Why Is Pursuit of Pleasure a "Third Rail" in Central Authoritarian Agricultural Societies?

A friend related the following to me. While she was an undergraduate, her grandparents came to visit and took her out to lunch. At the time she was dating a man of Middle Eastern descent. During the meal it became clear that her grandparents' true mission was not to buy her lunch, but to warn her about Middle Eastern men. They didn’t seem to be disturbed by her being with a non-Christian or ethnically different partner, so much as they were worried about her being in danger of abduction. "You know, when you get married and go back to their countries with them, you have no rights," her grandfather said. "Oh Grandpa," my friend responded somewhat innocently, "I really have no intention of marrying this guy." Her grandparents’ faces drained of color, and the conversation ended, and the rest of the meal was spent in icy silence.

To put it plainly: they were horrified that their granddaughter basically just told them that she was in this relationship for the sex, with no intention of commitment to marriage or reproduction. For them, this was far more serious than the prospect that she would be kidnapped and effectively enslaved! Why? Because she was acknowledging that she was making decisions in the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Of course in American culture and in most places, there is a double standard between men and women, but men are not immune to such attitudes either, though the social consequences are rarely as severe.

This may be part of why homosexual relationships have produced negative reactions across so many cultures - certainly not in all, but in enough for it to be a pattern. At least as often as they are accepted, they are either ignored or reviled. Why? Because gay sex can only result in pleasure. By these standards, an abomination if ever there was one!

But it's not just sex; it's the discussion of pursuit of pleasure in general. In very formal settings, any acknowledgement that you do something just because you like it feels very inappropriate. At a morbidity and mortality conference (where surgical residents stand up and accept blame for bad outcomes of cases - few settings are more formal or tense) I noted with some surprise that a physician even noting that he enjoyed his breakfast was met with uncomfortable laughter, eye-rolling or shifting in seats. The acknowledgement of enjoying any sort of physical pleasure seems to decrease, the more formal the setting, and this was an excellent example.[1] This is so basic to social reality that we don't notice or question it. Why is this?

Allan Tate said that civilization is an agreement to ignore the abyss. This is actually too limited. More to the point, civilization is an agreement to ignore affect - to ignore the primary drives in our basic animal code, and the reactions they cause in us, and the abyss causes anxiety. So it's not just the pursuit of pleasure we avoid, but the recognition of and response to affect in general - because affect can be dangerous. In social animals, affect is contagious, which is very effective for cohesion in hunter-gatherer groups below the Dunbar number (150 people.) But in any large civilization where we're constantly interacting with strangers in (necessarily) formalized settings, paying attention to and reacting to the affect on others' faces would seem to be inherently destabilizing. Try it when you go for a walk in a busy city some time - at best, you'll quickly be exhausted, and at worst you'll get into fights. And constantly talking about your pursuit of pleasure with strangers can make people resent you, or compete with you, or avoid you, and in general is a ticket to negative affect. The higher the stakes, the less we do it. In therapy training, we're "de-programmed" so that we don't just notice, but pursue affect, even when it flashes across faces for only a moment, and this de-programming is very difficult.

If this theory is correct, there should be other trends of affect-generating cultural practices that differ between hunter-gatherer and centralized agricultural societies, and that are at their most intense in the oldest longest-centrally-organized agricultural society (i.e. China and East Asia); and that are at their most intense in formal settings, like religion and many high-prestige professions.[2] To this end:

• I have found qualitative assertions (but not quantitative studies) that homosexuality is more tolerated in more traditional societies, often with specific institutionalized roles.
  
  
• Gender roles in general become more rigid in the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural.
  
  
• There is a trend toward brighter colors in the art and clothing of cultures that more recently converted from hunter-gatherer to agricultural (or "small-village" agricultural to nation-state.) Yes, bright colors are often used in nation-states - in specific settings (religious displays, holidays, weddings.)
  
  
• Drums tend to disappear as a central musical instrument in this transition as well, only to have re-appeared recently in the West in rock and hip-hop - possibly because, ironically, our wealth has allowed us to ignore social restrictions and revert back to our "native state" as hunter-gatherers, as in Hanson's theory of farmers vs foragers.
  
  
• In the hunter-gatherer to centralized agricultural authority transition, hallucinogens become restricted (often to religious ceremonies) or outright banned.
  
  
• There are exceptions to these rules, in the sense that these things which disappear in the transition still do appear under closed settings controlled by and useful to central authority - war chants, group initiations, religious artifacts and ceremonies, and team sports with big audiences.
  
  
• Bright colors, rhythmic music, hallucinogens, the spread of gender equality and tolerance of sexual minorities, and sex-openly-for-pleasure all reappeared in the West as we transitioned from agricultural back to hunter-gatherer values in the late 20th century, as per Hanson's theory.

These affect-restricting cultural practices can be thought of as a Dunbar's number multiplier, by decreasing the frequency of group fission events. Others are exapting family psychology to the state (leader as father figure, fellow soldiers as brothers) and organizing society into stable hierarchies (family, village, ethnic group, state.) If we assume that agricultural states ultimately win out over foragers - which they consistently have since the Great Stand on the Ugra and the fall of the Yuan Dynasty - then there is a form of selection for groups which develop such multipliers.[3]

A major cultural technology and Dunbar's multiplier is controlled tolerance. It is difficult for people with different moral systems to closely co-exist. The Ottomans had the millet system, China and the Mongols had a theocratically laissez faire approach, and in the modern West many countries build freedom of conscience into the law, though avoiding leg-breaking and pocket-picking by neighbors with different convictions was realistically much easier in Jefferson's wide-open agrarian utopia.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Psychiatrists are less formal than surgeons in our meetings and I am pleased to report much more comfortable talking about food.

