In the last post, I wrote about the virtuous cycle of labor gradually getting more valuable, driving the development of machines to extend that value, which in turn makes it more valuable still. This is an example of a potentially useful trick in reasoning about complex systems that avoids a cognitive pitfall.
In a complicated system in equilibrium, it is unlikely that a single element of many in the system could be responsible for a lasting perturbation or evolution to a new equilibrium. That is, reasoning about single-causes unidirectionally affecting the rest of the system is probably not a good way to improve our understanding. It's not like kicking a ball - foot causes ball to move, end of story - which is the way our brains seem to have developed to understand events on the order of a few seconds in the mesoscale world. (Notice even there that the ball moves once, stops, and the phenomenon is over.)
Mutually reinforcing sets of elements within the system are more likely to produce a lasting perturbation, that is, move the system to a new equilibrium. Looking for such reinforcement cycles can get us out of unproductive chicken-and-egg reasoning. Applying the idea to this case, it becomes evident that asking "Was it labor getting cheaper that caused the industrial revolution? Or the other way around?" is simplistic and unlikely to provide a clear and useful answer. It's better to ask, "What are the economic and social elements that reinforced each other in such a way as to produce the industrial revolution?" - along with other elements such as aspects of British culture at that time.
Another example would be the question: "Was increased use of tools and manual dexterity in early human ancestors a result of these ancestors favoring bipedal locomotion? Or the other way around?" They likely reinforced each other, along with other elements; i.e., increased adaptation to the savannah favoring bipedal locomotion to see further and tool use favoring survival in a drier, more open, less calorie-dense environment - et cetera.
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
The Value of Labor Over Time Is Still Increasing Over Time, Even Since the 1980s
As time moved forward, early economists increasingly appreciated the value added by the labor component. In the mid-1700s the physiocrats (like Turgot) thought that the value of land was pretty much the whole story, then a few decades later Smith recognized labor as an equally important component, and a half century after that Marx overshot the mark a bit when he argued that labor was the most important part of the story.
But each position was more correct in its own time, because the value-adding power of labor did increase over time. Economists have wondered why modern capitalism didn't develop in stable earlier market economies like ancient Rome, and the best argument so far is that the institution of slavery meant labor was cheap. As technology improved, so did the value-adding power of labor, and as labor became more valuable, the incentive to develop more technology to amplify labor also grew, in a virtuous cycle (see more about reinforcement cycles in complex systems here.) It's therefore not a surprise that the institution of slavery ended shortly thereafter, first in Britain, and later elsewhere. They couldn't afford to waste labor any longer![1] It's also telling that the natural experiment called the American Civil War - divide a country in half, one half has slavery, one half doesn't - which one develops its industry - and therefore wins when the two collide in war? It also makes sense that the least developed economies would be the ones most likely to persist in permitting slavery, e.g. Mauritania.
Many economists have also argued that starting in the early 1970s, the West had a technological and/or economic stagnation, and showed that the share of labor in the economy has been declining since then. The worry is that enough capital has accumulated that it has overtaken labor as the most meaningful input, and did not do so earlier because of world wars. This dominance of the capital component is the central concern of Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in which he describes the growing divide between those who rely on income (most of us) and those who rely on capital accumulation (the very rich.)
But it's quite natural to wonder whether a lot of the return to labor is hidden, for instance in the accumulated wealth of high-value laborers - i.e., I don't think Peter Thiel or Bill Gates worry about their salary. This is why a new paper by Eisfeldt, Falato and Xiaolan (h/t Marginal Revolution) is very encouraging. Taking into account equity awarded as compensation to highly skilled labor, the apparent decline in labor share evaporates.
I would expect that there is still further hidden value accrued to labor and this paper has found only part of it.
[1] As a pointed aside: For those who point out (correctly) that most abolitionists were Christians and claim that the end of slavery was driven by morality rather than materialist considerations: the tacit acknowledgement of slavery in the Bible a big problem for this hypothesis, let alone the whole history of Christianity before the Enlightenment and industrial revolution when Christians had eighteen centuries to figure out slavery was wrong, but did not.
But each position was more correct in its own time, because the value-adding power of labor did increase over time. Economists have wondered why modern capitalism didn't develop in stable earlier market economies like ancient Rome, and the best argument so far is that the institution of slavery meant labor was cheap. As technology improved, so did the value-adding power of labor, and as labor became more valuable, the incentive to develop more technology to amplify labor also grew, in a virtuous cycle (see more about reinforcement cycles in complex systems here.) It's therefore not a surprise that the institution of slavery ended shortly thereafter, first in Britain, and later elsewhere. They couldn't afford to waste labor any longer![1] It's also telling that the natural experiment called the American Civil War - divide a country in half, one half has slavery, one half doesn't - which one develops its industry - and therefore wins when the two collide in war? It also makes sense that the least developed economies would be the ones most likely to persist in permitting slavery, e.g. Mauritania.
