Books

Polystate, part 2

Rick Weber Books, Law , , , , , , , ,

After much distraction I’m back to continue my review of Polystate: A Thought Experiment in Distributed Government (part 1 is here). But now that I think about it, this isn’t so much a review, as a book club (of one…) where I respond to the book.

In this section, ZW gets into the benefits of polystates. He starts with the benefit of choice. Someone born into North Korea is utterly screwed, but someone born into an unattractive anthrostate can simply leave when they reach the age of consent. The reverse is also true: someone may join an anthrostate that the rest of us see as distasteful. Want to join a cult? You’re free to. The thought of that possibility will certainly make your inner-paternalist squeamish, but remember that if you aren’t free to make mistakes, you simply aren’t free.

Another benefit I wouldn’t have thought of is that traditionally problematic systems of government have a higher chance of success when they are separated from geography. For example:

It may be that the failure of collectivization has not got to do with the individual so much as the aggregate. If 95% of people work poorly in a collectivized environment, any random collectivized farm will perform poorly. But it may be the case that 5% of people would excel in such an environment.

I would expect a communist to protest that geographic seclusion is necessary to create New Communist Man. How are people supposed to learn how to shed their egoism if they cannot help but see the vulgar bourgeoisie all around them? But that sword cuts both ways and shows a benefit of polystates ZW didn’t bring up: a child raised in a fascist anthrostate can see non-fascists and so make a more informed decision of whether to stick with fascism when they get older.

ZW sees the polystate as offering a sort of decentralized Tiebout competition. That covers the demand side (what benefits to provide to whom). Adding in the supply side (who will face what opportunity costs) raises the problem of economic calculation in socialism. But ZW takes it in a different direction, hypothesizing that sorting between anthrostates would lessen decision making costs due to more homogeneous populations.

Choice ensures we get more of what we want with less hassle but also provides the option of exit at low cost. Taking geography out of the equation means that there is a larger number of potential state-competitors, as well as more credible movement on the part of citizens.

He raises an interesting problem related to a recent post of mine:

[T]here may be a difference between good governance and governance which pleases one’s constituency… But, regardless of the philosophy of good government, there is an extent to which good governance must have to do with what voluntary citizens decide is good.

First off: No! Government and governance are two different things! But putting that aside, the big problem we face is how to not just aggregate preferences (a difficult problem in itself), but how to ensure that (or even determine if) our method of aggregation results in something good.

I think cable TV is pretty good at giving people what they want, but I also think that the product is overwhelmingly bad. It’s not a big deal with TV because there are so many alternative sources of entertainment and information (although cable news might have existential dangers). Similarly, I think government broadly gives people what they want (not peace and prosperity, but xenophobia, “doing something,” paternalism, and the like) but that’s not a good thing. The idea of the U.S. senate was to prevent people from having too much choice so that good institutions could be preserved. So could the degree of choice offered by polystates be to much? On the other hand, how could you determine an answer without incorporating the revealed preferences of the governed?

Finally, ZW gets into an especially meaty benefit of anthrostates: peace. It’s hard to start a war with a disbursed enemy (“semi-random geographic distribution), and hard to finance one when your citizens can switch to a more peaceful government. This could be especially important in avoiding territory disputes as humans explore and colonize space (for example, if resources on the moon become valuable enough to justify the expense of following Newt Gingrich up there).

That concludes Book 1 of Polystate, and that’s where I’ll stop for now. I’ll be picking through the book fairly slowly, so I recommend that you buy the book for yourself!

A review in n parts: Polystate, part 1

Rick Weber Books, Law , , , , , , ,

Zach Weinersmith of SMBC comics just published Polystate: A Thought Experiment in Distributed Government. I’ve started reading it and immediately needed to start commenting. Before I get into the review, let me say that SMBC comics is an excellent web comic that everyone should read.

The basic idea ZW introduces is the polystate, a system of government comprised of anthrostates. An anthrostate is “a set of laws and institutions that govern the behavior of individuals, but which do not govern a behavior within geographic borders.” It is essentially government that individuals get to choose in the same manner that they get to choose their insurance company; so to neighbors can live under a different set of laws and any disputes between them are a matter for their anthrostates to sort out. At this point you should be thinking: Nozick did it. The idea of a polystate is essentially Nozick’s Utopia of Utopias.

He contrasts poly/anthrostates with geostates, the geographically defined monopolies on the use of force we are used to today. Does it need to be thus?

