Will World Government Rot?
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
And a lot of it is just plain wrong when you take a moment to think it through. For instance:
> Over time, legal systems seem to similarly become more complex, interdependent, and resistant to change. Sometimes legal systems are “refactored” to increase flexibility, such as when the Roman emperor Justinian arranged for a restructuring and simplification of the Roman legal code. This Justinian code was later adapted by Napolean [sic], who spread it across Europe, after which European conquests spread it across the world
This the kind of generalization you often see from dabblers and rarely see from actual historians or even amateurs with a solid understanding of history. The complexity and rigidity of legal systems in various parts of the world varies greatly depending on the era, the health of the political and socioeconomic systems in that era, whether or not the systems in question are based in civil law or common law, etc. And the idea that there's a straight line from Justinian to Napoleon is ludicrous as well. It glosses over 1300 years of legal history showing large fluctuations in the level of legal complexity because it's either inconvenient for the author to deal with or because the author is unaware of it. Regardless of the reason for the omission, it's a sign of the author's laziness.
I get that this "paper" (author's words, not mine) is just a blog post but IMO this is lazy, reductionist thought and we should demand better when people want to chime in on political or economic issues.
Or entrepreneurship, or nutrition, or (yelp) underestablished engineering issues too! Carelessly thought leadership should go the way of "statistical significance" / p < 0.05 sophistry of yore.
And because so many people are interested in these topics but are also uneducated, they find amateur analysis to be convincing.
I don't really get this criticism in response to what you quoted. He's talking about the dynamics, not the state. Your statement that the level of complexity waxes and wanes in different eras is perfectly compatible with a dynamic trend towards greater complexity in the absence of exogenous shocks (e.g. revolution, war, etc).
You seem to be confusing noise around the trend with its structural non-existence. The fact that things move around and occupy different levels at different times does not negate the existence of statistical structure.
I'm not saying the author is completely wrong: it's obvious (and kind of a surface level observation) that sometimes complex systems become less well-adapted to their circumstances. But the author doesn't make the case that the bodies responsible for international cooperation are a world government in any meaningful sense of the word or that their existence would constitute a point of failure (would the collapse of the World Trade Organization really threaten human civilization?). He also doesn't support his argument, think it through in any careful way, or even describe the mechanisms by which rot occurs.
I stand by my assertion that this is lazy thinking that makes broad generalizations about human systems and applies them without any kind of careful analysis.
It sort of seems to me that the phrase "in and of itself" is doing a lot of lifting there. I agree that it is far from established in a grand teleological sense that all systems tend towards rot and complexity. However, we can make observations about the systems we have and that humans have created, and there certainly seems, thus far, to be such a pattern. It could reverse tomorrow, of course, but generally we make inferences and extrapolations from what we're given, which is the best we can do.
> I'm not saying the author is completely wrong: it's obvious (and kind of a surface level observation) that sometimes complex systems become less well-adapted to their circumstances. But the author doesn't make the case that the bodies responsible for international cooperation are a world government in any meaningful sense of the word or that their existence would constitute a point of failure (would the collapse of the World Trade Organization really threaten human civilization?). He also doesn't support his argument, think it through in any careful way, or even describe the mechanisms by which rot occurs.
I think he's making a point about fragility. "World government" is certainly a loose concept here, but its precise technical specification isn't critical to his point. At it's core, the argument he's making is from induced correlation.
These forms of governance, whether explicit or implicit (e.g. by social convention rather than formal power structure) induce behavioral correlation among nations of the globe. They begin to respond to things similarly and use similar decision making processes to arrive at their actions. This is, as compared to a pre-modern globe composed of tribes with zero or very minimal contact with one another. Our world is much more correlated at the top level.
That sort of correlation is fine if we've figured out the right way to do things, of course. Spreading democracy, abolishing racism and sexism, or establishing human rights, etc are forms of "induced correlation" in this sense. Some parts of the world have decided that these precepts are the right way to do things, and are intent on establishing them as the norm in the rest of the world. This has the consequence of making the world more homogeneous and therefore less diverse. Less diversity can be a good thing sometimes, when we are eliminating "bad" diversity. But the argument he's making is that cultural and political diversity is narrowing.
