Why do we have the political systems that we do? Back in the farming era, regimes competed militarily. Winners had more militarily effective total systems on average, and part their total system was their political system, which was therefore plausibly militarily effective.
Given "political systems have changed only modestly ..." and "... systems vary so much around the world", the answer would seem to most likely be history ('path dependency').
I found this post to be a little too abstract to properly consider. Could you provide some examples of radically different political systems "around the world"? Would you consider the political systems of the USA and Saudi Arabia to be (almost) maximally different? I would imagine that regardless of how leaders are chosen, both systems are largely similar in how they operate at the level of bureaucracy, i.e. the actual people and organizations that perform the concrete functions of the system.
I don't think the US political system didn't change much in the last 100 years. It still has congress the senate and a president.
However you know have congressman spending most of there days raising campaign funds to pay for TV spots to be relected.That's a systematic change.
In the past congress used to declare wars. Now the president acts like he has the authority. He also acts like he has other power that he didn't have in the past.
The experiment would be biased if there were only believers (a real society has to function with a significant number of dissenters and apolitical people), plus there would not be much freedom to experiment if only systems with large numbers of supporters could be tested.
The people who move there would likely believe in the system. We've seldom prevented people from moving to new societies with their children. (viz. migrating to North America, setting up communes, moving to Celebration, FL.) Why do you think this would be different?
Damien responded to the questions in your first paragraph.
Google "privately run cities" to find out more about what I'm talking about. These would be "proper governments" as I understand the term, but being created in the 21st century, would be able to choose new rules, rather than having laws and ordinances left over from earlier times.
I'm not a big believer in seasteading but your argument isn't very sound. Possible counters are "no one thought of it" and "new technology, it wasn't possible or economical before".
If anyone does really try it I suspect it might be the Dutch or Japanese, who combine high starting wealth with a shortage of land.
I think the usual theory is that in order to keep up the arms race with the US, the USSR increased their military expenditures way beyond what their economy could substain, leading to a collapse.
With all the new information, it's still not understood. It isn't that the Soviet Union was on the verge of economic collapse. The political collapse was, on one interpretation, largely the result of the demoralization of the elite and population. The ruling elite more or less decided they had enough of Communism and wanted to enrich themselves. The discovery of oil was probably a major factor in their greed. But notably, there was no popular resistance to changes that impoverished masses of people. Soviet workers didn't want to go to capitalism--but they lacked sufficient confidence in the existing system to put up any resistance.
Wherever demoralization is a major factor, look to loss at war as a major contributing cause.
[Added. 4:45 pm] I overstated the absence of resistance above. There was limited resistance, for example, when the mine workers hadn't been paid for several months.
"My prediction is that we won't see many massive political changes unless there is a disruption of the system through resource depletion or perhaps environmental catastrophe (Both of which are highly unlikely) or space opens up for massive expansion (slightly more likely than the former)."
There will have to be massive political changes to adjust to the realities of the future. Of course that doesn't necessarily mean (violent) revolution, it could just go one high court ruling or amendment at a time.
The Soviet war in Afghanistan cost the Soviet Union less (relative to GDP) than the current war in Afghanistan is costing the US. It may have been the final straw, but that's not really a fair way of looking at it. Soviet defense and foreign aid spending was huge (combined it was about 20%) and contributed to the Soviet Union's weakening over many years. Why no one predicted it? Actually some people did, but most importantly we have hindsight and access to information Westerners in the 70s and 80s did not have, plus the actual fall was a spontaneous moment with the precise timing impossible to predict.
It is pretty easy to see why the cost of changing systems is so expensive today. Think of it as protein folding. Start out with a completely unfolded protein. There are tons of lower energy conformations that the protein (system) can take. But when you are in a stable conformation it is difficult to change states. You have to add a lot of energy to the system.
And how do you add energy to the system? Disease, hunger, even boredom. If you expect your life to be full of hunger and pain you will be a lot more willing to force change, even if it means death.
But guess what? Life is comfortable. Even for the poor in the country, it is relatively good. And the rest of the world is rapidly following suit.
Or you could look to evolutionary theory. Most changes occur not when you are in a competitive environment, but when you are in an environment with relatively little competition.
My prediction is that we won't see many massive political changes unless there is a disruption of the system through resource depletion or perhaps environmental catastrophe (Both of which are highly unlikely) or space opens up for massive expansion (slightly more likely than the former).
I'm glad you're so confident about why the Soviet Union collapsed when the experts aren't and no one predicted it. (Why wasn't this "instability" widely perceived?) And yes, this "stretch" is widely believed to be part of the answer. Defeat in war has always been a major cause of revolution--and this has particular truth for Russia.
