When kings and princes grow old | Hacker News Reader

When kings and princes grow old

economist.com

43 pointsbootload48 comments

I'm surprised that in this day and age there are still 'better' people, it's not like we don't know that this is a fiction.

In the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, England and a whole pile of other countries the royal families are pretty well entrenched. There is a whole media circus around them and there are still special laws on the books giving the royal people rights that ordinary people do not have.

The most heard argument against abolishing these institutions is that 'you need a head of state' and 'a president costs money too'. I'm not really sure what either has to do with creating and maintaining a special class of people, and I can't imagine a presidency to be as costly and as messy as what we have today.

Besides that, 'our' royal family isn't even Dutch, but hardly anybody seems to care, as long as the fairy tale is allowed to continue it's all good.

Well yes and no. They have special rights (you often can't criminally prosecute them, for example) and special duties (the Danish royals must be Christians, cannot vote or say anything in political debates, etc) but on the other hand, we got our democracy without war or a revolution, so a lot of lives where saved by keeping the royals.

But yeah, getting rid of them might be useful.

(All of this is from a Danish perspective).

> In the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, England and a whole pile of other countries the royal families are pretty well entrenched.

But in most of those places royalty is at best the nominal chief executive, with few if any factual power.

Technically however they have ALL the power.

No they don't - the last king of England to claim anything like absolute power had his head cut off after a civil war.

Certainly all European monarchies are constitutional:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_monarchy

I said technically. That is legally. The last monarch to not sign a bill was around 1700, but the queen has the legal right to not sign a bill. Also, the prime minister has the power, but he derives it from the royal prerogative, that is the queen, who can disolve parliament, appoint prime ministers, ministers, dismiss them.

So too, the entire united Kingdom is owned by the Queen, by a right of conquest from William the conqueror in 1066.

The queen can declare war, the judiciary derives power from the Crown, etcetera etcetera. Of course in practice things are much more sensible, but legally, all power rests with the monarch. She can not create new powers, but the powers she does have can be given or taken away.

Also, the United Kingdom does not have a written constitution. It does have an unwritten constitution, so it is indeed a constitutional monarchy, but that kind of deals with the rule of law, conventions which are not binding, etcetera. There are some legal restrictions, for example the queen can not make law without the assent of Parliament, she can not dismiss judges, it of course is not an absolute monarchy. However, legally all power derives from her, thus, she has all the powers.

You're right that many of the restrictions on the Queen's power are customary rather than official, but there are some official restrictions on her powers as well--- she isn't an absolute monarch. Since at least the 17th century, the Monarch has been unable to impose taxes without Parliament's consent, cannot make new laws through proclamation (they must be passed by Parliament), cannot imprison people without a judgment by the judiciary, etc.

> The last monarch to not sign a bill was around 1700, but the queen has the legal right to not sign a bill.

When King Baudouin of Belgium refused to sign the abortion bill in 1990 (for religious reasons), the Government declared him 'temporarily unable to reign' for a day, and signed it for him.

Hahaha. Belgium is a strange country from the point of view of governance. In the United Kingdom however I think there would be great constitutional crises if the Queen does not give assent. You can not simply declare her unable to reign for a day as all power is derived from her, thus, all others would have no power to sign either.

It would be an interesting time though, I wonder if it will ever come to pass.

They're not chief executives, not nominally, not actually. They're chairman of the board. The only power they have is firing the executives and approving the next one.

Those powers were stripped along with virtually all others from the Swedish monarchy in the 1974's reform of government, and now sits with the speaker. Our royal family isn't a lot more than a well payed magnets for tabloid journalists, so that our real civil-servants can get work done.

The purpose of monarchy is to rise above democracy, to ensure stability of the country in a time when the political system might not be stable. It's the realisation that democracy isn't perfect.

Consider the election of the new German president, Christian Wulff: It was deeply entrenched in the isolated, day-to-day petty politics and personal rivalry of the government. He probably owes favours left and right. Will he be able to rise above all that if, in the four to ten year he's likely to hold the office, Germany might need the special discretionary powers that the president holds in case of instability? On the other hand, Queen Beatrix has been the heir to the throne since before PM Balkenende was born, and Queen since he was probably still in University, which is for 22 year by the time he assumed office.

