Thought Crime and Public Shaming in the Internet Age

Thursday, September 12th, 2013

Clark “Danger” Bianco discusses thought crime and public shaming in the Internet Age:

Shaming works well (to the ends that it works, at least) in small bands of hunter gatherers. It causes people to adjust their actions to social norms, it leaves no physical scars, it doesn’t incarcerate anyone or destroy the value of their labor…and it’s got a built-in time horizon. A guy reaches for the last slice of pizza, one of his friends says “Hey, don’t be a pig; you’ve already had your share”. The guy’s face flushes because he was called out. He pulls back his hand and lets someone else eat the last slice. Perhaps over the next few days his friends make pig-snorting noises at him to remind him that he was greedy, and he’s annoyed, ashamed…and chastised. He takes extra pains to eat his share or less at future shared meals over the next week or two. The shaming joke never spread beyond 148 or so people, and within a few weeks the entire incident is forgotten.

Social mechanisms evolved in small groups without any form of information persistence other than fallible human memory. I constantly find it amazing that they work at all in our much changed world and society (I also find it amazing that primate minds that evolved to hunt small game on the savanna can do differential equations and put probes into orbit around distant planets).

[...]

I’d suggest that shaming people in very large, very modern social settings is a superstimulus. In the ancestral small-tribe environment it feels good to be the dealer of a joke and not the brunt. It feels good to be the social arbiter and not the social pariah. It feels good to be the cool kid and not the nerd. …and, in the iterated version of the game, where a given person is on the shaming end every now and then and on the shamed end every now and then, everything works out.

We’ve got the social process wired into our heads, and it works well when we’re in small groups, but it can be destructive when we’re in larger groups. Calling out the hunter in a pack of 150 who took more than his fare share of meat is one thing. Calling out the miller who took more than his fare share of flour in a village of 1,000 is another.

…and calling out the Jewish moneylenders as taking “more than their fair share” in interest in a modern nation of 50 million, in an age of newspapers, radio, and movies (or calling out the Tutsi merchants as taking “more than their fair share” of the economy) is another.

[...]

When we combine modern communications technologies with large crowds (far in excess of Dunbar’s number) and then add in persistence and searchability, the social environment of 2013 is radically different from that of even 1990.

Posted in Policy, Technology | No Comments »

Al Fin Next Level

Wednesday, September 11th, 2013

Al Fin’s blogs did not go gentle into that good night, he explains:

Google made the decision to block all administrative access to the Al Fin blogs back in January. So far I have not been able to get them to reverse their decision. I cannot access the blogs in order to redirect readers to the new site. I will continue to leave comments at particular sites where former Al Fin readers might congregate.

I have been busy with other projects, while trying to get better at using WordPress so that I can produce informative and timely articles with little effort.

He calls his new blog Al Fin Next Level.

(Hat tip to our Slovenian guest.)

Posted in Education, Policy, Science, Technology | No Comments »

Project West Ford

Tuesday, September 10th, 2013

In 1963, the United States launched half a billion whisker-thin copper wires into orbit as part of Project West Ford:

The Air Force and Department of Defense envisioned the West Ford ring as the largest radio antenna in human history. Its goal was to protect the nation’s long-range communications in the event of an attack from the increasingly belligerent Soviet Union.

During the late 1950’s, long-range communications relied on undersea cables or over-the-horizon radio. These were robust, but not invulnerable. Should the Soviets have attacked an undersea telephone or telegraph cable, America would only have been able to rely on radio broadcasts to communicate overseas. But the fidelity of the ionosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that makes most long-range radio broadcasts possible, is at the mercy of the sun: It is routinely disrupted by solar storms. The U.S. military had identified a problem.

A potential solution was born in 1958 at MIT’s Lincoln Labs, a research station on Hanscom Air Force Base northwest of Boston. Project Needles, as it was originally known, was Walter E. Morrow’s idea. He suggested that if Earth possessed a permanent radio reflector in the form of an orbiting ring of copper threads, America’s long-range communications would be immune from solar disturbances and out of reach of nefarious Soviet plots.