Why should we suppose that a person who likes hot dogs, is familiar with a two-party electoral system, and believes Abraham Lincoln was a great man is necessarily someone who should live in a temperate climate in the Western hemisphere?… This is not to deny that history and culture and the choices of individuals matter, but rather to assert that many of the “essential” qualities of nationhood are not, in the long run, meaningful ones.

I’ll agree and disagree. These qualities are relevant to some sense of cultural identity, but are not essential for defining the boundaries of a state. This cultural identity is part of the environment of informal institutions, which are part of a broader polycentric order. This is the underpinning of law (the way Hayek characterized it) which is much broader than legislation.

ZW approaches the problem like a mathematician and sets himself up with a hard sell, by assuming there will be a huge need for technological advances to overcome transaction costs. His argument rests largely on technological possibility and is highly concerned with interaction at the anthrostate level.

A polystate would likely increase the complexity of business and legal transaction. In a world with only 200 or so geostates, most commerce is not interstate and even if it were, geometry tells us that the number of possible two-state transactions is given by n(n-1)/2.

Nobody thinks the distribution of such transactions is uniform, and in real life we see a large proportion of international transactions go through countries that specialize in trade. Hong Kong would surely have an anthrostate analog. In fact, there are historical antecedents. He foresees rules being designed at the polystate level to simplify interactions but, “whatever rules were put in place, the results would be too burdensome to exist without a large bureaucracy or some sort of computational way to arbitrate these many interactions.”

The basic flaw in ZW’s approach is that institutions and laws are provided from the state, and so technology is the answer to transaction costs problems. In fact, the issue is that ZW (though he’s not alone on this) wants a change in institutions that will require a new order to emerge. His book will help to peacefully guide the process of societal change towards that new order. Technology will surely play an important role as well.

That gets us through the first four chapters. I will continue with more tomorrow evening.

In response to a comment

Rick Weber Books, Comments, Law, Liberty ,

In response to a comment, here’s an excerpt from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

“But–Professor, what *are* your political beliefs?”
“I’m a rational anarchist.”
“I don’t know that brand. Anarchist individualist, anarchist Communist, Christian anarchist, philosophical anarchist, syndicalist, libertarian–those I know. But what’s this? Randite?”
“I can get along with a Randite. A rational anarchist believe that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame…as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and *nowhere else*. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so
he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world…aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.”
“Hear, hear!” I said. “‘Less than perfect.’ What I’ve been aiming for all my life.”
“You’ve achieved it,” said Wyoh. “Professor, your words sound good but there is something slippery about them. Too much power in the hands of individuals–surely you would not want…well, H-missiles for example–to be controlled by one irresponsible person?”
“My point is that one person *is* responsible. Always. If H-bombs exist–and they do–some *man* controls them. In terms of morals *there is no such thing as ‘state.’* Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts.”
…
Wyoh plowed doggedly into Prof, certain she had all answers.But Prof was interested in questions rather than answers, which baffled her. Finally she said “Professor, I can’t understand you. I don’t insist that you call it ‘government’–I just want you to state what rules you think are necessary to ensure equal freedom for all.”
“Dear lady, I’ll happily accept your rules.”
“But you don’t seem to want *any* rules.”
“True, but I will accept any rules *you* feel necessary to *your* freedom. *I* am free no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I *alone* am morally responsible for everything I do.”
“You would not abide by a law that the majority felt was necessary?”
“Tell me what law, dear lady, and I will tell you whether I will obey it.”
…

Prof bowed and left, Stu and I followed him. Once in an otherwise empty capsule I tackled him. “Prof, I liked much that you said…but about taxation aren’t you going to pay for all this spending we’re doing?”
He was silent long moments, then said, “Manuel, my only ambition is to reach the day when I can stop pretending to be a chief executive.”
“Is no answer!”
“You have put your finger on the dilemma of all government–and the reason I am an anarchist. The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys. I was not joking when I told them to dig into their own pouches. It may not be possible to do away with government–sometimes I think that government is an inescapable disease of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive-and can you think of a better way than by
requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby?”
“Still doesn’t say how to pay for what we are doing now.”
“‘How,’ Manuel? You *know* how we are doing it. We’re *stealing* it. I’m neither proud of it nor ashamed; it’s the means we have. If they ever catch on, they may eliminate us–and that I am prepared to face. At least, in stealing, we have not created the villainous precedent of taxation.”
“Prof, I hate to say this–”
“Then why say it?”
“Because, damn it, I’m in it as deeply as you are…and want to see that money paid back! Hate to say it but what you just said sounds like hypocrisy.”
He chuckled. “Dear Manuel! Has it taken you all these years to decide that I am a hypocrite?”
“Then you admit it?”
“No. But if it makes you feel better to think that I am one, you are welcome to use me as your scapegoat. But I am not a hypocrite to myself because I was aware the day we declared the Revolution that we would need much money and would have to steal it. It did not trouble me because I considered it better than food riots six years hence, cannibalism in eight. I made my choice and have no regrets.”

