The Double Life of a Military Strategist

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

Anyone who writes a book called Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook is bound to be an interesting individual, but Edward Luttwak goes so far as to lead a double life as a public intellectual and an operator:

There’s one thing Edward Luttwak wanted me to know, before he asked if I had a cell phone, and if so, could I turn it off and remove its battery, presumably if improbably so that he couldn’t be traced. We were sitting in his office library in his family’s sprawling Victorian home in suburban Chevy Chase, Md., full of books from floor to ceiling in Greek, Latin and from the modern era, volumes by Clausewitz, Walter Lacquer, Theodore Draper’s account of Iran Contra and thousands of others. These included a recent U.S. Military Balance survey, cataloguing the F-14s, F-7s, Phantoms and every other significant piece of military anti-air equipment estimated to be held by Iran — statistics that Luttwak looked up and ticked off during the course of our interview.

“I am an operator,” Luttwak said.

Indeed he is, one who carries out field operations, extraditions, arrests, interrogations (never, he insists, using physical violence), military consulting and counterterrorism training for different agencies of the U.S., foreign governments and private interests. When we met, in February, the Drug Enforcement Agency was his latest client; Luttwak says he went to Colombia to help arrest and deliver a couple of Mexican drug runners wanted by the DEA.
[...]
Why is this 65-year-old intellectual — on the editorial boards of Harper’s, Britain’s Prospect and France’s Geopolitique, an emeritus fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies — still in the business of arresting fugitives and interrogating drug dealers, I asked Luttwak. It was evident he didn’t even believe in some of the missions he was doing (the drug war is futile, he howled, a fraud, and the heads of the DEA know it’s a fraud). Is it a thrill? Luttwak admitted, that yes, it’s thrilling. He enjoys the physical thrill of it all.

Born to a wealthy Jewish family in Arad, in Transylvanian Romania, in 1942 during World War II, Luttwak and his family fled soon after to Italy, where his father started one of the first Italian plastics factories. At the age of 9, he was sent off by his family to a Jewish boarding school in London, where he would later attend the London School of Economics. Given his background — part cosmopolitan, part refugee — from all over Europe, it’s no surprise that Luttwak speaks a half dozen languages fluently and with evident pleasure (his phone message at home is in three languages). He still travels frequently to Europe, South America and Asia for his consulting assignments. In addition to their Maryland home, Luttwak and his wife, sculptor Dalya Luttwak, also own an ecologically friendly cattle ranch in Bolivia. (Luttwak, who told me he conducts his family’s Passover Seder in the ancient Aramaic, says he doesn’t consider himself religious, but enjoys the traditions.)

Luttwak’s career as an international defense consultant, military strategist and operator, was launched when, in 1968, as a 26-year-old graduate of the London School of Economics, he wrote what would become his seminal book, “Coup d’etat: A Practical Handbook,” about how countries and groups can both launch a junta and protect themselves from one, and which, Luttwak noted proudly, is still in print some 40 years later. “This short book is…wicked, truthful, and entertaining,” the New Yorker wrote in its review of “Coup,” which has been printed in 14 languages. Recruited to Johns Hopkins after advising the French, Israeli and other governments on military matters, Luttwak earned a PhD in international relations and started consulting for the U.S. Department of Defense, military services, the National Security Council, State Department and nascent U.S. special operations command. Soon he was doing actions for, among others, the undersecretary of defense for policy in El Salvador.

(Hat tip to Joseph Fouché.)

Self-Control is Culture-Control

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

Robin Hanson suggests that what we call self-control is really culture-control:

Garrett Jones tells me that studies find a strong correlation between intelligence and conscientiousness (e.g., here), and he expects they have long been increasing together. The (good) book 10,000 Year Explosion (HT Kaj Sotala) guesses at mental changes induced by farming: less laziness, more self-denial and deferred gratification, better reasoning about trade, and more “self-domestication,” via less aggression and more acceptance of dominance by elites. Farming also brought war, marriage, and religion (beyond simple supernaturalism).

A key common thread here I think is “self-control.” While for the most part the intuitive inclinations of foragers tended to be well adapted to their circumstances, they also evolved social norms, such as against overt dominance, which used the threat of social sanctions to induce behavior contrary to ordinary inclinations. With farming, cultures evolved to hijack this norm mechanism to induce quite different farming-adaptive behavior, such as marriage, deference to elites, courage in war, and saving food for future needs. But this ability of culture to control behavior was limited by how much social sanctions could overcome other inclinations.

