Indeed there's a natural dichotomy between import replacement focused groups, like cults or isolationist states, vs. export-focused groups, like firms or exporter states. But I'm not sure import replacement is the right direction. I think the export-oriented strategy works about as well in terms of self-government, brings more money and success, and leads to a kind of healthy openness to the world.
Neither is generically healthier considered in isolation. One wouldn’t want to strictly focus on replacing imports, or maximizing export value, but doing each when it’s more profitable to do so.
Export orientation seems very bad for e.g. child care when fertility rates are below replacement & educational institutions have almost uniformly been deeply sabotaged. OTOH it would be stupid for most groups to try to grow all their own crops.
The Rationalist movement is explicitly premised on the idea that people seeking to do well on crucial decisions can and ought to do a lot of import replacement with respect to knowledge at least temporarily.
Economics says export orientation is, to first order, better than import substitution. Ricardian comparative advantage and all that. As for the rationalist community, I've been convinced for years that it took a major loss by doing AI research in isolation (and sometimes even in secrecy) which ended up going nowhere.
I don't think "someone tried a thing and failed" invalidates trying things. I do think the culture of paranoid secrecy at MIRI (articulately described by Jessica Taylor a couple of years ago) was bad. Growing your own grain is a bad value proposition because a lot of farmers are trying to grow grain cheaply and selling it at commodity prices to competing distributors. Doing your own health care is sometimes a good value proposition and sometimes a bad one because there is legitimate technical expertise and returns to scale for sharing costly equipment, but there's also cartelization and bad-faith gatekeeping. If the schools are trying to mentally cripple the children, it shouldn't be very hard to do better at pretty small scales. One has to look at the details.
Apple and Amazon have done very well at import substitution over the past couple decades.
Most of Apple's manufacturing is in China and most of its sales are outside the US. I think it's a huge success of globalism, and the same can be said about a lot of the US tech industry.
This doesn't seem like it implies any sort of disagreement and I don't understand why you think it's relevant additional information in this context. Maybe you're treating vertical integration as a very different thing from import substitution, while from my perspective they are identical; I didn't mean to say that the USA has done well by import substitution via Apple and Amazon, but that Apple and Amazon themselves, as statelike clients of the US-led global financial system, have done well through import substitution.
Yeah, I misunderstood how you used the phrase. But the new usage also seems iffy to me.
A firm can vertically integrate by buying other firms. This doesn't seem analogous to import substitution.
A firm can vertically integrate to make a product that can't be bought from elsewhere. I'd argue that's what Apple and Amazon did. Can you really say they were doing the equivalent of protecting their market from imported cheap steel, like a country doing import substitution industrialization? Could they get software as good as iOS or AWS from elsewhere for cheaper? No they couldn't, that's why they built it. It's not import substitution if there's no "import" to substitute. And when good "import" is available, they're happy to use it: Apple relies on Foxconn for manufacturing, and Amazon relies on lots and lots of sellers.
And most importantly, countries do import substitution to become less dependent on the market. But for a firm, the whole point is to sell stuff on the market. Apple and Amazon are successful because they sell lots of stuff. If you want to become successful like them, it seems your first priority should be "export orientation", selling stuff. "Import substitution" should be, like, tenth priority.
If you can extend your system of accountability to include people already making product X, that's frequently going to be better than diverting productive resources already being used profitably to make product Y, to make product X instead. But the "integration" element is important; I expect vertical integration or import substitution to be profitable if it protects you from monopolistic behavior by horizontal integrationists, or if it allows you to produce intermediate goods more suitable for their purpose than can be bought externally for the same cost. I think this responds adequately to your arguments 1 and 2.
"Identical" may have been too strong, as there is an edge case where one buys a supplier and then doesn't change anything about them. This may be formally considered "vertical integration" under some schemas, but it's not an interesting case. But as I see it, the meaning of expressions like "vertical integration" or "import substitution" is their functional relation to the long-run profitability of a firm/state. And that if we don't make an unprincipled distinction between Westphalian states and other sorts of firm, the distinction collapses. Production of a good by immigrants who used to make it for export in the old country, or by people living in newly annexed territory, would generally still be considered "import substitution," and that's strongly analogous to the sorts of "vertical integration" cases you mentioned.