Many economists have also argued that starting in the early 1970s, the West had a technological and/or economic stagnation, and showed that the share of labor in the economy has been declining since then. The worry is that enough capital has accumulated that it has overtaken labor as the most meaningful input, and did not do so earlier because of world wars. This dominance of the capital component is the central concern of Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in which he describes the growing divide between those who rely on income (most of us) and those who rely on capital accumulation (the very rich.)
But it's quite natural to wonder whether a lot of the return to labor is hidden, for instance in the accumulated wealth of high-value laborers - i.e., I don't think Peter Thiel or Bill Gates worry about their salary. This is why a new paper by Eisfeldt, Falato and Xiaolan (h/t Marginal Revolution) is very encouraging. Taking into account equity awarded as compensation to highly skilled labor, the apparent decline in labor share evaporates.
I would expect that there is still further hidden value accrued to labor and this paper has found only part of it.
[1] As a pointed aside: For those who point out (correctly) that most abolitionists were Christians and claim that the end of slavery was driven by morality rather than materialist considerations: the tacit acknowledgement of slavery in the Bible a big problem for this hypothesis, let alone the whole history of Christianity before the Enlightenment and industrial revolution when Christians had eighteen centuries to figure out slavery was wrong, but did not.
Saturday, April 20, 2019
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'
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.
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.
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Evidence for Coordinated Labor in Agriculture Hypothesis of Early State Formation (CLAHSF)
Early states tended to emerge in places that were actually somewhat marginal for agriculture, quite counterintuitively. (Most recent discussion here.) When combined with the example of China (which is not at all marginal for agriculture), the connecting argument that emerges is that states appear where central coordination of labor is required for agriculture, there is a benefit to population, and a centrally organized society develops. This can occur either because of marginal conditions (e.g. timing the flooding of a river surrounded by a vast desert) or difficult crops that require more central coordination, e.g., rice. Conversely, in places where the land easily produces calories, there is little benefit to central coordination, as dissatisfied "citizens" can easily refuse to cooperate and move away, and not lose any benefit in terms of population growth.
One way to test this would be to look at political stability within an early state - within a single early state - and how stability correlates with agriculture-favoring (or -disfavoring) climate changes. This hypothesis (CLAHSF) would be falsified if improved conditions outside the central areas of a state improved state stability, and if worsened conditions outside the central area de-stabilized the state. Ola Olsson from the University of Gothenburg shows that in fact, when the ancient Egyptian "hinterlands" received better rainfall (which improved agriculture in a desert climate), there was a delayed de-stabilizing effect on the Egyptian state, "since the decline in effective circumscription provides the farming population with an outside option in the hinterland."
Ola Olsson (University of Gothenburg), "Pharaoh's Cage: Environmental Circumscription and Appropriability in Early State Development", IAST General Seminar, Toulouse: IAST, March 29, 2019, 11:30–12:30, room MF323.
One way to test this would be to look at political stability within an early state - within a single early state - and how stability correlates with agriculture-favoring (or -disfavoring) climate changes. This hypothesis (CLAHSF) would be falsified if improved conditions outside the central areas of a state improved state stability, and if worsened conditions outside the central area de-stabilized the state. Ola Olsson from the University of Gothenburg shows that in fact, when the ancient Egyptian "hinterlands" received better rainfall (which improved agriculture in a desert climate), there was a delayed de-stabilizing effect on the Egyptian state, "since the decline in effective circumscription provides the farming population with an outside option in the hinterland."
Ola Olsson (University of Gothenburg), "Pharaoh's Cage: Environmental Circumscription and Appropriability in Early State Development", IAST General Seminar, Toulouse: IAST, March 29, 2019, 11:30–12:30, room MF323.
Thursday, March 21, 2019
The Three Ways of Dealing with Outsiders: Sub-Humans, Ignorance, or Evangelism
Humans have so far fully developed only three ways of dealing with outsiders:
You can be perceived as an outsider because you are of a different ethnic group, political system or party, or religion, among other things, whether or not your behavior actually does differ. This seems to offer hope, in case the perceived differences can be found to be mere labels with no real differences in behavior. But that is not always, or even usually, the case. It's not just perception; there are morally important differences. Either a man laying with another man is moral, or it is not. Either violently taking property from the bourgeoisie is moral, or it is not. Either honor killings are moral, or they are not. And inspired by an example from Robert Frank's Choosing the Right Pond: either it is okay to eat ponies, or it is not. It is very difficult to see what a mutually beneficial coexistence might be for people with conflicting views of these things.
