> 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.
Regarding within culture and between culture evolution - there was a broadly parallel debate in evolutionary biology starting in the 1960s. This involved the concept of "group selection". As a very brief summary, it was initially assumed that many traits were the product of group selection, but then there was a backlash as many of those traits turned out to be explained better by individual selection. Later there was a backlash against the backlash, with people claiming that the first backlash was overdone.
The modern consensus is that selection can be seen as acting at many levels. Any given feature might be selected for at one level and selected against at other levels. When you say "adaptive" there are more questions to ask: "how much?" and "at what level?".
I think that similar dynamics apply to cultural evolution - and because of cultural evolution's scientific lag (it's 100-150 years behind by some metrics) there is the risk that we will fail to learn from history and repeat some of our earlier mistakes.
So, for example, we might conclude that since armed conflict has been declining that high-level selection against whole societies has also declined. However if instead you look at conflict as having been partly virtualized by technology then selection between companies might seem to have become more significant. As they say: "business is war" and "let our ideas die in our stead".
Charles Taylor in The Secular Age makes the case that there was no “public sphere” and no concept of “public opinion” in pre-modern times. There just wasn’t enough coordination of voices for anything that could be called public opinion to emerge. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about comparing the influence of public opinion from pre-modern to modern times. Governments did not have to be responsive to public opinion in the way they are today. Yes, you need to make sure your barons are happy so they don’t plot your overthrow, and you have to be able to put down peasant revolts, but that’s a very different thing.
Robin, I realize your livelihood depends upon it, but you all complicate things unnecessarily.
Firstly, you misuse culture. I might agree that there has been cultural drift, but it has all been toward the same homogeneous culture.
Secondly, everything is much simpler than you describe. For humans, there is reproduction, both daily and through time, and there is status. Everything else is derivative.
Selectorate theory seems intended to model Democracy by saying a semi-quiet part out loud. Elite overproduction means the inclusion of too many people in the selectorate. Under first past the post Democracy the critical number of elites needed for unassailable would seem to be 75% in that once that’s achieved two parties can fight over spoils without conflicting at all regarding which populations are to be clients, only about how the fruits are distributed among the clients… so long as the clients can avoid being committed to the destruction of the non-clients. Wokism disrupted that with an escalating signaling cycle where the dominant behavior among elites was to show commitment via maximizing expressions and enaction of denegration towards non-clients during a last stretch sprint from 60+% clientism to 75+% clientism. The basic MAGA question is whether the number of clients can be brought down far enough to remover the attractor towards that signaling spiral.
- What is the semi-quiet part being spoken out loud?
- When you speak of the critical number of elites needed, needed for what? For one party to be unassailable, or to avoid elite overproduction? Neither seems to make sense. Under the first interpretation, "need 75%" would contradict the next sentence, because the first would be focusing on one party becoming unassailable by the other, while the second says that achieving this 75% would make both parties safe.
- When you speak of reaching 75% elites, do you mean 75% of the population, or 75% in a single coalition? 75% seems clearly too high for either meaning.
- When you speak of reaching 75% elite, do you mean going down to 75%, or going up to 75%? I am so lost in interpreting this paragraph that I must ask to be sure.
- How does reaching 75% allow the elites to fight each other without conflicting re who shall be the clients? I don't understand either side of this claim: neither how it allows them to avoid fighting over who are the clients past (above? below?) 75%, nor why they would necessarily fight over that before 75%.
- Where do you get the numbers 60% to 75+% clientism?
- Why do you think MAGA wants to bring the number of clients down? MAGA is certainly contributing to creating the spiral; cooperation seems more likely, in the usual manner of revolutionary parties: revolutionaries cooperate in sowing chaos until order is destroyed, then turn on each other to compete for the final prize, Highlander-style. Like in Germany 1920-1933.
- Your initial point about first past the post seems to imply we could destroy the attractor just by using runoff elections. If MAGA wants to destroy the attractor, why isn't it talking about that?
Elites needed to have a firm selectorate. Where both parties can agree on keeping out the actually productive people and focus on redistribution amongst themselves.
The voters powering MAGA want to destroy the attractor but it’s a question whether they can actually find a majority who won’t lexically prioritize the membership of the selectorate prior to the internal conflict over relative shares.
What does "lexically prioritize the membership of the selectorate" mean? In particular, what does the word "lexically" mean there (to lexically prioritize would, I think, mean to alphabetize), and does "prioritize the membership" mean "set determining who is a member of the selectorate as your highest priority", or "privilege the members of the selectorate in some way"?
Non-selectorate MAGA voters are probably right to judge that they lack the skills to evaluate voting theory given the level of trust available. They could ask a LLM if they could formulate the question but they can only dimly interpret themselves as an interest group at all.