So it seems to me that if it was possible, the key change after farming would have been an increased sensitivity to culture, so that social sanctions became better able to push behavior contrary to other inclinations. This could have included genetic shifts, e.g., improved abilities to foresee sanctions and a stronger aversion to them, and cultural innovations, e.g., new forms of religion, patriotism, law, and policing.

This increased sensitivity to the carrots and sticks of culture generally appears to us as greater “self-control”, i.e., as our better resisting immediate inclinations for other purposes. And since we have more self-control in far mode, I suspect an important component of change since farming has been greater inclinations toward and abilities in far mode. Another reason to expect more far mode thinking is that intelligence seems to have increased and more intelligent people are better able to think abstractly.

A Bright Future Beckons

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

John Tierney of the New York Times reviews Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, which he dubs the newest addition to the slender canon of books noting that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering:

It does much more than debunk the doomsaying. Dr. Ridley provides a grand unified theory of history from the Stone Age to the better age awaiting us in 2100. [...] What made Homo sapiens so special? Dr. Ridley argues that it wasn’t our big brain, because Neanderthals had a big brain, too. Nor was it our willingness to help one another, because apes and other social animals also had an instinct for reciprocity.

“At some point,” Dr. Ridley writes, “after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object.”

The evidence for this trick is in perforated seashells from more than 80,000 years ago that ended up far from the nearest coast, an indication that inlanders were bartering to get ornamental seashells from coastal dwellers. Unlike the contemporary Neanderthals, who apparently relied just on local resources, those modern humans could shop for imports.

“The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz,” Dr. Ridley writes. People traded goods, services and, most important, knowledge, creating a collective intelligence: “Ten individuals could know between them ten things, while each understanding one.”

As they specialized and exchanged, humans learned how to domesticate crops and animals and sell food to passing merchants. Traders congregated in the first cities and built ships that spread goods and ideas around the world.

The Phoenician merchants who sailed the Mediterranean were denounced by Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Greek intellectuals like Homer. But trading networks enabled the ancient Greeks to develop their alphabet, mathematics and science, and later fostered innovation in the trading hubs of the Roman Empire, India, China, Arabia, Renaissance Italy and other European capitals.

Rulers like to take credit for the advances during their reigns, and scientists like to see their theories as the source of technological progress. But Dr. Ridley argues that they’ve both got it backward: traders’ wealth builds empires, and entrepreneurial tinkerers are more likely to inspire scientists than vice versa. From Stone Age seashells to the steam engine to the personal computer, innovation has mostly been a bottom-up process.

While I tend to agree that society has progressed tremendously since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and it should continue to progress exponentially, we know that many proud civilizations have fallen. Even a tiny chance of societal collapse is worth guarding against.

Just last century, Western Civilization almost destroyed itself — but the US served admirably as an off-site back-up. This prediction could have been written in 1910:

“Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”

Daria got the popular kids right, too

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

Reihan Salam reviews MTV’s Daria, which just came out on DVD, and explains that it got the misfits right, but it got the popular kids right, too:

Daria centers on the adventures of Daria Morgendorffer, a keenly observant young woman who has little patience for the idiocies and indignities that define life at her drearily conventional suburban high school in the fictional town of Lawndale. At first, this provided plenty of fodder for cheap shots at the high-school establishment. Yet over the subsequent seasons, culminating in the brilliant TV movie Is It College Yet?, Daria became something different.

Rather than worship its all-knowing alternateen protagonists, the series humbled them, persuading them to let their guard down, open themselves to new experiences, and question their gut instincts. In the process, Daria became the greatest work of young adult fiction since the cave paintings at Lascaux.

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

I’ve been meaning to read Edward Luttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire — and his earlier The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire — but have settled, for now, for watching this Conversations with History interview:

The first seven minutes are about his academic career and the research that went into writing the book. Then he gets into why strategy is full of paradoxes — because there’s an enemy.

(Hat tip to Joseph Fouché.)

