We know several things:
- We're wrong a lot...indeed, when doing anything new, we should expect single-digit chances of being right.
- Feedback systems win: What system is in place to fix the broken parts of the existing system...so that when it works wrong (as it necessarily will), it stabilizes.
- He who has the scarce resource/skill makes the rules. For much of history, the scarce resource was the effective leverage of violence via unified fighting tactics in a cohesive unit. For a while in the 1500-1700s, this was less true.
- Strong central governments are massively incented to behave badly, as per Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's amazing game theory work. Indeed, one can predict very well the value to the people of the government by asking what proportion of the actual population is required in order to allow the government to stay in power: more is strictly better.
Further support from the thesis comes from the suggestion that the reason that China lost modern history is because of over-centralization. Too uniform of a government, with not enough variation, experimentation, and ability to exit caused a stagnation that Mancur Olson predicts from ANY centrally controlled system.
Indeed, even Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy suggests that the only thing that can possibly keep a large system from decay is a threat of failure.
You want a good government? The necessary and sufficient condition is: easy exit for citizens to a neighboring unit, thus ensuring competition for citizens, and governments which serve the citizenry, rather than the opposite. This mostly requires smallness in order to guarantee easy exit. Don't got it? Bend over, this is gonna hurt. Roughly...all other models are guaranteed to fail.
Some further evidence in this direction just surfaced at Dan Mitchell's blog. Go check it out.
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You want good government? Get good citizens.
You want a good government? The necessary and sufficient condition is: easy exit for citizens to a neighboring unit, thus ensuring competition for citizens, and governments which serve the citizenry, rather than the opposite.
The problem here is good government has come to be defined as the government that gives the most stuff away. Thus we have a balance of power between resources and looters.
RSF,
Except...those places with more competitive governance structures (those places under more competition) give less stuff away. See: Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland. All of those are very low welfare systems.
If the people you want to loot can move out of your country easily ...you don't do a lot of looting, as the historical record indicates.
The competition between governments theory also neatly gives us the "resource curse". Add a lake of oil or some other cheaply extracted mineral and the national government is no longer in competition with other governments for skills or capital. Result: Bad government.
HOWEVER, the Europe was divided, China was united theme, which everyone has been saying for decades now, leaves out a couple of data points.
India, South-East Asia and the Middle East.
All three areas were, in the year 1000AD.
1. Divided into competing states at least as much as Europe.
2. Had better access to the stream of new technology coming out of China.
3. Had bigger and better trading networks and more modern economic systems.
Now this is history, so it is perfectly reasonable to posit up to 4 (or more!) completely different reasons as to why of the 5 regions, only Europe hit the jackpot. But you can't just ignore the regions that don't fit your one theory.
Aretae, just my observation, but small, competitive governments are out of style today. A majority of people want a big, centralized behemoth.
RSF,
Styles come and styles go. But water is still what's wet, and oil don't cut it for bathing.
Same with small competitive governments. They are good governments...and the rest are guaranteed to be bad.
Shame that it's out of style.
RSF,
When measuring where people move... people appear to try to move whereever they have the greatest chance to make themselves rich.
It's only when theres bogus notions of "belonging" to a nation that folks get all into "bigness".
When measuring where people move... people appear to try to move whereever they have the greatest chance to make themselves rich.
One problem is that people who move to get richer are often the same people who want a big, central government.
What percent of immigrants will vote for a Libertarian candidate?
From the original post: "For much of history, the scarce resource was the effective leverage of violence via unified fighting tactics in a cohesive unit. For a while in the 1500-1700s, this was less true."
This makes it sound as though 1500-1800 was an interlude after which things have tended to return to the old pre-1500 normal. However, I think the new normal is significantly different. Land combat in the post-1800 world continues to richly reward your scarce resource of good units and tactics. But think of a representative incident when forces from a decentralized unspecialized barbarian society overran a civilization. I bet that incident precedes 1500. Civilizations have not developed a monopoly in good units and tactics, so something else is going on. It seems to me that post-gunpowder and post-Industrial-Revolution, land warfare also rewards at least as richly the scarce resources of technical sophistication, technical capital (physical capital and especially human capital), specialization of labor, and decentralization of authority-with-responsibility even when hierarchical command isn't prevented by distance or other factor. (Famously this decentralization is a benefit of free markets with secure property rights and written law, but that's not the only way it comes up: see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics .)
Incidentally, these newly important factors in land warfare seem to have been comparably important in naval warfare long before 1500: note various examples of rich small sovereign entities (city states and such) punching well above their weight at sea while having rather less success fighting big nations or empires on land, and note the scarcity of examples of barbarian naval units trouncing more civilized forces at sea.
RSF,
If the rich people can easily move, it simply doesn't matter what folks will vote for. The only thing required to undermine the socialist welfare state is a low cost of leaving.
You're talking about the problem of going somewhere and staying. I'm talking about moving to the next county over where the tax rates are half what they are nearby.
If folks vote via representatives, they get higher taxes. This isn't apparently true if folks are voting directly. If folks vote with their feet, they get lower taxes. All the places where people vote with their feet to go TO are low tax-places. And that's because they know they have to compete.
