If you receive a message of John Locke and you’d like to know whether it’s really sent out by Locke, then you could look up his public key and use it to decrypt his message. If the result is plaintext, and assuming that Locke is the only person in the world who possesses the only private key that can produce the encrypted message, you can be sure that the message was sent by Locke. In other words: applying a private key to a message is the equivalent to putting a digital signature.

Digital Signatures
Alice puts a digital signature on her message, and Bob digitally verifies that the message is truly coming from Alice. This is an easy way of using digital signatures. In reality, a text is hashed first with a hash algorithm, before it is encrypted with the private key. Bob then uses Alice’s public key to decrypt the message to retrieve the hash, and compares the resulting hash with the original hash of Alice’s message.

Digital signatures are particularly important, because they provide the following security aspects:

  1. Authentication: it offers proof that the message comes from the right person.
  2. Non-repudiation: we cannot deny that the signee has sent it.
  3. Data integrity: the message cannot be altered after it has been signed.

Diffie and Hellman saw great potential for public key cryptography in the coming digital age. The US secret intelligence, however, were not happy with this development in cryptography and tried to prevent public use of this new cryptosystem. The standoff between privacy advocates of whom many were cryptographers and the US government is known as the first crypto war.

In part three of this series, we will discuss the crypto war. Eventually, at the end of the post series, you will be able to encrypt your e-mails using public key cryptography.

Computational Economics is the Right Perspective

Rick Weber Economics, Liberty, Philosophy , ,

Here’s a vastly oversimplified picture of mainstream economics: We pick some phenomenon, assume all the context into the background, then build a model that isolates only the variables specifically relevant to that phenomenon.

Once you’ve simplified the problem that way, you can usually build a formal mathematical model, make a few more (hopefully) reasonable enough assumptions, and make some strong ceteris paribus claims about your chosen phenomena.

That’s a reasonable enough approach, but it doesn’t shed much light on big picture issues. I’m interested in root causes, and this “reduce things to their component parts” approach doesn’t give enough of a big picture to find those roots.

How do we broaden our perspective? One approach is to return to the more “literary” approach of the pre-Samuelson days. A bit of philosophy of science has me convinced that the primary flaw of such an approach is rhetorical. Written and mathematical arguments leave some assumptions in the background, but the latter is more convincing to a generation of economists trained to be distrustful of natural language (and too trusting of algebra).

As a pluralist, I think we should use as many approaches as we can. Different schools of thoughts allow you to build different imaginary worlds in your mind. But the computational approach isn’t getting enough play. I’d go so far as saying agent based modeling is the right form of mathematics for social science.

What does this mean? In a nutshell, it means modelling processes, simulating those processes, and seeing how interactions between different agents leads to different sorts of outcomes.

A common trope among Emergent Order folks is how ants are individually stupid but collectively brilliant. Neoclassical economics runs into the opposite problem: individually brilliant individuals who get trapped in Prisoners’ Dilemmas.

Computational economics starts with models that are more like ants than homo economicus. Agents are essentially bundles of heuristics/strategies in an out-of-equilibrium world. But these competing (and cooperating) strategies can interact in interesting ways. Each agent is a part of all the other agents’ environment, so the mix of strategies is a function of the success of the strategies which is a function of the mix of strategies in the environment.

In essence, computational economics starts from what the mainline economists have long recognized: human society is a complex, interwoven, recursive process. The world is, essentially, a sort of meta computer with a complex web of programs interacting and evolving. We don’t need to assume in any sort deus ex machina (that’s a bit of an overstatement, but we haven’t got time to explore it this week), we just need replicating entities that can change over time.

Such a view, to my mind, provides an end run around rationality assumptions that can explain the brilliance of entrepreneurship (without making heroes out of the merely lucky) as well as the folly unearthed by Behavioralist economics (without the smugness). We’ve always known it. It’s all just evolution. But the methodology hasn’t made its way into the main stream of economics. If there are any undergrads reading this on their way to a PhD program, let me know in the comments so I can point you in some interesting directions!

