It seems like Bryan and Matt are mostly talking past each other. They’re each advocating for changes along a different axis, and those two axes are in principle independent from each other.
Bryan is primarily interested in the axis of the “pervasiveness of market-restricting regulation in society” (or alternatively “how free are markets?”). He’s advocating for less regulation, and especially in key areas where regulation is destroying enormous amounts of value: immigration and housing.
Matt is primarily interested in the axis of “the distribution of ownership of capital in society”. He thinks a society is more just when ownership of capital isn’t concentrated.
He’s advocating for an alternative system of property rights than Bryan is relying on. His preferred system of property rights is unintuitive compared most common notions of ownership, and he (presumably) is aware of that, but he thinks that’s not very relevant, since he thinks that that common notions of ownership are philosophically bankrupt—they don’t actually hold up to scrutiny, and so some other notion is needed.
(This is much more interesting and (possibly?) intellectually cogent notion of socialism than I’ve encountered before.
These two axes are not fundamentally at odds! It is (in principle, at least) to have a society with common ownership of capital and very limited government regulation.
Matt doesn’t clearly have a strong view on the regulation axis. He specifically says (1:02) that the level of regulation is irrelevant to his definition of socialism!
Further, he specifically demurs from evaluating which setups are “free market” or not, stating explicitly that that’s not how he thinks about things. In his framework all markets are structured by rules, and some sets of rules are better than others, but there’s not really a coherent notion of “some markets are freer and others are less free”. (Which makes sense because Bryan’s idea of “free markets” are markets in which people are less restricted in what they can do with their property, and Matt denies the notion of property that idea relies on.)
I can’t tell, but it seems like maybe Matt would prefer the specific deregulation that Bryan advocates for? (He says at 1:05 that he doesn’t see the zoning rule that limits density of housing as socialistic because it doesn’t drive capital income to the public.)
I’m sure that Bryan does have strong views about property right systems, but to my mind, he does a bad job with contending with Matt’s arguments on their own terms.
Bryan tries to appeal to those common notions of ownership as an argument, but Matt unhesitatingly bites that bullet. It’s like trying to argue to a physicist that General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics must be wrong because it’s counter to one’s basic experience of living in the world. The physicist knows that those theories are bizarre to common sense folk-physics, but he also claims that there are fundamental problems with common sense folk-physics—hence the need for the these unintuitive alternatives.
Bryan does loop around to a different argument at the end: that his preferred innovations would do more for the poor than Matt’s. I think that was ostensibly what the debate was supposed to be about, and I continue to be interested in Matt’s response to that claim.
But were I to probe Matt’s framework, on it’s own terms, I wouldn’t just point out that most people don’t share his assumptions.
I am mostly interested in working out the patterns of incentives that fall out of his preferred property system, and what selection processes are on capital allocation decisions. (I guess that’s not a crux for Matt, but it’s at least a crux for me).
I agree that we could have a totally different framework of property rights, and I would want to figure out if his framework is better than the existing ones, and in what ways.
Overall, I’m pretty glad to have been introduced to Matt Bruenig. It seems like he might have a more intellectually coherent notion of socialism than I’ve previously encountered. I’m skeptical that it actually pans out, but I’m curious to learn more!
musings and rough drafts 