We have now arrived at the central problem, which goes as follows.
a) There are genuine differences between groups of humans in moral behavior
b) This forces a choice as to whether morality extends to a morally different group or not
c) If we are living with a morally different group, they may not want your morality extended to them; if you don't extend your morality to them, you are implying that they are not human.
This is a dismal hypothesis, as these three ways are obviously sub-optimal for human dignity and the functioning of a modern multi-ethnic state, so it is imperative that we understand them, and possibly find new ones.
This could be called either the triune theory of moral resolution, or ISE (sounds like "ice" - for Ignorance, Sub-humans, and Evangelism.) They are as follows.
1. Ignorance - for most of the lifespan of our species, humans have lived in small hunter-gatherer groups. Consequently we were spared from having to deal with outsiders. Even if you know they exist, if you don't have to interact with them, then you don't care that much how they behave. You might still interact with them minimally, transactionally, through trade* - often on neutral ground, and possibly not even sharing a common language. (When we behave transactionally, we're calculating and not engaging most of our social cognition.) They don't sleep in your territory and don't eat at your table, or only in settings which are carefully controlled by the tribe or state and prevent extensive contact between populations. This "non-strategy" is what obtained throughout all of pre-history, but starting in the Neolithic this strategy was no longer stable, as some populations began to expand into their neighbors' territories.
2. Sub-humans - unfortunately, the easy and automatic response when you live around people morally different from you is to consider them sub-humans. There is a wide spectrum of how we do this in terms of active, conscious malice. Starting on the more malicious end: you might outright condemn them as filthy animals and sometimes even actively exterminate them. You might just keep them sequestered in ghettoes or certain roles where they can't contaminate the rest of society. There might be a split between upper and lower classes of the dominant group, with the upper classes not worrying much about the sub-humans as long as they stay in their undesirable roles, and the lower class much more resentful, since they sometimes have to work alongside the sub-humans and their own jobs are more threatened by the sub-humans. You might appear to tolerate them because you aren't overly bothered by them, but it's only because the gentiles are dirty and going to hell anyway (or whatever the local terminology is) and you just accept that they can't help themselves. (Minorities with moral codes differing from the majority often take this last position of feigning tolerance and just keeping to themselves, as they're forced to do so if they're not going to agree that they themselves are in fact the sub-humans, and the other options aren't open to them - they're in no position to be exterminating anyone else.)
Most subtly and softly, as is often the case in modern states - you might even be horrified at the suggestion that you're capable of this - but there are groups of people in your society for whom you've drastically lowered your expectations. The Ottoman strategy of governing people, allowing a multi-confessional empire, seems quite modern in some ways - but I'm sure most people in the capital didn't regard with admiration the pork-eating Christians they allowed confessional self-governance. You may even have caught yourself, in the pony-eating example above, finding reasons to excuse the pony-eaters from full moral evaluation, though I doubt if you were told you were invited to a pony-eating party you would be excited.
We also sometimes categorize people in our own society as sub-human, usually based on class. The upper classes do this with the lower classes to explain why they "under-perform" (but might also try to evangelize them about how to improve, i.e., be more like the upper class.) The lower classes do this to the upper class to explain why the upper class has more money - it's not because they're better, it's because they're immoral, engaging in bizarre practices behind closed doors, and they have lots of dealings with dirty foreigners. The lower class of a dominant group rarely evangelizes the upper class, because this exposes that the lower class in the end would actually want to join the upper class, and exposes their self-comforting fiction.
Because moral rules sometimes place inconvenient restrictions on economics, multiple times throughout history conventions have evolved where a sub-human outsider is actually employed to perform morality-violating acts. (E.g., shabbas goys who tend fires on the sabbath, or eta in Japan. How exactly the employer or trading partner avoids naughty-points for this is quite mysterious.)
In some cases sub-humanism can be "escaped" by assimilation, which requires both the desire of those considered sub-human to be accepted by those considering them sub-human, and those considering them sub-human to want them to escape. This seems like evangelism (see below), but the difference is that there is no open recognition of the former sub-humans having joined the dominant group; indeed after the fact, they're loathe to note that there was ever anything different about them in the first place.