Would you trust a politically hostile LLM to evaluate the effects of something as mysterious to you as voting theory is to them? Especially given that while voting theory is not mysterious to its creators they still don’t know why some countries can hold uncontested elections and others can’t?
I would say premodern states were very far from libertarian. The word totalitarian might be appropriate. In Medieval times for peasants (most people), almost every aspect of life was regulated by law - what you could wear (you would be fined if you wore the wrong fabric or colors), what you ate (you could be fined or humiliated for eating “Lordly” food), what your job was (you couldn’t just decide not to be a farmer anymore), how you did your job (lots of regulation about when you could harvest, what tools you could use), where you lived (you couldn’t move from one place to another - you would be arrested and sent back), who you married, what church you went to, etc. The Enlightenment innovation of liberalism was called liberalism for a reason - to contrast the then-normal way of living and organizing society which was highly over-regulated. The trend from pre-modern to modern was a clear progression from totalitarian to libertarian way of organizing society.
Right. Feudalism creates a power hierarchy automatically, just by not having money nor freedom nor protection to travel. There were laws to control peasants, but they weren't usually needed. What really controlled the peasants was being situated in a work contract which could only be entered into by inheritance, and which did not pay in cash, but in goods. Even if they'd been allowed to travel freely, they didn't have the time, wouldn't be safe doing so, and had nothing to travel for except to barter for things over in the next village that would usually be the same things found in their village. They couldn't go looking for work because work was inherited. They couldn't stay at an inns because they had no money. They generally couldn't even buy clothing or tools for their work, because merchants knew peasants had no money, and were supposed to be supplied with tools by their lords, and so would not make or trade consumer goods for peasants. Peasants with money could buy rude cloth and sew their own clothing, but most peasants had no money until after the Black Death. No one but a peasant would make anything peasants wanted, no matter how badly they needed it or what efficiencies in mass production existed, as long as distribution and payment were impractical or impossible.
Freedom always begins with money.
The conditions I enumerated explaining why most peasants were locked into poverty until 1350 are similar to the conditions I found in China in the 2000s, where peasant rice farmers were bound to the land the state had stolen from them. They were probably technically free to travel, but it would be expensive and risky to do so. Essentially all of them live on land that their parents or grandparents bought, in houses that they built, which now belong to the village collective, and which they must leave behind with no compensation if they walk away. Not to mention that they live in an ethnic enclave, and would be heavily discriminated anywhere else in China, even by other ethnic minorities, and little chance of finding work in a city where they have no contacts.
They have money, but there's very little for them to buy, because corporations don't make things peasants need. Most of what they buy is made by the state, and the state picks one version of whatever it is (ox, tractor, flyswatter) and makes ten million of them each year and distributes them all across China, so that I found exactly the same small selection of consumer goods in Harbin near China's border with Russia, as in Beijing, as in Kunming and Mangshi on the southwest border with Burma.
(This is true even of handmade items! I have a hand-made carving of a tiger which I brought back, which is almost indistinguishable from a million other hand-carved tigers sold all across China at that time.)
Ironically, the Chinese communist party chose to encourage migration of farmers to the city, circa 1990, by /not/ providing jobs for them. They used to assign jobs to everyone, and still assign many jobs to the urban elite. But they found they could encourage migration to cities more by /not/ guaranteeing poor people jobs in the cities, and letting independent companies hire people themselves.
Also, people hired by companies instead of by the state don't get benefits, which is great for everyone but the migrants. The new system is set up to keep farmers in poverty, even if they move to the cities. As long as they remain registered as residents of their original rural town, they don't get the city's welfare benefits, nor its free public education; and they remain ineligible for those high-paying jobs which are still assigned by the state. They're allowed to apply for residency in a city; but they must have enough points on a scale of desirability to be admitted, and the things that gain points--university education, high-paying or high-ranking jobs, a long history of high-level social security payments, large monetary investments in the local economy--are all things that they would need residency in some city to acquire in the first place.
The wealth inequity in communist China was shocking when I visited. Urban Han lived in modern apartment buildings, just a few blocks from where ethnic Dai lived in log cabins and huts they'd made from tree bark with ditches for sewers and no garbage collection. 35-40% of China's population today is migrant workers, farmers, or other laborers with similarly low pay. A mid-level manager now makes about 5.4 times as much as a laborer in China, versus 6.0 when I visited in 2004, and about 2.4 in the US today, according to figures I just got from the Gemini chatbot. But that 5.4 is worse than it sounds because the laborers typically aren't getting benefits.
> 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.
