Later...the leaders were able to amass enough wealth to purchase the loyalty of guards, and with enough people purchased, they were able to unilaterally screw everyone else. This is the natural state of leader-systems.
Later, there were some number of cases where the leaders were (a) thrown off, (b) released some amount of control, of (c) partially constrained.
The best of times where a leader was thrown off, or constrained were: Athens, Roman Republic, Venice, Portugal 1400s, Netherlands 1500s, England 1600s, America 1700s. These times are collectively known as civilization.
However, in all the cases, the throwing off of the control of a leader eventually collapsed back into a state as bad as when there was a leader before. USUALLY, the throwing off didn't result in as crappy of a situation as the super-bad leader situations (North Korea), but it sucked pretty much.
Also...not all throwing off of leaders resulted in civilization. French Revolution. Russian Revolution. Vietnam. Etc. Any case where the mob took MORE control than the leader had seems to have turned out badly.
I've advocated the position before that the CORE of what is good in all of history was a weakening of the central power, and the ability for new, better institutions to evolve. AND that the eventual decline was when central power became a lever that could be used by others.
I think myself and MOST of the formalists would agree that most new institutions fail... and so, I think I have a proposition that is at least interesting to the formalists.
What historically observed long-lasting system of government has the correct balance of MOST stable, and MOST beneficial to the citizens? No fair choosing something that only lasted 70 years, like the pre-civil war US federalism.
Hmm...how about the swiss system. Stable, except for Napoleon since 1291. Massive devolution of power to effectively the COUNTY (Canton) level (1/2 million people each). Substantial differences between cantons (Hell, neighboring counties speak different languages). Moderate, non-war competition between cantons. Near zero federal power. Direct democracy inside the cantons.
IF we were going to try to design a system that was both stable, and good for the citizenry, I'd suggest that something resembling the Swiss system is the best thing we have in the world today. There is some question of whether it's TOO conservative...but regardless, it's awful good.
Posts
9 comments:
A quick perusal of la Wik shows a claim of 1291 is a bit much. Discounting the Switzer Republic, still it seems to me that the 1848 Constitution marks enough of a break. Of course that still makes the Swiss govt much older than ours -- USG being in its postmodern New Deal regime (1933-).
Certainly I prefer the Swiss system's current results to those in America. However, it seems to me to be following the same path of increasing and unstoppable centralization of power as any other democracy. It just happens to have been retarded in that respect, because
(a) it was a backwater,
(b) with a small population (thus direct democracy works),
(c) which was rarely invaded
(d) was too small and surrounded by too powerful states to gain from invading (contrast to USG)
(e) and seems to have avoided any nasty civil wars, for no obvious reason I can see.
Not all of those can be replicated just anywhere. And in any case, the democratic basis of decline is certainly there; and we know that large committees tend to be dysfunctional especially over time.
For example, Switzerland, like other democracies, is in demographic decline and has been importing a new people -- but just much slower than most other places. So reaction there is more effective. Still, we can hardly expect that the Swiss will hold the line in the long run. Or at least, I see no reason to believe that.
I think to make an argument to a formalist, you need to convince us of some structural feature that prevents the democracy in Switzerland or a hypothetical new state modeled on it from acting like what historically seems to happen in democracies. I.e., I will certainly admit that the Swiss seem to be doing very well in terms of, say, their national debt. But so did USG in 1960. What's to stop the people from voting for debt to pay for goodies?
By contrast, I can tell you why neocameralism should work: the design is effective, responsible, coherent, secure, and stable.
(1) it is effective because it uses the fuhrerprinzip, not committees, in the executive apparatus of the state. It is responsible for the same reason: one man, the CEO, ultimately is responsible for any failures of state.
(2) it is coherent, because the motivation of the owners -- greed -- is maintained via the market in shares. Any owner who comes to value things other than money as the highest goal will have the incentive to sell to someone who shares the value system of the vast majority of owners.
(3) it is secure via technological means, not ideological means. Therefore it has a drastically reduced need to propagandize the citizen.
(4) it is stable because it is secure and coherent.
Leonard,
1. Most new systems seem justified logically to at least some supporters. Most new systems fail anyway. FAR better than a new system is an old system that is known to work.
2. Nasty civil wars occur because one group uses government to screw other groups. No government power ~= no government screwing ~= no civl war.
3. It was rarely invaded because it's awful dangerous to invade a country where every citizen is armed + trained to defend...+mountains.
4. Small population works for DD...but the DD in switzerland is at the COUNTY level. US Counties could handle DD as well.
5. Committees are disfunctional: they don't do MUCH. Modern org-research says, though, that at nearly every level they've been tried in the modern business environment, committees perform on average better than leader-led teams.
