Predicting When a State Will Centralize

A 2015 paper by Koyama, Moriguchi and Sng (KMS) builds a model based on modern China and Japan's different experiences, suggesting a mechanism for how external threat and internal political and geographic characteristics drive centralization, as in Japan's case - or makes the state collapse, as in China's case. The small states either centralize to defend against the external threat or cease to exist, and due to their size, centralizing is not so difficult. The large states might not centralize, since there may be local disincentives that the central ruler cannot overcome. Consequently by the early twentieth century, the Japan (feudal a mere century before) emerged as a great power, and China (a centralized rich empire a century before) collapsed. KMS give statistics about railway-miles built per decade as a proxy for overall modernization, of course, referring to the dismantling of the Woosung Railway by the Qing.

This is intriguing, because it is not only consistent but complementary with the "labor-intensive agriculture drives state formation" hypothesis, and gives us a fuller picture of the appearance of the first states and their subsequent spread. The marginal agriculture hypothesis of state formation (MAHSF, pronounced "MASH-F") observes, again counterintuitively, that the first states (originating in a political analog of "spontaneous generation") tend to emerge in places which are actually quite marginal for agriculture. Like: the Nile Delta in the Sahara, which has to be irrigated in a time-sensitive and labor-intensive way; or, the Fertile Crescent, fertile only (again) if it is irrigated. Or the dry central Mexican highlands, or the Peruvian Andes. Not the plains of southeast Asia, or the Pacific Northwest, where even hunter-gatherers could develop a rich material culture.

But on consideration, MAHSF has an obvious flaw, which is China. (Any theory of state formation that does not account for the emergence of China is not a theory of state formation>) China was founded on fertile wet plains still today used for rice cultivation, and the exception shows that it's not a marginal physical environment, but rather the requirement for centralized labor, which played chicken-and-egg with centralized state capacity. Consequently a better account is the coordinated labor in agriculture hypothesis of state formation (CLAHSF, proncounced "CLASH-F.") It doesn't matter whether you live along a river in the desert and have to centrally organize labor because of the marginal environment, or you unfortunately have chosen a "tyrannical" crop like rice which places similar demands on its harvesters. In such a setting, advantage goes to the group that can organize labor, and the population and the state grows. CLAHSF explains why states emerge in certain places, and KMS provide a mechanism for how state formation "spreads" from those original nuclei. In the Old World, there are basically two nuclei and three vectors: from the Middle East to Europe and the Mediterranean; from the Middle East east along the Indian Ocean; and from China to the rest of East Asia. You'll notice the absence of Egypt, but modern Europeans, North Africans and Middle Easterners are much more the inheritors of statecraft and culture in general from the Fertile Crescent than from Egypt.

KMS apply their theory beyond China and Japan and look at both Anglo-Saxon England (ultimately unified by Alfred in response to Norse invasions) and Muscovy (in response to the Mongols; and Russians still psychologically think of Ukraine as a buffer state - the "Wild Fields" - since the Mongols easily crossed prairies but halted at the boundary of the boreal forest.) A third example that cries out for such a treatment would be the first unification of India after Alexander's arrival at its frontier; not to mention the seeming counterexample, why the Greeks, even after a long-standing threat from the Persians, never did manage to unify and remained a set of city-states - to be over-run by Alexander.

An entirely different question is why China, which to this day can be seen as the amalgamation of ethnicities it is (with the Han dominating in the east) unified so early, and essentially stayed unified under different rulers (as if the Roman Empire had never fallen), when Europe had one such period early on, which was never repeated (a Warring States period that never ended.) Thought experiment reversing this here.


Koyama M, Moriguchi C, Sng Tuan-Hwee. Geopolitics and Asia's Little Divergence: A Comparative Analysis of State Building in China and Japan after 1850. GMU Working Paper in Economics No. 15-54, 19 Nov 2015.

The Death of Subculture: Gibson's Failure and Chapman's Explanation

If you're a geek of a certain age (i.e., middle) you've read Neuromancer. And lines from this novel may occasionally come back to you, and not just the opening hook about Chiba. For me, one of the repeaters is

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

This sets the frenetic hyper-competitive pace of the future. In Gibson's future, youth culture followed suit:

Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light: entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.