Which one of President Wulff and Queen Beatrix is more likely to say no and fire the head of government if Chancellor Merkel, respectively PM Balkenende, decides to take dictatorial powers for her or him self? Or less dramatically, more likely to ensure a peaceful transition if Germany or the Netherlands decides to fall apart, like Belgium seems to be?

And I said "more likely", not "sure to". No nation is failsafe, not a monarchy, not a democracy.

It wouldn't be up to Wulff or Beatrix to do something about that, but up to the judicial arm. Beatrix technically has a lot of power but in practice if a prime minister were to ignore her it would most likely fall to the judicial arm to remove such a person from power in a more permanent fashion.

That said, Balkenende is about as weak a person as I can see to make such a power play and I doubt he'd get very far with his supporters doing this. Wilders however...

The judicial arm can only act within the law. The law can be changed. Hitler assumed the chancellory legally. Perhaps a German king could have overruled the annexation of Austria and/or the Sudetenland? (of course, it's pure speculation, and the Kaiser of WW1 wasn't exactly a bulwark against aggression).

Yes, there are characters significantly more scary than Balkenende, and I think the Queen is a much better cooling agent for such a person than the judicial arm can be.

It can also work the other way around though. A dictator could keep some royalty around in order to grant legitimacy to his regime. Spain is an interesting case in point. They had both, a king as a stooge of Franco and then another king saving the young democracy.

I think the idea of some people being more equal than others is terrible. This idea has kept the world in a state of constant exploitation and imperialist war for thousands of years. I don't want to see it continue in any shape or form, even if it may have benefits in some situations.

The Saudi example is a particularly nasty one by the way, but I don't think you intended to defend an absolute monarchy.

It's not a silver bullet, and obviously monarchy doesn't make society impervious to totalitarianism, as Francos Spain and the Saudis are examples of.

I don't give much for the egalitarian argument. Yes, I'm better than a lot of other people, and I have no problem accepting that there are other people who are better than me. Now, this doesn't imply that I should be in a ruling position over them, nor them over me.

The royal family isn't in power because they're "better", or because they just happen to be part of a class that happens to be in power. They're in power because they're the royal family, and the throne is passed down through predefined rules that they don't control. If you're not heir to the throne, you won't get it (this is why they're not a "class").

They exist as a check of democracy where the process of getting elected has more in common with a reality-TV-show than a thorough assessment of skills and ideas. Members of the royal family are born with a single, simple mission, should they choose to accept it: to secure the longevity of their nation. If they don't accept, there exists the option of abdication, which is irreversible. They train for this single mission for decades. At no point in their lives are they subject to petty political quibbles, and this is how they keep their legitimacy.

You have a very odd view of history. Thrones have not been passed down based on any predefined rules. Who could have predefined them anyway?. Thrones were faught over in wars, endless scheming, forced and tactical marriage, etc. Europe was devastated again and again for no better reason than some wacko royal trying to expand his power or go to heaven by slaughtering other peoples.

And no, they do not exist to keep democracy in check. They existed long before democracy and had to be removed from absolute power by force in most cases and by threatening force in others. If anything, democracy was introduced to keep the royals in check.

These clans together with their clerical stooges and armed thugs have wasted the world's resources for their own eccentric, self serving and unproductive endeavors for thousands of years.

And those constitutional monarchs, which are admittedly rather harmless, are not a counter weight to failures of TV-show democracy either. Quite the contrary. They are themselves the material for endless media gossip. Managing their own reputation is what they do all their lives. Keeping the monarchy going, that's all they do and that's all they have ever done.

Ah, yes, and sometimes they write strange letters to ministers about organic farming, alternative medicine or their private history Disney style architectural preferences.

Countries that don't have royalty make their own royalty. I'd rather keep the real thing.

That's the biggest problem for classical monarchy - you want succession that's crystal clear to avoid fighting, but you also want at least a competent monarch. Those two goals are often at odds with each other - very clear succession rules with primogeniture (first born son takes over) often means you get a weaker monarch - someone like Puyi, the last Qing Dynasty Emperor, or Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last Tokugawa Shogun. Sometimes you wind up with a monarch who is mentally ill, that happened notably a few times in Roman history.

