Why nations fail
economist.com
economist.com
I recently researched the thorny issue of what consititutes art, and the leading idea in that field is a cluster theory: a set of ten ideas which commonly associated with things accepted as art. Some objects don't have all ten, but together they provide a powerful guide. My point in mentioning this is that state failure seems to follow the same pattern. Geography (ie Jared Diamond's theory) is a factor in state success and failure. Culture is another factor. Economic system and the nature of institutions (extractive or inclusive) are two more factors. (And there's bound to be a few more).
A state can succeed with only a couple of these. Lacking them all is a sure sign of failure. Having them all likely comes as close to guaranteeing success as possible. But thinking there's some single indicator that determines state failure is a doomed project.
And in regards to parameters (a "cluster" of factors) that can be indicative of a failed state:
Looking at the submission's chosen title here, I would at least have expected some sort of connection to the actual idea of failed states[1], which are yearly ranked by a combination of multiple influences, where institutional organisation is a factor alongside others.
Pretty much it boils down to 'if someone calls it art, it's art'
If you mean, was _primarily_ designed to be used, then I don't think that is necessarily the case. For example, certain pieces of furniture are sometimes designed by an architect to complement their overall design. Of course, they want the furniture to be used just as they want the building to be used, but for many I think the art comes first.
http://youtu.be/KQ35zNlyG-o?t=7m11s
More detail for those interested:
(You will have to watch all 4 parts)
To your theory on art, could art be defined as anything which a group of people would define as art? Or potentially anything valued by a group seemly without functional value? It seems to be a balance between simplicity and informational content.
Fascinating. Can you post some links about this?
It was eye-opening for me to find out about research into multiple kinds of intelligence. I think I'd like to know more about what you found out about art.
In fact, you'll find that this is a popular style in economics and business articles.
You can try to use history to add some data, but on the other hand, many smallish states will have similar criteria (history, culture, geography,...) so that diminishes you data set.
In addition, while you could try to use this to make predictions, the time scale is so big that I don't think the whole endeavor is very useful.
It's far better than the trendy Jared Diamond writing. IMHO, Jared Diamond's collapse is a book written from end to beginning, much like Guns, Germs and Steel to simply reconfirm existing left of center ideas by torturing and cherry picking the data to ignore anything that doesn't reconfirm accepted and popular political narratives.
I can't make out whether that's meant as a compliment or a complaint. Would you elaborate on that description, please?
I haven't read Why Nations Fail, but I do read their blog[1] and my interpretation of their theories is much less absolute than the Economist's is - or rather, I think the emphasis is more on the problems of Extractive institutions (which may well be state institutions, but also could be private institutions or hybrids or the two).
For example, even in the review the Economist highlights the example of Botswana which is a good example of state power as a good.
Another example: the (book) authors are very positive about the potential impact of Jim Yong Kim on the World Bank: http://whynationsfail.com/blog/2012/3/27/mr-kim-vs-the-world...
I thought they were one of the most liberal papers in existence. (In the classical European sense.)
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/Articles/98spr...
Which doesn't really explain 'why' but does set out in concise form 'what failure looks like'.
Depends on what you need it to be useful for.
Understanding the root problems in a philosophical sense? Maybe not.
A rough guide for where to put a factory, do business with, startup ideas? Useful.
Pretty good reading.
This is the kind of thinking that got the US stuck in Iraq for a decade. "We'll change the country by killing this one guy".
If a nation's leader is a failure it's because the nation itself is a big pile of fail, not the other way around.
Maybe this isn't the grand theory to support them all, but it reminds me a lot of why cancer is so destructive. One part of a large community using far too many resources. There could be a cluster theory to support the causes of cancer as well, but cluster theories are very hard to find solutions for. We don't just need to casually understand the problem. We need to prevent it if possible.
At least this theory gives us a reasonable means of experimenting with and analyzing future failures.
Edit:removed my opinion of others' opinions.
