Public Opinion Is Culture
Until the last century or two, states had far weaker capacities to intervene in their societies. Even so, they typically used a big fraction of what state capacity they had, and they were plausibly adaptive cultures. This suggests that until recently the non-libertarian stance was in fact typically adaptive, even if maybe it didn’t make people happy or fit your moral intuitions.
In my last post, I listed many of today’s US govt policies that seem quite inefficient today, which plausibly also make those policies maladaptive. Suggesting that today libertarian policies of greatly cutting govt intervention would in fact give big gains in efficiency and adaptiveness. Which raises the question: what changed?
In general, the strongest proximate cause of govt policy seems to be “public opinion”, i.e. the opinions of voters in a democracy, or of a “selectorate” in other systems. In either case, elite opinion has a disproportionate influence over such opinions. And while on some technical topics public opinion defers to well-calibrated expert opinion, usually public opinion is more strongly set by ancestral origins, copying the prestigious, compelling art, and fights by cultural activists. That is, most public opinion on policy is set by culture.
You may recall that, by analogy with organisms and species in biology, I distinguish within-culture selection of behaviors that are relatively easy to vary within cultures, from between-culture selection of cultures themselves, re behaviors that are hard to vary within cultures, because of things like game theory equilibria, norms, conformity, and status markers. We have had a problem of cultural drift over the last few centuries where between-culture evolution of culture has become maladaptive, due to declining variety and selection pressures, and increasing rates of drift and context change.
In this framing, “private opinion” is the opinions set by that within-culture selection process, while “public opinion” is the opinions set by that between-culture selection process. Thus govt interventions are more set by public opinion which is set by cultural evolution. Such opinions used to be roughly adaptive, but have become quite maladaptive in the last few centuries. Framed this way the explanation is obvious: because of cultural drift.
Activities and areas of life not handled by govt tend to be more subject to within-culture evolution, making them roughly efficient and adaptive. (Though things like fertility are set mroe by between-culture evolution, even though not by govt.) However, when govt takes over an area of life, it makes behavior re that area more set by public opinion, which is a part of a society’s shared culture.
This used to be roughly adaptive centuries ago, when we had healthy between-culture evolution. But now after centuries of cultural drift the public opinions set by culture have become maladaptive, and this induces inefficient govt policy. And that’s why libertarian policy seems more often adaptive and efficient today, when it usually wasn’t until a few centuries ago.
> Until the last century or two, states had far weaker capacities to intervene in their societies. Even so, they typically used a big fraction of what state capacity they had, and they were plausibly adaptive cultures. This suggests that until recently the non-libertarian stance was in fact typically adaptive, even if maybe it didn’t make people happy or fit your moral intuitions.
All those old feudal states went extinct, proving they were not adaptive. There's no more feudalism.
"Adaptive" ultimately just means "able to continue and propagate." Every form of government that's no longer used was not adaptive, and every form of government currently used is adaptive, for the time being. There's no normative value to be drawn here. What's adaptive is no more nor less than what exists. That's a different question from what is good.
Re. "And that’s why libertarian policy seems roughly adaptive and efficient today, when it usually wasn’t until a few centuries ago." --
I would say libertarian policy couldn't be conceived of until a few centuries ago, because libertarianism isn't anarchy. It's a complex cultural technology which enables society to function while providing individual liberties. It required inventing money, free markets, free speech, rational discussion, arguably either guns or navies, a mathematical framework for probability, the reconceptualization of compromise as a good thing, democracy, and the delegitimization of religion, just for starters. "Free speech", for example, doesn't just mean "tell people to go say whatever they want"; it's a complex juridical theory which directed the construction, over centuries, of a legislative process for managing free speech. Likewise rational discussion doesn't just mean telling people to be smart; it's a set of ground rules about epistemology, politeness, and the tabooing of claims of certainty. All these things are technologies, in the sense of being complex, though intangible, mechanisms, with interlocking parts that produce behavior not inherent in the parts alone. And you need all of them for Enlightenment libertarianism to work.