A consequence of winnowed diversity is fragility and instability. Specifically, larger scale systems have lower short term variance and larger long-run variance. The tails get fatter. Mono-cultural systems can be highly efficient, because everything is standardized, and everyone can pull in the same direction at the same time. However, they are vulnerable to unforeseen and unanticipated shocks, and those shocks can be devastating, because they impact the whole system, for exactly the reason that we got those efficiency gains: they impact the entire system all at once. This is Nassim Taleb's argument about fragility and anti-fragility.
To address your specific point about the WTO collapsing, I think that is missing the point. The WTO does not have to collapse. We are certainly not relying on its continued existence in any material way. What the WTO is doing is inducing correlation and reducing diversity. It is inducing mono-culture, fostering specialization via Ricardian comparative advantage, etc. These things are good! The WTO is making global trade far more efficient than it used to be, reducing global inequality and improving the pace of technological innovation. I don't mean to argue this is bad in some narrow sense. It is, however, a Faustian bargain that not enough people understand. The price of this improvement is correlated risk, the bane of insurance companies everywhere. When all the countries of the world pull in the same direction, they are vulnerable to the same risks. And what 200 years ago would have been a recession or crisis in one country suddenly becomes global. Think of the US housing crisis and its near global impacts. That could not have happened in the absence of entities like the WTO and the IMF (that is, it would not have had global impact, it still could have happened here, but it would have been localized).
This argument doesn't hinge on whether you consider the WTO a government or not in some technical sense. What matters is the reduction of diversity (which is its intended goal) that it produces. Countries are not forced to follow the WTO, but they do. The same way farmers are not forced to use Monsanto's seeds, but they do. They do it because it increases the expectation of their annual profit, at the expense of long-run variance. In the long run the farmer may be dead, but society writ large is not. This is the mechanism by which individually, locally rational choices add up to systemic risk.
Pretty much how modern geometry is based on the discoveries of ancient geometers like Euclid or Archimedes.
The reality is we need both, as Silicon Valley might say, middle-out thinking. And I don't criticize the author or yourself for pushing their viewpoint, because the only way we move forward is bringing the Historians with the Systems thinkers. That's what this comment section is for. Better still, if we can find a Historian Hobbyist Systems thinker who can play both parts, like David Graeber did for the topics he was interested in. Although even he got criticized for basically your exact argument here.
So don't criticize the author for having a top-down viewpoint, give him concrete examples of his examples where he is wrong, point him in the direction of books you know that cover the things that he is talking about, he will appreciate it. He doesn't mean to be lazy, but it takes skill to know those things, and the skill he has acquired is elsewhere. This is the power of specialization.
Does law act like software, where a law written at the wrong abstraction level spirals out of control? What causes code and law to metastasize and be unable to refactor? Why was git, a source control system written in 2 weeks by Linus able to dominate the software space, when Microsoft had a team working for years on their source control system? What software are examples of systems that evolve over time? What software builds up so much spaghetti that it is best to throw it away? Joel Spolsky's argument is that answer is never, and refactoring is always preferable to starting fresh. Is that a good argument that laws should keep going forever? How do we know we found the law equivalent to git? There are many many more questions to ask, let's continue asking them.
Certainly, many of the best systems thinkers are programmers. Most programmers are pretty poor systems thinkers, though, and systems thinking doesn't do a lot of good if you don't have a deep understanding of the elements of the system.
> So don't criticize the author for having a top-down viewpoint, give him concrete examples of his examples where he is wrong, point him in the direction of books you know that cover the things that he is talking about, he will appreciate it.
Did the author engage the person you are chastising as an educator?
My discomfort with this line of thinking is that I've seen a lot of systems thinking hampered by bad abstractions. In fact, I'm currently working on one now. Given the extraordinary complexity of human society, we're much more likely to make bad abstractions and to ignore or even completely fail to observe critical feedback.
I also disagree that I shouldn't criticize him for his method of thinking. Criticism is our best path forward to refining our thought.
Lastly, I'd like to note that I think this comment was the kind of thoughtful and nuanced thinking I'd like to see more of. Even if we don't agree, you're asking better questions and attempting to synthesize different positions and processes. I appreciate that.
At the very least we need to be asking these questions...