If you're going to say I'm wrong, at least point out how I'm wrong. There isn't a big difference between what I said and:
>>corrupt governments siphon wealth into privileged hands at the expense of the public good.<<
The effect is the same. Too much money in too few hands. Countries don't only need the rule of law to protect us from violence. We also need it to protect us from semi-legal forms of theft.
Monarchs gathered wealth and provided protection, and they've been going out of business for quite a while now. Mexico has the richest person in the world along with a lot of corruption and lots of very poor people. How can a place be viable enough to support multibillionaires, and still have people living in shacks?
I'm trying to understand the truth.
To use extreme examples, in one case, the concentration comes from enslaving a populace, while in the other case the concentration could come from a pure free market where only contracts are enforced (and thus some people become extraordinarily wealthy by benefiting large numbers of people, as Steve Jobs & Bill Gates have.)
That's basically how capitalism works if left to its own devices. The place doesn't have to do anything at all.
It doesn't matter what the outcome is, as long as it is seen to be fair. As soon as it isn't, people will resent the system, subvert it or rebel. This is a trait we share with monkeys and elephants, and is possibly the basis of social organization.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/03/acemoglu_on_why.htm...
Sentences like these just read as nonsense to me:
"The intuition behind the theory is nonetheless compelling, which makes the scarcity of policy prescriptions frustrating."
I guess what it comes down to is that some people perhaps see it as pompous to place the precise expression of one's thoughts above the simple and efficient conveyance of information.
To these people, I say: read more poetry.
To find true opacity-for-its-own-sake one must look to the french postmodern "philosophers" of the 1960s:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.
Utterly unforgivable.
People who don't like big words work to continually reassure themselves they're missing no precision of meaning or accuracy of tone. They often are. The selection has a grade level of 15.73 (aka, Junior in college)
Doesn't mean everything should be expressed at the college reading level, but it doesn't mean everything else should be expressed at the reading level of a 6th grader.
To move this sentence down to the flesch reading level of a 6th grader requires the following:
>The intuition behind the theory is nonetheless compelling, which makes the scarcity of policy prescriptions frustrating
to
>Acemoglu's idea make sense to me. I'm still mad and unsettled that it does not tell the government what to do to fix the problem.
FK Grade level of 5.8
And it had to go into the 1st person to do so, Try to write the sentence, capturing all the nuance of what he's saying and keeping it in the third person. Requires several more lines.
Complex vocabulary has the opportunity to convey nuance and heterogeneity that simplistic vocabulary glosses over. It is one of the features of the paper, along with occasionally admitting they are wrong and usually providing rational explanations for the positions they take. I also don't agree with them, but have read the paper for over two decades and it has never induced the blind rage the stupidity and sloppy thinking of network news always seems to manage in the first few minutes.
Many discussions could be more productive if other people emulated their philosophy.
I've just disagreed with the authors about Botswana and the French Revolution. Nonetheless, they are wise and understand why nations fail. People suffer when nations fail. What should people do differently to avoid their nations failing? Since the authors had described the problems so well, I hoped that they would offer advice, for I felt sure that it would also be good. They give very little advice. I found that frustrating.
There is a lot of meaning packed into that sentence (read in context). It is brief, not wordy. Unpacking the sentence to make its meaning plain for all to read is self-defeating because it requires too many words. That surfeit of words, if sustained for the length of a book review, re-hides the meaning.
The other reason this works is that businesses have to accommodate the needs and desires of their customers, their shareholders and their employees. Businesses need all three in order to thrive. Governments don't need to accommodate anyone's desires or needs, short of that which would cause a revolution that overthrows the government... government imposes its edicts using violence while businesses can only attempt to pursuade or entice people.
Naturally this means that government is less interested in accepting economic reality, while businesses have to react very quickly... and if they don't, the entire economy of businesses overall will react quickly (e.g.: your business will get supplanted by one that accommodates the new reality.)
The lesson here for those who wish to enslave a populace and extract wealth from them is rather than have an overarching government with extreme control, allow a great deal of liberty and then impose a %10 tax on it. %10 is better than %50 when its %10 of an economy 1,000 times bigger.