And here Gibson did what science fiction does best - straight-line extrapolation, which often fails, as it did here.

My own youth subculture was metal (which drags on into old age for many of us.) But rather than accelerating in their life cycles, subcultures seemed to disappear as a cultural phenomenon. I realized this when I was passing through a very small remote town in the western U.S. on a vacation in 2008, saw a gaggle of teenagers with metal shirts and trenchcoats by the side of the road, and realized that I hadn't seen such an assemblage for years by that point. I speculated about the mechanism here.

David Chapman at Meaningness has an explanation which, while not necessarily in conflict with this mechanism, is much broader and relates the phenomenon to modes of developing meaning, understanding of morality, and explains why a counterculture appeared, then subcultures (a "native" mode prevalent from 1975-2000 for Gen Xers), then the atomization of youth culture in the aughts. The full chart is here (you REALLY should view and consider it), but the specific discussion of subcultures is here.

Advanced Technologies Increasingly Require States or Other Large Orgs; Loners Lose Out

As history progresses, it's increasingly the case that as an individual, you can't compete with the amazing technologies that have been created and manufactured by large groups of people. This is the opposite of the trend anticipated during the "internet-optimistic" early aughts.

For instance, drones are cool, and seem to put some surveillance (and minimal transport) capabilities back into the hands of individuals. But it seems to me that large organizations (corporations, governments) stand to benefit more by the tracking and surveillance opportunities they create than a single person or family.

There are endless examples of this, many of them with complex technology with capital requirements too great for individuals, depends on large groups to be designed and manufactured, and where there are organizational economies of scale. Maybe you have your one drone, but your state police force has a hundred of them, to watch you and your drone and maybe even knock it down. Space colonization is another case - while it might be a corporation and not a state that finally colonizes another planet, it's likely to be a large corporation.

Consequently, history is increasingly favoring the people who can maneuver into positions of power in large organizations. This is also related to the problem that wealth (rather than income from labor) is more important to individuals and the economy as a whole, and that the best thing you can do is save enough money to invest in these large organizations - yet most people have difficulty getting into a position where they're not dependent on wages. Even forgetting about class based on inheritance - the increasing cognitive demands of these kinds of positions effectively rule them out as possible career paths or life choices for (again) increasingly large slices of the population.

The problem of the benefits of technology accruing more to states and corporations than individuals actually does seem to be a new one (there is a qualitative difference between autonomous drones and swords made of Damascus steel) and this is therefore concerning that we're running into this problem for the first time, rather than it being a cyclic economic problem (for example, complex and leveraged investment instruments) that we've survived going back centuries or more. As recently as the Middle Ages, well-organized nomads could come out of the Eurasian steppes and over-run the most advanced states of the day. While on one hand it's comforting that this is unlikely to happen today (see second half of this article) it does suggest that we passed a threshold in history where states are invincible and the biggest will win - which suggests we should all learn Mandarin.

Is this argument false? If so why? If true, are we screwed, or is there some other way small groups can compete, or is there an inverted U shape to this phenomenon, as the libertarian digerati more freely imagined a mere 15 years ago?

Dracula, Nero, and History

A year and a half ago I was in central Europe and sadly didn't have enough time to get to Romania, an omission I will correct next time I'm in that part of the world. But I did do a lot of reading, especially (of course!) about Dracula. I'd always wondered how Vlad Dracul and his descendants have been remembered as such villains over the centuries, especially when they were instrumental in keeping the Balkans in the hands of Christendom and out of Turkish control. But old Vlad also persecuted the medieval German diaspora that had spread across central and eastern Europe; how do we know? "It's worth mentioning that most written sources regarding his reign are based on the numerous propagandistic pamphlets spread by the Germans with the help of their new invention, the printing press."

The Roman emperor Nero was comemmorated as both the most incompetent Roman emperor (which he definitely wasn't, among the many jokers that competed for that title) as well as being so evil that Jews and early Christians were worried he would come back to life, and the famous 666 in the Book of Revelations is actually a code referring to him. Not coincidentally, Nero was the emperor who began Rome's systematic program of persecuting the Jews in Israel.