1. What has global positive or negative externalities?
2. What has country-level positive or negative externalities?
3. What has local positive or negative externalities?
If you aren't at least asking those questions, you are never going to arrive at the correct level of abstraction. Should we have a World Government? We have global externalities, so probably. What should that government do? As little as required.
Case in point - we have "red states" and "blue states" with pretty substantial difference in policy, from taxes to abortion rights, but national red/blue party votes seem to indicate they're only split 60:40 or so in terms of their population, if that. Even though "immigration" across US state lines is as low friction as you can hope for.
The problem with only regulating trade is that most of what a government does ties back into trade. Any form of subsidies or tax benefits creates an unfair advantage to one country’s businesses, so any attempt at regulating trade will find itself regulating taxation and subsidy regimes. Any mismatch between product standards will make it difficult to trade, so inevitably you will see environmental and product safety regulation creep in. Devaluing a coin can benefit one country over another, so it becomes necessary to have a common monetary policy (see: the euro). Everything that the EU does, and it does a lot of things, has derived in some way of the attempt to regulate trade.
Add a sincere attempt to ensure human rights into the mix, and a global government will inevitably find itself regulating everything.
But for a long time the EU was moving towards ever closer integration. Its important thay changes.
Some time ago people have more faith in the EU. But since EU derailed, beaurocrats and politicians started pushing EU towards a progressive and leftist dystopia. And people don't like that.
They have their history, their culture, their way of life, their customs and they want to live how they used to, without being told by the others how to live their lives.
No one apart from the far left wants Europe to become a melting pot in which nations, ethnicities, languages, customs, cultures dissappear.
That just happened with UK. And it might happen again with Poland and Hungary.
Eu is not a supers state but it tries to become one. And the peoples of Europe do not like how a bunch of beaurocrats and politicians who they didn't even vote, are trying to change the way they live their lives, tell them what to do and mess with each country's internal affairs.
They don't call themselves sick. They call themselves globalists, progressives. In their generosity they want to impose others by force their own ideas, convinced that they know what is best for each of the World's 7 billion individuals.
Even being as critical as one can be about progressives, they are quick to preference the (perceived) rights of the minority over the will of the majority.
Who calls themselves globalists?
The US has either the worst government, or very nearly so, of all established democracies on measures of effective representation, popular satiafaction with government, etc.
“Even in the US” is, thus, a weird lead in here since it suggests that the US is the best of the best but even it still has the problem described, when it is very much not the best of the best, and there is plenty of research establishing the particular structural choices that cause that.
What amounts to world government so far is already quite rotten.
I would say one of the key parameters would be how well a system actor models the system in which it exists. In other words, do the internal rules of a system actor, whether it be an organism or a legal code, anticipate stressors from the outside and avoid them?
As two examples, an organism on earth needs to have a model of gravity to avoid falling from a dangerous height and dying. Likewise a legal system needs to have a prohibition against murder to prevent feuds that rip society apart.
If a system actor is really well-adapted to its niche it can forestall rot. However because the actor is always just a part of the system, it cannot model everything. There's simply not enough space to store the model. So all system actors rot and die due to unanticipated stressors.
The system itself, however large we define its scope (valley, earth, universe), will always outlast a system actor because it does not need to rely on a model but is big enough to contain all the information the model attempts to compress.
Renewal is when a failed model is discarded by the system which has more information. Rot is when the model is failing. I'm less worried with an absence of renewal than I am in how long I might have to live with rot.
I see no way to construct a world government that does away with conflict. External stressors are necessary to "keep the model honest". We can try very hard to build good models of governance, and we should, but we should also know that we will always fail. The risk is that fear of discarding a failed government, because of the loss of pride, tumult, and short-term regression, pushes us to maintain an oppressive, maladapted order.
World government has the potential to rot for a very long time.
The point of a government is to avoid war. The ruling class is made up of the more intelligent and more aggressive population, who make a pact of no aggression among them and that evolves into a government.
The whole European Union was born because of fears of repeating the WWII tragedy. WWI hadn't ended with a surrender, it had been an armistice. Defeated germany polarized and Hitler ascended to power. So, after WWII, France wasn't allowed to grab the coal and iron mines from Germany, and so on.