[2] Americans in particular might object that there are many high-status arenas in the U.S. which are now fairly informal, for instance technology, the entertainment industry, or academia. I would argue that apparently informal, high-prestige professions are actually formal in a more complex way. This is clearest in academia, but true for the others, that this apparent informality is not so much superficial as an another layer of complexity to let the ambitious signal that they can maneuver even under the paradox of forced "relaxed collegiality." Sure someone can wear jeans to work and set their own hours - but come back in 15 years and see who's setting budgets, and it probably won't be them.

[3] The current greatest combination of Dunbar's number multipliers remains China at about 9.2 million.

Violence Control and the Mutual Recognition Cartel

Modern states are a cartel that mutually recognize each other's right to hold a monopoly on violence within their territory. The prospect of seasteading is a fundamental threat to nearby nations' legitimacy, and in fact to the Westphalian idea of a state, since suddenly there is territory near yours which was previously not only uninhabited but uninhabitable, and poof - suddenly there are people outside your control on your borders. Consequently we should expect that seasteads will produce a rapid and disproportionate response from any nearby nation, using any excuse they can to commandeer or destroy it. That I know of, there has been very little discussion in the seasteading/voluntary society community about the likelihood of this happening, and how to avoid it. Previously , it was predicted that it would be "a few years at most before the nearby country finds an excuse to attack them", but in this case it was actually on the order of weeks.

This past week, the Thai government noticed a seastead platform just outside its international waters:

US bitcoin trader and girlfriend could face death penalty over Thai 'seastead'

US national Chad Elwartowski and his Thai girlfriend, Supranee Thepdet (aka Nadia Summergirl), are facing charges of threatening the Kingdom's sovereignty. Last Sunday officials from the Royal Thai Navy and Phuket Maritime boarded the structure saying it violated Article 119 of the Criminal Code and also posed a navigational hazard.

The couple launched the 'Ocean Builders' seastead on February 2 off the coast of Phuket. The structure is located to the southeast of Koh Racha Yai, approximately 12 nautical miles (22.2 kilometres) from the mainland.

Elwartowski has claimed that his seastead is outside Thailand's territorial waters, but Thai authorities insist that it violates Article 119 and challenges Thailand's territorial rights.

"The Royal Thai Navy has full authority and duty to protect national interest and marine sovereignty in the area," according to a Navy spokesperson. (from thetaiger.com)

Besides the disproportionate response, most telling is that Thailand has not even bothered to claim that the seastead is within their territorial waters. The couple previously inhabiting the seastead has fled in fear of their lives. Immediately Thailand shows what's really going on - whatever theory of state recognition you subscribe to, it all unfortunately returns to violence and the control of violence - control of it within your territory (the police, to maintain order) and outside your territory (the military, to at least prevent conquest, if not expand your territory.) If a country can't do those two things, it's not a country, and can't even convincingly pretend to be a country for long - e.g., no one is very impressed with the "Somali" government's claim to actually be the state of Somalia, that is, the organization which holds a monopoly on violence within the territory not claimed by surrounding countries.

One objection: Luxembourg (for example) appears to be a viable state, yet can Luxembourg really claim to be able to repel an invasion from Germany or France? No, but very likely the blowback from other countries in the mutual-recognition-cartel that could harm Germany or France in some way is enough to stop them. Dictators often test the resolve of the cartel - most obviously, Putin by invading Crimea. Ukraine could not repel such an invasion, nor could they count on the cartel to come to their aid. So they can say that Crimea is still part of Ukraine, but de facto, it is part of Russia.

It's also worth pointing out that both Vietnam and China have built not seasteads, but whole new islands in international waters in the South China Sea. They and their allies have made a lot of noise about the other state's islands, but aside from a few harassing passes by aircraft, there has been no full naval take-down of the settlements. Why? Because each country (or its allies) have the ability to hold their territory by inflicting and defend against violence, and as countries, are already in the mutual-recognition club by virtue of being able to use the threat of force to defend their territory. (Which is how they can have allies to begin with.)

In actuality, the Thai seastead and state response isn't the first one. This is stated not to diminish the accomplishment, but rather to point out that there was another would-be sea-platform microstate in the 1960s in the North Sea, which was allowed by the nearby United Kingdom to persist - though they may have been a bit nervous about this and hope to escape the UK's attention. Consequently we might ask - why don't seasteaders set up shop off the Somalian coast, most of which has no real government? For the obvious reason of piracy, i.e., unpredictable exercise of force by individuals with no claim to political legitimacy, protection of territory/prevention of others' violence, or promise of maintaining/improving conditions. In this, it's obvious that seasteaders would like to benefit from the nearby state's violence control, without paying taxes or following other rules. (In fact, Sealand had difficulty controlling violence within its borders, or preventing criminal behavior, and the UK's hands-off attitude had a lot to do with that.) A critique of "fundamentalist" little-l libertarianism in general is that it's only conceivable when there is already a state regulating commons and controlling violence that guarantees social arrangements - and a very similar argument can be made for socialism in states already wealthy-by-capitalism, also an unsustainable strategy. (Something very similar happened on Minerva reef in the Pacific in the 70s when Tonga suddenly decided it had to control the reef once settlers showed up.)

It's probably not good for anyone to dwell for too long on the basic fact that humans have never devised a system to organize themselves beyond the level of family without a threat of violence, and it seems that theories of state recognition are designed to be legalistic dances that distract us from this brute fact. The political scientist who imagines a system that allows the non-violent creation of new states that can actually take natural precedence over force will go down as the greatest philosopher in history - along with the one that figures out a way besides physical space to determine which laws apply to which people, thus making a more truly voluntary society. I'm very sad for the couple that tried to seastead off of Thailand, but they were more than a little naive. For now, I predict that any seastead, even one far out in the middle of the ocean inarguably in international waters, will quickly find itself dismantled by a state navy unless they have sufficient outward directed force - and will not be able to control their internal violence without pre-emptive threats of violence.

Europe as China: Why Didn't It Happen This Way, Part II

For the original thought experiment, see the opposite question being asked by a historian living in an alternate history, a la "Man in the High Castle".

Interesting papers on why Japan and China actually diverged in terms of centralization) in the modern era, from Mark Koyama and colleagues, here and here.