The lesson? If you don't want to be remembered for millennia as a villain, don't persecute industrious, highly literate people with a broad diaspora that's self-sustaining and wealth-generating due to trade.

"The Quixotic Single-Mindedness of the Live-Action-Role-Playing Russophile"

What a great piece this is, about a gathering of (very) left-of-center political activists. It sounds like a glorious mess, and I'm quite happy to read about it from a distance. Anything which contains phrases such as the one in the post title gets an automatic A+, but the gems keep coming: "Don't you just hate it when those fake-ass poseur environmentalists rip off your intersectionality? One would assume that in any intelligible scheme of political success, the mass 'appropriation' of their ideas/consciousness/jargon/acronyms would be the ultimate goal of these 'intersectional environmentalist' pioneers. But when you substitute po-mo politics for your personality, 'Moooooooom, he's coooooopying meeeee' quickly becomes a new standard of oppression."

Warning, anyone who has attended ideologically non-mainstream events may see a little (too much) of themselves reflected.

Remembering Jefferson; Forgetting Lee

As monuments to Robert E. Lee have been dismantled, there have been debates about whether we should do the same for monuments to Thomas Jefferson. Wasn't he a slave-owner as well?

Here's why in the United States we should keep statues of Jefferson but not Lee.

Thomas Jefferson owned, and by most accounts, mistreated, his slaves, even by the standards of the antebellum South. However, people revere his memory despite this, and not because of this.

Robert E. Lee invaded the United States in an attempt to destroy the country and to continue the institution of slavery. The people who revere his memory do revere him because of this. Nothing else in his legacy is remotely as important.

Both Jefferson and Lee were imperfect human beings who did immoral things that, thanks to moral progress, are no longer legal or tolerated by decent people today. But only one of the two made it his life's work to actively try to continue slavery and destroy the United States of America, since that had become necessary to continue slavery. We absolutely should not try to forget unpleasant facts about them, any more than we should forget the slaughter of the native people that lived in North America before Europeans arrived, or Germans should forget the Holocaust. Indeed, it's critical that we remember that otherwise decent people somehow looked the other way and did these things or allowed them to happen.

It is important to consider that if moral progress is real, and continuing, then most of us today are certainly doing things that our great grandchildren will find morally abhorrent.

Unfortunately slavery is not yet a historical footnote, and continues in several countries today. Here's how you can help.

Mondrian's Earlier Less Geometric Work

Gray Tree, 1911



Composition, 1913



Tableau Number 4, 1913



Farm Near Duivendrecht, 1916


Last art post here.

To Remind People of Status Hierarchies, Especially Opt-Outable Ones, Is Immoral

It's a shame that humans are so sensitive to status hierarchies (a zero sum game of relative value) as opposed to the "absolute value" of one's life experience. If I'm living in a shack in the woods getting by doing odd jobs and my family is fed and healthy, why should I ever be resentful? My life is fine!

Even if I'm going to compare myself to others, compared to the vast majority of people who ever lived, I'm doing great. But it's very hard not to let that status awareness among your here-and-now peers sneak in and start making us less content with our actually just-fine lives. This is the great irony and tragedy of living in the West in the twenty-first century. Avoid zero-sum games if you can, and remember, status is positional and therefore always zero sum.

There are many non-opt-outable status hierarchies (house, job, money, family, looks), and these are the most frustrating ones. One way that people in wealthy societies cope with status hierarchies is by voluntarily inhabiting multiple overlapping status hierarchies, but even then, you still live somewhere, look a certain way, and have a certain amount of money.

It is for this reason that people who go out of their way to make others MORE aware of status hierarchies and their position in them, whether non-opt-outable ones or consumption-based ones, are destroying contentment and are profoundly immoral. I'm sure you've already heard it a million times, but it's worth thinking about how your brain considers those rich good-looking leisurely people you see on TV to be your here-and-now peers, not to mention those enhanced pictures and narratives of your friends' and colleagues selfies and vacations. Robin Hanson goes into more detail on this here. Meanwhile - yes, I have quit Facebook, and maybe you should think more about it.