3 seems confused. I didn't bring up Apple and Amazon to suggest that import substitution is the most profitable strategy considered in terms of external currency, but to suggest that even firms trying to maximize long-run profits in terms of external currency like US dollars sometimes do so more effectively through developing their supply chains in-house than they could by focusing solely on exports. A fortiori people who aren't dollar-nihilists but want anything else in life also ought to see some upside some of the time in import substitution. I then suggested some specific ways in which I thought import substitution would be profitable. Either you agree or disagree with the specifics; if "economics" recommends never doing import substitution then "economics" is obviously wrong.
On Profitable Partial Exit from Perverse Regimes Through the Exercise of One's Formal Rights as a Citizen
Enough criticism and analysis for the moment; here's a constructive program!
Whole systems become richer through exchange and division of labor, which affords people more leisure to explore and investigate the environment, and add to the total knowledge and capacities of the community. Local subsystems that are part of a larger economic community that is fundamentally extractive may decide to temporarily become less wealthy in nominal terms in order to become more self-governing through import replacement. For a more detailed well fleshed out theory with many examples on the level of the municipal or state economy, see the published work of Jane Jacobs, especially Systems of Survival, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, The Economy of Cities, The Nature of Economies, and The Question of Separatism.
At each stage of the process, the import substitution has to pay off fast enough for the community to be able to reproduce itself, which limits the extent of possible import substitution; we do not want to become North Korea. The Amish represent a more appealing prospect along the efficient frontier; they abstain from television, which we permit, but retain the capacity to build enough new housing in desirable locations to meet new needs, which our civilization has lost.
I would like to increase the scope of trade for a community of people whose minds are increasingly integrated, fully endorsed parts of their survival and reproductive strategies, and who constitute a language community that can describe itself and whose members can increasingly honestly describe themselves. For now, comfortable survival as an individual in our society requires adapting to mores that are perverse, anti-intellectual, and promote self-hatred, which makes it much more expensive to retain a nonperverse and prointellectual internal attitude. (See On commitments to anti-normativity, Guilt, Shame, and Depravity, The Order of the Soul, Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency, and Can crimes be discussed literally?.)
Here are some ways I can imagine forming various small republics within the current American system. I am less familiar with foreign regimes but I imagine some elements of this generalize well.
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Republic of the Self
One person trying to improve the extent to which they are in integrity with themselves can profit from pursuing more bodily autonomy and integration, the resolution of self-inflicted pain, and improved nutrition.
The works of Moshe Feldenkrais are the best formal guide I've seen to body integration. Tai chi also helps. OpenATM or a credentialed Feldenkrais practitioner might be helpful for those who aren't exceptionally literate. Possibly some forms of yoga can help; Iyengar seems like the stupidest (and therefore most reliably reproducible) possible intervention that helps with this.
Generally, spending time playing around with the movement of one's own body, gently, investigating the edges of one's capacity rather than pushing past them, prioritizing balance, precision, and efficiency over cruder metrics like growing more meat or even maximizing strength in one stereotyped movement pattern. One can profit from adding mechanical challenge when one has become too strong for the current level of challenge to provide clearly interpretable feedback. Some movement patterns to learn, improve, and retain include walking barefoot on variable terrain, squatting, crawling, hanging, and climbing.
If there’s part of your body or a context where you feel pain or some other salient problem, or dissociate & don’t feel anything at all, that’s a natural target of investigation. If it feels *good* to move some way, that’s an even better target.
For mental integration, the canonical book is Spinoza's Ethics. It's old, a demanding read, and missing some important information about conflict, and I'm working on a patch, but for now, it's the best thing in its class by far.
Eating enough food, especially lightly processed and unadulterated animal products, and reducing or eliminating foods that lead to gastric distress or challenge, is the main way to improve nutrition. One might start by transitioning (gradually, to avoid transition shocks) to an elimination diet of fatty ruminant meat only, then trying to add back in things that Paleo-style heuristics would endorse and paying close attention to how they affect you. Salt, eggs, refined dairy, unrefined dairy, organ meats, bone broth. Then fruits and raw honey. Then root vegetables. Then other vegetables, grains, nuts, and other seeds. Then once you know what you can profitably eat and what it feels like to eat broadly enough and also nothing that makes you feel bad afterwards, experimenting with relative composition and timing.
Chris Masterjohn's work can improve the scope or precision of this work, as can state-published micronutrient guidelines.