Alternate history thought experiments are useful for reversing the anesthesia of the familiar - mixing terms, switching coincidences, you start to see where things might have been accidents, and where other things were probably destined. Hence, the "sinization" of European history, combining Europe into a super-state, and the Europizing of China's. But it didn't happen that way. It's still interesting to consider how Europe would seem if shoe-horned into the patterns of Chinese history and vice versa.

From a Chinese point of view, Europe is a just a Warring States Period that never ended; a China that never got conquered by one of the factions and unified under one government. Several of the warring states dominate the picture. They are those which have access to coastline and historical political access to new territories, as well as those with good cultural institutions that serve them well in the industrial age; those seem to be states that lacked strong central control until recently, especially those which were not dominated by an empire outside Europe. Europe is a multiethnic continent that has never been truly united. We still remember the Roman empire 15 centuries after its fall because it controlled two-thirds of the continent's territory at one point. Europe is often divided into east-west (although most of the east is now in NATO and this line has seemed to waver in the space of decades); more enduring is the north-south division, created by the more permanent physical barrier of the Alps and their weather effects, which we can see in religious and other cultural divides. Other conquests from without have been averted: the Persians, then the Moors, then the Mongols, then the Turks, all of whom who got pieces of the proximate fringes of Europe. (Don't forget that western Turkey was settled by people we would recognize as Greek and they were ruled by the Persians and fought for Darius at the Battle of Marathon.)


From chinasage.info

On the other hand, China is just Europe that got conquered, and never re-fractured. Pick your unification point - a loss at the Battle of Salamis, and/or Alexander going west instead of East, or the Roman Empire never falling, or at least always having its territories inherited intact by future rulers. When the Qin took Guangdong (modern Canton), they were culturally and ethnically distinct from the people they met, who they described as bamboo-thicket dwellers barely more advanced than hunter-gatherers. (Many Cantonese people even today who self-identify as Han in fact are more genetically similar to Cambodians or other southeast Asians than they are to Han from the rest of China.) [Added later: I learned that the Byzantine historian Theophylact Simocatta wrote an account of the Sui Dynasty's reunification of China as a story of one kingdom conquering another - which, of course, it was.]


Miao women in traditional dress, from chinapictures.org.
A glance at the map shows the old kingdoms of East Asia - the old Warring States - and the briefest of research will reveal China's persisting multiple ethnicities - unsurprisingly in its interior (the Uighurs and Tibetans) but even much further east (like the Miao women above, or the recently migrated Hmong, and many others) - and many of these are finally today losing their cultural distinctiveness, long after losing their political autonomy. The parallels in my little essay are fairly obvious. In that world, there is no "China", there's just East Asia, a collection of belligerent ethnically distinct states with confusing alliances, and an unlikely overarching religion (Neo-Shivanism) from a very foreign place that somehow does not cause them to unify. The Persian state was the Qin, who didn't tolerate lots of chattering scholars either; the burning of the library at Alexandria was nothing. The Macedonian and Caesarean dynasties were the Han, and the Norse were the Mongols. In the alternative universe the East Asians have their own barbarians (the Xiongnu who served as mercenaries in the Han legions) and their Scandinavians, the Mongols and Manchus. In the alternate-history Europe, the last of the Huns and Basques are losing their dress and cuisine, while the Russians and Turks remain politically problematic. (Perhaps Vladimir Putin is the Dalai Lamasky in that world? Who knows.) If you find a Norse or Finnish dynasty unlikely, why, that's exactly what the Sung would've said about the Mongols, and the Ming about the Manchus.


So what are the answers to the questions posed by my alternate history alter ego? That is to say: why am I real, a German-descended person with a Hebrew first name living in a United States settled by the British and named after an Italian, and he's fictional? (I'm not debating whether I'm the real one. Don't get all Chuang Tzu on me.)

1. Why did the super-state of China unify so early to be ruled by one dynasty after another, with only brief periods of fracture, in contrast to Europe, which has only been half-ruled by one state and only for a few centuries at that? This one may be straightforward: geography. Most of eastern Asia is a warm fertile plain, and you could walk from Shaanxi to Guangdong, eating rice along the way - which is exactly what many armies have done. (You would expect that places with geographical challenges would resist incorporation. Within China, Shu, now Sichuan, developed a distinct culture, and of course Korea and the tropical-forested Southeast Asian countries were never absorbed.) On the other hand, Europe has an insanely complicated coastline, plains frequently interrupted by mountains, and a shorter growing season. Europe is harder to invade, harder to administer, and until relatively recently has been less of an economic prize than much of the surrounding world. This is why the Romans ruled Syria but not Denmark, why Alexander went to Egypt and not Rome, and why the Moors only half-heartedly pursued Europe beyond the Pyrenees. In particular, the ornate coastline of Greece looks like something an overenthusiastic ten year-old geography nerd would invent.

2. Why did religion in the West evolve such that it was synonymous with political power? Why is religion in the despotic East syncretic and tolerant of other traditions? I do not have a strong answer for this, but here are several speculations: a) a statistical-evolutionary one. More religions evolving means more natural selection, and therefore more that want to spread and hold power (ie, evangelical, politically-aggressive religions.) Therefore, if you're a state in contact with more religions, you're more likely to encounter politically aggressive religions. If you're in Europe this is the case; and the Middle East was also more closely connected to Europe than to China. (This is the same reason in biology that Eurasian/Mediterranean species are more likely to become invasive in the New World and Oceania than the other way around - a larger initial territory means more species competing, and by the time of the Columbian exchange, only the best-adapted ones were left in that Darwinian crucible, and they often overwhelmed the ecosystems they encountered.) b) Large, centralized absolutist rulers who are serious about staying in power do not tolerate flourishing ideas: hence, the purge of philosophers that occurred with the foundation of China. Who knows, maybe if the Mohists were still here today, they would have spawned something as intolerant as the Abrahamic religions? Plus, religions in an absolutist state where the head of state is not interested in religions are not in a position to develop into an ideology that tries to purge other ideologies.