A Libertarian Rebel

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Ridley Scott’s latest film returns Robin Hood to his roots as a libertarian rebel — which displeases many critics:

The new Ridley Scott film Robin Hood, which has opened to mixed reviews on its merits as entertainment, is also drawing some critics’ political ire. In New York’s leftist weekly, The Village Voice, Karina Longworth laments that “instead of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood preaches about ‘liberty’ and the rights of the individual” and battles against “government greed”; the film, she scoffs, is “a rousing love letter to the tea party movement.”

On a similar note, the New York Times‘ A.O. Scott mocks Robin Hood as “one big medieval tea party”:

You may have heard that Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but that was just liberal media propaganda. This Robin is… a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties of property owners and provincial nobles.

Whatever one may think of Scott’s newest incarnation of the Robin Hood legend, it is more than a little troubling to see alleged liberals speak of liberty and individual rights in a tone of sarcastic dismissal. This is especially ironic since the Robin Hood of myth and folklore probably has much more in common with the “libertarian rebel” played by Russell Crowe than with the medieval socialist of the “rob from the rich, give to the poor” cliché. At heart, the noble-outlaw legend that has captured the human imagination for centuries is about freedom, not wealth redistribution — and this is reflected in many previous screen versions of the Robin Hood story.

As scholars have noted, the earliest Robin Hood ballads, which date back to the 13th or 14th century, contain no mention of robbing the rich to give to the poor. The one person Robin assists financially is a knight who is about to lose his lands to the machinations of greedy and unscrupulous monks at an abbey. (Corrupt clerics using the political power of the Church are among Robin Hood’s frequent targets in the ballads.) The Sheriff of Nottingham is Robin’s chief opponent; at the time, it was the sheriffs’ role as tax collectors in particular that made them objects of loathing by peasants and commoners. Robin Hood is also frequently shown helping men who face barbaric punishments for hunting in the royal forests, a pursuit permitted to nobles and strictly forbidden to the lower classes in medieval England; in other words, he is opposing privilege bestowed by political power, not earned wealth.

Later, the legend evolved and was adapted to more aristocratic tastes; by the 17th century, Robin Hood turned from an outlawed farmer into a dispossessed aristocrat and, eventually, a patron of the poor. Yet the fight for liberty and against tyrannical authority remained central to the story, particularly since Robin is often portrayed as a man fighting to reclaim his unjustly confiscated lands — and against high taxes.

No Association between Fat Intake and Heart Disease

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Apparently it’s still considered news that there’s no association between fat intake an heart disease.

In March the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a meta-analysis — which combines data from several studies — that compared the reported daily food intake of nearly 350,000 people against their risk of developing cardiovascular disease over a period of five to 23 years. The analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease.
[...]
In 2008 Stampfer co-authored a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that followed 322 moderately obese individuals for two years as they adopted one of three diets: a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet based on American Heart Association guidelines; a Mediterranean, restricted-calorie diet rich in vegetables and low in red meat; and a low-carbohydrate, nonrestricted-calorie diet. Although the subjects on the low-carb diet ate the most saturated fat, they ended up with the healthiest ratio of HDL to LDL cholesterol and lost twice as much weight as their low-fat-eating counterparts.

Stampfer’s findings do not merely suggest that saturated fats are not so bad; they indicate that carbohydrates could be worse. A 1997 study he co-authored in the Journal of the American Medical Association evaluated 65,000 women and found that the quintile of women who ate the most easily digestible and readily absorbed carbohydrates — that is, those with the highest glycemic index — were 47 percent more likely to acquire type 2 diabetes than those in the quintile with the lowest average glycemic-index score. (The amount of fat the women ate did not affect diabetes risk.) And a 2007 Dutch study of 15,000 women published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that women who were overweight and in the quartile that consumed meals with the highest average glycemic load, a metric that incorporates portion size, were 79 percent more likely to develop coronary vascular disease than overweight women in the lowest quartile.

These trends may be explained in part by the yo-yo effects that high glycemic-index carbohydrates have on blood glucose, which can stimulate fat production and inflammation, increase overall caloric intake and lower insulin sensitivity, says David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital Boston.

