Why was Monarchy abandoned by everyone who got rich enough?
Short answer: Because monarchy sucked.
The formalist position comes down to: Democracy sucks.
Of course, by "democracy", they mean a very specific, not very democratic approach as handled by most Western countries.
The simple retort is: you don't have (nor do I) a very good picture of how good or bad it was, nor do you have any reasonable measuring stick. Because the crushing poverty of the pre-modern age makes all other measuring sticks almost worthless.
You do have a picture that says that modern monarchies mostly to entirely suck as places one would like to live (I notice none of the formalists have moved to Saudi Arabia)...and that all modern places where you'd like to live have instituted partial democracy.
Very simply: you're not (nor am I) smart enough to identify the inter-relations. Nor which is better. Why do all rich countries go democratic? I don't know. Simple, Moldbuggian, monocausal theories are nearly universally wrong. Something about being rich for multiple generations makes for democracy? Something from Mancur Olson?
If you want a good system, there are lots of thoughts about what one might do. There's lots of evidence from the modern world. And there's lots of theory on the topic from many directions. Go back to something widely found to be crappy back then, and widely found to be crappy now...doesn't seem like a smart direction.
Smart directions:
Switzerland: Tiny, almost entirely autonomous federated states, with very little power to the federal government? Good Model.
British Hong Kong and Singapore: Please don't make any laws, because otherwise we British folks might have to do something, and we'd like to ignore the place.
Post-British Singapore: Technocracy with the major electoral check of moderate democracy on continuing wealth generation for the citizenry, because if they're not happy, they can vote your ass out.
Scandanavia: WE are a cohesive social unit who has some concern for one another. Free the markets to be rich, and then share the wealth. It's not obvious that wealth-sharing is anywhere near as wealth-destructive as is, say, tariffs, regulations around starting a business, etc. Indeed, there's some evidence that for general well-being one should choose redistribution over regulation.
BBdM-ism: Centralized power has only one sane way to behave...and the game theory is painfully clear: Screw the citizenry as much as you possibly can, and redistribute loot to those folks whose support you need to stay in power. Of course, all systems are power coalitions, whether it be a democracy or a theoretical dictatorship like Saudi Arabia...so the notion of coalition-free power is ROFLMAO.
Olson-ism: All static systems necessarily trend towards sucking. Good ~= Wealth; Wealth ~= Growth; Growth ~= Innovation; Innovation ~= only partially stable system. Key to a good life/future is to ensure that systems are not very stable ~= cannot Ossify.
Romerian/LaTNB experimentalism: We so obviously (updated for missing negative) do not know what works...let's have a lot of folks do cities as startups, and see what works, because it's so obvious we don't know much of anything, given such limited knowledge. Exit is important.
Aretae-ism: As it's true in all other economic systems, scarcity is the whole problem. The only problem that needs solved is the scarcity of countries. If it were easy to switch countries...the countries would get a lot better really fast...more or less like swiss cantons did.
But really...Monarchism?
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Having recently finished lecture courses on both Inca and Byzantine history, I'll bring up another point. Monarchy as we understand it (in the sense of political power handed down from father to eldest son in a defined pattern of heredity) was introduced because the previous systems SUCKED.
Until this defined system of inheriting power was established, the power went to whoever could grab it.
When the old emperor dies, there is a struggle for power among the relatives. This leads to civil war, coups, and a logical trap where any new emperor is FORCED to kill off most of his relatives to stop them rising against him. This logically means that any relatives are FORCED to rise against him, in self defense.
Likewise, any successful general is likely to stage a coup and overthrow the emperor. This means that the emperor MUST kill any successful general. This means that any successful general MUST try to stage a coup, in self defense...
The final result is an empire in which civil war breaks out at least once every generation. And one that cannot have any successful generals besides the emperor himself. As soon as such an empire finds
itself fighting a group that does have stable government, they are immediately at a huge disadvantage.
In both cases, the empires in question succeeded to some extent because all their enemies were at least as badly structured as they were. The Persian empire for example was apparently also subject to the same series of coups, palace intrigues and civil wars. Of course both empires proceeded to deliberately
encourage any such uprisings that might occur in their rival.
Hence when a small group of motivated Spanish pirates, or desert arabs, finaly got their acts together, they were able to split these huge empires apart and basically just move in and take over.
The Western Roman empire had pretty much the same problem.
"Why was Monarchy abandoned by everyone who got rich enough?
Short answer: Because monarchy sucked."
I think that short answer is so overwhelmingly insufficient that everything that follows is worthless.
Did Germany, Austria, and Russia really give up monarchy because it sucked?
I seem to remember some wars.
When there is one democracy, there is a tendency for neighboring, non-democracies to declare war on the democracy. After the democracy wins (democracy must triumph at all costs, after all), there are fewer democracies. I'm sure this is entirely coincidental.
I get that you like to try to simplify things, but you oversimplify your analysis so much here that you miss all the interesting historical anomalies that got us to where we are now.
You don't even stop to define your terms. Have the Asian countries really chosen democracy over monarchy? They seem much closer to the latter from my vantage point.
"There's a lot of ruin in a nation" - and that means that government systems and quality of life are loosely coupled at best. People like to live in countries that have built up a large stock of wealth, not ones with ideal governance.
I notice that you leave the US off your list. In fact, the US is the biggest immigrant magnet in the world. Is that because we have the best government?
Before that, in the 1800s, Germany was the place to go if you were a young, educated person. Is that because it had extraordinary governance?
Monarchy has worked REALLY well in Zamunda.
In addition to Foseti's objections: note that when England & France got rid of monarchies, they promptly went back. Monarchies, when not removed by foreigners, were generally deposed by privileged cliques, usually accompanied by an explicit promise that the removal of the monarch wouldn't lead to democracy. There simply hasn't been any systematic abandonment of monarchy prior to the Wilsonian crusade against it.
The real point is the good-government -> wealth -> growth -> innovation -> instability.
That's true as far as it goes. But extended a bit it's
stability -> good-government -> wealth -> growth -> instability -> bad-government -> corruption&destruction
That's a puzzle with no solution. The options are either: try to re-stabilise rapidly when some innovation tears society apart, or try to hold some compromise to hang on to decent-but-not-optimal growth with moderate stability. That second option has actually worked after a fashion for the last century, but there are grounds for fearing it is running out of road on both sides of the compromise.
I think Moldbug's thought is a lot subtler than you're giving credit for. Moldbug at various times propounds ideas similar to all of those you ID as "smart directions", other than Switzerland and Scandinavia as models. (For example, in this piece he mocks Romer as an intellectual craven who is rebranding colonialism.) He even nods at Aretaeism in advocating 10000 patches, although I expect he would regard the idea of "solving" the scarcity of countries as a pipe-dream, akin to solving the Earth's "gravity problem". He would rather solve the problem of designing stable government.
Leonard,
I think Moldbug's good stable government is a far harder problem that inter-government peaceful competition a la Switzerland.
We're not individually, or collectively smart enough to design a good system of government. so...we need to get teh external pressures right.
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