6. Demographic decline is a result of wealth. Good luck fixing that. Wealth = ability to pay for activities != wiping asses ~= desire for fewer kids.
7. Slower decline is a massive improvement over what we've got.
8. Armed citizenry solves the disorder issues of the formalist, without the jack-boot concerns of the libertarians.
9. The issue is MIS-USE of government power. If there's no power to use (Switzerland), and peacefulness (Switzerland), then there's no NEED for the formalist centralization.
10. I read history VERY different from Moldbug. The best periods in history BY FAR have been the times when the government's powers were in actuality limited. Dutch after they kicked the spanish king out. England, after Cromwell killed the king, and then retired while forcing limitations on future kings. America, when there wasn't a government. Athens, when Pericles was there to dampen the enthusiasm of the constitution-less democracy. Roman Republic pre-empire. Etc. If the best times in history were ALL limited governments, even proposing a not-so-limited government seems crazy.
Re:1&10) Yes, of course all systems seem justified in at least some sense to somebody. But then your conservatism is a prescription for no fundamental change. Without fundamental change, leftism always wins. This is because leftism is about destruction of existing order, and destruction can always be accomplished incrementally. Whereas, construction often cannot. Thus we see the historical pattern: order is created by a strongman, king, whathaveyou. Subsequently the regime degenerates: the son is not the man his father was. His son prefers to be a gardener, and his son is demented. Then we have a liberation event, where the people throw off the obviously broken parts of the regime. This creates the golden age: there is still social order (and the good things that flow from it), which the original regime helped to create. But there is not the deadweight of rotten government.
Then, in time the democratic forces gradually do what democrats do, which is destroy the social order in the name of equality.
But there I go again, with another attempt at logical analysis. Obviously, if you manage to convince yourself that all rational analysis is suspect and therefore only conservatism is prudent, then really no argument I can make would convince you otherwise.
If it makes you feel better, I would happily replace USG existing constitution (note small c) with Switzerlands. This is a tried and IMO safe experiment. Whereas, I am not sure I would push a red button that reset USG to neocameralism. The stakes are very high. I would happily do that, though, for pretty much any other government in the world. Iceland -- it's close enough I could move there and still get back to see family relatively easily.
Re:2) Agreed, but Switzerland's government was apparently powerful enough to actually trigger a civil war, the Sonderbundskrieg. That they resolved it after several battles, with only 100 dead (out of nearly 200000 combatants), is what seems like luck to me. Basically it appears that the leftist centralizers greatly overplayed their hand. But in any case, the results are worth considering: "Aftermath: The Swiss Federal Constitution of 1848. In 1848, a new Swiss Federal Constitution ended the almost-complete independence of the cantons and transformed Switzerland into a federal state. The Jesuits were banished from Switzerland." That is, this civil war transformed Switzerland from something resembling the Articles of Confederation to something like the Federal USA of 1789. This supports my general point that Switzerland is headed where democracy always heads -- it has just gone that way slower than other nations.
Re:3) even if you are right, the point is that not every nation can be a rugged mountainous one. In particular, the USA cannot be that.
Re:4) granted. However, there would then be some 3000 counties represented in the Senate; and I think that would change the dynamic from what prevails in Switzerland (26 cantons). 26 representative are within the magic "tribe size" computational limit that humans are adapted to. 3000 aren't.
Re:5) what are your references for this? (I note with interest that "nearly".)
Re:6) Wealth is among many factors.
Re:7) Agreed, although I would not say "massive".
Re:8) I support the armed citizenry. In fact I believe that the neocameral state will strongly encourage it. Why should any state expend money on police when men should defend themselves? It should not.
Re:9) Oh there is power in Switzerland's government -- more every day, I think. Again, they seem to be about 50-60 years behind where we are, so we see a sort of incredibly small government (as USG was in 1935, say). But the trend to centralization is clear enough.
Leonard,
A. I think you undervalue the core insight from Hayek. We're wrong A LOT. Basically, capitalism works by privatizing losses, and public-izing gains. Most entrepreneurs think they have a great idea, try it, and fail badly. Occasionally (my model says it's effectively luck), one of those guys hits a correct idea, and succeeds, becoming wildly wealthy himself, and putting 50-100x that amount of real wealth back into the economy. Most new stuff fails. Even most new stuff that seems like a good idea fails. It's a deep and important position...and should NEVER be underestimated. I think it's essential to try new stuff. I think it's insane to try new stuff on a coercive basis, rather than on a seasteading/charter cities basis. I'd love to see a formalist charter city. I'd love to see a neo-anarchist somali-law based charter city. And I'd love to see a bunch of other systems tried. But I think anyone who says they KNOW that either one will work well is bat-shit insane. I could get behind someone who says: use the Singapore/Hong-Kong/Dubai principles of largely inactive government, and English common law, and you have a >80% chance of success. We've seen it done 3 times at a city-state level, and it worked stunningly well all 3 times. Any example with fewer tries has a lower chance of success. Rule zero: Most new things fail, plan around it. And for God's sake, don't assume yours won't.