Pesos, medidas e as instituições

Claudio Shikida Books, Economics , , , , , , , , , , ,

Douglas Allen, em seu ótimo, The Institutional Revolution, defende a tese de que uma revolução institucional teria precedido a famosa revolução industrial. Texto importante, é que, para mim, já é candidato a livro-texto básico de qualquer bom curso de História Econômica.

Como sempre, senti falta de alguma coisa mais, digamos, tropical, no livro. Bom, mas como é que vou cobrar isto de um livro que não se propõe a contar a história das instituições em Portugal? Não posso. Isto é mais uma deixa para os pesquisadores brasileiros. Dica de amigo, quem sabe, para alguém que deseje fazer uma dissertação de mestrado sobre o tema.

Mas eu sou uma pessoa perigosamente curiosa. Fiquei intrigado com a questão dos pesos e medidas. No argumento do autor, a questão dos pesos e medidas, ou melhor, a questão da padronização de pesos e medidas, está diretamente relacionada com a mensuração de produtos, o que gera uma importante alteração nos custos de se trocar mercadorias (ou seja, nos custos de transação). Afinal, nada mais óbvio do que achar mais interessante comprar um quilo de abacate sem levar para casa meio quilo do mesmo.

No caso do Brasil colonial, então, pensei, deveria ser como em Portugal. Para checar isto, consultei este documento. Vejamos alguns trechos:

No que se refere às unidades de medidas adotadas ao longo do período colonial, o quadro não difere, como é natural, daquele oferecido por Portugal. A vara, a canada e o almude constituíam as medidas de uso mais comum, ainda que seu valor pudesse variar de região para região. Os produtos importados traziam consigo suas próprias medidas e, quanto mais geograficamente restrita uma atividade econômica, mais específico era o sistema de medidas utilizado. (…)

Vale dizer: nada muito diferente do restante da Europa.

Assim, a primeira menção expressa à atividade metrológica, em documentos coloniais, refere-se precisamente à fiscalização do funcionamento de mercados locais. Como em Portugal, o funcionário colonial mais diretamente envolvido com a fiscalização de pesos e medidas era o almotacé, mencionado pelas Ordenações Manuelinas e Filipinas e previsto pela organização do município de São Vicente, em 1532. Em número de dois, eleitos mensalmente pela Câmara Municipal, os almotacés tinham como atribuição básica manter o bom funcionamento dos mercados e do abastecimento de gêneros, além de fiscalizar obras e manter a limpeza da cidade. Como parte de suas responsabilidades, deveriam verificar mensalmente, com o escrivão da almotaçaria, os pesos e as medidas. Tal disposição estimulava, dada a dispersão e a diversidade dos municípios, a multiplicação dos padrões de medidas.

Veja só a importância do ofício. Alguém imaginaria que carregar uma régua ou uma fita métrica, hoje em dia, seria uma profissão digna de tanta importância? Bem, numa época em que o governo descobre que medir ajuda a maximizar sua receita, nada mais natural, não? Até eleição para o cargo havia.

No caso dos gêneros estancados ou submetidos a controles mais rígidos, a Coroa cuidava da melhor organização das atividades metrológicas. O estabelecimento do monopólio do tabaco, por exemplo, levou à criação, em 1702, do Juiz da Balança do Tabaco, nas alfândegas de Salvador e Recife. No caso das minas, o regimento do Intendente do Ouro, de 26 de setembro de 1735, mencionava expressamente sua obrigação de manter as balanças e marcos da Intendência aferidos, pesando o ouro corretamente, sem prejuízo das partes nem da Fazenda Real, atribuição expressamente mantida no regimento de 1751.

Como se percebe, a questão institucional é indissociável da questão econômica. Veja aí o depoimento do próprio autor: tem monopólio? Quem é o “dono” do monopólio? A Coroa. Reza o dito popular – e a teoria econômica – que “o olho do dono engorda o cavalo” – e não é diferente neste caso.

Pois bem, falta-nos – alô, colegas de História Econômica! – um estudo mais detalhado do papel dos almotacés (ou me falta mais pesquisa e leitura, vai saber…), não falta? Vou procurar meu exemplar de Fiscais e Meirinhos para rejuvenescer, digamos assim, meu interesse pelo tema.