3. Why did the technology and wealth of European states progress rapidly beyond that of China beginning just prior to the age of discovery? Economists and historians have put the most thought into this question, and one thing we do know is that the groundwork was laid well-prior to the age of discovery. That is to say: the answer wasn't just that Europe extractively colonized the world and benefited from the labor of non-Europeans (although that helped.) There is an argument that natural selection built states in Europe that were militarily successful, and that living in a state which was able to provide predictability and safety but was otherwise not authoritarian would tend to select at an individual level for values that would be useful in the late iron and industrial ages.

This immediately relates to current trends. If we are now in an age more dependent on administrative competence than military skill, China has the advantage. But if China's recent successes now come partly from implementing ideas and values the West has stumbled upon through natural selection, a continued strongly central authoritarian China would not be expected to keep producing such. And that by extension, a strong world state would be an absolute disaster in terms of cultural innovation. Ibn Khaldun, the Persian historian and observer of China, made an observation about this, just as relevant to China's initial unification as it is to the source of its continuing dynasties and ultimately the impact on civilization of the habitable world being entirely divided into states, as it now is. Why would the unifier of China be from Shaanxi, which even today is a bit of a backwater? Why did the first European conqueror not arise from Sparta or Athens, but from those upstarts Macedonia? Whether or not he was right, Ibn Khaldun thought there was an effect of outsiders on the frontiers of an empire coming in to take over the complacent inward-gazing capitals, at least in Chinese history, and he had the benefit of many additional dynasties' worth of data to make his argument than just the Qin. He was perhaps over-weighting the significance of the Mongol dynasty in power at the time he was writing. But what if there were no more clever barbarians on the frontiers, but only other states, operating in a cartel? I don't know, but some level of natural selection, and therefore the triumph of good cultural practices over bad, seems very likely to grind to a halt.

Anarchist Conference Devolves Into Chaos (Not from the Onion)

Story, such as it is, found here. I wonder if anyone asked "I thought we were an autonomous collective?"

"Small Government" Conservatives Forget States Rights When Marijuana is Legalized

Ted Cruz and social-conservative (read "fake") libertarians want to use government to force people to follow their moral code. Most of the time they think the state government is the way to encourage freedom, when (curiously) state governments are limiting freedom - of abortion, of religion, you name it. But when the state governments don't do what they want, well then, the Federal government is a-okay!

Is It Acceptable for American States to Oppress People?

"Volunteers" - "free" men - for a Confederate Army in the War of Northern Aggression...or was it Southern Oppression? Somehow the volunteers didn't feel more free than before.

Libertarianism in the U.S. has taken a strange turn. For one thing, people who call themselves libertarian in a rural area versus a metropolitan area are likely to have very different sets of opinions. Rural libertarians quite often are very much against allowing gay people to marry, allowing people to worship as they choose or not worship at all, or allow individual discretion in the consumption of mind-altering substances. But somehow, somewhere, these people claim they're the ones really in favor of freedom. Many an urban libertarian has told a rural resident that no no no, libertarians are in favor of gay rights, religious freedom, and drug decriminalization, and then been asked, "So how are you a libertarian then?"

The Civil War still looms large in rural libertarians' often provincial minds as well, which is why they appear to favor state government oppression instead of Federal oppression - that's what "States' Rights" really means. Another translation of States' Rights is, "Decisions should be made in a forum where the people with whom I culturally identify are the majority. At the national level, urban blue-staters outnumber people who think like me, so I shouldn't have to agree with them. However, in my state, people who think like me are the majority. So people in my state should have to agree with me."

The Federal government's limitation of rights remains their bete noir, and that's not a bad place to start. But it's the inter-level hypocrisy that's so glaring. What's confusing is that apparently, state-level oppression is okay. Washington D.C. tells the country what religion they have to be? Or passes a law demanding service of some kind? A distaster. (And in this, they're correct.) But if Utah or Texas forced Mormonism or Baptism on their people - well, that's okay. Why this reverse state worship, as Reason magazine labeled it? If socialists were Christians, these rural libertarians would be Satanists.

Good Libertarian Attacks on Rand

Cross posted to Speculative Nonfiction.

These should have their own special genre; one which deserves our attention. 1984 was Orwell's answer to what he saw as the developing problems with socialism, and (as an understatement) it is an important work.

Before giving you the sharper points of another writer's attacks, what is good about Rand? What do people get out of it?

- The power of capitalism to eliminate human suffering.
- The power of the individual; it's not surprising that young people establishing their own identities are the ones to whom this most appeals, and (I would argue) it's important that young people have things that reinforce their confidence in themselves and their goals and values.

The piece in question is by David Brin. The most interesting argument he makes is that (in his view) Rand is clearly influenced by Marx in terms of her teleological thinking. He misses a chance to mention her infamous standing-on-one-foot answer, which was a ripoff of Rabbi Hillel. She borrowed at least once, either (most charitably) unaware that she was doing so, or assuming that her audience would not be familiar with these sources. (Which itself says something else about her.)

A point worth disagreeing with, not just here but with other writers, is that it's not a valid criticism to say that her novels lay out a plan for bringing Rand's values to the world. Not because the world in Atlas Shrugged is a great one, but because the novels don't claim to be a blueprint for what the world should look like and the actions to take to get there, even with a 70-page monologue. (I'm unfamiliar with her having made this claim in non-fiction. If you're aware of any such claims, please point me to the evidence and I'll change my position.) Compare to Marx, who in a non-fiction manifesto, laid out a plan for the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Lenin followed fairly closely.

(Another article that Brin links to makes the argument the Atlas Shrugged is part of trilogy. Interesting non-fiction plot twist in that one.)