Regarding within culture and between culture evolution - there was a broadly parallel debate in evolutionary biology starting in the 1960s. This involved the concept of "group selection". As a very brief summary, it was initially assumed that many traits were the product of group selection, but then there was a backlash as many of those traits turned out to be explained better by individual selection. Later there was a backlash against the backlash, with people claiming that the first backlash was overdone.
The modern consensus is that selection can be seen as acting at many levels. Any given feature might be selected for at one level and selected against at other levels. When you say "adaptive" there are more questions to ask: "how much?" and "at what level?".
I think that similar dynamics apply to cultural evolution - and because of cultural evolution's scientific lag (it's 100-150 years behind by some metrics) there is the risk that we will fail to learn from history and repeat some of our earlier mistakes.
So, for example, we might conclude that since armed conflict has been declining that high-level selection against whole societies has also declined. However if instead you look at conflict as having been partly virtualized by technology then selection between companies might seem to have become more significant. As they say: "business is war" and "let our ideas die in our stead".
Charles Taylor in The Secular Age makes the case that there was no “public sphere” and no concept of “public opinion” in pre-modern times. There just wasn’t enough coordination of voices for anything that could be called public opinion to emerge. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about comparing the influence of public opinion from pre-modern to modern times. Governments did not have to be responsive to public opinion in the way they are today. Yes, you need to make sure your barons are happy so they don’t plot your overthrow, and you have to be able to put down peasant revolts, but that’s a very different thing.
Robin, I realize your livelihood depends upon it, but you all complicate things unnecessarily.
Firstly, you misuse culture. I might agree that there has been cultural drift, but it has all been toward the same homogeneous culture.
Secondly, everything is much simpler than you describe. For humans, there is reproduction, both daily and through time, and there is status. Everything else is derivative.
I might ask you, what is the goal here?
Selectorate theory seems intended to model Democracy by saying a semi-quiet part out loud. Elite overproduction means the inclusion of too many people in the selectorate. Under first past the post Democracy the critical number of elites needed for unassailable would seem to be 75% in that once that’s achieved two parties can fight over spoils without conflicting at all regarding which populations are to be clients, only about how the fruits are distributed among the clients… so long as the clients can avoid being committed to the destruction of the non-clients. Wokism disrupted that with an escalating signaling cycle where the dominant behavior among elites was to show commitment via maximizing expressions and enaction of denegration towards non-clients during a last stretch sprint from 60+% clientism to 75+% clientism. The basic MAGA question is whether the number of clients can be brought down far enough to remover the attractor towards that signaling spiral.
- What is the semi-quiet part being spoken out loud?
- When you speak of the critical number of elites needed, needed for what? For one party to be unassailable, or to avoid elite overproduction? Neither seems to make sense. Under the first interpretation, "need 75%" would contradict the next sentence, because the first would be focusing on one party becoming unassailable by the other, while the second says that achieving this 75% would make both parties safe.
- When you speak of reaching 75% elites, do you mean 75% of the population, or 75% in a single coalition? 75% seems clearly too high for either meaning.
- When you speak of reaching 75% elite, do you mean going down to 75%, or going up to 75%? I am so lost in interpreting this paragraph that I must ask to be sure.
- How does reaching 75% allow the elites to fight each other without conflicting re who shall be the clients? I don't understand either side of this claim: neither how it allows them to avoid fighting over who are the clients past (above? below?) 75%, nor why they would necessarily fight over that before 75%.
- Where do you get the numbers 60% to 75+% clientism?
- Why do you think MAGA wants to bring the number of clients down? MAGA is certainly contributing to creating the spiral; cooperation seems more likely, in the usual manner of revolutionary parties: revolutionaries cooperate in sowing chaos until order is destroyed, then turn on each other to compete for the final prize, Highlander-style. Like in Germany 1920-1933.
- Your initial point about first past the post seems to imply we could destroy the attractor just by using runoff elections. If MAGA wants to destroy the attractor, why isn't it talking about that?
Elites needed to have a firm selectorate. Where both parties can agree on keeping out the actually productive people and focus on redistribution amongst themselves.
The voters powering MAGA want to destroy the attractor but it’s a question whether they can actually find a majority who won’t lexically prioritize the membership of the selectorate prior to the internal conflict over relative shares.
What does "lexically prioritize the membership of the selectorate" mean? In particular, what does the word "lexically" mean there (to lexically prioritize would, I think, mean to alphabetize), and does "prioritize the membership" mean "set determining who is a member of the selectorate as your highest priority", or "privilege the members of the selectorate in some way"?