Novamente, percebemos que a História Econômica não precisa nos dar sono.

Antes do feminismo existe o indivíduo. E o que ele pensa?

Claudio Shikida Books , , , , ,

Outro trecho do ótimo Rational Optimist, do Matt Ridley:

When shown a photograph of an attractive man and asked to write a story about an ideal date with him, a woman will say she is prepared to spend time on conspicuous pro-social volunteering. By contrast, a woman shown a photograph of a street scene and asked to write about ideal weather for being there, shows no such sudden urge to philanthropy. (A man in the same ‘mating-primed’ condition will want to spend more on conspicuous luxuries, or on heroic acts.)

Ou seja, a psicologia evolucionária nos mostra que homens ou mulheres (ou qualquer outra coisa no meio destes dois aí) que pense, não o faz conforme a doce visão romântica e engraçada das crônicas publicadas no jornal de domingo. Não, antes disso, existe um belo de um auto-interesse.

Por exemplo, isso significa que aquela mulherada toda na passeata não pensa apenas em termos benevolentes, sob um suposto “altruísmo” (cuja discussão nos mostra ser um conceito para lá de falho e enganoso…).

Claro, continuo recomendando o livro.

Shopping in communism versus capitalism

Tibor Machan Books, History, Liberty , , , , ,

In a narrative portion of his latest (and characteristically riveting) novel the author has written the following sentence that prompts me to wag my finger at him a bit. “Now it was a Western-style shopping mall stuffed with all the useless trinkets capitalism had to offer…” Daniel Silva, The English Girl (2013). The sentence reveals something very important about capitalism as well as Silva’s apparent failure to understand it.

Silva was contrasting the Soviet style, drab, grey shopping center with the more recent type that have been springing up in Russia and the former Soviet bloc. Yet instead of showing appreciation for the mall with its great variety of trinkets, which include both what he can consider useless and the useful kind, he appears to show disdain for it.

It is precisely the fact that such malls include thousands of trinkets, some useful to some, some not, that makes capitalism so benevolent. Unlike the Soviet Union and its satellites, where only what the leadership deemed to be useful got featured in shopping malls (such as they were), in Western-style malls millions of different individual and family preferences are on display and for sale, aiming to satisfy the huge variety of tastes and preferences.

I recall many moons ago there was a fuss about the popularity of the Pet Rock! It was — may still be — a trinket sold as a novelty item. I remember defending it from its disdainful, snooty critics, arguing that there may well be a few people for whom it would be suitable gift.

Say your grandfather worked in a mine or quarry and now on his 80th birthday you want to get him something not quite useful but meaningful! He has everything useful already, so you pick the Pet Rock for him. It would make a nifty memento! Might even bring tears to his eyes.

For millions of others it would indeed be a “useless trinket” but not for old granddad. And for every other item that author Silva may consider useless, there will be someone who finds it touching!

That is precisely what individualism implies. Something Marxists cannot appreciate since for them only what advances the revolution counts as useful. Individuals as such, with their idiosyncrasies, do not count for anything! And capitalism rejects this misanthropic doctrine, which is why the enormous variety of goods and services is part of it while under socialism and communism only what is proper for the revolution makes sense to produce!

I wish Mr. Silva had indicated some of this as he derided those Western-style shopping malls. Even if he cannot find something useful for himself in them, he can at least appreciate them as contemporary museums of possibilities.

Thank You for Your Patience

Jacques Delacroix Books, Current Events

I am sorry that I am mostly absent from this blog these days. There are several jobs I want to do in connection with a number of important events in the world and of  ignorant comments on his blog.

I am not doing what needs to be done because putting the finishing touches to my manuscript, crossing the Ts, dotting the Ts, eliminating baroque hyphens is unbelievably time consuming.  I have done it before but I had forgotten.

It’s called : I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography

There are unpolished, faulty excerpts of this near-book on this blog.

I still don’t have a publisher. (I have not looked for one.) I listen to advice.

Thanks for your patience.

News you can abuse from the New York Times

muricaderp Books, Economics, History, Links, Religion , , , , , , , , ,

Annoyed New York Times readers are asking why the Gray Lady recently deigned to publish an advice piece on avoiding interpersonal and legal troubles with one’s household staff. I can answer this:

1) A paper must cater to the demographic that actually buys the obscenely overpriced, and roundly obscene, items that it advertises, instead of just staring in amazement that such things exist. The Times’ gleaming new office building across from the Port Authority ain’t paying for itself, now.