Gone in 28 seconds

Friday, May 21st, 2010

When I first read that a British sniper took out five Taliban fighters in 28 seconds, I assumed he was using one of the newer semi-automatic sniper rifles that have come into vogue — but he was using a newer bolt-action rifle, the L115A3 Long Range Rifle, a variant of the Arctic Warfare Magnum from Accuracy International, chambered in .338 Lapua Magnum:

He said: ‘They gave me the “weapons free”. I engaged with the first insurgent. It took me nine rounds but I took him down with the ninth. ’Then the other four had moved closer, so I took them down as well.’

Food Allergies Overestimated

Friday, May 21st, 2010

A new study shows that food allergies are vastly overestimated — sort of:

The government-funded study, published in the May 12 Journal of the American Medical Association and organized by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, shows that while 30 percent of people believe they have food allergies, fewer than 5 percent actually do (in children, the percentage of sufferers is around 8 percent). AOL Health decided to take a closer look at the misdiagnosis of food allergies.

The study found that a combination of factors has led to the vast overestimation of food allergies. After looking at 72 food allergy studies published between January 1988 and September 2009, the researchers deduced that doctors commonly misdiagnosed allergies, that tests often gave foggy results and that studies on food allergies were often subpar (for example, the researchers waded through a pool of 12,000 published papers in order to choose the 72 rigorous studies that they ultimately used). In addition, people often incorrectly self-diagnose an allergy when they simply react badly to a food.

You don’t have a food allergy; you simply react badly to a food. Totally different:

In large part, patients are unclear about the difference between an allergy and an intolerance. An allergy, by definition, involves the immune system.

“When someone is allergic to something, their immune system responds the way it might if it were infected with a parasite,” says Hugh A. Sampson, professor of pediatrics and dean for translational biomedical sciences at the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics.

Allergy symptoms can include flushed skin, hives, swelling, wheezing, nausea or anaphylaxis. Intolerance, on the other hand, involves the digestive system, which may react badly to a certain substance (most commonly dairy), causing gas, nausea, headaches, bloating and diarrhea. Food intolerances can have a range of consequences, but they are far more common and usually less dangerous than allergies.

Start In The Middle

Friday, May 21st, 2010

When it comes time to start a new project, you should start in the middle, not at the beginning:

Has this ever happened to you? You wake up one day with a great new idea for applying bayesian filtering to twitter streams to filter out the pictures of Joel’s new puppy spam. You’re totally convinced it’s what the world needs. It’s the startup that’s finally going to help you to break out of your day job maintaining PHP payroll software stock supermarket shelf stockers. So what do you do? You do this:

  1. Fire up your IDE and start a new website project
  2. Whip up a login page and get the user account basics set up
  3. Decide OpenID’s really where it’s at these days and hit stackoverflow for a good OpenID provider plugin
  4. Run into problems getting it to accept Google accounts and spend half the night debugging it

Wait, what? How did this happen? Getting OpenID working isn’t fun. It’s almost the definition of not fun.

I didn’t want to do all this, I just wanted to make an awesome bayesian twitter filter, but somehow there’s all this stuff I have to get through first.

— Me (swear words redacted)

My hard disk is littered with projects that I started, got half way through setting up without ever really getting to the good bit, then abandoned. I suspect yours is, too.

The right way to start a bayesian twitter filter is to apply a bayesian filter to content from a twitter stream. I know. It looks like this:

  1. Google for some bayesian filter code
  2. Dump whatever’s in your twitter client logs to a file and write three lines of python to parse it into a form the bayesian filter can work with
  3. Train the filter and see what happens

Compared to the original approach it looks awesome, right? So what stops us approaching all projects like this? Well, there’s something beguiling about wanting to get the framework right from the start this time. It’s more comfortable starting with something we already know how to solve. Sometimes we have a clear vision of how it should end up in our heads and simply start to create that vision from the beginning through to the end.

Start in the middle.

— Paul Graham (lightly paraphrased)

Lean startups and the Minimum Viable Product are all about starting in the middle. Paul Graham’s advice for startups can be summed up as ‘first solve the interesting part of the problem, then build the business around it’, but the process is also fractal — starting in the middle applies right down to the level of writing a new class, or a single function. First write some code that solves the problem even if it’s imperfect or partial, then expand it out with your favourite blend of accessors, inheritance and polymorphism (Note: don’t even bother with that bit unless you hate yourself).