Supreme Court hears vital freedom-of-religion case

Ethan Blevins Current Events, Law, Liberty, Religion , , , , ,

Today, the Supreme Court heard  the most important case on the intersection of religion and education to arise in decades–Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. A few years back, Montana had passed its first school-choice program, a tax-credit scheme that allowed a small tax credit for donations to scholarship programs that helped kids afford private school.

As in any state, many of Montana’s private schools are religious. Right after the state legislature passed the tax-credit statute, the Montana Department of Revenue promulgated a rule that immediately gutted the program by forbidding students attending religious schools from receiving scholarship money.

The Department based its rule on Montana’s Constitution, which says the legislature can’t “make any direct or indirect appropriation or payment from any public fund or monies . . . for any sectarian purpose or to aid any church, school,” etc. Plenty of states have very similar “no-aid” clauses. Revenue claimed that scholarships for religious students under the tax-credit scheme violated the “no-aid” clause.

It’s worth taking a moment to consider how bizarre this argument is. These scholarships are funded by private donations–the money never enters a public coffer. Yet Revenue thinks such donations would constitute state aid to religion because the donor gets a tiny tax credit (up to $150) for the donation. Underlying this argument is the strange notion that any money the government declines to collect from you is still the government’s money.  This would mean, for instance, that every charitable donation eligible for a tax deduction would likewise constitute a government appropriation. Revenue’s argument has always looked to me like an extremely weak pretext for blatant discrimination against religious students.

So Kendra Espinoza and a few other parents with kids at religious schools sued the Department of Revenue, claiming, among other things, that Revenue’s rule violated their free exercise of religion under the First Amendment. Kendra won at trial, and then lost spectacularly at the Montana Supreme Court. In fact, the Montana Supreme Court did something even worse than the Department of Revenue–it invalidated the entire tax-credit program, such that even students at secular private schools could no longer receive scholarship assistance.

Thankfully, the Supreme Court took up the case, and they heard oral argument today. (My colleagues and I filed an amicus brief with the Court in support of Kendra).

The oral argument transcript shows a Court divided along the typical ideological lines. The liberal justices seemed preoccupied with standing–whether the petitioners had the right to sue. One justice implied that only taxpayers (who have a financial interest because of the tax credit) and schools (who receive the scholarship money) should have the right to sue. This is a weird take, given that families and students are obviously the intended beneficiaries of the scholarship program.

A number of the justices discussed a odd quirk about the Montana Supreme Court’s decision. The basic question they raised is this: since the Montana Supreme Court took the scholarship program away from everyone, are petitioners now being treated equally? But the sole reason the Montana Supreme Court struck down the program was to prevent religious students from receiving scholarship. A government action taken for a discriminatory reason is, well, discriminatory. If the legislature had excluded religious students when it enacted the program, the program would still stand. And if the legislature tried to enact the same program, providing equal treatment to religious and secular students alike, the Court would strike it down. That’s discrimination based on religious status–pretty straightforward.

One justice cited to James Madison’s famous Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, arguing that the founders wouldn’t have wanted public funds flowing to religious schools like this (again no public funds were flowing to Montana religious schools under this program, but why let accuracy get in the way of a good narrative). That’s a terrible misreading of Madison. The Memorial and Remonstrance was an attack on preferential aid to religion, not to a program that provided public benefits to all groups, including religious ones. The difference is vital. Can the government deny churches police protection, fire protection, sewer connections, electrical service, or any other public benefit on the grounds that the government would be providing indirect public funding to religious institutions? Surely not. In fact, that’s exactly what the Supreme Court said in a recent case called Trinity Lutheran, where Missouri denied a church daycare access to a government program that helped renovate playgrounds.

There is a difference between Trinity Lutheran and this case, arguably, which is that here the money goes more directly to religious indoctrination, not something secular like playground materials. But at bottom, public funding is fungible. Providing police protection and other general public benefits obviously makes it easier for a religious institution to fulfill its religious mission.

This case should be an easy one. The government offered a benefit to all private schools. To include religious schools doesn’t “establish” religion. It just treats religious groups equally, as the Constitution requires.

