A Revolution in Sovereignty
In his book on sovereignty, Robert Jackson writes (pg. 38):
During the Reformation in many parts of north-western Europe the cosmopolitan Catholic Church was greatly reduced in its authority and power. Its sacerdotium was undermined and even terminated. Its lands were expropriated by kings and distributed to aristocratic supporters. Its clergy were shorn of autonomy and often reduced to being functionaries of a national church…The regnum, however, was expanded substantially in its authority and power: it was becoming a sovereign state. Not only was it now a location of independent government but it was also a home of spiritual life as well. The king replaced the pope as head of the national church, which became the church of crown and realm.
At the end of the 19th century, Nietzsche famously announced that God is dead, which was never a pronouncement of his atheism (though he was one), but more of a statement about the dissapearing authority of the “spiritual.” Because of a moral vacuum left by this waning authority, he prophesized that in the next century men would project onto the state a spiritual life they fooled themselves into thinking science had explained away. The terms would be different, but the emotional resonators would remain the same, only at terrifying scale. And that disgruntled German was right. All too right. Nowadays it is by no means an exaggeration to say we live under the Church of Unlimited Government.
But if the executive branch is the pope, who will be the Henry the VIII of the competitive government movement? It’s not clear from what Jackson writes which came first: did the dissolution of the Church occur because its moral authority vanished? Or was it that the conflict over spiritual authority was merely a subtext to the raw struggle for power and authority? I tend to think the latter, which means the incentives created by new shifts to the balance of power are more important than changes in the society-wide perception of this or that moral authority.
Technology changes faster than culture and alters the logic of violence between the center and the periphery. The rest is post hoc rationalization.
The Future of Money
Here’s a good example of the spirit of a thousand nations. All these folk have ideas about how to improve currencies or banking, ranging from the philanthropic to the privatization of currency.
From Emergence.cc
Behavioral Public Choice Theory
Matt Ridley points to a paper by Slavisa Tasic, “Are Regulators Rational?” The answer is no–they suffer from cognitive biases as well, such as action bias, motivated reasoning, the focusing illusion, the affect heuristic, and illusions of competence. Whither the “nudge” for bureaucrats? From Tasic’s intro:
The aim of this paper, however, is not to assess the validity of behavioral economics itself, but to show that association of behavioral economics with one kind of policy conclusions has been misplaced. Whatever the other merits or limitations of behavioral economics may be, the issue this paper deals with is only its one-sidedness–its nearly exclusive focus on market participants and its neglect of policymakers who are supposed to remedy the failures of the markets. Rarely have behavioral arguments been used to question the knowledge and rationality of policymakers and regulators, and the reason for this neglect is not in the lack of utilizable psychological research. Cognitive psychology in fact offers many findings that are equally applicable to other participants in policymaking process.
A Theory of Moral Change
At the NYT book review, Jonathan Haidt reviews Kwame Anthony Appiah‘s new book on honor and “moral revolutions.” I haven’t read the Appiah book, but I say it’s about time a moral philosopher investigated the question of society-wide moral change. Appiah examines three practices of old–dueling, foot-binding, and slavery–and investigates why they were given up. It appears to be some sort of trickle down status based theory, where the elite come to denigrate a practice and then, by a pattern of imitation, the lower orders change. What I find most striking is that rational argument appears to be useless. What matters most is international comparison to other, higher status cultures.
Take Haidt’s summary of the abolition of foot-binding:
Allied with members of the Chinese literati, they made arguments that appealed to China’s national interest, like the need for strong and healthy women to bear strong and healthy children. Yet these arguments had no effect on the practice until members of the elite class discovered that they and their nation had become objects of ridicule. Foreigners were taking pictures of women’s tiny feet and sending them around the world. Combined with the shame of recent military and commercial defeats at the hands of Japan, Britain and other foreign powers, the thirst to restore national honor created an opening. The anti-foot-binding societies recruited high-ranking families to make a dual pledge: to refrain from binding their daughters’ feet, and from marrying their sons to women with bound feet. With upper-class boys growing up ready to marry a new pool of upper-class, unbound girls, there was now an honorable alternative, and the practice essentially disappeared within a generation.
Totalitarian regimes, particularly the USSR and China, faced similar problems. Whenever the elite of these brutal governments visited Western Europe, Hong Kong, or even the U.S., they were struck by how worse off their societies were. They saw for themselves that non-totalitarian states were patently wealthier and happier. Such international comparisons would drive dissent at the highest levels and ultimately incite change from the top down.
All of this speaks to the need for maintaining (or increasing!) inter-governmental competition. Belabored moral arguments about the good tend to fall on deaf ears. As Richard Posner has argued, moral philosophers are really poets and novelists manque. Instead, the best hope for moral progress is to instantiate first, flourish second, and then hope others imitate later. Telling someone what they’re doing is morally wrong–stop that, you savage!!–lowers their status. It’s unsurprising that they retrench on the defensive. But raise your own status by any objective measure and status-seeking behavior might lead to socially desirable results. Criticize by creating Michelangelo said. So for those who think they have the moral high ground, it sounds like a good reason for starting a new country.
“The future isn’t going to feel futuristic.”
Douglas Coupland on the next 10 years:
North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989
Quebec will decide to quietly and quite pleasantly leave Canada. California contemplates splitting into two states, fiscal and non-fiscal. Cuba becomes a Club Med with weapons. The Hate States will form a coalition.
Coupland’s Microserfs is one of the funniest novels about start-ups. (Maybe the only one, although JPod had its moments.)
Don’t Be Evil: Google Sees Good In Jurisdictional Arbitrage
From Bloomberg:
Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.
Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.