As mentioned, sub-humanism is the default option when morally differing people move out of the "ignorance" category, and this transition is all too easy. Very often this is discovered by traders who have overstayed their welcome. In the current populist surge, we are witnessing discussion of "globalists" now, either outsiders, or people tainted by outsiders through business loyalties. Persian merchants were slaughtered during the Guangzhou massacre for explicitly this reason. The Dutch merchants living near Nagasaki during the Tokugawa Shogunate never made the ignorance-to-subhuman transition because the Shogun kept them sequestered on an island, consistent with state practices that repeatedly appeared in history to keep the population ignorant.
3. Evangelism - This is a more difficult strategy in the sense that it is not innate to humans, but it has been very effective for expanding empires that aim to retain stability. In this strategy, you recognize your neighbors as human - and want to help them! (To avoid Hell, become more economically successful, etc.) So you Christianize them, or send advisors to make them more capitalist/communist, or otherwise "civilize" them in general, etc. Witness Thomas Jefferson's well-meaning attempts to civilize native Americans, the British white man's burden to educate and develop Africa, and communists' attempts to export revolution. (Reading about Che Guevara's frustrations in Bolivia or the Congo, you could almost do a find-and-replace with Thomas Jefferson's irritation with assimilation-resistant native Americans, or anyone working in an NGO in the Muslim parts of the developing world.) Compare the non-evangelical religions to the evangelical ones (better-adapted ones which appeared later in history) and note how they emphasize brotherhood in the faith over national origin. Obviously none of these were done with purely altruistic motives, but the impulse to assimilate rather than exterminate is on plain display.
If this strategy is made to work, it is dramatically successful - witness the success of the Roman Empire, the United States, Christianity, and Islam - although often the evangelized don't want to be assimilated (but that's just because they're incorrigible sub-humans, off with their heads!) This mode can fail as well - when Jews in Spain were forced to convert to Christianity after the final departure of the Moors, this wasn't satisfactory to the rest of the population, who could never be convinced that the conversos were not underneath their baptisms still sub-humans (and the more attempts to convince that the conversion was true, the more outraged the mobs became.) The populism in twenty-first century America is a turn from evangelism as well - from the ideal of the melting pot, to anger that too many foreigners are polluting the creed and are still, underneath their iPhones and Starbucks, sub-humans.
There are instructive differences between states that otherwise seem to have some of the same sorts of beliefs, but where one is more clearly evangelizing than the other. One example is the differences between the Soviet Union and modern China. The USSR was trying to export revolution, because (besides of course strategic reasons) they believed in the universality of communism. China has quickly regressed to the historical mean, and is concerned about their territory, and Chinese people, full stop, even producing tracts on the genetic superiority of the Han - but they don't seem to care much whether the people in Africa for whom they're building roads and stadiums agree. (When ethnic supremacy doctrines are espoused, a tribe or nation is lauding its own immutable and unobtainable heritage, a sure sign of the sub-human strategy instead of evangelism.)
Can There Be Any Solution?
The hypothesis can seem worrisome in the sense of unfalsifiability. It's tempting to play the game of putting every interaction between morally differing people into one of the three boxes - "Are you aware of their existence? You're not ignorant of them then. Do you think what they're doing is wrong, or not care? You consider them sub-humans. Do you want to help them? You're evangelizing." Indeed, most such interactions really do fit.
But we will hopefully never go back to being ten thousand disconnected tribes, able to ignore each other's differences. The way forward will likely depend on the aforementioned sometimes-present gap between perception and reality. In some cases, the perceived differences are not real concrete differences in behavior. For example: the country you live in predicts your moral sense better than your religion. You may claim you share convictions with Muslims or Christians, but your behavior is more likely to resemble your neighbor from another religion than it is someone in a developing country of your religion. I was struck by this when looking at examples of surveys of Christians and atheists in the United States. With rare exceptions, they make the same moral choices in the same situations. It's not just the cliche of focusing on similarities over differences; rather, we need to focus on the concrete outcomes of beliefs. What do our moral convictions actually make us do? If we do the same things for the same reasons, and we're all aiming for a world with more human flourishing, then that makes living together much easier. This approach (of actually dissecting the effects of beliefs) has really only begun in earnest in the past few decades, and it may be a fourth way. My hope is that the people and nations that are able to make this work, in at least part of their populations, will out-compete the other models, just as the evangelism strategy out-competed sub-humanism. I think explicit reasoning about and repudiation of slavery, and later racism, is one such example, although the increasing value of labor certainly helped (both ability to reason morally and increasing value of labor were themselves both products of increasing rationality, i.e. the Enlightenment.) Very metropolitan trade-oriented cities may also be early examples of the fourth way - trade cities on ports have long been thought of as more "relaxed" culturally than the hinterlands around them. I submit that they are not "less moral", nor are they evangelical places, but rather they're necessarily consequentialist. Ironically, it's precisely the transactionalism of New York or London that have driven this; thinking more abstractly about actual effects of behavior prevented conflict between traders during the "ignorance" mode, and it can (and is) again. Voltaire recognized the emergence of such a system of coexistence when he said
In one sense, this approaches the voluntary ideal. That said, it may be that the only solution to coexisting with people who perceive genuine moral differences is to limit the interaction in this way. And this does seem much better than sub-humanism or assimilation. In cases where concrete moral actions really do differ and people must live intimately together (especially with very limited resources), I have no solution. This should be added to the list of political science problems, along with how to organize a truly voluntary state that is not determined by physical territory (see also here.)
