States Emerged In Places With Marginal Agriculture Potential That Benefited From Central Control

I. More Evidence for the Argument That States Emerge When Food Production Benefits from Central Control

If you looked at climate and climate alone, Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, the Andes and the Mexican Plateau would not seem like optimal cradles of civilization. And yet, it's exactly these kinds of marginal places where states first emerged. Yes, those places are hotter and drier than they were during the neolithic, but they still weren't better suited for cultivation than other places with more arable land. They're dry, they rely on rivers, and in some cases there's considerable altitude. So why there?[1] Why did we not first have large states in the Pacific Northwest of North America, or the southern (wetter) African Sahel, or the (early, but not first) wet parts of the Mediterranean? No, it had to be at the edge of the Sahara, or in the highest mountains outside Asia.

The immediate counterargument to such a theory is one word: China. Any theory of early state emergence that does not include China is not much of a theory of early state emergence. And if we're assuming that the cause is marginal conditions for agriculture, we definitely can't explain China, since the Chinese coastal plain is ideal for agriculture and for transporting agricultural goods. Is there still a commonality? One argument is that anywhere conditions are such that farming only works with central coordination of labor - but with such coordination, it really works - you have the conditions for a state. Planning your crops in a harsh environment and relying on the flooding of a river, as in Egypt would be one such setting. Another would be an otherwise fertile environment but where the grain of choice was hard to harvest alone, but paid off handsomely when harvested with central coordination.

In a review of Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, Reddit user lunaranus quotes Braudel and then expands on him:

Rice is an even more tyrannical and enslaving crop than wheat.

The key difference between rice and wheat is that the former can produce ~7.3 million kcals per hectare, whereas wheat can only reach 1.5 million. Unlike wheat, there was no need for fallow land, and bythe 13thC in China a system of double (or sometiems triple) crop was established. "And thus the great demographic expansion of southern China began."

The high population density created by rice, combined with the necessity for elaborate top-down irritation systems, resulted in strong state authority that constantly pursued large-scale works.

My argument is that this principle applies to the more marginal areas, but the necessity for labor coordination, including irrigation, is really what was important. Any place that could get 1) a big bump in food production from central coordination, and 2) which you couldn't defect from and survive, would favor state formation.

II. A Side Observation About Genetic/Cultural Quality vs. Climate as an Influence on Propensity for Regional Dominance, Toward a Macro-Theory of History

There's also the argument - though this makes some people uncomfortable[2] - that people from climates with wider annual temperature extremes are more behaviorally adaptable, and therefore when they encounter people from less extreme climates, they "win". To the surprise of many, the closer to the poles you are, the more extreme the annual temperature difference (the temperate regions are NOT the most extreme.) That is to say, during the summer Arctic regions are at or close to room temperature but can get to -50 C or worse in the winter. (Is -50 C really that different from - 30 C to humans, livestock and agriculture? Maybe this could be adjusted by "meaningful" temperature variation, but I digress.) Sure enough, the history of China is a history of more northerly groups (including, in two cases, non-Han steppe people) taking over territory to the south. The history of India is a history of Indic speakers coming from the north-northwest and displacing Dravidians. In North America, Na-Dene speakers migrated from the northerly Alaska/Yukon region, displacing people throughout Western North America, just in the last millennium. And of course in 2018 it's Germany, not Rome, that has most influence over the continent. Of note: I recently visited the site of Carnuntum, a Roman garrison town frequently visited by Marcus Aurelius, who was trying to keep the Germanic tribes out of the Empire. At the time he celebrated some successes, commemorated with carvings on cliff faces occasionally like the one in Trencin, Slovakia. But Since Carnuntum is now in Austria we can see how successful he ultimately was.

