the second world

a tour of "you don't wanna go there"

people are familiar with the common construct of “the third world.” they are also familiar with the idea of “the first world.” what’s interesting to me is the idea of how one becomes the other and the presumption of the causality and the pathways by which that occurs. it’s worth some exploration.

worryingly, this is a topic on which i think most people’s intuitions and utopian hopes are hopelessly wrong to the point of being outright dangerous.

in an attempt to clarify and circumvent such, i’d like to add a new construct to the list, that of “the second world” and this is important because it is not at all what most people presume.

many people, if you ask them, would sort of puzzle with it and then posit this second realm as some interstitial state betwixt the third and first worlds, a sort of adolescence one grows through. but this, to my mind, is not correct and that is not how it works. the difference between the third world and the first world is not actually wealth or development, it’s systems and cultural practice.

“the third world” is the base state of humanity. it’s not some aberrant outcome, it’s the norm, a thing that must be escaped by building the structures that allow for human flourishing.

when you introduce ideas of scientific rationalism, modern communication and transportation systems, sound property rights, markets (including for capital), and ideas of golden rule, you get a phase change and a meteoric rise to wealth. there is no real middle state between third world and first world, it’s a binary. you get the pieces in place, and change comes very quickly.

i have written on this many times in the past notably on “causing prosperity” and on golden rules making golden ages as the fragile idea of doing unto others as one would have done onto them in turn that underpins the civilizations capable of supporting sufficient amounts of the free market capitalism that has been the only force to ever durably lift meaningful numbers of people out of grinding poverty.

there is no real middle state of half development that’s worthy of the name, it’s really a kind of “escape velocity” sort of system where you either achieve it or you don’t and are locked in a sort of low orbit low overall development cycle that does not and cannot lift all boats to anything like a first world valence.

you can see how this must be so in the order of affairs. if a society of low trust people adopts rules designed for high trust societies, it simply fails. none of the systems can function or establish themselves. it is only by first becoming high trust people that these sorts of structures may find foundation. the direction has to go that way.

so where then does “the second world” lie if not on the path from third world to first world?

i would posit that second world exists as a post 1st world stage and that you basically cannot get there without first having been first world. it’s not a transitional stage so much as a form of post achievement decline, a sort of senescence and degradation, a once lush garden gone to weeds. the second world is a trap and a truly nasty one from which extrication once caught is very difficult because the second world is, in many ways, the worst of all worlds, it’s first world systems that have fallen into hands and practices under which they cannot function, technology, technocracy, welfare systems, and systems of trust that work (or at least that can be managed at tolerable costs) by a certain sort of society but that become ruinous albatrosses around the necks of everything and everyone once they fall into disfunction, disrepair, and abuse.

the structure basically looks like this:

low trust people in a low trust system are the third world. if they develop into high trust people, they get the ability to adopt high trust systems and when they do, voila, first world.

but if once they have those systems in place they revert to being low trust people, the second world awaits

it’s not a place where you want to be, but is a place where many are increasing ending up.

the third world has a number of advantages:

labor tends to be plentiful, cheap, and often eager. populations tend to be young. things like land and construction food and services are inexpensive. there are not a lot of systems or regulation in place. you can “just do things” and it’s easy to build and hire and engage in small scale entrepreneurial activity. the problem is that it’s difficult to scale because the rights and trust systems are not there to support it. it’s fertile soil if you can find an ethos that works.

the first world also has many advantages:

labor tends to be highly productive and able to use large amounts of capital to be ever more so. it comes with lots of rights protection and strong ability to scale because of this and the high trust nature of interactions. it’s safe and predictable. you can have far flung, high function supply and production chains. it becomes rich and flourishing, but this enables many things that oppose such a state to exist, things like widespread welfare, regulatory, and taxation systems. populations get old. it’s harder to “just do things” and the flourishing increasingly predicates on advanced technologies used in complex chains of interdependence that are great when they run and highly resilient if left alone, but which can really graunch on you if meddled with sufficiently or if they fall into disrepair or incompetent hands. the rights that make a first world society worth inhabiting become vulnerabilities if consciously abused. the systems of technology that elevate life become boat anchors in the hands of those unable to operate or sustain them.

many examples of system collapse around communist takings (warsaw pact, maoist and stalinist plans, the “traditional” second world) abound, but the insidious aspect of the full scope second world is the manner in which it starts to infect and grow within the first world, extinguishing it like phylloxera. it’s gradual at first, but accelerates rapidly and you can see it as simple institutions erode and functionality dies. infrastructure decays and degrades. it starts to feel like you are living in the ruins of a civilization.

i type this with electricity powered by a building generator because for the 4th or 5th time in the last couple weeks, the power has gone out on puerto rico. last night it went out due to “rain.”

two weeks ago half the island lost power for 1-2 days and still, basically no one really knows why. the power generators blame the line runners. the line runners blame power gen. darkness spreads.

welcome to the second world.

and once you land here, it really does get pretty hard to get out.

