Let A Thousand Nations Bloom

Interested in how to Let A Thousand Nations Bloom?  Come to the Second Annual Seasteading Conference in San Francisco, CA, Sep. 28th – 30th!

Speakers of particular interest to our readers include:

• Peter Thiel: Back To The Future
• Paul Romer: Charter Cities
• Michael Strong: Free Zones (our most popular post so far on ATN has been his Free Zones as an additional option for the Cambrian Explosion in Government)
• David Friedman: Legal Systems Very Different From Ours
• Erwin Strauss, author of How To Start Your Own Country
• A roundtable between Paul Romer, Michael Strong, and I on the relative merits and differences between Seasteading, Charter Cities, and Free Zones for increasing competition in government.

See the conference webpage for more speakers and information.

If you’re interested in immediate action as well as talk about the future, consider attending our first ever Ephemerisle festival of politics, community, and art.  Ephemerisle will be held Octover 2-4, 2009, on the water in the Sacramento River Delta region east of the SF Bay Area.  TSI will provide a central platform, and residents will bring boats, inflatable islands, and crazy home-built structures.

Ephemerisle is one of the parallel legs in our seasteading strategy – letting one Temporary Autonomous Zone bloom in a river is a step on the way towards more permanence and autonomy.

Please help spread the word for these awesome events by linking to this post on your blogs, forums, facebooks, twitters, etc.  And don’t hesitate to personally invite anyone you think would enjoy and add to the experience!

The discussion riffing off Charter Cities has been fairly interesting – for the latest see Will Willkinson’s Arnold Kling on Freedom as Exit, especially the comments.  On the one hand I’ve found it a bit frustrating because Wilkinson seems to be operating from such different assumptions, but OTOH, elucidating differences in assumptions is often a productive and stimulating exercise.

I don’t want to clutter up the blog with constant back-and-forth posting, which is why I’ve been using comments instead, but in the comments on my last post Wilkinson obligingly gave me a straight line that I simply can’t resist, because it relates to the very core of our political philosophy.  In much of the other discussion in this engagement (“How free are liberal democracies compared to past societies?” “In what context do voice and exit work best?”), the discussion comes down to definitions and knowledge of history and I don’t have high confidence in my positions.  But here is where I feel sure that I have hold of a piece of important truth that is missing from most people’s political worldview, including Will’s.  He writes:

So far, in the natural experiments that have been run, democracy works. So I’m not sure why you insist on predicting that successful seasteads will not be democracies of some form. I predict that if there are successful seasteads, they will be democracies of some form on the basis of democracy’s actual winning record. The basis of your prediction, if you’re making one, is not so clear to me.

Imagine it is 1850.  Will predicts that successful personal transportation systems will involve horses of some kind on the basis of horse’s actual winning record.  He is very wrong, and he could have known that he would be.  You can think of many more examples in this vein, I am sure.

Technology advances almost inexorably.  If no planet-wide disaster happens, technology will continue to advance.  No one expects the best possible computer, best possible car, or best possible psychedelic drug to remain the same forever – for the current best technology to stay the best.

Now, it may be that the best accessible computer, car, or psychedelic drug remains the same or even goes backwards, because society sometimes limits our ability to use the best possible version of a given technology.  But it is very rare for the state of the art to decline – for best practices to be lost.  And it is also very rare for the state of the art in an active technological field (one being used to meet people’s needs) to not advance.

With economics, we can add more nuance.  The rate of progress of a technology is intimately related to the degree to which the technology is developed and sold in a competitive market.  The greater the barriers to competition and profit – whether regulation, barriers to entry, overly restrictive IP laws that  prevent building new discoveries on old, whatever – the slower a technology advances.

A prediction that the best possible technology in the future will be the same as the present is almost guaranteed to be wrong.  If there is a competitive market for the technology, we can remove the “almost”.  Thus it only remains to point out that rules, governance, political systems, decision-making mechanisms, social arrangements, whatever you want to call them, are technologies.  Thus, they can be improved, and will improve, with time.

Unfortunately, the market for them is not very competitive, and so our knowledge of the best possible forms of political organization advance in quality quite slowly.  But to say that democracy will always be the dominant form of social organization merely because it is the current dominant form is a claim of immense technological pessimism.  It is a claim that this particular technology is so unique that unlike almost every other technology, a market for it will never produce any new discoveries, new products, inventive new arrangements that we would never have thought of in advance.  For it to be true, not only must, say, my dad’s favored new governance technology fail, but so must every other idea of every other political theorist!