B. I went through most of a masters level program in Org Behavior. It's really amazing compared to what I thought before the extent to which leaders are a cost to organizations, rather than a benefit. Harvard researcher talking to a pile of CEO's basically concludes: Look, working groups >> led groups at EVERY level, but CEO's won't try it because they like their power. I'm more or less onboard with the idea. Researcher: Warner Burke. Book: Org Change...one of the best resources on the topic, if a bit expensive.
C. Aretae's Rule 2: Wealth is THE social metric. More or less everything else follows from wealth, both individual and social. The evidence is awful strong.
D. You keep saying Switzerland doesn't have the same level of political power that the US has now, or even in '35. I'm suspicious of whether the Swiss federation has the same power that Lincoln had in 1860...and inclined to believe they don't have what Lincoln had in 1865.
E. re: 3000 counties. Yes. I agree. It's part of why I suggest that governance at a large scale is fundamentally unworkable. The value to capturing the government becomes TOO large, and thus unavoidable.. Hence my repeated insistence that the only thing that can make a government behave is competition with other governments, which requires smaller units. Test to confirm, of course.
F. States should defend citizens because citizens that defend themselves are easier to control. IF you want control over citizens, and I think ALL rulers want control over citizens, then the ruler prefers a police, because it increases control. Self-defense is a fundamentally independent position...and decreases control. Even the formalist moneymakers probably prefer more control to less control...but I don't know that the cost of the police that generate the control is low enough to make it cost effective. My expectation is that it is.
G. Thanks for engaging here, thoughtfully.
Also note that for a polity to be stable, it has to be able to stave predatory neighbours.
Switzerland is simply not worth invading, has good natural defenses, so there is no real need to get large scale political unity to fund an army.
Most large polities were formed by agressive annexation, or internal defensive alliances. Switzerland doesn't need any of those. Just to play nice with their immediate neighbors.
A. I am not claiming I know anything with absolute certainty. Only that I have reason to believe that neocameralism will work, and also I have reason to believe that democracy cannot work in the long run.
That said, you simply cannot just try out sovereign forms without coercion. Not even the charter cities you seem to think are OK -- they are coercive.
B. Org Change is partly online, but I cannot find anything in it speaking to the idea that leadership is actively bad for an organization. Indeed, were anything other than a single CEO a superior method for running companies, you might think that some corp somewhere would try it. But I am not aware of any examples.
So I have your claim that "working groups >> led groups at EVERY level", versus what I see every actual corp I know of doing. Sorry, I am going to stick with revealed preference on this one.
C. You sound very Marxist here. I agree that wealth is important and much flows from it, but I do not agree that it is the only thing.
In any case, even focusing only on wealth I think we might agree that there are two wealth effects that pull in opposite directions for fertility. Really poor people with low tech farming can breed new farmhands, so they have incentive to. Above that level somewhere, women still have to work, and children are not productive. So fertility is low. At very wealthy levels, women no longer have to work, and I think we should expect the pure consumption value of having kids to increase fertility over the mid-wealth level.
D. Look again at that list of Swiss federal law I just linked. The government there evidently has the power to pass laws like an "Ordinance on Beverage Containers" or the "Anti-Money Laundering Act, AMLA".
E. Well, I think I just scored a point? Unless you are saying you think the USA should be divided into 30 countries so as to keep the county-count in each one to 100.
Leonard,
A. My core epistemological claim is this: If it ain't a pure physical engineering problem in known space...strong reason to believe that something new and untried will work gives somewhere between 5 and 10% chance of success. See, for instance, startups. If you're just saying that the Moldbuggian option has as high of a probability of working as anything new (5-10%)...I'm actually mostly ok with that. It's just the nuts who think that probability of success is near 90% that give me issues.
B. Charter cities done well are like singapore/hong kong/dubai/new indian city/etc. Build a town on a barren rock...invite anyone who wants to come...with rules up front. Damn close to voluntary.
More to come.
use the Singapore/Hong-Kong/Dubai principles of largely inactive government, and English common law, and you have a >80% chance of success. We've seen it done 3 times at a city-state level, and it worked stunningly well all 3 times.
To what extent was London prior to 1800, Sydney prior to 1830, Melbourne prior to 1850 or Salt-Lake City prior to I-don't-know, in effect City-states (because their level of transport infrastructure and/or population/political domination of the hinterland meant that 90%+ of everything important to the city happened in the city)?
Post a Comment