How do you get to Denmark?

Tuesday, August 8th, 2017

Where do ‘good’ or pro-social institutions come from?” Pseudoerasmus asks:

Why does the capacity for collective action and cooperative behaviour vary so much across the world today? How do some populations transcend tribalism to form a civil society? How have some societies gone beyond personal relations and customary rules to impersonal exchange and anonymous institutions? In short, how do you “get to Denmark”?

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So to answer the question at the head of this post, “where do pro-social institutions come from?” — if “bad” institutions represent coordination failures, then intelligence and patience must be a big part of the answer. This need not have the same relevance for social evolution from 100,000 BCE to 1500 CE. But for the emergence of modern, advanced societies, intelligence and patience matter.

It’s not that people’s norms and values do not or cannot change. They do. But that does not seem enough. Solving complex coordination failures and collective action problems requires a lot more than just “good” culture.

I am not saying intelligence and patience explain everything, just that they seem to be an important part of how “good” institutions happen. Nor am I saying that intelligence and patience are immutable quantities.

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Intelligence and patience allow you to understand, and weigh, the intuitive risks and the counterintuitive benefits from collaborating with perfect strangers. With less intelligence and less patience you stick to what you know — intuit the benefits from relationships cultivated over a long time through blood ties or other intimate affiliations.

Your “moral circle” is wider with intelligence and patience than without.

In the 1990s, in the middle of free market triumphalism, it was widely assumed that if you let markets rip, the institutions necessary to their proper functioning would “naturally” follow. Those with a vested interested in protecting their property rights would demand them, politically. That assumption went up in flames in the former communist countries and the developing countries under economic restructuring.

Comments

  1. George Wells says:

    I’m half Danish and grew up in England, so I see Denmark from the inside and the outside.

    A Danish author, I don’t remember who, wrote that we are a tribe, as much as any tribe of Africa.

    There are effects of temperament and culture, calmness and an admiration of organisation, the small popuation, the winter and so on.

    The institutions have varied wildly over the past century. (German occupation strengthened asabiyah, so did a bad institution strengthen society?). But Denmark was Denmark before the welfare state.

    You can’t replicate Denmark without Danes.

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