That's the biggest flaw with monarchy - succession is hard to get right. Historically speaking, competent and well-run monarchies outperform republics in almost all metrics except maybe military, but republics are insulated from having a long terrible reign of government by having a bad monarch. In a republic, usually you can get rid of a poor ruler within 10 years.

The most effective monarchy succession plan is probably having the current ruler groom his successor and retire or alternate - that happened during the height of Rome with emperors choosing and grooming their successor before retiring, and it happened in Heian Japan with two branches of the Emperor's family alternating duties as emperor and jointly choosing the order of alternating a number of years in advance. Unfortunately, this system seems to be unstable - eventually someone can't resist the temptation to put their own child in power, even if they're not fit to govern. Then you get the despotic monarch again, and all the problems that entails.

It's a hard problem to solve.

Not to challenge you, but what do you mean when you say " Historically speaking, competent and well-run monarchies outperform republics in almost all metrics except maybe military"? The United States seems to have done pretty well as a republic in terms of average quality of life and gross domestic product. While it hasn't controlled as much land as the largest Roman Empire, I'd think that it has done more per capita than any form of nation in history.

> The United States seems to have done pretty well as a republic in terms of average quality of life and gross domestic product. While it hasn't controlled as much land as the largest Roman Empire, I'd think that it has done more per capita than any form of nation in history.

I think you are overlooking Switzerland.

"You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

- Orson Welles in The Third Man

That's a humoristic but completely wrong view of Switzerland and the Swiss.

The United States has a lot of cultural influence on other countries, but when you give examples such as "average quality of life" and "gross domestic product" I doubt that the US has done more per capita than any form of nation in history.

Could you give any examples to back your claims (per capita)?

Edit: Here's an example:

                  USA         Norway
  GDP             $46,381     $79,085  (best)
  GINI            45.0        25.8  (best)
  HDI             0.956       0.971 (best)
  Unemployment    9.5%        3,2%  (best)

Another example is the public dept. While the United States has a huge dept, Norway's net asset position is positive. The government could repay all government debt without raising new loans.

According to OECD, the United States ranks third worst in inequality and poverty of the 30 member states:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/oecd-o22.shtml

Considering that Norway, as many other countries has a more inclusive welfare system, the poor have a better quality of life as well, with free (total) health care and free education.

I might have been wrong when I said "gross domestic product per capita". I meant to compare the US to similar sized nations, like the Roman or Mongul Empires. It wouldn't be possible to get figures to back this up, it's just an estimate on my part.

In terms of debt and poverty, I would say that the US has the financial burden of having the most powerful military in the world. In many ways that also speaks to quality of life. While we may have higher levels of poverty and crime when compared to scandinavian nations, our citizens don't have to live at the whims of foreign military powers. National security is something that doesn't factor into many quality of life charts. I still stand corrected, but it's something to consider.

With cherry-picking, you can prove anything.

Norway is the world's fifth largest oil exporter and third largest natural gas exporter, but has a population of 4.8 million. With petrochemical exports accounting for 20% of GDP on top of a western model economy, of course per-capita GDP is going to be high.

A more interesting comparison would be with the other leading first world countries that don't have gigantic petrochemical industries to skew the figures and don't share the same governmental system. UK would be one option (constitutional monarchy); France would be another (republic, but not based on the US model).

(Hint: both the UK and France beat the US into a cocked hat on healthcare; the UK is significantly ahead on unemployment, and France is way ahead on GINI.)

ok, let's take Denmark as an example. They are ranked as number 32 in net exports of crude oil, so it's a much smaller part of the GDP.

  GDP: $56,115 (better)
  GNI: 24.7 (much better)
  HDI: 0.955 (the same)
  Unemployment: 6.3% (better)

If we are talking about advantages, let's not forget that there are 310 million citizens (56 times more than Denmark) who all share the same continent, language, currency and government. The home market is huge, which certainly gives companies a significant advantage compared to other countries. This is something that can be seen when companies starts competing internationally. Even a medium sized US company (relative to the home market) has a lot of muscle compared to the average Danish company.