You probably are not part of that demographic. When I’m cooking my own quesadillas and potato-onion stirfries in a housekeeping motel in Springfield, Oregon, I most certainly am not.

2) It is excellent click bait and a good business practice to regularly troll the poors.

My main topic tonight, however, is this week’s book review of a new Malthusian work, Countdown, arguing that the world population is overshooting its carrying capacity and nearing a crash.

I definitely find some of the alleged threats in question quite concerning, in particular the brittleness of modern crop monocultures (the Ug99 wheat stem rust is partially contained so far, but it’s no joke) and the depletion of the world’s fisheries. It’s worth noting that that’s why Somalia has so many pirates these days. Somalia has gone a generation without a coast guard. As a result, it has practically no fishery left, foreign trawlers having effectively strip-mined it in the absence of any functioning sovereign government, but as Captain Philips could tell you, it is a nation (if that) lately renowned for its fishers of men. Notice, too, that Iceland, settled by Vikings, does not have pirates or an extremist sectarian militia but does have a coast guard that opens live fire on poaching vessels within its territorial waters. These things are related.

The author, Alan Weisman, starts with a buzzkill for those who love them some Biblical living. According to the review, “Because of agricultural irrigation, the Jordan River is now a ‘fetid ditch’; pilgrims who attempt to bathe at the spot where Jesus is said to have been baptized will develop a rash and, if they swallow the water, will most likely vomit.”

Actually, Ecclesiastes was right: there’s nothing new under the sun, at least not in Holocene times. Check out this foreign army commander bitching to Elisha’s messenger in 2 Kings 5:12 about the skankiness of the Jordan, presumably not knowing its coming longue durée: “‘Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Couldn’t I wash in them and be cleansed?’ So he turned and went off in a rage.”

Dude eventually listened to the obscurantists, took his dip, and was cured. These days, the Jordan will more likely give a man leprosy, but it isn’t so much different as merely worse: thousands of years ago, rational people were scared to swim in that shit.

That said, things can get really unstable as they’re scaled up. A few tens of thousands of people watering their riverside farms from the same glorified creek may be sustainable. Several million people trying to water major cities and industrial monocultures from the same glorified creek is not sustainable at all.

The inevitable result is war. What, all sides swear that they’re holy peoples living in the Holy Land? Tough titty: they’ve still got war. In fact, they’ve got even more of it, since they’re not just desperate for resources but also inflamed by sectarian passions, the two aspects of their anger feeding one another.

As an institution, it’s good for a lot more than Edwin Starr ever wanted to contemplate. The Nazi expansion into Eastern Europe was about the glory of the Deutsche Volk, but it was also about the oil fields of Ploiesti. Hitler was a megalomaniac, but he wasn’t a total fool. Japan had an even starker motivation for its invasions of Korea (coal) and Indochina (oil, lumber, rubber): it was a heavily populated archipelago devoid of many important natural resources and, starting in 1941, under American embargo at a time when the US was the world’s top oil producer.

In a moral sense, though, Starr was right. War is a travesty. One has to be a bit dense or a lot immoral and atavistic not to recognize this. (These are great traits for government “service,” by the way.) A huge portion of the restiveness in the world can be straightforwardly explained by blatant resource shortages in times of growing population. It’s a total buzzkill for the nationalist and the End Times aficionado (similar personality types, and often the very same people, no?) but it’s true. Surely there must be an alternative to this madness.

There is. Brace yourselves.

Japan.

[T]he fertility rate is so low–1.4 children per female–that the population has been declining since 2006. This might make Japan something of a best-case situation, but an aging population means there are too many senior citizens, and not enough young people to take care of them. Already Japan has a shortage of geriatric nurses. Weisman visits Nagoya Science Park, where Japan’s oldest scientific firm has built RIBA II, a robotic white bear designed to carry elderly people around the house. It has large, widely-spaced black eyes, cute little ears and a painted smile.

“I will do my best,” says the bear, as it approaches a man who is lying on a hospital bed. “I will carry you as though you were a princess.”

RIBA II slides one paw under the patient’s knees, the other beneath his back. The robot cradles the man in its arms. It carries the man across the room, and lowers him tenderly into a wheelchair.

“I’m finished,” announces RIBA II, and it’s hard not to wonder whether the robot speaks for us all.

That bear won’t be finished with me until it can respond to my follow-up command: “Fuck you. Bring me a White Russian.”

Even if you’re familiar with Hello Kitty, you’ve probably been mercifully ignorant of Fukuppy. No more. He (she? it? ooh, goody: “indeterminate gender”) is like the Maytag Man, but actually a smiling Humpty-Dumpty with angel’s wings. Don’t blame me; I’m not the one using that imagery to market refrigeration equipment.

