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Comment by solidsnack9000 | Hacker News Reader

What I think is unfortunate is that the author doesn't compare the Roman system to that of other countries, and highlight an important underlying issue: state capacity. Early legal systems were not backed by capable and well organized executive branches. A huge range of things that now are a matter of law -- even contracts -- were basically left up to individuals to sort out for themselves. In tribal societies, all there was to settle differences was people's good credit with their neighbors; so you better be liked by everybody.

But it was not until the principate, when the stability and power of the Empire rested on the shoulders of a single man, that murder truly became a crime.

What does the author want us to draw from this conclusion?

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Authoritarian dictatorships are bad for many reasons. Ineffeciency when compared with more collaborative decision making processes is often not one of them.

No need to go through a comitte or build consensus when there is only one person that needs to make a decision. On the other hand that often means the person making the decision doesn't need to consider the opinions of others when making decisions.

EDIT To clarify my comment I didn't say that dictatorships are better at making good decisions or result in a more efficient society simply that they are more effectient at making a decision. Whether they make good or bad decisions is much more dependent on the leader. It is a common pattern in the world the more constraints on a position the less autonomy an individual has the less impact they can have either for good or bad.

Probably is related to the fine line between idiocy and genius.

You can still have a powerful enough state to enforce laws and not be a dictatorship.

The question is for how long. Many states have had a tendency to grow over time.

Nothing lasts forever, and not everything is a slippery slope. Historical context is also important.

For example, some people have this notion that the Roman Republic was somehow "good" and the empire was "bad" solely because the Senate had power in the Republic, and voting = good. But in actuality it was a pretty messed up system of government because only Romans (literally people in that city) got a vote while the rest of the Italian peninsula got no say. And yes they fought a war about this and the "good" side lost. Voting was heavily weighted towards the upper classes, too. The empire wasn't all bread and circuses, but it did scale better, which had some pros and cons too :). But for your average inhabitant of the Italian peninsula you had no more or less say in how either government ran.

Dictatorships can be quite a mess when it comes to enforcing laws unrelated to keeping power. These laws tend to turn onto soft of weapon to be used or not depending on whether you want harass someone or not.

This happened in both Nazi system and Communist system. Both were high corruption a lot of petty crime normalized society (and a lot of other petty crime severely punished depending who done it and what was done).

I think there’s a reasonable argument that street-level drug possession crimes during the “War on Drugs” had similar properties/effects.

I am not so sure about that in the absolute.

In eg a 'chaotic' market system, you can just go and buy a yacht. Very quick, very efficient.

If you have an authoritarian dictatorship like eg Stalin's Soviet Union, good luck getting your yacht quickly.

Even the most authoritarian dictator can not make all decisions on their own. There will always be delegation.

My understanding of the mechanism for getting yachts quickly under Stalin is that if you gave someone a large pile of money, that was clearly bribery, Взятка. If you gave someone a large pile of money and a few bottles of vodka, then it was just a tip, merely Brassica oleracea.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24176587

A yacht was probably a bad example.

A better example might have been to get an extension to your factory or a new machine. Something clearly more of a reasonable business investment than a yacht.

If you got Stalin's attention, you might have been able to get it right away (or go to the Gulag right away..) But that's a very special case, and in general dictatorships don't lack for bureaucracy.

For a more benign version, look at getting anything done in the military or a very big and very top-down company where in theory the CEO reigns supreme.

Perhaps - though notice that other systems have the same, or greater, simplicity - for example, when making a decision, choose randomly, or choose the option which sorts first alphabetically, or...

When you don't have the constraint of making good decisions, or popular decisions, you can make decisions very efficiently!

> Authoritarian dictatorships are bad for many reasons. Ineffeciency when compared with more collaborative decision making processes is often not one of them.

this is one of those things which many people believe but which isn't actually true. authoritarian dictatorships are very often total chaotic shitshows.

the old line about Mussolini making the trains run on time is a great example. Mussolini used propaganda to claim that he made the trains run on time, and he did drive a few improvements to high-profile train lines in Northern Italy that were used mostly by elites and tourists, but trains in Mussolini's Italy were not efficient, not well-maintained (and therefore not safe), and they didn't run on time.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/loco-motive/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/stop-sayi...

there's even an academic term for it: "the myth of fascist efficiency." Hitler's regime was also pure chaos, and he was largely regarded as a clown for most of his political career. authoritarian dictatorships lack legitimacy, so they're run by people who don't care if they're perceived as legitimate or not, which basically means fanatics and grifters. fanatics are too disconnected from reality to be highly effective, and grifters have a vested interest in chaos, since it makes their grift harder to detect.

