What are the most successful economies one can think of?
USA
Post WWII Japan, Germany
Singapore
Hong Kong
Industrial Revolution England, Netherlands
What are the interesting features these all share?
1. NEW systems. Effectively, the existing power structures were broken...and no one could prevent new players from doing things better.
2. Anglo-derived capitalist systems.
Incidentally, the worst systems we've ever seen are all also new systems, heavy on central control.
1. Midieval China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, North Korea, Mao's China, Stalin's Russia.
Aretae's conclusion:
Anglo-common law derived systems (evolved law, imported) that are new are good systems. Stronger central control makes bad systems.
Olson explains: Systems are like boats...they get barnacles...except in economies, the barnacles get on the rudder and start driving. Only new systems are relatively good....because the barnacles haven't had time to accumulate.
TJ and the tree of liberty is also appropriate here.
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6 comments:
The Anglo-derivation might have something to do with the English conquering much of the world.
Even so, classical Athens was clearly a result of shaking off the barnacles: The reforms attributed to Solon seem to have fixed the strife that was paralyzing their society.
Medieval China was actually quite prosperous for lots of its history, though punctuated by interregnums of famine, war, and technological innovation. But in the pre-Industrial Revolution era, it did pretty well even in terms of per capita income. One hypothesis: good top-down systems are useful in technologically stable periods. Regime certainty is always useful, and being resistance to change is not a cost in those periods.
CF,
2 items?
1. Do you mean prosperous for the average person (who was a peasant farmer)...measured in calories/day over maintenance, or leisure time? Or do you mean prosperous for the upper classes? AFAIK, those are unrelated topics. It seems like you mean for the average person..which seems to go pretty hard against the Malthusian Limits hypothesis/data of Gregory Clark.
2. I'm inclined to believe that the causal arrow goes the other way. top down periods cause technological stability...and the consequent massive fall in real standards of living.
I think you are cherry picking your data points.
How about all of Europe from 400AD to 1500AD? Germany from 1500 to 1700. Poland from 1500 to 1945. Russia before Peter Romanov. The various caliphates around 1200AD. The era of Tafia kingdoms in Spain.
All of these examples featured weaker central governments than the modern U.S. or industrial age England. All featured weaker governments than their neighbors and weaker governments than the same area a few centuries before. And all did quite horribly. The main downside of weak central governments are a) constant internal strife b) vulnerability to external invasion c) lack of access to resources needed to grow. In most times in history, these downsides have been absolutely devastating. That's why for most of history "good king" and "strong king" were synonyms and its why nearly every political thinker in the 17th and 18th century believed in strong states - memories of barbarian Europe and the 30 years war were too recent. Only now, the world hegemony of America is taken for granted, and the "Let a thousand nations bloom" libertarians forget what it's like to not have a strong superpower in control.
On a slightly unrelated note - the conventional wisdom is that America and England have always been much more free than was China during the middle ages. But I'm curious if it's actually true. Is there a good source that compares, and can inform us if middle ages China was actually less free than post-world war II America?
Devin,
I wasn't picking weak systems... I was picking phenomenal systems.
I think that the feature that unites all of them is what I said: 1. new. 2. anglo-common-law foundations. Thought I made that clear.
We'd need a metric for freedom. My primary metric is: security in one's own body, against the whims of the nobility.
To add to the confusion, the phrase "middle ages China" is much like the phrase "middle ages Europe".
It covered a similar area, with similar variations in culture, freedom, and wealth.
The Han farmers of the coastal plains were under strict central government, but lots of China, such as Sichuan or Vietnam were basically independent kingdoms that "obeyed the Emperor" in much the same fashion as Norman England "obeyed the pope". Namely, the local ruler sent a fairly token amount of tribute once a year, and made sure not to actually declare independence.
And there were wild tribal areas (Manchuria for example) that were more akin to the Scottish highlands.
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