*A complicating observation of tribes (usually not nations) who are mostly ignorant of each other is that one of the "interactions" can be warfare. In traditional tribal warfare, there are ceremonies, there are few casualties relative to what might otherwise have occurred given the technology available, and there are agreed-upon conventions: we don't fight each other when it's raining because our warpaint runs off; we stand in order lines and kneel and fire our muskets because only cowards hide behind trees like savages; etc. (See the Aztec Flower Wars for a well-documented example.) Every so often we witnessed a sudden transition from traditional to modern warfare, with a disregard of previous conventions and much higher casualties (or even extermination; see here for discussion of this in Iroquois and Mongols) that in this framework represents a transition to sub-humanism. As with trade, in traditional warfare, you remain basically ignorant of the other tribe because you have very limited "interaction" with them. The complication is that clearly there must be some cultural norms shared between the two tribes for this arrangement to occur, although again, interaction is quite limited other than at the highest level of the tribe or state.
- remaining ignorant of them (or feigning ignorance)
- considering them sub-humans and acting maliciously or merely neglecting them
- evangelizing and assimilating them
You can be perceived as an outsider because you are of a different ethnic group, political system or party, or religion, among other things, whether or not your behavior actually does differ. This seems to offer hope, in case the perceived differences can be found to be mere labels with no real differences in behavior. But that is not always, or even usually, the case. It's not just perception; there are morally important differences. Either a man laying with another man is moral, or it is not. Either violently taking property from the bourgeoisie is moral, or it is not. Either honor killings are moral, or they are not. And inspired by an example from Robert Frank's Choosing the Right Pond: either it is okay to eat ponies, or it is not. It is very difficult to see what a mutually beneficial coexistence might be for people with conflicting views of these things.
We have now arrived at the central problem, which goes as follows.
a) There are genuine differences between groups of humans in moral behavior
b) This forces a choice as to whether morality extends to a morally different group or not
c) If we are living with a morally different group, they may not want your morality extended to them; if you don't extend your morality to them, you are implying that they are not human.
This is a dismal hypothesis, as these three ways are obviously sub-optimal for human dignity and the functioning of a modern multi-ethnic state, so it is imperative that we understand them, and possibly find new ones.
| Name of strategy | Ignorance | Sub-humans | Evangelize | |
| Interaction | Trade, at most* | Living with | ||
| Underlying strategy | (no strategy) | Degrade | Assimilate | |
This could be called either the triune theory of moral resolution, or ISE (sounds like "ice" - for Ignorance, Sub-humans, and Evangelism.) They are as follows.
1. Ignorance - for most of the lifespan of our species, humans have lived in small hunter-gatherer groups. Consequently we were spared from having to deal with outsiders. Even if you know they exist, if you don't have to interact with them, then you don't care that much how they behave. You might still interact with them minimally, transactionally, through trade* - often on neutral ground, and possibly not even sharing a common language. (When we behave transactionally, we're calculating and not engaging most of our social cognition.) They don't sleep in your territory and don't eat at your table, or only in settings which are carefully controlled by the tribe or state and prevent extensive contact between populations. This "non-strategy" is what obtained throughout all of pre-history, but starting in the Neolithic this strategy was no longer stable, as some populations began to expand into their neighbors' territories.
2. Sub-humans - unfortunately, the easy and automatic response when you live around people morally different from you is to consider them sub-humans. There is a wide spectrum of how we do this in terms of active, conscious malice. Starting on the more malicious end: you might outright condemn them as filthy animals and sometimes even actively exterminate them. You might just keep them sequestered in ghettoes or certain roles where they can't contaminate the rest of society. There might be a split between upper and lower classes of the dominant group, with the upper classes not worrying much about the sub-humans as long as they stay in their undesirable roles, and the lower class much more resentful, since they sometimes have to work alongside the sub-humans and their own jobs are more threatened by the sub-humans. You might appear to tolerate them because you aren't overly bothered by them, but it's only because the gentiles are dirty and going to hell anyway (or whatever the local terminology is) and you just accept that they can't help themselves. (Minorities with moral codes differing from the majority often take this last position of feigning tolerance and just keeping to themselves, as they're forced to do so if they're not going to agree that they themselves are in fact the sub-humans, and the other options aren't open to them - they're in no position to be exterminating anyone else.)
