Comments on: How Rich Countries Die

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 14:13:52 +0000

Destabilizing the current regime isn’t the intractable part. Maintaining the ensuing power vacuum is the intractable part. And a roving bandit is worse than a stationary bandit.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 14:12:33 +0000

Societies and empires are certainly linked but far from perfectly coupled. When Rome fell, Italian society suffered — both population and standard of living dropped — but it didn’t disappear. It reverted to a simpler, feudal model, with less trade across long distances and thus less specialization and lower incomes.

The key point, I suspect, is that societies don’t come into being with a certain amount of societal strength that gets withered away over time, but they can get stronger or weaker from year to year, and sometimes the more inefficient forms of parasitism get replaced with more efficient forms, even if the parasites are rarely removed outright.

By: Baduin

Baduin — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 10:24:35 +0000

The problem with that book is that it is completely wrong. Macroeconomic theory does not explain what happens in the free market, because its mathematics are faulty. USA does not suffer from low corporate profits — corporate profits are high.

US corporate profits reached their highest level in history, while new home sales fell to their lowest pace ever, according to data released this week by the federal government.

At the same time, the wages and incomes of the working class have steadily fallen. There is no problem with lack of money for investments. Money is free and abundant; what is lacking are investment possibilities. In short: this book is a piece of propaganda which was used to cause current economic crisis. The problems he noticed were quite real: but they were inefficient half-measures used to balance the real fundamental problems: ie the decline in the incomes of the consumers and the crisis of overproduction. He noticed that a man with a broken leg in a cast cannot run, and decided that it is the cast which is stopping him. Therefore, the cast was taken off, the man run a few meters and the leg broke again.

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 20:03:51 +0000

Abolition of government might actually be easy — more specifically, separation of security and state. All states have relied on political myths and a perception of legitimacy or at least inevitability. Break the perception of legitimacy for all kinds of states simultaneously, show even a single counter-example of inevitability — Iceland, the Apache — and they are doomed. No revolution necessary. This ["memory-less" life-span distribution] implies that all predictions of USG collapse are false. The end may be becoming more likely due to "moral decay" and such, but the end is not itself predictable. Especially as stability is decreasing, it is impractical to discriminate between normal decay and catastrophic decay.

By: Madera Verde

Madera Verde — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:35:42 +0000

If both things are true (that you refer to at 1:03 and 1:08) then some things occur to me to explain the apparent contradiction:

Societies and empires are decoupled.
Societies renew themselves.
Parasitism is reined in when it creates a danger of societal collapse.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:14:56 +0000

Saying something is solvable through the abolition of government is turning a difficult but potentially tractable problem into a totally intractable one.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:08:49 +0000

Olson’s point, that Aretae was reiterating, isn’t simply that all societies are unstable but that they follow a particular pattern of dynamic growth, followed by increasing parasitism, and then outright collapse.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:03:55 +0000

If we look back at the life-spans of empires, they appear to follow an exponential, or memory-less, distribution, suggesting some small chance of things going terribly awry each year (and then spiraling out of control), rather than insults and injuries accumulating over the years before hitting some threshold.

By: Buckethead

Buckethead — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 02:56:43 +0000

The question, then, is for how long? What’s the half life for different societal types?

By: Johnny Abacus

Johnny Abacus — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 01:47:19 +0000

“It ain’t democracy that’s the problem. All known stable societies have done the same thing.”

I would rephrase this as “All known societies are unstable.”