Unfortunately, all states I'm aware of historically, no matter how rooted in liberty, eventually become parasitical and over the years start to extract more and more of the wealth to profit politicians and more and more controlling to make protect that extractive policy.
Finally, the state's real power has little to do with direct force. Functional society's run on softer forms of coercion. Such as propaganda, tribal allegiance, religion, or even entertainment. Consider, over 10 million people live and work in america without permission from the government to do so. And even those with citizenship the largest crop in many states is marijuana and such income rarely makes in on the old tax forms.
So while 10% of something 1000 times bigger is definitely better than 50% of the base, that isn't really the issue. It is not as though in an extractive government the loot is divided at the end of the year according to rank or something. It's a bit more catch-as-catch-can.
Basically, and I guess this is what the book is arguing, in the absence of the kinds of institutions that enforce or engender inclusive policies and practices, people do whatever they can get away with.
This is only true where a strong state exists to enforce monopoly of violence. Businesses are perfectly capable of imposing edicts by violence where there is none.
Why shouldn't it be the null hypothesis that genetic diversity is the cause of global inequality? Human beings have been thinking about this subject for a lot more than the last 50 years, you know. All I think is what more or less everyone used to think - since when Jesus was a little boy. If that's not a null hypothesis, what is?
So, from my perspective, the OP is like a long, vague explanation of how stress causes ulcers or marsh miasmas cause malaria. It's impossible for any such analysis to be any more cogent than any other - all are equally wrong.
In case you're posting from a different dimension, these "minor" differences can change the color of our skin, the shape of our bones, and even (gasp) the size of our brains. If these are minor organs, what are major ones?
In case you're posting from the same dimension, your fallacy has a name:
https://www.google.com/?q=Lewontins%20fallacy
Furthermore, it is very doubtful that you can find any statistically significant genetic differences between some of the countries mentioned in the article (e.g., England and Spain).
You've been keeping up with the latest genomic research, I see! Ha. I jest, of course.
Again, your own eyes are a great start - they really never lie. Have you been to England? Spain? Would you be confident in saying: "Englishmen look just like Spaniards?" Or if there's a difference... what's the cause? The weather, perhaps?
Personally - call me crazy, I know - I feel I can tell an Englishman from a German with much better than random accuracy. If I note that English weather is pretty similar to German weather, does that make me... oh, noes... a racist?
It is really cute how you think you can tell an Englishman from a German. Do you know, by the way, the genetic make up of the Englishman? Do you know where the word "England" came from? Here is a clue -- it came from the Anglo-Saxons a group of GERMAN tribes that conquered England after the Romans left and later became the people you now call English. So your ability to tell apart the English and Germans based on their look is most likely a figment of your imagination.
Anyways lets not get carried away and stick to the topic at hand. Here is another example from the article -- the economic difference between the southern US and the rest of the US. Could you explain that one. Please tell me how the southerners developed a statistically different genetic make up than northerners in the 400 year period since colonization. I would love to hear about the split between the grits and pizza genes.
You're really good with teh googles! I guess you read the A.W.F. Edwards paper too:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.10315/abstra...
You also seem interested in European population substructure:
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...
You always create flamewars with people that disagrees with you, this is not Digg if you're old enough to know what this mean.
I also have my motives to believe that you're not a psychometrist, population geneticist or whatever could and that you're probably someone sitting your ass in class each day at Uni.
I am jewish and it always sad to see people acting this way, like you, saying they are jewish.
You probably never read the Shas, as the majority of American jews are not brought up in a religious environment, but Rabbi Shimom ben Gamaliel used to say that the best thing for a man is silence. You can learn a couple of things with the Bavli, what about giving it a try?
It's everyone else who's obsessed with "IQ and Race stuff." They're just obsessed in the other direction. Worse still, they don't know it - because everyone they know has the same obsession. Fear is a kind of obsession, too. Don't we think of the Victorians as obsessed with sex?