This is an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence.  I grant that the technology of political organization has numerous peculiar qualities which render its progress extremely bumpy.  And democracy is a very broad category.  Predicting that democracy will always be the best form of social organization is less like predicting that horses will always be the best form of transportation and more like predicting that combustion will always be the best way to get energy.  But while we still haven’t moved past combustion to fusion, fission, or photovoltaics, we inevitably will.  Technologies improve – that is their nature.  And the idea that our young race on our single planet has come close to exhausting the possibilities for technological development in any area, including governance, seems extremely far-fetched.

As Robin Hanson recently wrote:

a vast space of possible forms of government remains unexplored, and it is high time we explored it. Yes, democracy beats a dictatorship, but there might be better systems.

I only disagree with the “might”.  If one views my claim narrowly: “I know some better form of government than democracy, and if we build seasteads, we will have it!”, then of course it is absurd.  The winning record of democracy favors it over any single challenger.

But the point of Letting A Thousand Nations Bloom is to make the much broader claim: “Markets improve technologies.  Governance is a technological field.  Democracy is the current best technology.  Markets can improve it.  If we have a more competitive market for government, then we will get better technologies.  The market will produce solutions that we can’t even imagine now.  When given a chance, it almost always does.”  Against all possible challengers, democracy is an overwhelming underdog.

Will Wilkinson doesn’t hate the (democratic) state.  Which is great!  Rothbard’s “Do You Hate the State?” convinced me of the opposite of it’s point, and I firmly believe that hating the state is bad for your blood pressure and productivity.  But Will Wilkinson seems to find it far more tolerable than I do, and that is unfortunate (for me, at least), because it means he is less motivated towards change.

In a comment on Will Chamberlain’s post, Wilkinson writes:

I’m a liberal meliorist who doesn’t think nation-states are likely to go anywhere and who wants them to be governed in a way that does the best possible for freedom and prosperity. I understand the utopian aspirations that animate this blog, and I wholeheartedly support experiments in living and jurisdictional competition. But it is precisely the empirical spirit some of you profess to uphold (when in an evangelizing mode — some of the thousand blooming nations will be democratic!) that leads me to stand by the well-tested success of liberal democracy. If there is some non-state, or non-democratic mode of governance demonstrated to do better, I’ll happily acknowledge it. But, as one might say when throwing down, put up or shut up.

Yes, liberal democracy is well-tested – it is by far the best system at achieving a 6 out of 10 on my personal 1-10 scale of economic and social freedoms.  Tons of liberal democracies achieve that coveted 60% D- grade, which puts them at the top of their class of morons and retards.  Perhaps Will finds this world of D-minuses satisfactory – I do not.

I’m glad that he supports the experiments, and I fully agree that some (perhaps most!) of the thousand blooming nations will be democratic.  I think our differences lie in whether we consider the current “success” of liberal democracy to have achieved a reasonable standard of freedom, or a miserable but tolerable one.  Relatedly, whether we think it achieves close to the best possible governance, and thus how easy and how important we think it is to do better.

For example, I believe in Mencius’ claim that over the last hundred years, a vastly decreased quality in governance has been masked by a vastly increased level of wealth, knowledge, and technology.  I think life in liberal democracies is good despite their governance, not because of it.  For example, inner cities that look like war zones, where it isn’t safe to walk for a man during the day, and certainly not a woman at night, are a feature of liberal democracy that would have shocked urban residents in past societies.

Perhaps I am wrong, and liberal democracy is a B+ on the scale of possible governance.  But I think this difference may be at the heart of why he is relatively democraphilic and I am relatively democraphobic.

I’ve had some thoughts in my head about similarities and differences between Seasteading and Charter Cities since talking to Paul Romer a couple weeks ago.  I was thinking of saving them for the planned Competitive Government roundtable at the upcoming Seasteading Conference, but now that Alex Tabarrok is comparing the approaches, I’ll post my thoughts.

First, I want to emphasize the core observation that is at the heart of both ideas (and this blog).  Governance, laws, institutions – all of these are types of information technology.  Given the right incentives, technology, especially information technology, can advance quickly and provide enormous benefit to humanity.  Unfortunately, certain structural elements of the governing industry give it poor incentives and little competition, which results in very slow improvement – especially now that there is no frontier for bloodless resets.  In fact, the implementation of current government technology is actually getting worse, due to democratic sclerosis.