The veil of nostalgia

Mary Lucia Darst Liberty , , , , , ,

In article for Worth, titled “A new wealth gap is growing – attention inequality,” authors Joon Yun and Eric Yun of the Yun Family Foundation, an institute dedicated to “transforming the way people think,” argued that “attention inequality” is having a destructive force on society and expressed nostalgia for the days of “monoculture.” They defined this idyllic time as one where all attention was focused on one or two people or groups, e.g. the Beatles, and on no one else. The idea expressed by the Yuns is that the new internet world where everyone may take his best shot at fame is unfair, and a veil that should not have been lifted has been removed. In the meantime, everyone, described as “the heart-broken masses,” wanders through the selection at will, as customers as well as fame-seekers. The Yuns’ complaint is very similar to a running theme in the works of Michel Houellebecq: the free market of choice has created winners and losers and in doing so has destroyed the dreams and self-respect of the last group.

Perhaps the question is whether existing in a world of dreams, one in which a person could feel good about himself using the “might have been” fantasy, is an acceptable burden to thrust upon society. After all, in his short story “The secret life of Walter Mitty [which the Ben Stiller film butchered],” satirist James Thurber’s point was that living in dreams replaces action, allowing people to imagine themselves as people filled with unrecognized abilities. Even Thurber’s picture of the type for whom such an existence is necessary was probably accurate: a passive middle-aged man who had missed opportunities in his youth (implied WWII vet, so both chances to be a military hero and cash in benefits to start a business, further education, etc.) and resents his wife as the cause and the personification of the mediocrity of his existence.

But are we better off with the veil of mediocre monoculture lifted? Is the fact that revelation may not be pleasant for those who discover that they are unappealing to the modern market really a justifiable cause for concern? Is the old world of “monoculture” really something to look back upon with nostalgia?

My former composition and counterpoint teacher was also a concert pianist, who trained at The Juilliard School. While still a student my teacher was signed by a major record label. One of the tidbits I learned from him was that back in “those days (mid-20th century)” practically the only way a young (classical) artist had of obtaining notice was to be at an elite conservatory since that is where the scouts went almost exclusively.

The MO for finding the “latest new thing” made perfect sense for the time period. There was (and still is) a tremendous amount of investment on the part of the label that went into publicity for and grooming of a young artist. Further, in my teacher’s case, the label handled studio and recording expenses, created and booked concert tours, and handled venue costs. The artist did not have to repay the funding; however, total expenses would be deducted from any royalties should he/she become successful. The investment risk meant that going to places where the already-succeeding were clustered was the safest bet for the big labels. There was very little room in the equation for a person who was not already positioned to join the upper professional echelons, or someone who had no insider access.

Was a situation where the major labels acted as gatekeepers and only considered people who fit a certain profile really better than the current one where the internet and digital tools allow artists to perform directly to the audience? The nostalgia for a time of “monoculture” speaks to a yearning for a closed, stratified world. The world where my teacher grew up and worked was a world in which someone with big dreams could imagine himself as simply undiscovered, an unrecognized talent whose gifts would never benefit society. There is some security, a perverse comfort, in such a dynamic. A person never has to confront the idea that maybe he has no talent, maybe his music is not good enough, maybe what he does is something no one finds interesting, perhaps there is no market for him to fill.

The breakup of the “monoculture” has forced average Joe dreamer to confront these possibilities. Instead of only playing and dreaming in his garage, he can now release his own albums on iTunes and Prime Music, upload videos to YouTube and Daily Motion; he can have his own website and create his own publicity. He can wait to see if his work is accepted and if there is an audience for it. The Yun family has argued that the process of exposure and competition is cruel, that it breaks up human contact, that it consigns the vast majority who desire to be part of the “culture” to being part of the “heartbroken masses.” But the real question is: How is average Joe dreamer any better off under the old system? Isn’t a situation in which he at least has a chance to be seen, to make it big, better than one in which he is simply locked out? 