Ninja, Please

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

A German exchange student studying medicine in Sydney, Australia was taking the late-night train home, when three local thugs demanded his wallet. They followed him off the train, pounced on him in a dark alley, took his phone and iPod, and kicked him while he was down — until ninjas came to the rescue:

Nathan Smith told his sensei and the rest of the students at Ninja Senshi Ryu and they rushed out to confront the thugs — all dressed in traditional black ninja garb.

On seeing the ninjas, the men fled, only to be later arrested by police.

“You should have seen their faces when they saw us in ninja gear coming towards them,” the school’s sensei, Kaylan Soto, told the Herald.

Matt Ridley Standing on One Foot

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Arnold Kling cites a passage from Matt Ridley’s new book, The Rational Optimist, that he considers the crux of the book — Matt Ridley standing on one foot, as it were:

Empires, indeed governments generally, tend to be good things at first and bad things the longer they last. First they improve society’s ability to flourish by providing central services and removing impediments to trade and specialisation; thus, even Genghis Khan’s Pax Mongolica lubricated Asia’s overland trade by exterminating brigands along the Silk Road… But… governments gradually employ more and more ambitious elites who capture a greater and greater share of the society’s income by interfering more and more in people’s lives as they give themselves more and more rules to enforce, until they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is a lesson for today.

This should seem very familiar.

Anyway, how do we turn this around?

One approach is to try to re-educate the elites (call this the Liberaltarian project). One approach is to try to overthrow them (call this the Tea Party project). A third approach is to try to escape them.

I think that escapist projects, such as seasteading, suffer from the drawback that they make it more difficult for you to interact with everyone else. Ridley’s whole point is that trade and sharing of ideas are the key to prosperity. As a result, I think that escapism has to work very rapidly on a very large scale if it is to work at all.

Floyd Landis Admits Doping, Accuses Lance Armstrong

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

I’m shocked — shocked! — to find that doping is going on in cycling:

The emails are particularly focused on American riders. Mr. Landis said in them that during his career, he and other American riders learned how to conduct blood transfusions, take the synthetic blood booster Erythropoietin, or EPO, and use steroids. Mr. Landis said he started using testosterone patches, then progressed to blood transfusions, EPO, and a liquid steroid taken orally.

In one of the emails, dated April 30 and addressed to Stephen Johnson, the president of USA Cycling, Mr. Landis said that Mr. Armstrong’s longtime coach, Johan Bruyneel, introduced Mr. Landis to the use of steroid patches, blood doping and human growth hormone in 2002 and 2003, his first two years on the U.S. Postal Service team. He alleged Mr. Armstrong helped him understand the way the drugs worked. “He and I had lengthy discussions about it on our training rides during which time he also explained to me the evolution of EPO testing and how transfusions were now necessary due to the inconvenience of the new test,” Mr. Landis claimed in the email. He claimed he was instructed by Mr. Bruyneel how to use synthetic EPO and steroids and how to carry out blood transfusions that doping officials wouldn’t be able to detect. Mr. Bruyneel and Mr. Johnson could not be reached for comment.

In the same email, Mr. Landis wrote that after breaking his hip in 2003, he flew to Girona, Spain—a training hub for American riders—and had two half-liter units of blood extracted from his body in three-week intervals to be used later during the Tour de France. The extraction, Mr. Landis claimed, took place in Mr. Armstrong’s apartment, where blood bags belonging to Mr. Armstrong and his then-teammate George Hincapie were kept in a refrigerator in Mr. Armstrong’s closet. Mr. Landis said he was asked to check the temperature of the blood daily. According to Mr. Landis, Mr. Armstrong left for a few weeks and asked Mr. Landis to make sure the electricity didn’t go off and ruin the blood. George Hincapie, through a spokesman, denied the allegations.

Ibn Khaldun, Taxes and the Rise and Decline of Empires

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Nathan Lewis cites Ibn Khaldun on taxes and the rise and decline of empires:

It should be known that at the beginning of the dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.

The reason for this is that when the dynasty follows the ways (sunan) of the religion, it imposes only such taxes as are stipulated by the religious law, such as charity taxes, the land tax, and the poll tax. They mean small assessments, because, as everyone knows, the charity tax on property is low. The same applies to the charity tax on grain and cattle, and also to the poll tax, the land tax, and all other taxes required by the religious law. They have fixed limits that cannot be overstepped.