Of course that begs the question of why we haven't all been conquered by the Inuit already. The pattern of the Germanic takeover of northern Europe gives us a clue. The first Germanic-speakers appeared in non-Scandinavian Europe around 120 BC, migrating from (guess what) farther north in Scandinavia. Even in Julius Caesar's time seventy years later, the Celts were still his main concern. It wasn't until the mid-second century that the Germans were a major concern for the empire, with their numbers now growing after settling in the lands north of the Danube. The idea is this: Scandinavia has more extreme temperature and bred more adaptable people, but it's just too cold to grow enough food for the population to expand (the region still only has 26 million today, fewer than California.) After three centuries of farming in the much-more hospitable northern "mainland" Europe, their numbers had grown, and now they were ready to take on the Roman Empire, which lasted only three more centuries after that. So we have our time scale: six centuries from crossing the Baltic to destroying the Western Roman Empire. (You could even make the argument that Braudel's southern Chinese expansion was actually northern Chinese - Han - who had settled in what was previously tribal areas, done under the more stable-appearing timeline of centralized governments.)

And there we have the outline of a macrohistorical and demographic theory: states began in areas where food production was difficult, either because of local conditions or choice of food source, but where food production benefited greatly from centralized control. The old centers of civilization give way to waves of people coming from areas of more extreme climate, usually from the north. One prediction that follows from this theory is that the Inuit and related people, given time in warmer more fertile land, will start farming and demographically expanding, moving further south and indeed controlling Siberia and Canada, but this might be simplistic. It's not the mere fact of living where there are temperature extremes, it's that you have to adjust your behavior to seasons. The Inuit did outlast the Norse in Greenland but it wasn't because they were better farmers. Even though the Inuit might have to move to follow fish and game, they're still hunter-gatherers. My expectation is that it's seasonal agriculture which is the key factor to producing more adaptable behavior (read: more effective ability to control behavior to plan for the future.) So that being the case, in the year 3000 look for states in Eurasia dominated by people who are Siberian agriculturalists today. (Seem silly? If you had told Julius Caesar that western Europe would be dominated by German-speakers within five centuries, including former Roman territory, he would have fallen down laughing.)

Things that may have checked this trend in some cases in the past, and could stop it in the future:

The Old Word interrupting this process in the New World. (Obviously.) If there are two continent systems and one of them has both better diffusion of inventions and more territory, chances are that one will be "ahead" in terms of cultural evolution (the Guns, Germs and Steel argument) and it won't be because of more adaptable northerners, but the other continent finally crossing the ocean that your state-originating-center will be overwhelmed (i.e. the Columbian exchange.) Without that you might orthodict (rather than pre- or retrodict, that is, predicting alternative histories, granted untestable) that the Mapuche would have been the Germans to the Incas' Romans, and likewise the Comanche or Lakota to the Aztecs; maybe the Maori to indigenous Australians.

Centers of civilization getting too far ahead of the northerners. Also, there may be a point where the sheer population numbers of the old centers of civilization are so far ahead of the northerners that they can't be overwhelmed. Had the Germans arrived a few centuries later at the edge of an even more-developed Roman Empire, they may not have had the same effect. The communication and transportation capabilities of modern states may exaggerate this effect, so that the Inuit don't have the same opportunity. There is a major asymmetry in modern technology in terms of the capital and manpower it requires. The Germanic tribes and Mongols had technology that was not substantially inferior to the people they were inundating (in some cases, actually superior.) And colonials in Pennsylvania could re-invent medieval metal-working techniques which turned out to be good enough to run off the British, whose weapons were better but not that much better. But it's harder to imagine that a nascent state in the boreal forests distant from Moscow, no matter how adaptable its people, could really produce their own technology to resist the drones and agriculture-attacking Stuxnet malware of even a decadent future Russia.

Technology obviating the need to plan and adjust behavior seasonally. This is the most speculative. Living in a northern OECD country today, do you really have to plan that much for the seasons now? Yes, you reserve your beach house in the summer and get your coats out during the winter, but your life is not directly dependent on your ability to plant and harvest and store and ration food as it would have been until just a few centuries ago. The reign of the northerners may then be over. Of course, just living in such a technologically advanced society requires cognitive discipline and planning, but does that often result in poor reproductive success? Sure enough, in Iceland in the last century, genes associated with educational achievement have become less common. Also curious: there is a known bump in births in September, but I don't know if this extends outside the U.S. Is this just because in January people don't have anything better to do? Or an adaptation so more babies are born during the harvest when there are calories available? (Easy to check: does it persist in US states or other countries with low seasonal variation? Does it differ between ethnicities (forbidden question!) whose ancestors are from different latitudes, living together in a high-variation climate?)


