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Comment by DrJokepu | Hacker News Reader

Don't be so naive. A "social contract" can only exist if there's a large enough middle class, which is something Somalia (and East Africa in general) lacks. Unfortunately a more likely outcome will be the emergence of a few local warlords and a particularly bloody tribal war and a total humanitarian disaster.

Don't forget that things have changed since the creation of "social contracts" in modern Western nations; genocide is a lot cheaper and simpler to execute than it used to be. These days all you need is to put four men equipped with cheap Russian-made machine guns into a jeep and they will exterminate a dozen villages in the course of an afternoon without breaking a sweat.

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I stand corrected. I failed to take into account the effectiveness and efficiency of modern weapons. They assign disproportionate power to the top of the thugocracy (Saddam Hussein being an extreme example). Such a thugocracy can propagate itself brutally, suppressing the trickling down of wealth and development.

The question that follows (and that I honestly don't know the answer to) is whether the invention of modern weapons was a historical tipping point that obliterated previous routes of national economic development. What if mechanized warfare had been invented before the rise of the West by a non-Western civilization and transferred (via trade) to the medieval European feudal lords. Would they have allowed the rise of the middle class in the West the way it did?

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do" -- Samuel Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 51.

Hard to tell. If you ask me, I think that if the invention of modern warfare happened before the Thirty Year's War and the subsequent Peace of Westphalia (which created the modern West as we know it) then the Thirt Year's war would have been a lot bloodier and more violent, not unlike the current tribal wars in Africa but on the scale of the World Wars. Eventually someone would have won it but the West would have became a lot weaker than it is (due to the destruction and death toll), making the world a lot more multipolar.

This is, of course, worthless crystal ball history, but that's my two cents.

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