And I'm not Jewish, just partly of Jewish descent. I know what "mitzvah" means, however. I'm willing to be downvoted a little because I hate to see smart, thoughtful people stumbling around in the darkness, when they could just turn on the light. At least, from my perspective. I know I spent quite some time stumbling in the darkness - don't you think I used to believe what everyone here believes?
I am not a psychometrist or a population geneticist, but I know some. Also, while not Israeli or even (properly) Jewish, I'm a big fan of Moshe Feiglin:
Perhaps you'll change your mind and I'll change my religion, and we'll see each other at a Korban Pesach on the Temple Mount. Shalom!
So do you agree or disagree with people being "born-that-way", for lack of a better term? That's what's being argued here (at least by me). Not whether "all whites are born that way" or "all blacks are born that way", which is where you seem to be trying to steer it.
Can we not talk about genetic diversity without associating it with race?
Afterall, humans came from the same small genetic stock, and races generally reflect adaptation/mutation to particular geographies - not to the very recent economic developments.
Not to mention that diversity and specialization is generally good for trade.
The problem is, I never really understood why it's a stretch to believe that in all of the messy soup of chromosomes and culture (variables of a magnitude beyond what we could ever possibly research) that there are tangible differences between human beings. And once you start acknowledging differences, you have to acknowledge that those differences are going to give rise to advantages and disadvantages to things so random that they might not ever matter. But sometimes they do.
Are these differences, this genetic diversity, the root cause of global inequality? Based on my understanding of economics, I don't believe so. But that doesn't mean the conversation should be off the table.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas
You can evaluate Boas' logic yourself, by reading his The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) - free online:
http://archive.org/stream/mindofprimitivem031738mbp#page/n10...
Fascinatingly, in the introduction to the 1938 edition (copyright police missed this one), Boas writes:
"Still worse is the subjection of science to ignorant prejudices in countries controlled by dictators. Such control has extended particularly to books dealing with the subject matter of race and culture. Since nothing is permitted to be printed that runs counter to the ignorant whims and prejudices of the governing clique, there can be no trustworthy science. When a publisher whose pride used to be the number and value of his scientific books announces in his calendar a book trying to show that race mixture is not harmful, withdraws the same book after a dictator comes into power, when great encyclopedias are rewritten according to prescribed tenets, when scientists either do not dare or are not allowed to publish results contradicting the prescribed doctrines, when others, in order to advance their own material interests, or blinded by uncontrolled emotion, follow blindly the prescribed road, no confidence can be placed in their statements. The suppression of intellectual freedom rings the death knell of science."
Indeed:
So in the overall scale of things, I think it's better not to have those discussions. The costs are too high, and frankly, history has shown that the public can't be trusted with authoritative opinions that can give cover to heinous acts. The conversation should be off the table.
Your reasoning is sound and supported by a cursory look at human history. That said, I just can't buy into that conclusion. It can't be either/or.
If you're in the mood for an excellent book on these topics, with what I think is good representation of both arguments, you should check out http://www.amazon.com/Defenders-Truth-The-Sociobiology-Debat.... It's one of the best books I've ever read.
When you're trying to have a rational discussion about which factors contribute to certain effects, it's better to exhaust all possible theories before attempting to prove that "some people are just better than others."
I wonder, though, how you feel about all the violence we've seen committed in the name of egalitarianism, in the lives of those now living? For instance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Blokhin
Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber—which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room"—for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door. The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against. Blokhin—outfitted in a leather butcher's apron, cap, and shoulder-length gloves to protect his uniform—then, with no procurator present and no reading of the sentence or any other formalities, pushed the prisoner against the log wall and shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2 .25 ACP pistol. He had brought a briefcase full of his own Walther pistols, since he did not trust the reliability of the standard-issue Soviet TT-30 for the frequent, heavy use he intended.
If we're going to excommunicate 20th-century philosophies on the grounds of their association with this sort of thing, we find quite quickly that we have to excommunicate everyone - right and left, fascist and communist, nationalist and universalist, racist and egalitarian. And then what's left?