We don't feel richer (because we have no memories of life in the past and because we also take into account immaterial forms of wealth that are not counted in the GNP), so we don't care about a greater absolute cost if the percentage of GNP change is the same. It's possible the change would be larger as a percentage but then again the recovery may also be quicker, that we don't know and I doubt we have strong intuitions about it either so it doesn't factor into our feelings. It's probably more important that the price of not having a revolution was greater in the past because there were no safety nets and rulers were more cruel.
“But then why did systems ever change in the past? It is hard to see change being less expensive then.” Not so hard! We are much richer now than people were in the past, especially in the distant past, and our economic systems are more complex and, therefore, fragile. A political change that cost a certain percentage of GNP would be more expensive in absolute terms for us than for our forebears, and because of the greater complexity of our economies a disruption of a certain degree of severity (in political terms) would cost us a greater percentage of GNP than our forebears.
The Soviet Union was not defeated through warfare, it collapsed because of internal instabilities. To say that the Soviet Union collapsed because there was not much popular support for the war in Afghanistan is quite a stretch (it's not like the Soviet high command needed popular support to conduct a war as best as they could, just like NATO command doesn't need popular support for the current war in Afghanistan, the soldiers aren't ordered by popular opinion).
Well, in that case the EU is a nation with a truly remarkable political system. The nation has no police, no army, and in fact no enforcement powers whatsoever, and hopes for voluntary compliance from the regions. There is a national parliament, but it is essentially powerless, and all real power is held by the regional leaders. Has there ever been a country like that? Some might say the HRE, but historians have rarely referred to that as a nation. Moreover, unlike the HRE, the EU has a national bureaucracy - in fact, it has two, one run by appointees of the regional leaders and the other run by the regional leaders themselves, which rival each other and possess what national power does exist. And moreover, despite the seeming centrifugal tendencies in such a system (and which did eventually tear the HRE apart) this nation appears to grow ever more regularised.If this is a national political system, is is clearly a novel and remarkable one, which has arisen (and others aspire to copy) in exactly the period in which you claim no such political system changes are being proposed. I do not think this is a promising line for you to take.I think the only way to rescue your original point is to take the opposite tack, and say there's no political system at all there, it's all just treaties. But that is also problematic.
Given "political systems have changed only modestly ..." and "... systems vary so much around the world", the answer would seem to most likely be history ('path dependency').
I found this post to be a little too abstract to properly consider. Could you provide some examples of radically different political systems "around the world"? Would you consider the political systems of the USA and Saudi Arabia to be (almost) maximally different? I would imagine that regardless of how leaders are chosen, both systems are largely similar in how they operate at the level of bureaucracy, i.e. the actual people and organizations that perform the concrete functions of the system.
I don't think the US political system didn't change much in the last 100 years. It still has congress the senate and a president.
However you know have congressman spending most of there days raising campaign funds to pay for TV spots to be relected.That's a systematic change.
In the past congress used to declare wars. Now the president acts like he has the authority. He also acts like he has other power that he didn't have in the past.
Federal Income taxation.
Blacks are now allowed to vote.
Political systems change frequently.
The experiment would be biased if there were only believers (a real society has to function with a significant number of dissenters and apolitical people), plus there would not be much freedom to experiment if only systems with large numbers of supporters could be tested.
The people who move there would likely believe in the system. We've seldom prevented people from moving to new societies with their children. (viz. migrating to North America, setting up communes, moving to Celebration, FL.) Why do you think this would be different?
Damien responded to the questions in your first paragraph.
Google "privately run cities" to find out more about what I'm talking about. These would be "proper governments" as I understand the term, but being created in the 21st century, would be able to choose new rules, rather than having laws and ordinances left over from earlier times.
I'm not a big believer in seasteading but your argument isn't very sound. Possible counters are "no one thought of it" and "new technology, it wasn't possible or economical before".
If anyone does really try it I suspect it might be the Dutch or Japanese, who combine high starting wealth with a shortage of land.
I think the usual theory is that in order to keep up the arms race with the US, the USSR increased their military expenditures way beyond what their economy could substain, leading to a collapse.
With all the new information, it's still not understood. It isn't that the Soviet Union was on the verge of economic collapse. The political collapse was, on one interpretation, largely the result of the demoralization of the elite and population. The ruling elite more or less decided they had enough of Communism and wanted to enrich themselves. The discovery of oil was probably a major factor in their greed. But notably, there was no popular resistance to changes that impoverished masses of people. Soviet workers didn't want to go to capitalism--but they lacked sufficient confidence in the existing system to put up any resistance.