Given Google’s tendency to acquiesce in rituals of liberal appeasement, I expect they’ll offer some bagatelle of social justice as atonement for violating intuitions about fairness.
Hotel Atlantis
General Motors hosted the ur-Epcot Center ride at the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. The exhibit was called Futurama and it foretold moon bases, computer controlled cars and underwater hotels in the “near future.” The music, the narrator’s disembodied, yet joyful voice…it has a three in the morning bad TV feel about it. I find it disturbing.
I suppose by aligning itself with Tommorowland, GM was hoping to signal how technologically minded they were. Looking over forty years back, I relish the contrast of how utterly sclerotic GM is now with this futurism of the 1960s. They had an idea for a seastead among other things, but instead they decided to make less efficient and more expensive cars. “Technology can point the way to a future of limitless promise, but man must chart his own course, a course that frees the mind and the spirit.” Too bad GM didn’t listen to that guy.
What Technology Wants
I’ve been reading my way through Kevin Kelly’s new book. I’m about halfway through. Kelly continues the trend started by Richard Dawkins by postulating desires for non-sentient entities. For Dawkins it was the selfish gene; for Kelly it’s something he calls “the technium,” a word he’s coined to describe the proliferating world of technology around us. That parallel is deliberate as the main contention of the book is that just as we see a drift towards rising complexity in biological systems, we can detect the same trend in technology. Perhaps they’re even directly related.
I suspect Kelly’s book might draw some criticisms from the likes of Dawkins, however, because he asserts evolution proceeds by non-random mutation in an (almost?) purposeful direction. What others have called intelligent design, Kelly calls “the exotropy of self-organization” or the upshot of “self-generated positive contraints” in complex adaptive systems.
All of this is well and good, and contrarian, but I’m concerned about Kelly’s optimistic fatalism. The word he invokes too frequently is “inevitable.” He’s a technological and biological determinist who writes as though innovation will proceed apace irrespective of deliberate human action or policy. Discussing Moore’s Law and the “inevitable” trends of progress, Kelly writes (p. 172):
More clever folk might reason that since the economic regime as a whole determines the doubling time of Moore’s Law, you could keep decreasing the quality of the economy until it stopped. Perhaps through armed revolution you could install an authorititive command-style policy (like an old state communism) whose lackadaisical economic growth would kill the infrastructure for exponential increases in computing power. I find that possibility intriguing, but I have my doubts. If in a counterfactual history, communism had won the cold war and microelectronics had been invented in a global Soviet-style society, my guess is that even that alternative policy apparatus could not stifle Moore’s Law. Progress might roll out slower at a lower slope, maybe with a doubling time of five years, but I don’t doubt that Stalinist scientists would tap into the law of the microcosm and soon marvel at the same technical wonder we do: chips improving exponentially as constant linear effort is applied.
Okay, this is just nuts. And much more alarmingly, it’s dangerous. With its history of the world and the rise of progress, the first third of the book reminds me of Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist and Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz’s From Poverty to Prosperity. Kelly would do well to pay attention to some of the lessons contained in those tomes, especially the Kling book, as it’s a good entry point into understanding the engines of progress. Economic growth is not inevitable, and contrary to Kelly, policy matters. I don’t care how many comrades worked on the Soviet duel core processor in 1982. It’s not gonna happen. In fact, I highly recommed The Innovation Decision in Soviet Industry by Joseph Berliner, which contains a fascinating analysis of the obstacles that thwarted innovation in the Soviet economy.
A final point–no where does Kelly discuss Cardwell’s Law, which holds that no country remains the leader in technological progress forever. David Hume, D.S.L. Cardwell, Joel Mokyr, and Paul Romer, among others, have all discussed this historical pattern. And all have suggested that the rate of innovation correlates with the number of countries in the world. The idea is that borders protect innovators from being thwarted by vested interests. If policy doesn’t matter, as Kelly claims, then why did China lose its technololgical edge in the 15th century? Or why did Britian’s dynamism flag late in the 19th? The extraordinary technological progress of the last 100 years has been a marvel, and there is a story to tell about what made it possible. But whatever that story is, it’s not one of fate and inevitablity. If only it were that easy.
The Seasteaders Respond To Slate
From the blog:
The idea that these communities will be “law-free” gets our goals exactly backwards. Any community larger than a single hermit needs rules to govern the interaction of it’s residents, and seasteads are no different. We are so pro-law, in fact, that our core mission is to increase the diversity and quality of legal systems! What we are against is the idea that today’s laws represent the ultimate pinnacle of political perfection and the global political monoculture where new institutions are rarely tried. We instead favor experimentation with a diversity of societies to find better ways of living together.
You can read Slate’s Gossip Girl rant against seasteads and pajamas here.
Quebecois Pitch Sovereignty to U.S. Cognitive Elite
The Montreal Gazette says the small D.C. audience was skeptical:
In a prepared speech to an audience of a few dozen people from a pair of influential U.S. public-policy think-tanks, [Bloc Quebecois leader] Duceppe predicted the defeat of the pro-Canada government of Liberal Premier Jean Charest, opening the door for a Pauline Marois-led Parti Quebecois regime with a “core objective” of separating from Canada.
“One thing is certain: Our relationship with the U.S. would be the focal point of a sovereign Quebec’s foreign policy,” Duceppe said at the event co-hosted by the Canadian Institute of the U.S.-government-funded Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Hudson Institute.
Duceppe’s founding experience affecting his views on social justice occurred at the age of 12. He tells a story of an anglophone Grade 6 teacher slapping him after he complained about preferential treatment being given to anglophone students.[2] Duceppe said that he slapped the teacher back. Duceppe became a sovereigntist at the age of 20…
Let A Thousand Nations Bloom 