But the rest of your comment makes very little sense to me. Blokhin seems to have been an instrument of state power. I don't see any relationship, necessary, causal, or otherwise, between an executioner and a pragmatic principle of equality.
I also haven't "excommunicated" philosophies on the grounds of association. Rather, I have explained a rationale for a taboo around discussion of certain topics. If "association" with the reprehensible is sufficient grounds for "excommunication", a random walk through Wikipedia should be sufficient to convince oneself that one can trivially "excomunnicate" everything; reductio ad absurdum, hence mere association is not enough.
I don't see any relationship, necessary, causal, or otherwise, between an executioner and a pragmatic principle of equality.
But you do see a relationship between racist/nationalist/fascist ideology and racist/nationalist/fascist executioners, right?
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/battal...
I certainly can't interpret your post in any other way. (Although I can't interpret "pragmatic principle" in any way at all - it makes me think of jumbo shrimp.)
So essentially, you see a necessary and causal relationship between fascist ideology and fascist terror, but you don't see a necessary and causal relationship between communist ideology and communist terror. Or to use the Russian color codes, you see a relationship between White Terror and White ideology, but not between Red Terror and Red ideology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
Perhaps you won't take my word for it, but you don't need to - the truth isn't hard to find. I can guarantee you 100% that almost everyone involved with both these systems of terror was completely drenched in, convinced by, and in thrall to the ideologies they served.
General Blokhin, for example, single-handedly murdered a substantial percentage of the Polish aristocracy. As he is doing so, is his mind a blank? Or does he conceive himself as freeing the Polish workers and peasants from the grip of the alien, rapacious hereditary nobles? What do you think? With every bullet in the back of some stuck-up count's neck, he's bringing Poland closer to equality.
You'll no doubt agree on the ideological nature of Nazi crimes. The "ordinary men" of Reserve Police Battalion 101 are in exactly the same boat - in their minds, as they slaughter the Jews of Poland, they think: the Jews caused this war, we are freeing Germany from Jewish oppression.
Likewise, as American airmen incinerate hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians, they are thinking: the Huns and the Japs caused this war, now they're paying the price.
We cannot know the mind of any of these individuals. However, the collective propaganda mind of World War II is very easy to recall - all we have to do is read the texts. There is no shortage of American and Soviet propaganda that, read in context, is just as horrifying as anything Goebbels produced. Do you want to hear FDR sneering, raving, and lying like something out of Hitler's Greatest Hits?
http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/timeline/411027awp.html
So should we excommunicate it all? Or do you not like that word? Too Catholic, perhaps?
No. I see systems of power-hungry humans manipulating other humans by whatever means they can to achieve their ends. Propaganda and ideologies are usually just vectors - potent vectors - for the transmission of instrumental power. Humans, in the large, are like packs of rabid dogs; it takes very careful social and institutional design to balance force against force and prevent single individuals gaining too much power. I believe the emergence of a dictator, along with the mass murder of opponents, as a natural outcome for a large population starting out otherwise unorganized.
Words like communist, fascist, capitalist, are useful shorthands for communication, but they are labels, and as labels they risk short-circuiting thought. Some thing A is labeled as X, some thing B is labeled as X, and you naturally start to think that A and B have some connection.
When I said "pragmatic principle", I'm joining together two concepts; the pragmatic, by which I mean ends rather than means; and principle, by which I mean a rule governing personal behaviour. But I am not an absolute consequentialist; rather, I hold that the systemic consequences of deontological positions should be considered. One should usually be deontological on an individual basis, but adopt certain things as principles - i.e. not necessarily justified under deontology - on a consequentialist basis.
I think you see a parallel between discussion of ideologies associated with 20th century atrocities, and discussion of race as some kind of determinant. And if I deny the latter, that I must deny the former; and since denying the former seems absurd, my position, by analogy, is absurd.
But I don't think that's the right parallel to draw. The parallel of discussion of 20th century atrocities is discussion of racism, not race as a determinant. The parallel of race as a determinant might be an enthusiastic discussion of how Jews run media, banking, etc. - a discussion which is similarly abhorrent and taboo.