The Blockchain Basics Book has been published and is available for free

Chhay Lin Lim Books, Liberty , , ,

Our Blockchain Basics book (Blockchain Basisboek in Dutch) has just been published on January 17th. You can download it here for free. The book will be used in classrooms across more than 8 local universities in the Netherlands. Hopefully, other universities will follow soon.

In this post, I’d like to discuss why I started the initiative to write the ±550 pages book, and what other project I have in mind to further improve blockchain education in the Netherlands.

Blockchain_Basisboek_voor

The current state of blockchain education in the Netherlands

After two months of teaching blockchain at a local Dutch university, October 2018, I realized that blockchain education in the Netherlands (probably in most parts of the world) is still lacking.

I have identified the following 7 issues with our blockchain education in the Netherlands.

Blockchain education in Netherlands
Issues in the Dutch blockchain education space.

  1. Few Dutch class material. Good blockchain content is mostly written in the English language. My required reading list therefore consists mainly of English material, which proves to be a high barrier for Dutch-speaking students that are not at all familiar with (a) the technology and (b) the technical jargon used in the blockchain space.
  2. Dutch content is dispersed. Good content in Dutch is very dispersed among many different websites.
  3. Current Dutch books are not very useful for educational purposes. The books available on the Dutch market are not comprehensive enough and are not suitable for students.
  4. There is no standard for good blockchain education. Most universities are developing curricula on their own and there’s no standard on what good blockchain education consists of.
  5. Few sparring partners. Most universities don’t share their class materials or experiences teaching blockchain. Fortunately, the Dutch Blockchain Coalition is trying to change this, but we need to put much more effort to do cross-institutional sharing. Many universities also want to develop blockchain education, but lack the expertise. It would be good if these universities jointly develop their blockchain curriculum with other universities and share teachers.
  6. Knowledge is dispersed. Different faculties within a university are developing blockchain education in isolation and have their own blockchain experts who don’t know that some of their colleagues are also working on blockchain. Someone who’s working on the legal side of blockchain may not know that there’s someone at another faculty who is working on the technical or ethical side of blockchain. Bringing knowledge from different people together can lead to interesting and surprising new perspectives.
  7. Not enough diversity in perspectives. Blockchain can be approached from many different perspectives. Most classes only focus on a limited number of perspectives. A business department may heavily focus on blockchain applications and little on the technical side. Not knowing the technical side of blockchain, a business teacher may talk about potential blockchain applications and develop business models that are technically unfeasible.

I wrote the Blockchain Basics book, together with my colleague Arthur Janse, to tackle the first 3 issues (in green).

Main topics of the book

The book comprises three parts:

  1. Part I contains the technical side of blockchain and relevant innovations. Topics that we discuss are Bitcoin, current payment systems, consensus protocols, mining, nodes, forks, cryptography, smart contracts, governance, cryptoeconomics, and self-sovereign identities.
  2. Part II contains the economic and philosophical background of the Bitcoin blockchain. It discusses the different economic schools and in particular how the Austrian School of Economics and libertarianism, crypto-anarchism and cypherpunk have influenced Bitcoin.
  3. Part III contains topics revolving around enterprise blockchain. It discusses decentralized business models and enterprise applications.

What’s next?

While writing the book, I came up with the idea to create an organic community based open access digital knowledge platform that anyone can join for free. I pitched the idea in September 2019 at a Dutch Blockchain Coalition (DBC) event for all universities in the Netherlands. The DBC and other universities responded enthusiastically. Four months later, we have a proposal ready to develop the platform with 6 universities and the DBC.

We would like to use the Blockchain Basics book as the foundation of the platform, and – acknowledging that knowledge is decentralized – give all users the right to add new or revise already existing content. A public reviewing feature and a reputation system will be put in place to make sure that wrong content becomes corrected and to incentivize users to add good content. Students can also submit their Bachelor, Master and PhD dissertations and researchers can submit their papers on the platform. 

I think that the multidisciplinary and cross-institutional cooperation will structurally improve blockchain education in the Netherlands. Doing so, I think we can tackle all the other issues (issues number 4 – 7).