William,
Yes, I was a little confused by the idea that after 1800 the power returned to the organised violence.
It seems to me that any movement of power away from the military has clearly continued.
William, Dr. Pat,
I admit less military history than most of my readers. My understanding was that for some period of time...personal weaponry in the form of muskets/rifles made idnependent individuals nearly the equivalent of soldiers. You couldn't buy an advantage.
Since then...machine guns, tanks, etc., have made the average armed individual less potent against a military.
I could agree with your take if you changed it to "narrowed the gap"
The advantage in modern (gunpowder) arms is not their lethality, at least not until recently. It's in the ease of training. Arrows shoot people dead better than any gun before percussion cap rifles. Better rates of fire, etc.
However, you can train a musketeer or rifleman in weeks or months. Archers took years. Likewise with other martial skills. And further, each of those riflemen will be more or less equally effective.
So, random citizens do not need the years of training and practice, they do not need complicated and expensive armor, don't need horses. (This is why knights required serfs to exist.) Mr. Random Citizen needs a relatively inexpensive firearm and regular weekend practice and he is more or less equal to an individual soldier.
However, there are two things that he will never equal, and these have always been outside the reach of the citizen: numbers, and heavy weaponry.
Only kings had cannon. They could knock down the castles of their nobles. And they could bribe the merchant class with their own taxes, and they served in the new model armies with guns. The aristos were squeezed, to be sure. But no single person - and soon, no group of people or even half a country - could resist the military power represented by those two factors.
Artillery and numbers. The second amendment doesn't seem to allow me to own my own cannon, and my militia will never be as large or well equipped as the Federal Army.
Dr. Pat, I think there was a real movement of cost-effectiveness away from pro military for some centuries, but I don't think it has continued; I think it was reversed sometime in the twentieth century.
I think continuously through recorded history a specialized well-trained military unit has enjoyed a considerable advantage (other things being equal) over a less-specialized force. The period from 1500 to the early 1800s was no exception in this, but differed for roughly the reason perfidy describes: the battlefield effectiveness of infantry with relatively cheap equipment (cheap compared to e.g. medieval cavalry or modern mechanized units). In that time the advantage of specialized elite units didn't go away, but that advantage was rivalled by the advantage of superior numbers. That is, as effective equipment becomes cheaper, a substantially larger less-trained force with equal-quality equipment becomes a cost-effective alternative to a smaller elite force.
Then from the mid 1800s the battlefield effectiveness of infantry with cheap equipment continued until sometime in the twentieth century, while the industrial revolution made it increasingly practical to support a large fraction of the military-age male population in the field.
So I think your 'movement of [battlefield] power away from the [pro] military' trend was real, not because pro military units lost their absolute effectiveness, but because a cheapness of equipment trend made them lose their cost-effectiveness. I also think the trend was reversed around the middle of the twentieth century, because of a reversal of the cheapness of equipment trend: modern military vehicles are expensive and very deadly, military jet aircraft especially are very expensive and deadly, and while there are some effective ways for infantry-heavy forces to fight back, they tend to involve missiles that are not particularly cheap. And mass armies require supply with vehicles, and air power and long range artillery have gotten increasingly good at seeing things and at killing anything that can be seen, definitely including vehicles. If I had to date the reversal more precisely I'd guess 1960. Before that, the Korean War and early Arab-Israeli wars seem consistent with it potentially being cost-effective for a cheaply-equipped force to hide, dig in, and shoot back. From the wars since then, I judge that a cheaply-equipped force can expect to suffer a ridiculous attrition rate for vehicles moving anywhere near the front, which alone is probably a war-losing problem if the theatre is large enough that strategic movement is possible.
That said, in one way cheaply equipped and irregular forces might still be roughly as effective today as they were 100 or 200 years ago: keeping a government from making enough money from the natives in an area to pay for the project of conquest and occupation. (This is coupled with another phenomenon, that since the Industrial Revolution backward areas have been so much less prosperous than advanced areas that even without armed resistance it can be hard to make conquest cost-effective.) But if anyone with a good pro military decided not to control and tax the natives of a region, but to 'make a desert and call it peace', I don't think there's any cheaply equipped force that could do much to interfere. And the forces that are not 'cheaply equipped' in this context make a rather short list, and all of them are national militaries. Until someone comes up with new ways of fighting (e.g., some implication of cheap drone tech that isn't obvious at the moment) or GDP per head explodes to a level where ordinary military vehicles seem cheap, the days of poorly equipped forces significantly interfering with crude pro military control of a sizable region (as in e.g. American Revolution, Napoleon's peninsular campaign, or Chinese warlords vs. Japanese occupiers) seem to be over.
Aretae wrote: moving to the next county over where the tax rates are half what they are nearby.
Sort of works if the cost of moving is low. Otherwise you are selecting for occupations that can move easily, while heavy industry, farming, etc. either wither or become concentrated in areas where population movement is limited: if you want big castings, you need to go to Korea or Japan.
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