Non-selectorate MAGA voters are probably right to judge that they lack the skills to evaluate voting theory given the level of trust available. They could ask a LLM if they could formulate the question but they can only dimly interpret themselves as an interest group at all.
Would you trust a politically hostile LLM to evaluate the effects of something as mysterious to you as voting theory is to them? Especially given that while voting theory is not mysterious to its creators they still don’t know why some countries can hold uncontested elections and others can’t?
I would say premodern states were very far from libertarian. The word totalitarian might be appropriate. In Medieval times for peasants (most people), almost every aspect of life was regulated by law - what you could wear (you would be fined if you wore the wrong fabric or colors), what you ate (you could be fined or humiliated for eating “Lordly” food), what your job was (you couldn’t just decide not to be a farmer anymore), how you did your job (lots of regulation about when you could harvest, what tools you could use), where you lived (you couldn’t move from one place to another - you would be arrested and sent back), who you married, what church you went to, etc. The Enlightenment innovation of liberalism was called liberalism for a reason - to contrast the then-normal way of living and organizing society which was highly over-regulated. The trend from pre-modern to modern was a clear progression from totalitarian to libertarian way of organizing society.
Right. Feudalism creates a power hierarchy automatically, just by not having money nor freedom nor protection to travel. There were laws to control peasants, but they weren't usually needed. What really controlled the peasants was being situated in a work contract which could only be entered into by inheritance, and which did not pay in cash, but in goods. Even if they'd been allowed to travel freely, they didn't have the time, wouldn't be safe doing so, and had nothing to travel for except to barter for things over in the next village that would usually be the same things found in their village. They couldn't go looking for work because work was inherited. They couldn't stay at an inns because they had no money. They generally couldn't even buy clothing or tools for their work, because merchants knew peasants had no money, and were supposed to be supplied with tools by their lords, and so would not make or trade consumer goods for peasants. Peasants with money could buy rude cloth and sew their own clothing, but most peasants had no money until after the Black Death. No one but a peasant would make anything peasants wanted, no matter how badly they needed it or what efficiencies in mass production existed, as long as distribution and payment were impractical or impossible.
Freedom always begins with money.
The conditions I enumerated explaining why most peasants were locked into poverty until 1350 are similar to the conditions I found in China in the 2000s, where peasant rice farmers were bound to the land the state had stolen from them. They were probably technically free to travel, but it would be expensive and risky to do so. Essentially all of them live on land that their parents or grandparents bought, in houses that they built, which now belong to the village collective, and which they must leave behind with no compensation if they walk away. Not to mention that they live in an ethnic enclave, and would be heavily discriminated anywhere else in China, even by other ethnic minorities, and little chance of finding work in a city where they have no contacts.
They have money, but there's very little for them to buy, because corporations don't make things peasants need. Most of what they buy is made by the state, and the state picks one version of whatever it is (ox, tractor, flyswatter) and makes ten million of them each year and distributes them all across China, so that I found exactly the same small selection of consumer goods in Harbin near China's border with Russia, as in Beijing, as in Kunming and Mangshi on the southwest border with Burma.
(This is true even of handmade items! I have a hand-made carving of a tiger which I brought back, which is almost indistinguishable from a million other hand-carved tigers sold all across China at that time.)
Ironically, the Chinese communist party chose to encourage migration of farmers to the city, circa 1990, by /not/ providing jobs for them. They used to assign jobs to everyone, and still assign many jobs to the urban elite. But they found they could encourage migration to cities more by /not/ guaranteeing poor people jobs in the cities, and letting independent companies hire people themselves.
Also, people hired by companies instead of by the state don't get benefits, which is great for everyone but the migrants. The new system is set up to keep farmers in poverty, even if they move to the cities. As long as they remain registered as residents of their original rural town, they don't get the city's welfare benefits, nor its free public education; and they remain ineligible for those high-paying jobs which are still assigned by the state. They're allowed to apply for residency in a city; but they must have enough points on a scale of desirability to be admitted, and the things that gain points--university education, high-paying or high-ranking jobs, a long history of high-level social security payments, large monetary investments in the local economy--are all things that they would need residency in some city to acquire in the first place.
The wealth inequity in communist China was shocking when I visited. Urban Han lived in modern apartment buildings, just a few blocks from where ethnic Dai lived in log cabins and huts they'd made from tree bark with ditches for sewers and no garbage collection. 35-40% of China's population today is migrant workers, farmers, or other laborers with similarly low pay. A mid-level manager now makes about 5.4 times as much as a laborer in China, versus 6.0 when I visited in 2004, and about 2.4 in the US today, according to figures I just got from the Gemini chatbot. But that 5.4 is worse than it sounds because the laborers typically aren't getting benefits.
Interesting.