My point is that we can't state that the US political system is superior by design. We have to consider other factors such as the large home market and the political influence that comes with a larger economy and military.

First, you're right to assert that the US system of government is not the be-all, end-all of good governmental systems and it certainly has its share of problems. I'm not really arguing that.

However, going down the path of ad hoc comparisons with other countries never ends and and certainly never ends well. The logic of "government causes everything good or bad about a nation's economy" is implicitly assumed and severely flawed.

Also, where are you getting your numbers? According to the CIA factbook Denmark's GDP is actually in the $36,000 range, which is less than Connecticut and Massachusetts, which are similar in population and culturally more diverse.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts

Sorry about that. I copied the number from Wikipedia, but picked the nominal GDP by mistake.

I agree that comparing political systems based on numbers directly is a bad idea. It was just a reaction to the many posts I see where the citizen of one country automatically assume that their system is the best as it was a fact.

the US at its largest extent was about 50% larger than the roman empire at its largest extent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires#All_emp...)

> "Historically speaking, competent and well-run monarchies outperform republics in almost all metrics except maybe military"

Gosh, this is an incredibly long discussion and I don't know where to start. I tried writing a reply and I'm just not accurately capturing it - my ability to articulate all the history I've read in a short summary isn't so good. Let me try, though.

First, yes, the United States is amazing, it was the most well-designed republic in history during the early years. There's been times when republican government was suspended and dictator/imperial leaders came to power. Since I don't want to make this overly political, without naming names I'll say there's been two American presidents that acted very much like dictator-type emperors. They took emergency powers, suspended civil rights including habeas corpus, drafted men into military service, seized industry, and conquered large tracks of land. Both of those guys were popular but quite brutal and oppressive to people who opposed them, including arresting people for peaceful protest. The first of these guys even arrested elected officials that didn't agree with his war! Both of them seemed poised to control the United States for a long time, but then they both died in office, and the next administrations quickly put more safeguards to make sure America didn't get a tradition of presidents doing whatever the heck they wanted.

It's a really strange case - these guys are generally seen as good guys, and were good guys in some ways, so history treats them favorably, but they were both very dictator/monarchy-like once coming into power, ignoring the Senate and Supreme Court. Prior to them, I think the early American federal government was one of the finest government designs in history, so yes that is pretty incredible. Though, the USA has been gradually sliding towards what tends to happen in republics with corruption, politics, factions, and all that.

Generally speaking, you get lots of politics, bureaucracy, waste in a republic, and lots of corruption once people come into power. There's corrupt monarchies, but a good monarch can almost completely end corruption and waste in a short time. I'm thinking of someone like Tokugawa Yoshimune -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_Yoshimune

Or more controversially, the Napoleonic codes of law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_code

It's very hard for a republic to get corruption, waste, and crime to zero, it almost never happens. It is very possible got a good monarch to clean house and get corruption, waste, and crime to zero.

Beyond that, my, where do I start? I'd recommend looking at comparable nations at comparable eras of history and see if republics or monarchies produced more art, science, architecture, trade, general happiness and health and prosperity, and things like that (admittedly difficult to measure). I'd read some thoughts by smart people on what happens in democracy through history, and monarchy. I'd look at the Federalist Papers to see how America was designed, I'd also strongly recommend Machiavelli's The Prince which has some analysis on the difference between monarchy and republics, and then I'd look at some of the Greek and Roman thoughts on the matter. The height of Rome came after Rome transitioned from a republic to an imperial monarchy, but this same transition sowed the seeds of its downfall with succession crises and the power of the Praetorian Guard. Likewise, the Ottomans and the Janissaries...

The most insightful eras for me is when there were a number of small states with similar resources and technology in a local era. The monarchic states in Renaissance Italy, the Greek city states, different eras of civil war in China and Japan... republicanism traditionally underperformed monarchy on average, but was less prone to catastrophically bad leadership, with the exception of rulers who came to power democratically but then seized power (that's what happened with the Chancellorship of Germany, there's been between 2 and 5 hardcore dictator American presidents depending on how you define it, etc). It's a large topic - if you have specific questions, I'll try my best to give a starting block of where to read and learn.