Other weaknesses that have always appeared to me likely because of my background: a lack of familiarity with evolution and in one case a distrust of how it could have produced an intelligent animal; a strange proclivity to imply heritable positions in her characters (all while decrying decadent monarchies elsewhere); and implicit assumptions about gender roles including disparaging comments about possibly gay characters. To the last point, defenders might say "But this was the 1950s; you can't fault someone for being a product of their times," to which an appropriate response is "But this is someone who was claiming the absolute, correct and final version of morality; if she missed something, that makes it irrelevant whether or not the ambient culture produced those blind spots." When you claim to have produced the final answers, rather than improving the process to get the answers, these are the kinds of problems you're open to. (Defenders might also say that homosexuality is morally wrong, and then the discussion devolves to a more profound level about the origins of morality, and that species of defender will have a hard time showing themselves in this case to be on the side of reason and not irrational authoritarianism there.)

A final problem that Brin mentions is the inverse state worship that afflicts objectivists and libertarians, but this is not unique to Brin's critique or to Rand. Suffice it to say the state is not the only institution ever conceived which can make humans suffer.

Post-DOMA Gloating and Prediction Challenge

This is truly a sad moment in America's history. But now that DOMA is dead, I guess social conservatives will understand that I am now forced to abandon my monogamous relationship, and run out and have constant casual group sex with every woman I see. After all, it's not my fault! The reason that this decision is a tragedy (and a danger!) for everyone is that marriage has been so degraded by this decision that none of us can be held responsible for our sexual behavior any longer, and this communist fascist Muslim atheist weak-willed dictatorship we now live under is responsible.

In all seriousness: I challenge social conservatives distressed by this decision to publicly make a prediction about what will happen, now that DOMA is gone and marriage equality will go forward. For example, the concern about pedophilia and bestiailty - anyone want to put a date on that?

Why Do Government Services Often Suck?

There are several forces operating that make government institutions less effective than they might otherwise be.

One is that governments are bigger, and the bigger an institution, the more administrative friction (in large part due to the free rider problem). Of course, this is not unique to government; if you've ever been at a large university or corporation, you've seen this operate as well.

A second problem is that as society becomes more complex, the services that agencies provide become more specialized, and less comprehensible to most citizens; in the old days when specialized information was mostly the province of the professional class, this was pithily summarized as "All professions are conspiracies against the laity.". This problem is particularly bad for services that are used infrequently and/or by a small number of people and/or that are unglamorous. Consequently there is no feedback from past users who have had bad experiences to future users making decisions. (Family law courts, for example, score at least two out of three in that list.) This feedback loop damages markets and cripples competition, which sometimes helps the laity, cutting out middlemen and de-mystifying opaque language to benefit consumers, not without resistance from established interests of course.

A third problem, unique to government, is that of guaranteed lack of competition. The free rider problem becomes more severe because the free riders know that even if the building they work in is physically destroyed or a customer is harmed, it doesn't matter - you still have to go to the DMV (or wherever) somewhere, sometime, and they'll still have a job. Of course, there is always competition on some level, and there is here too, in the sense that if a government functions so badly that it collapses due to civil strife, invasion by foreign powers, starvation or insolvency, then the agency employees stop getting money. This is an unpleasant competition mechanism, although it was the de facto way that (for example) Rome got new Emperors, in the absence of succession rules. Recognizing this unpleasantness, the founders of the U.S. put in a provision for a peaceful transfer of power which does in fact cost some government employees their jobs - but not the vast majority. So if you hate your local DMV enough, you can vote for a governor from another party, and you'll get a new secretary of transportation, but very likely the mean lady at desk 18 will still be there.

One possible solution to this problem would be a more extensive application of the ideal of overlapping status hierarchies. Humans react badly to loss of status, but as long as we're all moving in multiple spheres (family, work, church, your golf buddies, your cooking class) damage to status in any one realm is mitigated in terms of damage to your overall status. The problem to solve here is that ultimately, all animals including us need control of a specific physical territory, and where you appear in one of those territories (and the cultural allegiances that you invariably develop) are involuntary. It would be nice to say, "You know what, I live in San Diego, but California's DMV sucks, so I'm going to go to the one from Missouri. And our environmental laws suck too so I'm going to have open bonfires in my yard with my friends, as is permitted in Mauritius, which is the law I'm choosing to follow." But you still live in San Diego and have no choice but to cooperate with your physical neighbors, who probably don't want the smoke and wildfire risk. San Diego burns down, not Mauritius. Interestingly, to some degree we do in fact allow these arrangements with incorporation and litigation law, and it's probably no surprise that non-physical-geographical solutions have emerged in business, that is, in purely voluntary associations of cooperating individuals with much lower average costs of "emigrating" (quitting or selling out your share). I submit that a solution allowing these arrangements to apply to all government policy would be the greatest political innovation since modern democracy. It would improve government profoundly. Right now the quality of government appears to rest on the cultural values of the country the government is running and how well-suited they are to being a modern nation-state. If you're Finland or Korea, that's good news. If you're Sudan, not so much.

Emigration is arguably another way in which governments do face competition, but there are considerable barriers that decrease the effectiveness of freedom of movement, namely that there is invariably a large cost to emigration - the DMV would have to be pretty bad before you moved to Missouri or New Zealand - which leads to Coasian non-global optima in the quality of policy and services. This is discussed in the previous post in the context of charter cities. Charter cities are arguably another solution to this problem. The idea is to apply putatively more effective laws from another polity in a small enough chunk of territory that people in surrounding polities would have a realistic choice of where to work and do business (the model being Hong Kong of course).

A final problem regarding the brute fact that governments are based on the physical control of territory, and here Chairman Mao deserves a point for honesty: these organizations (governments) maintain their monopoly over territory with force, period. Again this is a forced move, since by basing organizations on physical territory and emotional allegiances that can't be opted out of, there are members of the group who are non-voluntary or who are irrational, and who you can't "fire". Hence armies and police. It is likely that the violence institutions will be used to preserve the status quo, so I fully expect that if Thiel et al's seasteading initiative is realized, it will be a few years at most before the nearby country finds an excuse to attack them, likely for trade in something considered contraband in the attacking country (drugs, weapons, gambling, prostitution) and likely in as morally inflammatory a way possible, to engineer sympathies against the seastead. (I'm picturing military units storming the structure and the President at the time reading a statement about child prostitution, or funneling drugs to America's children.) I'm not familiar with the details of the current proposal but I hope they have taken this into account.