When the dynasty follows the ways of group feeling and (political) superiority, it necessarily has at first a desert attitude, as has been mentioned before. The desert attitude requires kindness, reverence, humility, respect for the property of other people, and disinclination to appropriate it, except in rare instances. Therefore, the individual imposts and assessments, which together constitute the tax revenue, are low. When tax assessments and imposts upon the subjects are low, the latter have the energy and desire to do things. Cultural enterprises grow and increase, because the low taxes bring satisfaction. When cultural enterprises grow, the number of individual imposts and assessments mounts. In consequence, the tax revenue, which is the sum total of (the individual assessments), increases.

When the dynasty continues in power and their rulers follow each other in succession, they become sophisticated. The Bedouin attitude and simplicity lose their significance, and the Bedouin qualities of moderation and restraint disappear. Royal authority with its tyranny, and sedentary culture that stimulates sophistication, make their appearance. The people of the dynasty then acquire qualities of character related to cleverness. Their customs and needs become more varied because of the prosperity and luxury in which they are immersed. As a result, the individual imposts and assessments upon the subjects, agricultural laborers, farmers, and all the other taxpayers, increase. Every individual impost and assessment is greatly increased, in order to obtain a higher tax revenue. Customs duties are placed upon articles of commerce and (levied) at the city gates, as we shall mention later on. Then, gradual increases in the amount of the assessments succeed each other regularly, in correspondence with the gradual increase in the luxury customs and many needs of the dynasty and the spending required in connection with them. Eventually, the taxes will weigh heavily upon the subjects and overburden them. Heavy taxes become an obligation and tradition, because the increases took place gradually, and no one knows specifically who increased them or levied them. They lie upon the subjects like an obligation and tradition.

The assessments increase beyond the limits of equity. The result is that the interest of the subjects in cultural enterprises disappears, since when they compare expenditures and taxes with their income and gain and see the little profit they make, they lose all hope. Therefore, many of them refrain from all cultural activity. The result is that the total tax revenue goes down, as (the number of) the individual assessments goes down. Often, when the decrease is noticed, the amounts of individual imposts are increased. This is considered a means of compensating for the decrease. Finally, individual imposts and assessments reach their limit. It would be of no avail to increase them further. The costs of all cultural enterprise are now too high, the taxes are too heavy, and the profits anticipated fail to materialize. Thus, the total revenue continues to decrease, while the amounts of individual imposts and assessments continue to increase, because it is believed that such an increase will compensate (for the drop in revenue) in the end. Finally, civilization is destroyed, because the incentive for cultural activity is gone. It is the dynasty that suffers from the situation, because it (is the dynasty that) profits from cultural activity.

If (the reader) understands this, he will realize that the strongest incentive for cultural activity is to lower as much as possible the amounts of individual imposts levied upon persons capable of undertaking cultural enterprises. In this manner, such persons will be psychologically disposed to undertake them, because they can be confident of making a profit from them.

That’s from Ibn Khaldun‘s Prolegomenon, written in 1377 — a few years before Laffer described his curve.

Here Ibn Khaldun sounds a bit like Douglass North or Bruce Bueno de Mesquita:

The ruler and his entourage are wealthy only in the middle (period) of the dynasty.

The reason for this is that at the beginning of the dynasty, the revenues are distributed among the tribe and the people who share in the ruler’s group feeling, in accordance with their usefulness and group feeling and because they are needed to establish the dynasty, as we have stated before. Under these circumstances, their leader refrains in their favor from (claiming) the revenues which they would like to have. He feels compensated for (his restraint) by the control over them that he hopes to establish. They can put pressure on him, and he needs them. His share of the revenues is restricted to the very small (amounts) he needs. Consequently, the members of his entourage and company, his wazirs, secretaries, and clients, usually can be observed to be destitute. Their position is restricted, because it depends on the position of their master, and the authority of (his position) is narrowed down by the competition of the people who share in his group feeling.

Then, when royal authority has come into its own and the ruler has obtained control over his people, he prevents them from getting (any part of) the revenues, beyond their official shares. Their portions shrink, because their usefulness to the dynasty has diminished. Their influence has been checked, and clients and followers have come to share with them in the support of the dynasty and the establishment of its power. At this time, the ruler disposes alone of the whole income from taxes, or the greater part of it. He keeps this money, and holds it for spending on important projects. His wealth grows. His treasuries are filled. The authority of his position expands, and he dominates all his people. As a consequence, the men of his entourage and retinue, the wazir, the secretary, the doorkeeper (hajib), the client, and the policeman, all become more important, and their positions expand. They acquire property and enrich themselves.