Why do I get the vague sense that there’s something off about modern Japan’s zeitgeist that isn’t all about raw demographics? Hello Kitty, Fukuppy, girls’ shopping getaways to Vegas, the hikikomori and the dame-ren, virtual girlfriends, a popular magazine imploring young people to start having sex again, a robotic bear that promises to carry old geezers like princesses: this isn’t just a skilled nursing shortage. If the papers aren’t reporting about how similar demographic changes play out in, say, Russia, it’s probably because the results aren’t weird enough. Babushka hoeing her cabbage patch again while her grandkids shoot smack behind a disused asbestos factory, or shut-ins who only leave the house to go on “honeymoons” with pixellated “girlfriends” while bedridden grandpa is romanced by ElderBear: which would you rather read?

There is, however, a bit of good news about Japan’s demographic profile. Rod Serling would approve.

Ron Paul, Change Agent

henrymoore Books, Liberty , , , , , , ,

From what I can tell, a “change agent” in the lingo of the conspiracy theorist is a person who seems alright on the surface but in reality is bought and paid for by the New World Order/Illuminati/Bilderbergs and whose primary function it to co-opt the opposition and channel their frustration into fruitless endeavors, so that the powers that be may effect the change they desire with virtually no threats to their plan. If someone like Ron Paul can be accused of this, of course, then no one is safe. Which is why using the term “change agent” in this way has little effect. But as an actual agent of change, Ron Paul’s record speaks for itself, I think. No, I don’t mean his legislative record, for this is rarely something anyone should be proud of, and at best serves only to condemn the person in question for the misdeeds they have committed in the name of making law and doing the will of the people. I refer to his other record. His list of achievements in public life outside of the halls of Congress.

The man has single-handedly convinced thousands upon thousands of people to adopt a more freedom-oriented outlook on life, if not also to utterly transform their worldview. And he continues to do so with his latest book, which I received in the mail today not more than a few hours ago. I’m already reading it and in the first chapter he is keen to stress the ideas that liberty and personal responsibility go hand in hand (one might term this a “Virtuous Voluntaryism“) and that an education’s structure and content must be consistent with one another in order to be effective.

I hope that thousands if not millions of people read this book (and/or others like it) and come away from it with a fresh or reinforced opinion on what needs to be done with our education system (hint, the bulk of the fight takes place outside of “the system”), which is in a complete shambles. Because that’s just how many people it is going to take to reform fix restructure completely uproot the current establishment. Doing this is an end in itself, of course. But it is also a means to a far greater goal. Children raised by the state cannot help, on the whole, but to be children raised for the state. Ron Paul forcefully drives home the point that the status quo cannot be successfully challenged without first addressing the wholesale brainwashing of what many deem to be society’s greatest asset: the children. Stop the elites and bureaucrats on this front and victory over them in perhaps every other field of battle is all but assured.

So I encourage you to read this book, to suggest to others that they read it, and once done, to share (your/their) copy with still others (could be wrong, but I think it’s WAY easier to do this with a hard copy than with a Kindle or iPad). That is what I intend to do with mine. I hope and expect to be finished with it within the week.

Life Unplugged

Brandon Christensen Books, Current Events , ,

Hey all,

I’ve been enjoying LA. I finished up 1493 about a week ago and can’t recommend it enough.

Chapters 8 and 9 – on the impact that Africans and Asians had on the New World – are especially fascinating . Mann essentially destroys every myth about race that has ever been devised, but does so in a way that is not condescending (Politically Correct) and not reactionary.

I’ve since been slowly working through Mastering Space, but it’s a real daisy and I think the only people who take it seriously are Marxist-oriented geographers and anthropologists.

I picked up a couple more books with graduation money (Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms, Edwin Wilmsen’s Land Filled with Flies and Bernard Lewis’s Islam and the West), but most of my time will be spent going through Volume 2 of Armen Alchian’s collected works (the volume on property rights and economic behavior), finishing up Said’s Orientalism (again) and studying for the GRE.

The coup in Egypt was predictable. Imperial Britain essentially strangled liberalism in Egypt just after its birth. What we have in Egypt is a large society with no political alternatives: either you can pick the Islamists (and Islamism has nothing to do with Islam, of course) or you can pick the national socialists (i.e. the fascists). Without a regime based on private property rights, individualism and free trade, Egypt will never know tolerance, prosperity or liberty. Democracy by itself can do nothing for Egyptians.