puerto rico warned to brace for nonstop summer blackouts as power grid crumbles

“According to a resident interviewed by The Mirror, there were 20 major blackouts in some areas between May and September last summer. LUMA, the company that operates the transmission and distribution system in Puerto Rico promises around 90 this summer in the same time frame.”

the spectacle of this is truly amazing. a couple years ago, we got a tiny sideswipe from a tiny hurricane (cat 1) and it knocked out power all over the island for some time. the same hurricane then accelerated to cat 2 and hit the (poorer third world) domincan republic bang on. i’m not even sure they lost power at all.

this is the problem with “the second world”: it’s sort of the worst of all worlds. you have the high cost, high regulation structures of the first world but without the knowhow or labor productivity to support it. in the third world, you’d just “go do things” and fix the grid. here, the regulatory structures don’t allow it and, because the labor is expensive, no one can afford it anyhow once fortunes start to decline.

puerto rico is a really strong example of this issue. everything is a toll booth, a monopoly, an implausibly intractable permission structure. watching people enter year 3 of a 6 month home build is pretty normal. hiring people and running a restaurant is devastatingly difficult as labor is scarce, expensive, and once they have worked for you for 6 months, entails levels of difficulty to separate from sufficient even to make a frenchman exclaim “mon dieu!”

the “isla del encanto” has been in a 20+ year decline and the demographics promise much worse to come. there has been a massive brain and motivation drain as people move to miami and new york pulling off the top 1-2% each year and local hospitals provide convenient job fairs for US groups to find bilingual nurses and doctors and hire them away. the tax deal that kept the pharma and med device manufacturers here ended in the 1996-2005 timeframe and that was that. the knowhow that and incentive to keep the place running started to fade.

per US census only 15.6% of the population is now 18 years old or under with only 3% under 5. that’s devastating shrinkage. the sub 5 cohort is nearly 1/3 smaller than the 6-18. meanwhile, 65+ just hit 24% of population. these are the demographics of impending collapse and the loss of expertise and function feels more palpable each year.

roads are a wreck, the power grid is failing, we have huge swathes of incredible farmland that grows nothing but weeds and goats because no one is willing to work it. restaurants in san juan are priced like miami and so too are the nicer apartments and homes. construction is very difficult from a regulatory and from a labor standpoint and you’d rather set your car on fire than lose your housekeeper as it’s incredibly difficult to find, much less hire reliable people who want the work.

we’re an island with a 45% labor force participation rate, 60%+ of residents on some kind of welfare/aid/social security, and about 970k jobs held among 3.2 million people but you cannot find anyone to work.

life here is pleasant if you have money, but the island is sinking. you can feel the service levels and functionality dropping year by year. it’s hard to escape noticing that this is a system run by folks who cannot seem to manage it and the deckchairs on the titanic vibe grows more prevalent by the day.

having gotten such a preview, perhaps it makes this creeping incursion of systemic societal senescence easier for me to see.

but y’all are going to see it soon.

this movie is coming to a great many theaters and some of them are going to be near you.

spain and portugal and california are all “blackout curious” as well. it’s systems run by those past peter principles and going into decline.

some enter the second world by subtraction, but others do so by addition.

we’re seeing this all over the world. the golden state may actually be doing both, importing problems and causing competence flight.

power and other utility grids and infrastructure like roads are obvious markers. so are crumbling neighborhoods and neighborhood safety. the ever expanding homeless shanty towns and human detritus littering sidewalks and doorways is another second world phenomenon.

in the first world, people shooting up and passing out in the doorway of your high end home in a nice neighborhood get rousted and perhaps arrested by a high functioning constabulary.

in the third world, they get tossed by private security and private actors. each is a functional system.

but in the second world they get treated like precious faberge eggs, afforded infinite rights and prerogative, ignored by police, and untouchable by homeowners. a good friend of mine had a lovely place south of market in san francisco back in the 2000’s. he had to sell it and move because his wife kept getting blocked into their house (with the baby stroller) in the morning by junkies passed out with needles in arms and other appendages in pools of urine and feces on their front stoop. police would not even respond much less help.

in the second world, the rights of the anti-social become vectors of societal abuse and dissolution. they erode and prey upon morals and mores. behavior drops to terrible low equilibriums and the first world rules defend it and first world conflict avoidance makes handling it oneself impossible.

you try to prevent crazy people on trains from attacking innocent women and you land in jail. the first and third worlds know better, but the second world does not. it has the protections that make sense for sensible, respectful high trust people, but people who are none of those things wind up wielding them like maces.

it can go pretty bad pretty fast.

what is one even supposed to say about this?

and it has this weird ability to just creep, day by day into normalcy. one day you live in a pleasant place like portland.

the next, you look up and you live here.

and no one seems to know how to fix it.

that “not knowing” is a sure sign of second world status.

the very people you’d think would most want it fixed wind up being the ones who line up to stop you.

come on in, the water’s gross.