Charter Cities and Costs of Emigration

It was in doubt for some time; translated story here. I will be visiting but not living. But I wonder how many libertarian types will even put their money where their mouth is to that degree. Here is an article which points out that even though we now have annual indices of economic freedom by country, at which New Zealand* and Hong Kong frequently beat the U.S., American libertarians do not respond by moving en masse to Auckland (and an economist writes about this here as a revealed preference); further discussion here. Another way to ask this (if you're libertarian) is: when Peter Thiel et al get their seasteading proposal off the ground or at least in the water, would you move? If not, why not?

Charitably, you might say that this hesitance results from there always being a nonzero transaction cost to emigrating. Practically speaking, you are familiar with the customs of your country (not to mention the language), you have a social and professional network, not even mentioning the inescapably human, irrational connection to the land that programmed you in childhood into the adult you became and the utility cost that losing that imposes. There is clearly a Coasian local optimum type-solution operating here.

For that matter, American states differ considerably in their economic freedom too, but again it's still rare for people to in-migrate for abstract economic freedom - I know of exactly one, and that's likely one more than you - even with the cost of migration dramatically lowered. When people in-migrate it's almost always for a concrete opportunity, i.e. a transfer or new job waiting for them.

Rather than highlighting the insincerity of people's convictions about socioeconomic justice, to my mind this only emphasizes the importance of internal self-correction mechanisms. Freedom of movement - "love it or leave it" - will only eliminate severe polity-inflicted-suffering (that tramples on libertarian economic freedom or any other values) that goes above and beyond that considerable barrier. Consider large-scale emigrations in history, and they generally have not been people trying to improve their lives a little. They were escaping wars and famines and genocides and dictatorships, not marginally improving their local economic freedom index.


*RE New Zealand, a young friend just moved there on a whim and within a week he was working (legally) for the government and had met the mayor of Auckland in the course of his job. So I asked him if he'd had to set this all up ahead of time, and his answer was "No. They offer a visa called a working holiday visa to U.S. citizens under 30 years old to come travel and work for up to a year. It is an incredibly easy visa to apply for and get with practically no red tape. We got our visas like nine months ago, and when we got here we didn't have anything set up. You have to apply for your IRD number (SSN equivalent) once you're here and it takes about two weeks to come and then I just signed up for a temp agency and lucked out by finding work really quickly." Now that's a country serious about economic freedom and attracting the right immigrants.

Who Among Us Would Not Say The Same

Cross-posted from my outdoors and trail-running blog.

An interesting short piece at Reason about Gary Johnson:

One of the worst things you can say about Johnson is that he's a little too honest sometimes. Another is that he always seemed to want to be doing something other than campaigning. On Jan. 29, 2012, for instance, Johnson, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney were all working crowds in Florida. On Jan. 28, Gingrich and Romney were working crowds in Florida, and Johnson was hiking in Taos, New Mexico. Can't say as I blame him, but the act of running for president does require a delusional belief in one's own significance that Johnson doesn't seem to hold.

...he does [say] that reaching election day last year "was kind of like being let out of prison."

It's sobering to think that Teddy Roosevelt was able to go camping in Yosemite with John Muir, while he was in office - but if someone is that much of a normal, whole human being today, their chances of getting elected are probably close to zero.

The GOP's Push to Change the World at the State Level

There's been a recent, clear push by the GOP to aggressively focus on social conservative issues at the state level. Sam Brownback's call to do so in Kansas could not have been missed, and quickly we had a restrictive abortion law passed in North Dakota, an abortive tax plan in Louisiana (along with further rumbling about damage to science education), and an attempt to legislate Christianity in North Carolina. Focusing on change at the state level is a smart maneuver for the cast-out GOP, and it's not unprecedented in American political thought. The states (and smaller municipalities) are the laboratories of democracy we have to thank for things like gay marriage, marijuana decriminalization and euthanasia. If we wait for these political footballs to gain traction at the Federal level, they'll never get anywhere.

There are a few incongruities here, not least of which is that so far, the state-level social issues have been those dearest to progressives (and real libertarians); this focus of social cons on social issues is new. At least since 1861. A glance from the map of seceding states to the GOP-voting states in the 2012 election shows an uncanny resemblance, and American libertarians' discussions of "states' rights" are oddly bound up in this history - and serve as a dog whistle to both ends of the political spectrum. And it remains a total mystery to most people (including many libertarians) why it's acceptable for any non-state organization, or even for certain levels of government to take your rights, but not the Federal government. One piece in Reason several years ago, cited here, calls this "inverse state worship". That is: if the U.S. government picks a religion we all have to follow, that's oppression. But if your state does it - well, that's states' rights! Freedom!

Where many of the social experiments that states do have no impact either way on growth, some of those being pushed by social conservatives (particularly regarding science education) promise to have a negative one. Do we think that Brownback, Jindal et al will strengthen, or harm science education and research in their states? And that's one of the main problems with social conservatism - its goals, even when they're expressly declared, are rarely more than just a focus on justifying and extending itself. Ideally these states-as-laboratories experiments, across all parts of the political spectrum, should make measurable predictions about what impact they expect to have in the real world. But as with pundits, politicians aren't in the business of accountability, at least when they can avoid it (which is when we let them). Even if Brownback et al believe that they're doing something more than just manipulating how demographic inputs are read, there will be no feedback loop for their experiment, and in the minds of local electorates the further ruin of the heartland (the cycle of poor investment in education and technology, the crony capitalism instead of real growth, and the focus on social issues that don't matter) will again be seen as the central government's fault - and Kansas can move closer to being America's own Kazakhstan. Fortunately California and New York are here to support them with state-to-state welfare.