I won't question that american leaders have acted like dictators at times. Though technically, they were all still democratically elected and subject to impeachment.

From my knowledge of history, a representative democracy is just more efficient than a dictatorship. It's true that monarchs can reduce corruption, waste and crime to zero. But I think that the US has been a prime example of the positive tradeoffs that come from those things. An analogy would be a startup that only ships bug free code. It's good, but they'll probably get outperformed by a more nimble company that tolerates defects here and there.

Personally, I think that many of your examples of empires that outperformed republics (specifically Rome vs Greece) are a result of conquest and military power. A young empire can do a much better job of fielding an army than a young republic can. But as the US proved in world war 2, a mature and functioning republic has a much greater capacity for production because it utilizes the skills of more of it's citizens. I think a lot of that is because we were isolated from many other powerful empires on the american continent so we had time to mature to our capacity.

Think of it almost like a game of Starcraft or Age of Empires. If you have one player in "Republic mode" and another player in "Dictator mode", the dictator will get more resources in the beginning allowing him to crush the republic. But if the republic is given time to build, he'll have a resource advantage in the long run. Which is why I'm still not so sure that a well-run monarchy can outperform a republic.

> But as the US proved in world war 2, a mature and functioning republic has a much greater capacity for production because it utilizes the skills of more of it's citizens.

I think in modern times -- say after 1850 or so -- there's a strong element of truth in this and the republican/democratic tradition works better than the monarchial/autocratic one.

Having said that, here are some counterexamples in WW2:

- Hitler was more effective at quickly re-arming Germany and conquering its enemies in 1933-1940 than a republican leader would have been.

- Stalin was more effective at getting his country to produce good quality weapons in the right quantities than any other leader in WW2 was.

- Were Britain and America any better than France at coping with the initial Axis onslaught? The French army is often written off because it was quickly beaten by Germany in 1940, but at the time it was at least as good qualitatively, and vastly bigger, than the British ansd American armies. It's at least arguable that Britain and America only won that war because they had good natural defences -- the English channel for Britain, and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for the USA.

> It's very hard for a republic to get corruption, waste, and crime to zero, it almost never happens. It is very possible got a good monarch to clean house and get corruption, waste, and crime to zero.

Stuff like this makes me wonder if there is any hope in the practice of studying history or trying to recreate it. Your statements make sense (in retrospect and with your evidence) but, at least here in the States, it is almost 180 degrees opposite to the political consensus.

Your above quote reminded me of the Civilization PC games, especially the early ones that just have a simple "government type" instead of an attribute matrix. The older game consistently portrayed Monarchy as having corruption problems, while Republics didn't have as much and Democracy was immune. As if...

The key word in his sentence was "possible." The reason for that is the efficiency and creativity of a single person versus a complex process-driven organization. Monarchy, in the long term, is far more volatile than a republic.

The best solutions to corruption is, often, making it irrelevant.

In the Saudi system, the rulers don't pilfer public money (like oil money) the way that most if it will be pilfered in Iraq, the just own it. They aren't corrupted into placing friends, family & allies in government positions, that how systems work and it's exactly what is expected of them. Filing to appoint a powerful ally might result in the weakening of the alliance and instability in the kingdom.

Similarly, capitalism doesn't have to worry about the corruption of greedy individuals out to make money for themselves without regard for the greater scheme, this is how the system works. If people didn't follow their own desire for personal prosperity, nothing would be produced.

Saudi Arabia is not a good example for anything though. The country itself (IE, the land) produces the wealth pretty much autonomously. The people do not have to be productive for the monarchy to have wealth. All government needs to do is provide government services and ensure stability. They don't have to be all that efficient because they can afford to do things the costly way. In other monarchies (EG, neighbouring Jordan) the people have to make the wealth. This creates a completely different dynamic.

I don't agree. In fact after the middle of the 19th century you would have a hard time finding a monarchy that performed even remotely as well as a republic of the same time. (Of course, for this comparison, one would consider "monarchies" that are just republics pretending to be monarchies, such as 20th century England, or Sweden to be republics).