You want to improve a government and to stabilize it. War has a few winners and the rest are losers. And not inconvenienced losers, dead or enslaved losers.
"Gimme that old time Religion" and "here come the New Boss"
Those were Malthusian times, before industrialisation and widespread literacy and the internet. We don’t have evidence that this time is different. But we can’t reject that hypothesis, either. The biggest thing we currently lack is a culture that believes it can break the cycle.
Lots of banks. Honestly, I have a hard time finding a bank that is large today that were created in the 1900s. Most seems to come from 1700s and early 1800s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_contin...
I think the biggest reason you don't see more banks is that the concept of a bank is fairly novel, and they exploded in popularity with the printing press and industrialization. World war 1 and 2 didn't end these big banks, and if they can survive those then they can survive most things.
Let's put aside the obvious racism. The Spanish weren't extraterrestial. They were different, smart and had cool gadgets. So, poor kid meets Ironman?
And horses. Those were almost extraterrestrial.
The Eastern Roman Empire, more commonly known as Byzantium or the Byzantine empire, fell in 1453. They weren't under the authority of the Catholic church ( great schism and all that).
The Western Roman Empire fell much earlier.
The Catholic Church dates since the Great Schism. So it is not 1700 years old.
It changed pretty significantly with the donation of constantine, and more recently, the second vatican council made some pretty big changes. Opinions can be had about whether that was a long overdue overhaul, or the church succumbing to the heretical evils of modernity, what can't be denied is that they were pretty significant.
1. There are a lot more small organizations at any given time than large ones. There were only two Caliphates at the time of the Fatimid Caliphate (the other being the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate, to which we owe Western Civilization, such as it is), and they covered the entire Middle East. But at the same time and in the same place there were thousands of schools and universities, some of which did get blown up by catastrophes (like the House of Wisdom in Baghdad) and some of which did not.
2. There are a lot of catastrophes that are harder for a big organization like the Fatimid Caliphate to absorb than for a smaller organization like al-Azhar University. More generally there are certain kinds of organizations, such as universities, that are very resilient.
Why are you prefixing the years with a zero, is that a thing? Are you preparing for those who might read this in a few millenia after us?
(Not sure if that is what he meant, but if he did that for ease of parsing it will just make it harder)
A top general in ww2 (modern armies are much smaller despite the world having tripled in population) could manage literally millions of people in a direct chain of command for a single purpose, mostly through the use of hierarchically nested units which each had similar substructures.
Think about a large company like Google. Lots of energy is spent on ensuring alignment, common culture etc., and this isn't achieved primarily through manager->subordinate communication.
Maybe armies are a special case due to the limited instruction set.
The human brain has only approximately 7 registers, therefore all of humanity's accumulated knowledge and culture can't have come into existence because 7 registers per computational node is insufficient?
These cognitive limitations are better understood as challenges, not fundamental barriers. Culture is an immensely powerful tool. Indeed, one might argue that culture is so powerful that as our capacity to construct and leverage culture grew the selective pressures and evolutionary need for further increasing other, primitive cognitive limits diminished.
Where did you get this idea? Or did you come up with it?
Ayn Rand had the same idea. She called it the "crow epistemology," rather than using an analogy to registers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...
Pettiness just feels like despotism without sufficient imagination and/or power to enforce desired change.
Governments are efficient?
"We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making. Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised 'elites' and 'experts' who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted." — Robert Steele
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/j...]
Googling his name and climate change brings up a tweet in which he says he's been in the room when climate scientists attempt to make climate change seem worse than it is, which is fascinating.
I even went and learned more about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking .
But the article just stops right when it’s getting going! I wanted more. Still glad I read it, but it makes you want “the rest of the book.”
Modern governments in the West seem to be entering another period of crisis so I'm very skeptical that any global government would succeed in their place.
Successful ones. The ones poorly set from the start don't make it anywhere near that.
USA is a country, a federation of states like Germany.
EU is not a country and never will be.
The bigger they are, the more ineficient they become. The bigger they are, more and more people start realizing that their interests are not well served by those institutions.
But we don't have yet a World Government and that is a dystopia we might never live in.
The only thing I’m absolutely certain about is that International Socialism, regardless of characteristics, is not a solution to any problem, I won’t be voting for it.