[1] Inferring too much from population patterns in terms of climate and impact on agriculture and the local economy is always a precarious road to go down, especially in parts of the New World that have seen most of their development in the industrial age. For example - population density in the United States drops off west of the 100 W meridian. This is commonly assumed to be due to decreasing rainfall and therefore poorer agricultural productivity, but this is not the case - it's most likely a historical artifact, since aside from a few wagon trains willing to risk the long ride all the way to the coast, until the trains went all the way through and were cheap and reliable enough, people generally just moved a few miles west to start a new homestead. Around 1880 trains had become accessible for most relocating families, and by 1880 that slowly moving population front had made it to about 100 W. Here's the data. What's more, to this day, poorer countries have lower agriculture productivity even with the same or better innate agricultural endowments in terms of soil and climate - see Adomopolous and Restuccia, 2018.

[2] This makes no argument as to whether and what combination of genes and culture mediate this effect - but to drive the point home, either genes affect bodies, or they do not. If we accept that they do affect bodies, it's a very tortured argument to say that for some reason genes cannot affect behavior, since that's saying genes can affect other organs but not the brain. There's a similar gyration you can observe when someone wants to say that culture matters (fair enough) but can't effect outcomes in the aggregate (that is to say, culture doesn't affect happiness or survival.) Either culture matters to outcomes, or it's meaningless static.

The Great Stagnation: Problems Are Harder, and/or Talent is Misallocated

On Rationally Speaking, Julia Galef interviews Michael Webb about increasing research inefficiency - for example, Webb cites the statistic that today, to get another Moore's-Law-Doubling, it takes twenty times as many researchers as it did in the 1970s. It's not obvious that research is more and more inefficient because it's still producing improvements at the same rate, but only by consuming more and more resources to maintain the same rate. He uses the analogy of mining, where you have to keep going further and further into the ground to get to the gold, or the coal, or whatever it is. The longer the mine is operating (assuming a single central shaft) the bigger this distance gets:

[The pre-work you have to do in order to make a contribution] is a lot further today than it ever was. The amount of knowledge you have to have as a scientist to be able to get to the frontier, to make these contributions, is just so much larger today. And you can see this from the amount of time of it takes to do a PhD, how old an inventor is the time they first take out a patent, the size of research teams. Ben Jones, he's a fantastic economics professor at Kellogg, has papers that document these things.

That means that for individuals, they could either end up spending more time studying, which is what you see in the PhD length, or you see that they just focus on narrower and narrower fields. For a given amount of time, you only learn something about a much, much narrower field. Which might mean that you just have less good insights if it turns out that for all you progress, the fields...The wider field you have to be combining with some knowledge from quite distributed science.

I had previously argued for exactly this idea as an explanation for technological stagnation (or, prior to that, increasing research inefficiency), and with admitted nerve called this ultimate economic heat death "Caton-Schumpeter stasis."

Another factor is the availability of talent, which operates on the assumption that talent is unevenly distributed in the population and is a constraint on technological progress. Consequently there are also the ideas of talent dilution and talent mis-selection.

Talent dilution is the idea that there are only so many Fermis and Oppenheimers, and there is a negative marginal utility to adding more people to the research endeavor. The otherwise productive people are overwhelmed with meetings and emails and swamped by mediocrity. This is actually optimistic, as it suggests that we could return to research productivity by restricting the size of research teams. That this is not already happening suggests that either this idea is wrong, or that people putting the teams together have perverse incentives (quite possible) but, since these are mostly private sector endeavors, somehow overwhelm the profit incentive without unsustainably driving the enterprise into the ground - which seems hard to believe on its face.