there is a basic high trust morality, one where you have a “leave a penny take a penny” system or where places like nordstroms can have a reputation for “accepting any return for any reason” because they pride themselves on top notch, zero friction customer service.

then some group starts stealing pennies and returning 12 year old converse all stars as brand new louboutins and the systems choke.

people do it on purpose. i have a good friend who has some “second world” extended family associated with his daughter. they buy products with warrantees and mark the warranty expiration on their calendars so they can return the goods for new ones a week before the warranty expires. it’s a game to them, an obvious way to come out ahead. it’s third world morals in a first world system.

and it just breaks everything.

this is why you cannot just drop such low trust non-golden rule people into high trust golden rule societies and expect to lift them up. they have no interest in being lifted. they just see easy pickins and go picking. they think you are stupid for letting them and lose respect for you and your ways. after all, why respect a culture full of idiots who are so easy to take advantage of?

it becomes the second world way of life.

the second world is a siege, a hostage scenario, a way of life under attack and abuse. the systems are not all crumbling by accident, they are being pulled down by people who play on one move look ahead and cannot pass a marshmallow test (or would have no interest in doing so if they could). it’s people who always defect in a prisoner’s dilemma living in a society built around a presumption that mostly everyone would learn to cooperate because the game is iterative and you’re going to play over and over again and that’s how we all win.

not in the second world you don’t.

the mismatch of ethics and systems will not allow it.

you still see this in small towns.

farm stands where you can take food and leave money on an honor system.

this has been common all over the west for generations. i remember things like this as a kid. you can still leave a bike unlocked outside and go into a store in a place like this and have no fear of theft.

you can have all the easy, pleasant systems of a high trust first world life because the sort of people who break those norms are not around.

but it takes very few to see the rules, game the rules, and break the system.

and pretty soon, you stand in the ruins of your civilization while cheap legalism and manipulation exact expensive prices for everyone.

in the first world, this is simply not done and someone who exhibits such behavior is basically anathema.

in the third world, this system likely did not exist but if it did and you acted like this, someone would throw you a beating.

but in the second world, you get neutered “stop or i’ll say stop again” protestations that malefactors find hilarious because they know they can use your rights structure against you, but you cannot use it in self defense.

it’s the libertarian conundrum.

bad people can really take good people for a ride.

in the second world, you cannot have nice things.

and that which is a nuisance at small scale rapidly grows until the toxin becomes systemic.

basically nothing goes bankrupt faster than the second world.

it’s a path to penury.

all your safety nets get wrapped around your neck and drowns you.

i watched this in minnesota with the somali community. it’s just grift after grift in endless concatenation. they robbed the state blind on PPP loans, feeding our future programs, health and welfare programs, you name it. it’s all grift and fakery. $250 million got stolen with fake meal sites for “the needy” under “feeding our future” when 10’s of millions of meals were paid for but never provided. the community suddenly discovered that welfare agencies would pay large sums for “autistic” kids. the number of care providers exploded from 41 to 328 over 5 years and spending from $6million to $192 million. see the grift, be the grift, instant on, always on.

this is not even seagulls eating french fries left unattended. this is seagulls learning to use the taxpayer’s uber eats account to order from mickey d’s to get more fries delivered and no one having any idea how to stop the process and getting called racist and anti-immigrant if they do.

“i’d like fries with that…”

in the second world, defrauding the system is the cottage industry.

and everyone plays.

they share plans with one another until the sophistication is incredible. in london, muslims pretend to have special needs kids to defraud SEND. they get a free car lease under the motabilty provisions and then free school transport daily by claiming the kid cannot take the bus (£70 per day). they then sign up the motability vehicle as a taxi business and get paid to use their free car to drive the kid to school.

the whole of the structure is pretty amazing.

this is replicated all over the world time after time after time.

the high trust first world lacks the third world immune system to attack such infections.

and systems stress.

and systems break.

and systems fail.

the second world is the worst of all worlds:

expensive, aged, restrictive, and unable to adapt while robbed of the productivity and flourishing that made it so attractive. it’s an inversion of ethics and incentive driving high function high equilibrium systems to low equilibriums through constant defection and abuse, through incomprehension and inattention and simpleminded plunder of complex systems that prove too regimented and unpermissive to allow adaptation.

it’s a self digging pit until you wake up and realize that the world is not flat, not everyone wants what you want, not everyone wants to be like you, and that when you mix third world mores into first world systems, nothing gets raised up. it’s just gravel in gears and sugar in gas tanks.

in the end, the high trust high function wealthy west is a small place. left to itself, it’s incredibly resilient internally and against external threats and stressors. it’s been a flourishing first world experiment in human elevation and progress.

but it has little in the way of internal immune system and its systems require high trust to be high function.

this is not a way of life to be lightly traded away.

it’s not a thing you want to lose.

and we can either get back to golden rules and golden ages, or we can just keep sliding into that which cannot be repaired.

choose wisely.

object lessons abound

the third world would have a new path. the first world would have a new road. the second world goes nowhere.