Critical Junctures and Path Dependency in “Why Nations Fail”: Implications for U.S. Foreign Aid Policy

Michael Adamson Books, History , ,

Greeted with wide acclaim, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, should put to bed all debate on using foreign aid to promote economic development on a national level.

Authors Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson effectively deploy path dependency to explain the trajectories of the political institutions that form the core of their argument: Nations with “inclusive” political institutions succeed economically whereas those saddled with extractive” political institutions fail. Citing cases from myriad times and places, the authors demonstrate the relationship between political institutions and economic development. The authors tether their argument to Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction in the marketplace: No creative destruction, no long-term development. Nations encumbered by extractive political institutions typically privilege monopoly. And so, over time, their economies atrophy.

So far, so good. In deploying path dependency to explain why institutions, once in place, tend to persist, authors add a solid piece of research to a literature that includes persuasive and important studies from Paul Krugman and Robert Higgs (and show that path dependency is an ideologically independent analytical tool). Notwithstanding their clear, concise, and compelling prose, however, the authors do less well in explaining the origins of divergent dependent paths. This is disappointing, because knowing and understanding the point of origin is crucial to understanding the dependent path. Because points of origin are often associated with cataclysmic events, however, one thing is clear: Development economics has no chance of establishing a new point of origin for nations encumbered by extractive political institutions.

Acemoglu and Robinson call their points of origin “critical junctures.” As they explain, critical junctures “are major events that disrupt the existing political and economic balance in one or many societies.” Critical junctures launch nations down their respective dependent paths. Because of small differences in initial conditions, the same critical juncture can send nations in radically different directions. But a lot is murky here in terms of understanding the historical foundation of a particular critical juncture. In many cases, I found myself accepting the facts that the authors present as the starting point and then going along for the narrative ride. Origins happen, and until another critical juncture occurs, a nation is pretty much locked in an institutional straightjacket.

What the authors do show is that we really have very little control over the initial conditions that propel nations down a particular path. And if paths are truly as dependent as the authors insist, it is extremely difficult—especially for outsiders—to get a nation to change course, that is, reform its political institutions. Whatever else they accomplish in elaborating the findings of their research, Acemoglu and Robinson bolster the argument, made by economists from P. T. Bauer to William Easterly, that foreign aid generally does nothing, and really can do nothing, to promote economic development.

Here’s my short list of the most important critical junctures in the book:

  • The Black Death
  • The French Revolution
  • The Glorious Revolution—a relatively peaceful resolution to decades of bloody civil war

If pestilence, famine, and war are requisites for institutional change, what chance do USAID, the World Bank, and the various UN agencies have to affect reform, armed only with dollars and expertise?

Less apocalyptic critical junctures described by Acemoglu and Robinson give no cause for cheer among aid advocates, either:

  • Of more than 50 African nations, only Botswana enjoys inclusive political institutions, and only because its leaders acted on their own initiative and in the face of conventional wisdom to break the institutional chains that have shackled all of the other nations on the continent.
  • Notwithstanding the arguments of the authors, the weight of the evidence suggests that America enjoys inclusive political institutions and Latin America does not above all because of climate, geology, geography topography, and differences in the demography of indigenous populations. (Score a point here for Jared Diamond.) English and Spanish colonists set out from Europe with similar intentions. In contrast to their Spanish counterparts, English colonists unhappily found no gold or silver, and in any case, encountered no large concentrations of peoples to enslave. The indentured servants that they imported in their stead proved to be a poor substitute. Paths diverged.

There is little in these stories to guide contemporary aid missionaries.

Why Nations Fail provides no justification for Washington maintaining its foreign aid apparatus. The general reader might close the book relieved to know that China, America’s greatest adversary in the international political economy, will inevitably falter because of its extractive political institutions. Policymakers and practitioners operating in the aid arena have no similar cause for relief. The authors leave some wiggle room in their conclusion, but in my reading, Why Nations Fail closes the door on using aid to foreign governments to foster economic development.

What I’ve Been Reading

Brandon Christensen Books, Current Events, History , , , , , , , ,

Hello all. Apologies in advance for not posting more often since graduation. I’ve been reading a lot of books lately, rather than stuff on the internet, so I haven’t had much to link to lately.