Of course you will find plenty of well performing monarchies in previous historical periods, but that does not mean that your statement is true today. Government is actually a matter of technology (among other things) and a republic is just too complicated and hard to pull off with ancient communications technology.

Regarding the US, you are obviously referring to Lincoln and FDR, but you are really going overboard comparing them to dictators. The US was very much a republic during those times.

If you exclude well-functioning monarchies from the comparison, there are, obviously, no well-functioning monarchies.

But 20th century England and Sweden are in fact monarchies. They have just evolved to give the people a very big voice in the day-to-day business of the country. Being a monarchy does not mean that you'll have a monarch who'll dabble in every little political debate-du-jour. Roe vs. Wade has very little significance to the long term (100 years) well-being of the US - yet every president since the ruling has had to manoeuvre in that space. A monarch isn't as exposed to (on the grand scale) short term political controversies, and can focus on the long term instead.

A popular monarch is a defender of the very long term stability of the country, a bulwark against revolutions. Not a perfect one, by no means, but not completely useless, either.

I could buy that that was true some decades ago, but these days I'm not sure European monarchs can be said to have any power at all. Yes, technically the Queen of England has reserve powers, but only so long as she never exercises them--- if she ever tried to withhold royal assent from a duly passed bill (last done in 1708), or fire a Prime Minister (last done in 1834), she would be buying herself a quick ticket to formal figurehead status, if not outright abolition of the monarchy.

That depends on what she'd use if for. If she started to dabble in day-to-day politics, say, demanding funds for a certain issue in the budget, then yes. But if a prime minister was successful in getting support for abolishing the limits on when to hold parliamentary elections, or other such irreversible steps towards totalitarianism, the Queen might very well intervene, and, in the long term, be applauded for it. I think it's likely that this safety valve helps to keep such attempts at bay.

But the essence of my argument isn't that I disagree with you (much, at least) on that point. It's that a monarchy is a monarchy as long as there's a monarch with formal power, no matter if they're exercised or not.

Exactly what I wanted to say. In fact the last time the Swedish king tried to exercise the powers that he thought he had by not signing a law he did not like, the parliament immediately stripped him of those powers and passed the law anyways.

There's been times when republican government was suspended and dictator/imperial leaders came to power.

This just rings wrong.

I think you're conflating the actions of individuals in power and the fundamental nature of government systems.

Even a president who takes more power than is normally granted him hasn't necessarily established anything like different governing system.

Whatever the excess power US presidents may at time have taken upon themselves has virtually always been within the form of the US constitution. We might consider their actions ill-legitimate but such illegitimacy is different from the question of whether they were creating a different system of government.

Oliver Cromwell unambiguously suspended the British Monarchy. I don't think you find anything similar in US history post 1776.

This got me thinking about Singapore, which has recently overtook the US on the basis of GDP (PPP) per capita. Singapore's system is officially democratic, but in fact quite authoritarian with competent rulers. The direction of the country has been in control by the Lee family for decades, but they put a lot of smart 'commoners' to some of the highest posts in the country. And given the track record, few can argue against the ability of the Lee family in the areas of economic and overall material development. The city-state also has little corruption and its citizens receive some of the best education in the world.

Does the example imply that such a "meritocratic monarchy" is the most rapid way to develop a country economically?

If we consider the way South Korea went from profound under-development to first-world in 50 years under a somewhat autocratic republic with heavy economic dirigisme, yes, probably.

On balance then, what would you suggest is better, an absolute monarchy, a representative democracy, or perhaps a mixture of the two?

True, and worth noting that the run of good emperors stopped once they stopped adopting heirs.

Really, the biggest flaw with a monarchy is the difficulty of succession? Not that the whole concept is based on subjugation of the populace and nepotism? A benevolent dictatorship seems a great idea if you're the dictator I would have thought that most people here would have realised that you won't be, and even if you were you shouldn't be. Yes it is a hard problem to solve but the first step is to abolish or disempower the monarch not to try and plan a more effective succession strategy.

> Yet the king is now thought to be 86.

Er... Interesting.

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