Thus the way forward is to enable small scale experimentation in governance to increase the rate of innovation of the technology, and to increase competition among governments so as to improve the implementation of the technology.  We need real experiments, not just talk, so Folk Activism is out.  We will challenge entrenched power structures, so inhabited land will probably not work.

I believe that this set of ideas, so contrary to the vast majority of attempts to reform government, is crucial to achieving real change, regardless of how it is implemented.  That is why this blog is about letting A Thousand Nations Bloom – not just seasteading, and why the similarities are far more important than any differences between the ideas.

That said, differences can be fruitful to explore.  Here are a few of the important ones I see:

Spread Best Practices vs. Raise The Bar: Charter Cities can be thought of as a way to bring the current best practices in governance to places that currently have vastly inferior governance technology.  Seasteading, on the other hand, is an attempt to raise the bar by improving the current best practices.  Both are useful and important.  Note that in the long-term, charter cities also enable raising the bar, by promoting the concept of governance as a product and providing it as a business.  Thus in the long-term, it can result in experimentation with new governance technology, not just spreading best practices.

Government Relations: Charter Cities are closely tied to existing governments, as they are administered by one government, and located within the territory of another.  This makes them less threatening to current states and gives them access to the enormous resources that states can command – which was key to the settlement of North America.  On the other hand, this prevents the most radical innovations – stable governments tend to be conservative, and all the defects which we are trying to improve upon will be in effect to make improvement more difficult.

Seasteads require relationships with governments as well, for a number of reasons.  Locating in the 200-mile EEZ is beneficial and requires a treaty.  Autonomy requires that seasteads not offend the few major nations that can project power around the globe.  Even economic relationships with countries requires some lack of animosity from the trading partner.

However, distance matters – militarily and psychologically.  Being within the claimed territory of a current country means the residents will consider a charter city as “theirs”, unlike a distant seastead.  Seasteads thus have the potential to operate with less government interference in the best case, although there is certainly quite a bit of risk.  As Alex Tabarrok writes:

A charter city is an agreement between governments – Cuba agrees to let Canada import Canadian rules onto a small portion of Cuban property.  Cuba could renege on the deal but it’s going to be much harder for Cuba to renege on Canada than for the U.S. government to regulate or otherwise control seasteading.

While it may be hard for Cuba to renege on Canada, a charter city is guaranteed to be regulated by Canada or Cuba, perhaps quite closely, and a seastead at least has a chance of being regulated loosely or not at all.

Ease of Startup: Seasteading requires significant but incremental developments in ocean engineering technology to make ocean living cheaper, more comfortable, and more permanent than existing technologies such as cruise ships and oil platform.  However, it does not require initial permission from governments.  Charter cities require no technology improvements, and can be built on land.  In order to start one, however, you have to bring two governments to the table – a substantial task.

Both pose substantial challenges, and it is not clear to me which is easier.  Certainly I am personally more comfortable with solving engineering problems that negotiating with governments, but I can easily imagine someone with better political connections feeling the opposite.

Long-Term Impact on Incentives: As Alex Tabarrok writes:

Seasteading is more radical but it is more open, less tied to elites, and more flexible so, if it works, it is a better design for what Romer calls innovation in rules formation.

If we can solve the engineering problems, and seasteads are generally left alone by governments, seasteading will enable much quicker experimentation with rules systems because new ventures can be done entirely privately, with no government bureaucracy involved.  In other words, the barrier to entry is lowered more by seasteading than by charter cities.  Additionally, if seastead cities are built in a modular fashion, they allow residents to “Vote With Their Houses” (and factories, and office buildings). The ability to re-arrange ocean city-states is a crucial factor in resisting governance sclerosis and increasing the speed of innovation.

That said, seasteading’s main challenges (living on the ocean and obtaining autonomy) are significant, and charter cities avoid both of them.  Thus they are lower reward, but also lower risk.  As I have stated elsewhere, given that any such venture to improve government is far from certain, having a portfolio of multiple independent ventures will give far greater odds that at least one will succeed.

I have more thoughts relating to how we bootstrap credibility and who is the ultimate enforcer, but I will save them for the future…