Most subtly and softly, as is often the case in modern states - you might even be horrified at the suggestion that you're capable of this - but there are groups of people in your society for whom you've drastically lowered your expectations. The Ottoman strategy of governing people, allowing a multi-confessional empire, seems quite modern in some ways - but I'm sure most people in the capital didn't regard with admiration the pork-eating Christians they allowed confessional self-governance. You may even have caught yourself, in the pony-eating example above, finding reasons to excuse the pony-eaters from full moral evaluation, though I doubt if you were told you were invited to a pony-eating party you would be excited.
We also sometimes categorize people in our own society as sub-human, usually based on class. The upper classes do this with the lower classes to explain why they "under-perform" (but might also try to evangelize them about how to improve, i.e., be more like the upper class.) The lower classes do this to the upper class to explain why the upper class has more money - it's not because they're better, it's because they're immoral, engaging in bizarre practices behind closed doors, and they have lots of dealings with dirty foreigners. The lower class of a dominant group rarely evangelizes the upper class, because this exposes that the lower class in the end would actually want to join the upper class, and exposes their self-comforting fiction.
Because moral rules sometimes place inconvenient restrictions on economics, multiple times throughout history conventions have evolved where a sub-human outsider is actually employed to perform morality-violating acts. (E.g., shabbas goys who tend fires on the sabbath, or eta in Japan. How exactly the employer or trading partner avoids naughty-points for this is quite mysterious.)
In some cases sub-humanism can be "escaped" by assimilation, which requires both the desire of those considered sub-human to be accepted by those considering them sub-human, and those considering them sub-human to want them to escape. This seems like evangelism (see below), but the difference is that there is no open recognition of the former sub-humans having joined the dominant group; indeed after the fact, they're loathe to note that there was ever anything different about them in the first place.
As mentioned, sub-humanism is the default option when morally differing people move out of the "ignorance" category, and this transition is all too easy. Very often this is discovered by traders who have overstayed their welcome. In the current populist surge, we are witnessing discussion of "globalists" now, either outsiders, or people tainted by outsiders through business loyalties. Persian merchants were slaughtered during the Guangzhou massacre for explicitly this reason. The Dutch merchants living near Nagasaki during the Tokugawa Shogunate never made the ignorance-to-subhuman transition because the Shogun kept them sequestered on an island, consistent with state practices that repeatedly appeared in history to keep the population ignorant.
3. Evangelism - This is a more difficult strategy in the sense that it is not innate to humans, but it has been very effective for expanding empires that aim to retain stability. In this strategy, you recognize your neighbors as human - and want to help them! (To avoid Hell, become more economically successful, etc.) So you Christianize them, or send advisors to make them more capitalist/communist, or otherwise "civilize" them in general, etc. Witness Thomas Jefferson's well-meaning attempts to civilize native Americans, the British white man's burden to educate and develop Africa, and communists' attempts to export revolution. (Reading about Che Guevara's frustrations in Bolivia or the Congo, you could almost do a find-and-replace with Thomas Jefferson's irritation with assimilation-resistant native Americans, or anyone working in an NGO in the Muslim parts of the developing world.) Compare the non-evangelical religions to the evangelical ones (better-adapted ones which appeared later in history) and note how they emphasize brotherhood in the faith over national origin. Obviously none of these were done with purely altruistic motives, but the impulse to assimilate rather than exterminate is on plain display.
If this strategy is made to work, it is dramatically successful - witness the success of the Roman Empire, the United States, Christianity, and Islam - although often the evangelized don't want to be assimilated (but that's just because they're incorrigible sub-humans, off with their heads!) This mode can fail as well - when Jews in Spain were forced to convert to Christianity after the final departure of the Moors, this wasn't satisfactory to the rest of the population, who could never be convinced that the conversos were not underneath their baptisms still sub-humans (and the more attempts to convince that the conversion was true, the more outraged the mobs became.) The populism in twenty-first century America is a turn from evangelism as well - from the ideal of the melting pot, to anger that too many foreigners are polluting the creed and are still, underneath their iPhones and Starbucks, sub-humans.