Talent mis-selection is a little more subtle. The track to become a physical scientist or semiconductor engineer in the mid-20th century was not as "artificial" (i.e., externally imposed) and clear as it is now. The cause of your having a career in STEM was likely early achievement in that field, because your primary motivation is to explore things in STEM, not to make money or move up in a hierarchy.* Getting good test scores, being a well-behaved student, and knowing how to game your applications is probably much more important now than it was then, and may not be sorting for the actual most productive talent. On top of this, the world today is just a lot more interesting, with a lot more (easy!) options, for someone who's good at quantitative thinking, and the best may not be going into research - they're going to Wall Street or heading to startups. (There are pretty solid statistics that med school applications drop when the economy is good and vice versa - I'd wager that the correlation is even more true for physical science and engineering graduate programs.) By selecting for the type of person who focuses for their first quarter century of life on collecting prestige coupons, climbing hierarchies and gaming applications, you are very likely selecting against exactly those people who will be most productive in STEM, i.e. the kind of person who is directly motivated and rewarded by work in STEM. (For a great discussion about the gap in social cognition or lack thereof between STEMmy and other types of people, see this Slate Star Codex post.)

To put a finer point on the idea of talent mis-selection, let's look at another domain of achievement. Imagine a national program claiming to identify "the nation's top talent in military conquest", complete with an entrance exam and rigorous interviews. You need a reference from a military historian. Those not wearing a tie to their interview are shown the door for their disrespectful and noncomformist behavior. How likely would it be to find the next Genghis Khan or Hannibal this way? The most interesting thing to do for a real potential conqueror would be to go wherever there is active conflict, and the "successful applicants" would likely be annihilated in a real war by the person who went to Syria and became a warlord.

[Update: you may be aware of the Thiel fellowship where students are paid to drop out of college and pursue a business. Business Insider has been following up on how its Fellows have been doing. The reporting certainly shows survivor bias since I don't see a clear "out of Y fellowships awarded, X are currently successful outside education" - and a lot of these students would have been successful anyway so we don't know the denominator. Still, I suspect the fellowship as an intervention is increasing the rate. Still: what gets measured gets addressed, which is why every metric ends up getting gamed, and looking entrepreneurial is no exception, so people are no doubt trying to game the fellowship, and we're back to the mis-selection problem again: "Entrepreneurship has become a line you put on your resume," Thiel says, apparently non-ironically - and to paraphrase Thiel's complaint, in the businesses his fellows are founding, he's getting lots of Facebooks but few flying cars (one exception in this list here.)

[Added later: here's great article summarizing a paper, which simulated how the funding and promotion incentives of scientists are degrading the average quality of work, and unsurprisingly a reproducibility crisis in multiple fields. This would be true even with good talent allocation - because the entire system is selecting for publishable but not necessarily true findings. You might call this third problem talent distraction.]

[Historical example: in discussing the erosion of China's technological and administrative lead over Europe during the second millennium CE, Brad DeLong offers the following as one among many causes:

Perhaps the root problem was that with triple-cropping rice strains the wet-rice fields were too fertile, the governmental bureaucracy too effective, and the avenues of establishment-oriented upward mobility to the striving and aggressive too open. After making a little money the logical next step was to buy some land. Because the land was rich, because labor was plentiful and cheap, and because the empire was (most of the time) strong internally, one could live well after turning one's wealth into land. One could also easily make the important social contacts to pave the way for one's children to advance further. And one's children could do the most important thing needed for upward mobility: study the Confucian classics and do well on the examinations: first the local shengyan, then the regional juren, and then the national jinshi. Those who had successfully written their eight-legged essays and made proper allusions to and use of the Confucian classics would then join the landlord-scholar-bureaucrat aristocracy that ruled China and profited from the empire. In the process of preparing for the examinations and mastering the material needed to do well on them, they would acquire the habits of thought and values of a Confucian aristocrat landlord-scholar-bureaucrat. Entrepreneurial drive and talent was thus molded into an orthodox Confucian-aristocratic pattern and harnessed to the service of the regime and of the landlord class: good for the rents of the landlords, good for the stability of the government, but possibly very bad indeed for the long-run development of technology and organization.

This is a nightmare, real-world example of talent distraction and would also produce talent mis-selection, and Delong's thesis merits further study.]

*I'm all for scientists getting paid. A statistician once pointed out to me that if statistician jobs were suddenly paying 10x more, you might not get the best statisticians - you would get the people best at obtaining stable large paychecks signed by someone else, and some of them will hopefully be good statisticians.