Meditation - the simpler kinds like practicing attending to the breath, body scans, and nonjudgmental awareness of whatever else comes up in the process - can help cultivate the sensitivity to apply the above interventions intelligently. If you're too anxious to sit quietly for a while without a lot of outside stimulation, you might have mental knots that need meditation to unravel.
Republic of the Household
One can insource early childhood education - see the published work of Maria Montessori (inventor of the Montessori method) and Siegfried Engelmann (inventor of Direct Instruction), especially Give your child a superior mind. Taking Children Seriously is important as well.
Food preparation can be made much more efficient through division of labor (these profits can be realized as either spending less time or money on food, or consuming higher-quality food), and intelligent friendly touch can also be insourced profitably at this scale. You may need to live somewhere less fashionable and consume less conspicuously.
Republic of the Pod
Child care / education and meal preparation can be rendered much cheaper if several households collocate within easy walking distance, especially if they are adjacent. If they coordinate well about housing, they will be less reliant on living in central fashionable areas, which should reduce housing costs and allow more members of the household to focus full-time on internal and other local production rather than working outside the home to earn money from a larger extractive system. This is the smallest sustainable size at which I can imagine adults who are not exceptionally privileged sustainably (from an intergenerational perspective) enjoying serious leisure, since exchange - watching and befriending each other's children - can allow this size of group to attain a high educational standard without heroic, individual investments of time and attention that would be financially unsustainable for most people. This is also the smallest group size that can profitably and economically purchase land in order to improve it for the future.
Another critical specialization would be that only some members of the pod would have to be expert at navigating the bureaucracies that gatekeep critical services from the broader society such as hospitals.
Dunbar Republic
A group of 80-150 people is large enough to begin to assert itself politically to create space for distinctive norms that permit more efficient resource allocations than the broader society. For instance, a nonparanoid attitude towards freedom of movement for children.
If located within a broader municipality, a relatively unambitious version of this would be a whole city block of people collectively petitioning the city to close that block to automobile traffic for a couple of hours a week to allow their children freedom to roam within those boundaries (Play Streets). They could also stick up for each other and lobby the government if harassed by outsiders, in ways that would make it feel more politically expensive for municipal or state decisionmakers to tolerate, enable, or participate in such harassment. For instance, the Orthodox Jewish community of Pittsburgh successfully lobbied the state to change mortuary regulations to permit simple inexpensive burials. I would have a noticeably easier and more relaxed time caring for my children if I lived in a neighborhood that robustly supported Scandinavian-style mores around babies napping outside, instead of having to perform constant conspicuous vigilance lest the police arrest me for child endangerment.
Republics frequently practice something like universal conscription (the Swiss and Israelis notably still do this) as a formalization of their collective commitment to mutual defense. While small towns are not permitted military autonomy, they are sometimes permitted their own police force, which customarily receives broad deference from the state around use of force. A group this size could potentially incorporate a small town in an unincorporated area, and constitute their own police force comprising the entire adult citizenry (or whatever other arrangement is compatible with their local mores), though this would be easier with a somewhat larger well-coordinated group. Universal adult membership in the police is an important form of lawful autonomy under systems where policing of some kind is mandatory; it at least prevents the sorts of systemic inequality of violence that emerge where policing is a specialized role. The Rajneeshi cult documented in Wild Wild Country did this, and while their experiment eventually failed for other reasons (for instance, they were a crazy guru sex cult that attracted a lot of adverse attention, and then poisoned some random salad bars when they felt threatened by outsiders), constituting their own police force seems to have been an entirely sensible measure that worked well as long as the project lasted and did not itself lead to any major problems for the Rajneeshis.
Festival Republic
Several Dunbar groups with compatible household and pod norms could constitute a minimal viable mating pool, so that members wouldn't have to adapt to external mores in order to get enough attention to find a mate.
Political Economy Republic
At some point there are enough people with enough volume of exchange to require explicit procedures by which a confederation of distinct communities negotiate mutual trust. This is a large enough group to profitably develop a formal internal currency, and a formal defensive alliance. This is also a large enough group to constitute a sustainable language community (even if it's effectively a strongly differentiated dialect of the outside culture), since where conflict extends to competing uses of language (as it frequently does in our current political context), the meaning of language is ultimately decided by the process for resolving disputes about commitments. (See Civil Law and Political Drama)
I have not prioritized novel institution-design for this last topic because I don’t see enough coordination on the lower levels to make it worthwhile.