Have you considered that Mussolini didn't care about the trains which weren't high-profile trains for elites? The person you're responding to said dictators do what they want efficiently, but don't care about what others want. Was Mussolini even trying to genuinely improve the lower class trains?

In Italy to this day the line about trains running on time is spoken with reference to lower class trains. So no matter what the fascist regime wanted to improve, the propaganda was about _all_ trains.

Mussolini would have said he cared about lower-class trains running on time whether or not he did.

Intuitively, a state with a dictator should be more chaotic than a democracy, because the decisiveness mentioned in the grandparent comment would result in a loss of coherence in policy, since all the interest groups in the government would not have been brought on board in time. At best, this would lead to miscommunication, at worst, revolt.

I'm not sure that decisiveness is a natural characteristic of dictatorship, though. Most dictators sit at the pinnacle of large networks of clients and rely implicitly on their network of relationships to maintain legitimacy. This would imply they would have to be more 'softly-softly' than an equivalent democracy, because they can't rely on all the systems democracies have to legitimize contentious decisions (elections, etc).

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24377232

dictators don't do what they want efficiently. nor do they do anything else efficiently.

if you were to read the links I posted in the comment you're replying to, you would discover that an expert who was there at the time reported that all of the trains were typically late during Mussolini's regime. this includes both the trains which were favored by elites, and the trains favored by the working class.

> I didn't say that dictatorships are better at making good decisions or result in a more efficient society simply that they are more effectient at making a decision.

I think that one comes with asterisks too. The cultures in dictatorship are often pretty good at avoiding decisions at all cost. The price can be high for making decision someone in power does not like, better to do nothing or appear to have no opinions. Moreover, you don't want to appear to be making decisions, so that you don't look like threat for people who could be jealous and destroy you.

Communist system was largely characterized by passivity.

Even if the dictator himself can make decision at whim, the structures around him tend to insulate him from the rest of world. Oftentimes simply to protect this or that real world interest. Which means they end up not making decisions.

> But it was not until the principate, when the stability and power of the Empire rested on the shoulders of a single man, that murder truly became a crime.

You would have to discount the entirety of Old Testament Judaic law, which goes back at least 5800 years, to make the claim that murder wasn’t a crime until the rise of the principate.

The oldest books of the Old Testament were written around 300-500 years BC... so many centuries after the events supposedly occurred. To say that those books are definitely indicative of what the law was 5,800 years ago seems like a bit of a stretch.

Edit: spelling.

Murder is mentioned in the first clause of the Code of Hammurabi, in 1700 BC. So that gets us 3,700 years back.

But it, and the Bible, are irrelevant to Roman law, which is what's being discussed here.

The OT was an oral tradition predating it's written recording...

I knew my grandfather, who in my eyes was a god, and I embellish everything about him. He died in 2010. Think how muddled, exaggerated, revised, and dressed-up stories get over centuries... especially when they are not written down.

Somewhat different cultures, I think. There are oral traditions where we can compare the written and oral records and see less deviation in the oral records over even long periods of time.

I acknowledge that requires examples and citations and at one point I knew where to pull them up offhand.

I think the author is referring specifically to the situation under Roman law here.

It is very interesting to look at the intersection of state capacity and legal systems.

However, you don't need much government (nor state capacity) at all for legal systems to work. Some might even say the can work better without under some circumstances.

See http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsCo... for many historical examples like Jewish law or Romani law or England in the Eighteenth Century.

>What does the author want us to draw from this conclusion?

That their book expanding on the topic is worth reading.

Nothing, he is stating a historical fact, that's all. I found it interesting, because we sometime tend to think we kind of know how roman society worked -- a lot of our own institutions in the west are modeled on roman equivalents: courts, marriage, civil assemblies and we do live in democracies with a strong oligarchy. This example shows how strangely different the ancient society was compared to our own.

Off topic, but Emma Southon probably goes by "she".

You seem to think the author is writing this paper with the goal of espousing a viewpoint or tying it back to current affairs. It's possible to write and read about history purely for the interest.

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