Why does this matter? Well, we know what makes a discussion "abhorrent and taboo" in the People's Republic of China. It simply boils down to anti-government speech. My suspicion is that when you examine your own epistemology closely enough, you'll find you're applying exactly the same test. It is certainly an objective test!
The "discussion of how Jews run media, banking, etc." is a poor example, I feel, because it's a very easy discussion to have - especially in the light of Cochran & Harpending 2005.
There are two statements here, a factual one which is true and an implicit one which is false. The true statement is that these industries are full of Jews; the false one, that they act collectively as Jews (eg, under the direction of the "Elders of Zion"). We know the false statement to be false because we know that your media or banking Jew is almost always an assimilated, nontribal, anti-nationalist, and in other words communist Jew - utterly indistinguishable from his WASP communist friends. So there's no social network for exclusively Jewish collective action.
What was abhorrent and taboo about that? Except possibly the communist part. Somehow in a world that contains living equivalents of General Blokhin, it's socially taboo to speak ill of communism. Don't you find that a little peculiar?
I'd also warn you against the word "determinant." There are a large number of differences, many surely relevant, between Japan and Haiti. Japan is a much larger island and has a much larger population - not to mention colder weather. We cannot say that genetic diversity is the only reason that international development assistance seems unable to develop Haiti into a new Caribbean Japan - or at least a Singapore. Hence declensions of determine are inappropriate, I feel.
What's good, though, is that we agree there's an elephant in the room. All we disagree on is who's allowed to notice it. What a strange world we live in!
It takes a look at the question of why one group of people ended up with the tech first and largely comes to the conclusion that it is part of a complex interaction involving the environmental availability of species and geography neccessary for the development of sedentry existence and then also a maximally heterogeneous cultural development.
[edit] the explantation I just gave is a massive oversimplification of his argument, but it would be very hard to fit his book into a post.
And do please stop waving around the razor and the butterknife, you'll only do yourself another mischief.
Highly recommended.
There is also the elephant in the room with this subject, which is when you look which cultures might be at risk from collapse in the future. Or perhaps I have just read Snowcrash too many times.
We're staring down several of his modes of failure.
I'd throw resource depletion into the "environmental problems/issues" bucket (interesting that he distinguishes this from "climate change" now that I look at it again).
A few other views on "problems facing the world" based on exhaustive research (viz: a quick Web search): http://aspdeveloper.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/10-problems-or-... http://www.globalissues.org/ http://www.arlingtoninstitute.org/wbp
My own off-the-top-of-my-head list: Overpopulation, resource depletion, environmental contamination, anthropogenic climate change, societal inequities, WMD proliferation (particularly to non-state actors and rogue states), general systemic fragility/complexity, social intransigence in the face of many such issues (e.g.: US counterfactual denial political movements, rightist movements in various EU states, militant Islamist movements, etc.), government / corporate / social corruption, breakdown of social institutions, failures in universal education (primary, secondary, and higher). In no particular order.
The plausibility of a link between prosperity and IQ is also going to depend on one's basic assumptions about how nations work. Suppose that national prosperity is basically a battle between the good guys building and the bad guys looting. What happens when both the good guys and the bad guys are smarter? Smarter bad guys makes things worse and the bad guys generally out number the good guys, so it is no surprise that the planet's smartest race lose 30million members to a man made famine.
There are rival basic assumptions, around which one could build ones political theorizing. I like "Man versus Nature". So I'm temperamentally inclined to smarter is better. But I can see how some-one who sees the world as "Man versus Man" would dismiss "IQ leads to prosperity" as not worth considering, because there is no underlying mechanism to make it work.
I would argue that in many cases wealth causes IQ and poverty takes it away. E.g. ex-ussr is rather blue for its sorry state, and I guess it would be much bluer if measured 25 years ago. Argentina is pretty blue but yet it fails to monetize that. Mongolia is very blue and it's effectively a placeholder.