There are instructive differences between states that otherwise seem to have some of the same sorts of beliefs, but where one is more clearly evangelizing than the other. One example is the differences between the Soviet Union and modern China. The USSR was trying to export revolution, because (besides of course strategic reasons) they believed in the universality of communism. China has quickly regressed to the historical mean, and is concerned about their territory, and Chinese people, full stop, even producing tracts on the genetic superiority of the Han - but they don't seem to care much whether the people in Africa for whom they're building roads and stadiums agree. (When ethnic supremacy doctrines are espoused, a tribe or nation is lauding its own immutable and unobtainable heritage, a sure sign of the sub-human strategy instead of evangelism.)
Can There Be Any Solution?
The hypothesis can seem worrisome in the sense of unfalsifiability. It's tempting to play the game of putting every interaction between morally differing people into one of the three boxes - "Are you aware of their existence? You're not ignorant of them then. Do you think what they're doing is wrong, or not care? You consider them sub-humans. Do you want to help them? You're evangelizing." Indeed, most such interactions really do fit.
But we will hopefully never go back to being ten thousand disconnected tribes, able to ignore each other's differences. The way forward will likely depend on the aforementioned sometimes-present gap between perception and reality. In some cases, the perceived differences are not real concrete differences in behavior. For example: the country you live in predicts your moral sense better than your religion. You may claim you share convictions with Muslims or Christians, but your behavior is more likely to resemble your neighbor from another religion than it is someone in a developing country of your religion. I was struck by this when looking at examples of surveys of Christians and atheists in the United States. With rare exceptions, they make the same moral choices in the same situations. It's not just the cliche of focusing on similarities over differences; rather, we need to focus on the concrete outcomes of beliefs. What do our moral convictions actually make us do? If we do the same things for the same reasons, and we're all aiming for a world with more human flourishing, then that makes living together much easier. This approach (of actually dissecting the effects of beliefs) has really only begun in earnest in the past few decades, and it may be a fourth way. My hope is that the people and nations that are able to make this work, in at least part of their populations, will out-compete the other models, just as the evangelism strategy out-competed sub-humanism. I think explicit reasoning about and repudiation of slavery, and later racism, is one such example, although the increasing value of labor certainly helped (both ability to reason morally and increasing value of labor were themselves both products of increasing rationality, i.e. the Enlightenment.) Very metropolitan trade-oriented cities may also be early examples of the fourth way - trade cities on ports have long been thought of as more "relaxed" culturally than the hinterlands around them. I submit that they are not "less moral", nor are they evangelical places, but rather they're necessarily consequentialist. Ironically, it's precisely the transactionalism of New York or London that have driven this; thinking more abstractly about actual effects of behavior prevented conflict between traders during the "ignorance" mode, and it can (and is) again. Voltaire recognized the emergence of such a system of coexistence when he said
Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son's foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn't understand mumbled over the child, others go to heir church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.You might object that a transactional relationship is not a full one, and you would be correct. Here we can take advantage of the millions of people who we live among in the modern age - you don't have to interact with every single member of your society, and the ones you choose to interact with, you choose at what level you do.
In one sense, this approaches the voluntary ideal. That said, it may be that the only solution to coexisting with people who perceive genuine moral differences is to limit the interaction in this way. And this does seem much better than sub-humanism or assimilation. In cases where concrete moral actions really do differ and people must live intimately together (especially with very limited resources), I have no solution. This should be added to the list of political science problems, along with how to organize a truly voluntary state that is not determined by physical territory (see also here.)
*A complicating observation of tribes (usually not nations) who are mostly ignorant of each other is that one of the "interactions" can be warfare. In traditional tribal warfare, there are ceremonies, there are few casualties relative to what might otherwise have occurred given the technology available, and there are agreed-upon conventions: we don't fight each other when it's raining because our warpaint runs off; we stand in order lines and kneel and fire our muskets because only cowards hide behind trees like savages; etc. (See the Aztec Flower Wars for a well-documented example.) Every so often we witnessed a sudden transition from traditional to modern warfare, with a disregard of previous conventions and much higher casualties (or even extermination; see here for discussion of this in Iroquois and Mongols) that in this framework represents a transition to sub-humanism. As with trade, in traditional warfare, you remain basically ignorant of the other tribe because you have very limited "interaction" with them. The complication is that clearly there must be some cultural norms shared between the two tribes for this arrangement to occur, although again, interaction is quite limited other than at the highest level of the tribe or state.