Then, when the dynasty starts to become senile, as the result of the dissolution of group feeling and the disappearance of the tribe that founded it, the ruler needs supporters and helpers, because there are then many seceders, rivals, and rebels, and there is the fear of (complete) destruction. His revenues then go to his allies and supporters, military men who have their own group feelings. He spends his treasures and revenues on attempts to restore (the power of) the dynasty. Moreover, the revenue from taxes decreases, as we have stated before because there are many allowances to be paid and expenditures to be made. The revenues from the land tax decrease. The dynasty’s need for money becomes more urgent. The intimates, the doorkeepers (hajib), and the secretaries no longer live under the shadow of prosperity and luxury, as their positions lose importance and the authority of the ruler’s (position) shrinks.

That group feeling he mentions is the asabiyah at the center of Peter Turchin‘s cliodynamics (which I’ve mentioned before).

Prophets of the Great War

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Anatoly Karlin cites three prophets of the Great War — a Communist, Friedrich Engels; a Warsaw banker, Ivan Bloch; and a Russian conservative minister, Pyotr Durnovo.

In 1887, in a preface to a pamphlet, Engels predicts that the next war will be terrible:

No war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany except a world war and a world war indeed of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt of. Eight to ten millions of soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Eurepe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done. The devastations of the Thirty Years’ War compressed into three or four years, and spread over the whole Continent; famine, pestilence, general demoralisation both of the armies and of the mass of the people produced by acute distress; hopeless confusion of our artificial machinery in trade, industry and credit, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their traditional state wisdom to such an extent that crowns will roll by dozens on the pavement and there will be no body to pick them up; absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will come out of the struggle as victor; only one result is absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the ultimate victory of the working class.

That strikes me as a quasi-religious prophecy — especially since it’s a lead-in to his real prophecy:

This is the prospect when the system of mutual outbidding in armaments, taken to the final extreme, at last bears its inevitable fruits. This, my lords, princes and statesmen, is where in your wisdom you have brought old Europe. And when nothing more remains to you but to open the last great war dance — that will suit us all right (uns kann es recht sein). The war may perhaps push us temporarily into the background, may wrench from us many a position already conquered. But when you have unfettered forces which you will then no longer be able again to control, things may go as they will: at the end of the tragedy you will be ruined and the victory of the proletariat will either be already achieved or at any rate (doch) inevitable.

In 1899, Ivan Bloch’s Is War Now Impossible? argues that the next war will be a great war of entrenchments:

At first there will be increased slaughter — increased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue. They will try to, thinking that they are fighting under the old conditions, and they will learn such a lession that they will abandon the attempt forever. Then, instead of war fought out to the bitter end in a series of decisive battles, we shall have as a substitute a long period of continually increasing strain upon the resources of the combatants. The war, instead of being a hand-to-hand contest, in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority, will become a kind of stalemate, in which neither army being willing to get at the other, both armies will be maintained in opposition to each other, threatening the other, but never being able to deliver a final and decisive attack…

That is the future of war — not fighting, but famine, not the slaying of men, but the bankruptcy of nations and the breakup of the whole social organization…

Everybody will be entrenched in the next war. It will be a great war of entrenchments. The spade will be as indispensable to the soldier as his rifle… All wars will of necessity partake of the character of siege operations… soldiers may fight as they please; the ultimate decision is in the hand of famine…

Unless you have a supreme navy, it is not worthwhile having one at all, and a navy that is not supreme is only a hostage in the hands of the Power whose fleet is supreme.

Bloch clearly had some influence. H.G. Wells cites him casually in The Land Ironclads:

‘What’s he doing?’ asked the war correspondent.

‘Field-glass at us,’ said the young lieutenant.

‘And this is war?’

‘No,’ said the young lieutenant, ‘it’s Bloch.’

‘The game’s a draw.’