Here is a list of a few books I have been working on:

  • 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by the science journalist Charles C Mann. I know I’ve blogged about this book before, but I’ve finally got a little bit of free time to hunker down and read the whole thing. I’m about halfway through and it’s really good.
  • Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy by the Marxist political geographers John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge. This is a pretty crummy book, but it was recommended because of some good critiques of the IMF and the World Bank that it supposedly has. I’ll keep ploughing through and hope for the best.
  • The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age by the historian Simon Schama. This is a very well-written book about Dutch culture (not Culture) in the seventeenth century and so far I have not been disappointed. Schama eschews the political and economic aspects of the Dutch republic in favor of examining the everyday lives of its citizens.
  • Democracy in Botswana which is edited by John D Holm and Patrick Molutsi. I picked this up for a research project I was doing last quarter and have not been able to let it go yet. It brings together a compendium of talks given at a conference held in Gaborone in 1989 to assess Botswana’s current status in the world, in sub-Saharan Africa and according to the citizens of Botswana.

Of the four books, I’d recommend 1493 to the intelligent layman, but the other three are definitely tough slogging.

Ham-Fisted Coercion and Incompetence versus the Invisible Hand of Self-Interest

henrymoore Books, Economics , , , , , , , ,

A Tale of Two Hands

I came across Gary Galles’ recent article in The Freeman about Leonard Read’s analogy of government coercion as a clenched fist, “The Clenched Fist and the General Welfare.” I see a symmetry between this analogy and Adam Smith’s about self-interest unintentionally channeled into market organization, one that is so familiar to free market proponents and detractors alike that it is a common metaphor: the invisible hand.

Government coercion and market organization. Two very important concepts for any libertarian to master. Which one better provides for the general welfare? Smith and Read would contend the latter. The reasons for this are contained in the analogies. As Read and Galles point out, not much good can come from a clenched fist. Only violence and incompetence. It can punch. It can pound. That’s about it. What better description of government? Likewise, as Smith notes, the usefulness of markets is that they do better than government many of the noble things government tries to do, thereby rendering it redundant, if not unnecessary, in those areas. The all-too obvious fist of government regulations and mandates is no match for a more efficient, less obvious hand: self-interest. Continue reading →

Thoughts about “sofa fascism”

Evgenii Grigorev Books ,

Привет, подписчики и читатели сообщества!

На днях перечитывал одну книгу Харуки Мураками. Так вот, в книге был эпизод, связанный со студенческими восстаниями в Токио в 1970 годах. Вся суть вопроса состояла в том, что после того, как восстания были подавлены силами правопорядка, вчерашние бунтари спокойно и без лишних слов вернулись к занятиям как ни в чем не бывало. Возникает вопрос: зачем тогда было орать с баррикад про какие-то права и свободы, если в конечном итоге они так легко отказались от своих идей? Это понятие называют в России “диванный фашизм”. Человек будет сидеть дома, до одурения орать про какие-то права, свободы, законы, расовую нетерпимость, про необходимость поменять текущий государственный режим и прочее, прочее – при этом сам человек ничего не будет делать. Человеку страшно или лень что-либо делать. Не хочется покидать свою зону комфорта, ограниченную стенами квартиры, привычного жизненного уклада. И таких у нас треть населения. Так вот, к чему я все это пишу тут. Эти овощи на диванах, табун овец, формирующий пресловутое “общественное мнение”, на деле откажется от всех своих убеждений и продаст Родину за новый iPhone, лишь бы не посягнули на его личный комфорт. Время идет, а “стандартный электорат” почему-то не меняется. Сколько еще нужно войн и насилия, чтобы до народа наконец дошло, что если чего-то желать и при этом не прикладывать усилий для достижения целей – будет так, как хочет “действующее меньшинство”. Спасибо за внимание.

Looking Backward: A Review

Warren Gibson Books, Liberty , ,

My Amazon review of Beth Cody’s “Looking Backward: 2162-2012, A View From a Future Libertarian Republic”

The author’s stated goal was to write a libertarian equivalent of Edward Bellamy’s socialist utopian novel “Looking Backward.” She achieves that goal with room to spare.

If I were to judge this novel by its plot, characterization, or dialogue, I would have to knock off a couple of stars. I won’t because those elements, which are crucial to most novels, don’t matter here. The flimsy plot is quite adequate to the author’s purpose which is to portray a near-ideal libertarian society. I wouldn’t call her vision a “utopia” because at several points, Prof. Seeton, the expositor and defender of the new society, admits that it has flaws. He even says it will collapse eventually and only hopes that event will be peaceful.

I almost wished that I too could crawl into a time capsule, as her protagonist does, and go back to a time before I became a libertarian. That’s because this would be such a dandy introduction for someone new to the philosophy. A novice with an open mind would find a trove of solid arguments on nearly every aspect of human life.

Get copies of this book for the young people in your world.