Sunday, March 17, 2019
A Morbid Calculation: Conquest Rate of the Americas and Cultural Assimilation Rates
The first European set foot on what would later become the United States in 1513. The last uncontacted indigenous person was captured in 1911. Many people are familiar with the story of Ishi; the picture above is of the monument commemorating the place in Oroville, California where he came under the power of European-descended people. (Image credit to Ray_Explores on Flickr.) This marker commemorates not just Ishi, but the date and place at which an entire nation's worth of indigenous people had finally been completely assimilated or exterminated - on August 29, 1911.
If taken in terms of territory, if it's just a linear expansion of a certain amount per unit time, then the annual expansion was 9,450 sq mi (24,729 km^2) per year; meaning a square of land about 98 miles (157 km) on a side. If we break it down to the day, then the U.S. was taking 26 sq mi per day (blocks 5.1 miles on a side.) Given the average American County size, that means every 46.5 days (about a month and a half) the U.S. was taking a county's worth of land in our march to manifest destiny. (I realize it didn't happen this smoothly but it gives us an idea.)
If we go by percent expansion (the more land you already got, the faster you get more), and we assume Ponce de Leon's camp when he landed was a square a hundredth of a mile on a side, then Europeans expanded at an average annual rate of 6.31%. Again, assuming this was a completely smooth process just for visualization purposes, that means the last year the US would have added territory equal to an area bigger than California but smaller than Texas. If going down to the day, the day Ishi was captured/gave himself up the US added half a county's worth of land.
But people are what we're most interested in here, and in human terms, the annualized assimilation rate for the United States of 4.1% over those 398 years. Obviously the size of the territory matters; to get a second data set to investigate territory size effects, I tried to find a similar event in the history of Canada but could not. With more than one country, we could get an idea of how the territory affects the rate.
Although it's not a conquest in the same way, it's been noted that the time for Germanic people to take over the Western Roman Empire was about six centuries, which corresponds to a 2.45% annualized rate of assimilation. In territory, in linear terms it's more than seven times slower, gaining 1,292 sq mi/year (an area 35.9 miles on a side.) In percentage terms, it's a 3.89% annual increase, using the same assumptions, i.e. same starting area, except this time it's a camp in the Black Forest instead of the Florida Coast. This is to be expected given that transportation was not as good and the technology gap between the Germanic tribes and the Romans was not nearly as great as between Europeans and North Americans; same people have likened colonization to being invaded by people from 4,000 years in the future.
Saturday, March 9, 2019
How Do People Decide Which Experts to Trust?
A summary of the aim of modern propaganda is this: dictators don't do propaganda so people believe something but so they believe nothing. And more importantly, do nothing. In a modern society, no one individual is in a position to evaluate every scientific, medical, or political claim we hear, so we rely on experts. A central technique for saboteurs of public discourse is to undermine confidence in experts. It's therefore important to understand how people actually evaluate experts.
Hendriks, Kienhues and Bromme (2015) use the Muenster Epistemic Trustworthiness Inventory and show that people's evaluations are affected by three considerations: level of expertise, integrity, and benevolence. People are predisposed to discount any expert opinion that conflicts with their chosen moral authority. Consequently, it's not surprising that efforts to undermine experts frequently focus on integrity ("They're shills/they're only in it for the money" etc.)
This is an important tool not only for understanding propaganda attacks from Russia and other governments, but critically analyzing our own responses to expert opinions, especially ones we're inclined to disagree with. It also provides a way to understand why someone might listen to a celebrity instead of a scientist, if the belief in integrity and benevolence outweighs the expertise factor.
Hendriks F, Kienhues D, Bromme R (2015) Measuring Laypeople’s Trust in Experts in a Digital Age: The Muenster Epistemic Trustworthiness Inventory (METI). PLoS ONE 10(10): e0139309. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0139309
Hendriks, Kienhues and Bromme (2015) use the Muenster Epistemic Trustworthiness Inventory and show that people's evaluations are affected by three considerations: level of expertise, integrity, and benevolence. People are predisposed to discount any expert opinion that conflicts with their chosen moral authority. Consequently, it's not surprising that efforts to undermine experts frequently focus on integrity ("They're shills/they're only in it for the money" etc.)
This is an important tool not only for understanding propaganda attacks from Russia and other governments, but critically analyzing our own responses to expert opinions, especially ones we're inclined to disagree with. It also provides a way to understand why someone might listen to a celebrity instead of a scientist, if the belief in integrity and benevolence outweighs the expertise factor.
Hendriks F, Kienhues D, Bromme R (2015) Measuring Laypeople’s Trust in Experts in a Digital Age: The Muenster Epistemic Trustworthiness Inventory (METI). PLoS ONE 10(10): e0139309. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0139309
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