Niall Ferguson summarizes Bloch in The Pity of War:

In Is War Now Impossible? (1899), the abridged and somewhat mistitled English version of his massive six-volume study, the Warsaw financier Ivan Stanislavovich Bloch argued that, for three reasons, a major European war would be unprecedented in its scale and destructiveness. Firstly, military technology had transformed the nature of warfare in a war that ruled out swift victory for an attacker. “The day of the bayonet [was] over“; cavalry charges were too obsolete. Thanks to the increased rapidity and accuracy of rifle fire, the introduction of smokeless powder, the increased penetration of bullets and the greater range and power of the breech-loading cannon, traditional set-piece would not occur. Instead of hand-to-hand combat, men in the open would “simply fall and die without either seeing or hearing anything“. For this reason, “the next war… [would] be a great war of entrenchments“. According to Bloch’s meticulous calculations, a hundred men in a trench would be able to kill an attacking force up to four times as numerous, as the latter attempted to cross a 300-yard wide “fire zone“. Secondly, the increase in the size of European armies meant that any war would involve as many as ten million men, with fighting “spread over an enormous front”. Thus, although there would be very high rates of mortality (especially among officers), “the next war [would] be a long war“. Thirdly, and consequently, economic factors would be “the dominant and decisive elements in the matter”. War would mean:

entire dislocation of all industry and severing of all the sources of supply… the future of war [is] not fighting, but famine, not the slaying of men, but the bankruptcy of nations and the break-up of the whole social organization.

The disruption of trade would badly affect food supply in those countries reliant on imported grain and other foodstuffs. The machinery of distribution would also be disrupted. There would be colossal financial burdens, labour shortages and, finally, social instability.

As Karlin says, Bloch pretty much nails it.

I hadn’t heard of Pyotr Durnovo before. Karlin came across a reference to the Durnovo Memorandum while reading Secular Cycles by Turchin & Nefedov. It predicts the alliance system of the war — Russia, France, and England, on the one side, with Germany, Austria, and Turkey, on the other — and then spells out Russia’s weaknesses:

In this regard we must note, first of all, the insufficiency of our war supplies… the supply schedules are still far from being executed, owing to the low productivity of our factories. This insufficiency of munitions is the more significant since, in the embryonic condition of our industries, we shall, during the war, have no opportunity to make up the revealed shortage by our own efforts, and the closing of the Baltic as well as the Black Sea will prevent the importation from abroad of the defense materials which we lack.

Another circumstance unfavorable to our defense is its far too great dependence, generally speaking, upon foreign industry, a fact which, in connection with the above noted interruption of more or less convenient communications with abroad, will create a series of obstacles difficult to overcome. The quantity of our heavy artillery, the importance of which was demonstrated in the Japanese War, is far too inadequate, and there are few machine guns…

The network of strategic railways is inadequate. The railways possess a rolling stock sufficient, perhaps, for normal traffic, but not commensurate with the colossal demands which will be made upon them in the event of a European war. Lastly, it should not be forgotten that the impending war will be fought among the most civilized and technically most advanced nations. Every previous war has invariably been followed by something new in the realm of military technique, but the technical backwardness of our industries does not create favorable conditions for our adoption of the new inventions. …

[A] war will necessitate expenditures which are beyond Russia’s limited financial means. We shall have to obtain credit from allied and neutral countries, but this will not be granted gratuitously. As to what will happen if the war should end disastrously for us, I do not wish to discuss now. The financial and economic consequences of defeat can be neither calculated nor foreseen, and will undoubtedly spell the total ruin of our entire national economy.

Oh, yeah, Durnovo also predicts this:

But in the event of defeat, the possibility of which in a struggle with a foe like Germany cannot be overlooked, social revolution in its most extreme form is inevitable.

As has already been said, the trouble will start with the blaming of the Government for all disasters. In the legislative institutions a bitter campaign against the Government will begin, followed by revolutionary agitations throughout the country, with Socialist slogans, capable of arousing and rallying the masses, beginning with the division of the land and succeeded by a division of all valuables and property. The defeated army, having lost its most dependable men, and carried away by the tide of primitive peasant desire for land, will find itself too demoralized to serve as a bulwark of law and order. The legislative institutions and the intellectual opposition parties, lacking real authority in the eyes of the people, will be powerless to stem the popular tide, aroused by themselves, and Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen.

(Hat tip to Joseph Fouché.)