Wherever demoralization is a major factor, look to loss at war as a major contributing cause.
[Added. 4:45 pm] I overstated the absence of resistance above. There was limited resistance, for example, when the mine workers hadn't been paid for several months.
"My prediction is that we won't see many massive political changes unless there is a disruption of the system through resource depletion or perhaps environmental catastrophe (Both of which are highly unlikely) or space opens up for massive expansion (slightly more likely than the former)."
There will have to be massive political changes to adjust to the realities of the future. Of course that doesn't necessarily mean (violent) revolution, it could just go one high court ruling or amendment at a time.
The Soviet war in Afghanistan cost the Soviet Union less (relative to GDP) than the current war in Afghanistan is costing the US. It may have been the final straw, but that's not really a fair way of looking at it. Soviet defense and foreign aid spending was huge (combined it was about 20%) and contributed to the Soviet Union's weakening over many years. Why no one predicted it? Actually some people did, but most importantly we have hindsight and access to information Westerners in the 70s and 80s did not have, plus the actual fall was a spontaneous moment with the precise timing impossible to predict.
It is pretty easy to see why the cost of changing systems is so expensive today. Think of it as protein folding. Start out with a completely unfolded protein. There are tons of lower energy conformations that the protein (system) can take. But when you are in a stable conformation it is difficult to change states. You have to add a lot of energy to the system.
And how do you add energy to the system? Disease, hunger, even boredom. If you expect your life to be full of hunger and pain you will be a lot more willing to force change, even if it means death.
But guess what? Life is comfortable. Even for the poor in the country, it is relatively good. And the rest of the world is rapidly following suit.
Or you could look to evolutionary theory. Most changes occur not when you are in a competitive environment, but when you are in an environment with relatively little competition.
My prediction is that we won't see many massive political changes unless there is a disruption of the system through resource depletion or perhaps environmental catastrophe (Both of which are highly unlikely) or space opens up for massive expansion (slightly more likely than the former).
I'm glad you're so confident about why the Soviet Union collapsed when the experts aren't and no one predicted it. (Why wasn't this "instability" widely perceived?) And yes, this "stretch" is widely believed to be part of the answer. Defeat in war has always been a major cause of revolution--and this has particular truth for Russia.
We don't feel richer (because we have no memories of life in the past and because we also take into account immaterial forms of wealth that are not counted in the GNP), so we don't care about a greater absolute cost if the percentage of GNP change is the same. It's possible the change would be larger as a percentage but then again the recovery may also be quicker, that we don't know and I doubt we have strong intuitions about it either so it doesn't factor into our feelings. It's probably more important that the price of not having a revolution was greater in the past because there were no safety nets and rulers were more cruel.
“But then why did systems ever change in the past? It is hard to see change being less expensive then.” Not so hard! We are much richer now than people were in the past, especially in the distant past, and our economic systems are more complex and, therefore, fragile. A political change that cost a certain percentage of GNP would be more expensive in absolute terms for us than for our forebears, and because of the greater complexity of our economies a disruption of a certain degree of severity (in political terms) would cost us a greater percentage of GNP than our forebears.
The Soviet Union was not defeated through warfare, it collapsed because of internal instabilities. To say that the Soviet Union collapsed because there was not much popular support for the war in Afghanistan is quite a stretch (it's not like the Soviet high command needed popular support to conduct a war as best as they could, just like NATO command doesn't need popular support for the current war in Afghanistan, the soldiers aren't ordered by popular opinion).
Well, in that case the EU is a nation with a truly remarkable political system. The nation has no police, no army, and in fact no enforcement powers whatsoever, and hopes for voluntary compliance from the regions. There is a national parliament, but it is essentially powerless, and all real power is held by the regional leaders. Has there ever been a country like that? Some might say the HRE, but historians have rarely referred to that as a nation. Moreover, unlike the HRE, the EU has a national bureaucracy - in fact, it has two, one run by appointees of the regional leaders and the other run by the regional leaders themselves, which rival each other and possess what national power does exist. And moreover, despite the seeming centrifugal tendencies in such a system (and which did eventually tear the HRE apart) this nation appears to grow ever more regularised.If this is a national political system, is is clearly a novel and remarkable one, which has arisen (and others aspire to copy) in exactly the period in which you claim no such political system changes are being proposed. I do not think this is a promising line for you to take.I think the only way to rescue your original point is to take the opposite tack, and say there's no political system at all there, it's all just treaties. But that is also problematic.