First Law Making Drones Illegal for Individuals, Okay For Government

This is also posted at my technology blog, Speculative Nonfiction.

A Senator in New Hampshire - a Republican (more on this below) has proposed a law that would make all aerial photography but government aerial photography illegal.

Francis Fukuyama warned that governments would soon become threatened by this technology, and outlaw it except for their own use in enforcement.

Regarding the New Hampshire Senator's party afiliation: I would like a party that safeguards individual rights, but the GOP is clearly not it at the moment.

"The enforcer class is primarily concerned with itself (see Dorner)"

Please read this great piece by Ian Welsh, the Logic of Surveillance, which contains the statement in the title of this post. What was most disturbing about the Dorner incident was how the police acted out of all proportion to "get him", compared to a threat he might have made against any other professional class. They really didn't make much of an effort to hide the fact that this was a personal vendetta, because Dorner had declared war on police. Certainly when an armed and trained individual declares his intentions to kill human beings, you have to find him and stop him. That said, if Dorner had made threats against lawyers, or dentists, or scientists, certainly there would have been a response, but not the war footing we saw.



What's more, I highly doubt that the public would be as blithely accepting of the collateral damage we experienced in the form of a mother and a mailman being shot because they were driving vaguely similar vehicles.

The full quote that I used from the title is: "The enforcer class is also insular, primarily concerned with itself (see Dorner) and is paid in large part by practical immunity to many laws and a license to abuse ordinary people.) Not being driven primarily by justice and a desire to serve the public and with a code of honor which appears to largely center around self-protection and fraternity within the enforcer class, the enforcers reliability of the enforcers is in question: they are blunt tools and their fear for themselves makes them remarkably inefficient." It bears pointing out that the Blue Wall of Silence is particularly strong in SoCal cities. LAPD is notorious for this from incidents in the 90s, and San Diego's current mayor may be in office largely owing to support from the police union in a close election, since his competitor promised more thorough oversight.

Post Election Priorities

It's been said that there is no liberal or conservative way to pave a road.  Political differences are usually differences of priority or method, rather than absolute ones.  The following are priorities for the U.S. and for California that it seems difficult to argue against.

NATIONAL

- We need a sustainable budget, independent of the current fiscal cliff situation, independent of how we get to that sustainable budget.  This is the single greatest threat to continued American prominence and liberal democracy on Earth.  It's a bridge too far to ask us to reform our tax system to incentivize wealth-building rather than wealth-hiding, and to reward tax-code-jockey attorneys, but we should start thinking about it.  Specifically, people regard taxes as penalties, period.  Start penalizing things you want people to do less of - polluting, crimes, unhealthy behaviors, etc.  (Singapore has used this model successfully for quite a while now, and we seem to think such "social engineering" is okay when it comes to owning homes and marriage.)  In other words, we should stop penalizign earning money and investing.

- Continue the economic and diplomatic pivot to Asia, and focus on containing the remaining threats to liberal democracy and the international order.  The countries which pose the greatest threat on that count, in this order, are Pakistan (which is largely run by extremist Muslims, and has nuclear weapons - how does this escape the notice of hawks?), Iran, and North Korea.  A nuclear weapon built in Pakistan and used by militants will be too late a reminder that the U.S. should not design its foreign policy around oil companies.

- Restructure immigration as recruiting.  Stop letting people in just because their husband is here; make it much easier to get people who have STEM degrees from top universities around the world, otherwise they will continue going to the UK and (increasingly) Asia.  At the same time, we can recognize that there's a legitimate security and economic consideration about the porousness of our border with Mexico that has nothing to do with racism, which unfortunately seems to be what has motivated the most passionate opinions on this issue.  After the election, the GOP has suddenly realized that not every American is a WASP and a reform of their immigration position is necessary.  Let's take advantage of this moment.

- The legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington is a more radical opportunity for local politics than many realize, because it will force a confrontation on state vs Federal rights on this and many other issues.  "Small government" conservatives will either have to get on board with CO and WA's right to do so (and to resist Eric Holder's goons) or stop claiming to be small government conservatives.  Furthermore we might finally understand what on Earth Holder has been doing, alienating some of the Dems' base in these states.  How to make sure it remains legal?  Invite states and localities to tax it, as has been done in Oakland.  They can't chill out every single small business.

- If the Dems are serious about staying partners with business (at least high-tech growth industries) then make a serious, concerted effort at smart regulation.  Yes, this will mean repealing and streamlining many regulations and maybe some departments.  The Obama administration has started to do this quietly but it needs to be much higher-profile to give confidence that it will be meaningful and that it will persist.  Staffing it with subject-matter experts who haven't spent their whole lives inside the Beltway will show seriousness in this regard; this can be done without letting foxes guard henhouses.  The FDA is a perfect place to start; implement some form of Andrew von Eschenbach's suggestion to make drug regulation about taking unsafe drugs off the market, rather than approving them before they can be sold.  (On the other side, the GOP is starting to look more like the party of big-business+government cronyism, and less like the party of capitalism.  Time to fix that before the Democrats take that away too.)


STATE - CALIFORNIA

- We need a balanced, sustainable budget, and that has to mean pension reform, in some form.  Now that the Democrats have a supermajority, we will know if this can be accomplished.  If either party has a supermajority, and can't pass a balanced budget, then California cannot ever pass a balanced budget.  I do not have high hopes for this and think the state government will see tough times before any real reform ever occurs.  We will hear reasons for why it couldn't occur, but the point remains that even with a state-congressional supermajority, they will likely not pass a sustainable budget.  I hope I'm wrong about this.

- Other considerations are secondary.  It would be nice to see gay marriage having official recognition but in a state that's degrading its parks and universities because it doesn't know how to balance a checkbook, such otherwise important questions become ancillary considerations.


CITY - SAN DIEGO

- Is public transportation really that difficult?  Yes, it's damn near impossible to put a real light rail system in (and San Diego doesn't have one) once an area develops, but is a real bus system really that expensive to develop?  My hope is that the local transit systems like UCSD's are putting enough people in place who see the value of one, and will vote accordingly in the future.

- For a California city, San Diego has a curiously unaccountable police department, with questions about officer-involved accidents and shootings often going un-answered.  Curiously in this mayoral election, we had a gay Republican facing a Democrat favored by police.  Filner's administration may not change this.

- If the Chargers want to build a new football stadium, that's fine, but to ask for taxpayer dollars to do it is absolutely unacceptable.  Filner is on record saying he opposes this - let's keep his feet to the fire in case he has some magical change of heart - and in any event, there is no evidence that stadiums help their local areas economically (in actuality they hurt).

The Effectiveness of States over Time, Measured by Language Death

On his Facebook page for Fooled by Randomness, Nicholas Nassim Taleb advances a theory that the rapid expansion of Islam (and Arabic-speakers) in North Africa in the seventh century was aided by a remnant population of Punic (Phoenician) speakers, whose language and culture would be more similar to Arabs than to their other neighbors. This, despite the fact that Carthage had been erased by the Romans in the second century BC, 800 years before; literally delenda, in the words of Scipio Aemilianus. Taleb says:

Many Greek Cypriots still speak the language called "Cypriot Maronite Arabic", that is, 12 centuries after their settlement and integration in the Greek side of the Island. Languages are stickier than we think (People tend to associate languages with states, when the correlation was low before 1917: around the Mediterranean, particularly in Asia Minor, languages had no link to the rule (Armenians spent thousands of years in the area between Cilicia to Aleppo, way past the lifetime of some "Armenian State";etc.).

There's more at the link, where I left a comment that I've expanded into this post. His argument is certainly an interesting parallel to the theory that Hellenistic Alexander unknowingly paved the way in the Near East for early Christianty. But what's really interesting about this is his observation that before the 20th century, state vs language correlation was very low. Something changed to allow states to become more effective at assimilating minorities, linguistic or otherwise, forcibly or otherwise. What was it?

For one thing, authoritarian states prior to the modern era didn't favor the development of patriotism. Why did it matter to autocrats if peasants liked being French or Chinese?   The autocrats and peasants were in different worlds, and the illiterate peasants would spend their entire lives within ten miles of where they were born all their lives, knowing the same hundred people.  In the same way, isolation of rulers from ruled as well as the fact that states didn't really transform the ruled's lives economically or socially, meant that languages and culture persist, despite swapping out rulers that look or talk differently.   Sure, today Spanish has a hard jota and some al- prefices, but that's not much to show for 750 years of Moorish occupation. And how many Mongol words are there in modern Russian? Hardly any, despite 250 years of rule.


Carthage. Ironically, the tourists walking around the ruins are actually walking around the re-built Disneyland-Carthage replacing the one leveled by the Romans - then re-built by the Romans, ironically in part for Roman tourists.

That is not how it works today.  To put it bluntly, Yiddish has largely disappeared from Europe, for obvious reasons.  Why were the Nazis so much faster than than the Moors and the Mongols?  What changed is that in the 20th century, states starting putting in place the tools of the industrial age; not just weapons, but systematic organization and instruction. In the U.S., Native American children were shipped to Catholic schools that methodically removed their native languages from them (this idea in broad outline dates to Jefferson, who like Luther ministering to the Jews, found his disappointment in Indian disinterest in cultural conversion turn to full-on anger). Mass exterminations began, sometimes actually triggered by a spasmodic lurch toward modernity by a centralized authority, as in Turkey and Cambodia, although the latter didn't "disappear" an ethnic minority, but rather a socioeconomic class. Today the Chinese government is quite deliberately overrunning Tibetans and Uighurs with Han families. The power of the state has become much more transformative.  If you're American, ask how many conversations in native languages you've ever heard.  Just over four centuries ago those are the only languages you would have heard.

Whether Taleb's thesis about Punic-speakers' facilitation of Islam is correct, his observation about the relative persistence of culture in the ancient and modern worlds is well-taken. The effectiveness of states - that is, the amplification of ruling classes' ambitions that the technology of modern statehood allows - is not all positive. The Romans may have erased Cartharge but they didn't have the technology or ideas that allowed them to erase their culture. But the social engineers reporting today to Beijing that Lhasa delenda est don't need to signify their subtle conquest with a plow over the city's fallen walls, because success is clear in the measurable dilution of Tibetan culture with modern tools.

Drone Technology: Institutions vs. Individuals

In this wired piece by Chris Anderson on the drone boom, he mentions that hobbyists are currently ahead of militaries. This is good, but not a permanent state of affairs. The clearest threat from drones is not the singularity (yet) but rather a world of ubiquitous surveillance if the drones are only in the hands of states.  Consequently we shouldn't be surprised when the legislatures of the world start making this technology illegal, except of course for state-controlled institutions. Frank Fukuyama, himself a drone enthusiast, has already expressed this concern.  Drone hobbyists would be well-advised to set online news alerts for "legislation" "drone", and organize pre-emptively in anticipation of the inevitable paranoia that politicians will promulgate through the media.

Maybe this is why Anderson's company 3D robotics has its headquarters in San Diego and a new manufacturing center in Tijuana, just across the international border.

Gary Johnson Is Top Civil Liberties Presidential Candidate

So says the ACLU.  Add your support - check him out here.

The Most Literal Sense of Intrusive Government

I try to keep this blog family friendly so you'll have to click through for someone with a very clear, concrete understanding of intrusive government. (More info on the issue here.)

Marijuana Safer Than Tobacco

Marijuana is safer than tobacco, according to this study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), one of the premier peer-reviewed publciations of medical science in the country and world.

Remind me again why we're all paying tax money not only to continue, but intensify strong-arm tactics to put state-legalized entrepreneurs out of business? And where is the party of the free market when we need them? It would be one thing to just be too lazy to repeal the laws and move marijuana off the list of DEA Schedule 1 substances; that would be a sin of omission. But to waste more of everyone's money and attention, when there's more and more information showing this is all a fraud?