Each copper wire was about 1.8 centimeters in length. This was half the wavelength of the 8 GHz transmission signal beamed from Earth, effectively turning each filament into what is known as a dipole antenna. The antennas would boost long-range radio broadcasts without depending on the fickle ionosphere.

[...]

On October 21, 1961, NASA launched the first batch of West Ford dipoles into space. A day later, this first payload had failed to deploy from the spacecraft, and its ultimate fate was never completely determined.

“U.S.A. Dirties Space” read a headline in the Soviet newspaper Pravda.

Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was forced to make a statement before the UN declaring that the U.S. would consult more closely with international scientists before attempting another launch. Many remained unsatisfied. Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle went so far as to accuse the U.S. of undertaking a military project under “a façade of respectability,” referring to West Ford as an “intellectual crime.”

On May 9, 1963, a second West Ford launch successfully dispersed its spindly cargo approximately 3,500 kilometers above the Earth, along an orbit that crossed the North and South Pole. Voice transmissions were successfully relayed between California and Massachusetts, and the technical aspects of the experiment were declared a success. As the dipole needles continued to disperse, the transmissions fell off considerably, although the experiment proved the strategy could work in principle.

Concern about the clandestine and military nature of West Ford continued following this second launch. On May 24 of that year, the The Harvard Crimson quoted British radio astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell as saying, “The damage lies not with this experiment alone, but with the attitude of mind which makes it possible without international agreement and safeguards.”

[...]

Because the copper wires were so light, project leaders assumed that they would re-enter the atmosphere within several years, pushed Earthward by solar wind. Most of the needles from the failed 1961 and successful 1963 launch likely met this fate. Many now lie beneath snow at the poles.

But not all the needles returned to Earth. Thanks to a design flaw, it’s possible that several hundred, perhaps thousands of clusters of clumped needles still reside in orbit around Earth, along with the spacecraft that carried them.

The copper needles were embedded in a naphthalene gel designed to evaporate quickly once it reached the vacuum of space, dispersing the needles in a thin cloud. But this design allowed metal-on-metal contact, which, in a vacuum, can weld fragments into larger clumps.

In 2001, the European Space Agency published a report that analyzed the fate of needle clusters from the two West Ford payloads. Unlike the lone needles, these chains and clumps have the potential to remain in orbit for several decades, and NORAD space debris databases list several dozen still aloft from the 1963 mission. But the ESA report suggests that, because the 1961 payload failed to disperse, thousands more clusters could have been deployed, and several may be too small to track.

Please note that prominent opponents of the project included Pravda and The Harvard Crimson.

(Hat tip to our Slovenian guest.)

Posted in Policy, Technology, War | 2 Comments »

Your New Tech Bro Nightmare

Tuesday, September 10th, 2013

So, ValleyWag finds @paxdickinson, declares him “your new tech bro nightmare”, and gets him fired — but that’s not enough.

Nobody expects the Progressive Inquisition.

Posted in Business, Policy | No Comments »

In Syria, America Loses if Either Side Wins

Monday, September 9th, 2013

In Syria, America loses if either side wins, Edward Luttwak suggests:

Indeed, it would be disastrous if President Bashar al-Assad’s regime were to emerge victorious after fully suppressing the rebellion and restoring its control over the entire country. Iranian money, weapons and operatives and Hezbollah troops have become key factors in the fighting, and Mr. Assad’s triumph would dramatically affirm the power and prestige of Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, its Lebanon-based proxy — posing a direct threat both to the Sunni Arab states and to Israel.

But a rebel victory would also be extremely dangerous for the United States and for many of its allies in Europe and the Middle East. That’s because extremist groups, some identified with Al Qaeda, have become the most effective fighting force in Syria. If those rebel groups manage to win, they would almost certainly try to form a government hostile to the United States. Moreover, Israel could not expect tranquillity on its northern border if the jihadis were to triumph in Syria.

Luttwak recently wrote about China’s lack of strategic thought and shared his thoughts on Conversations with History:

(Hat tip to our Slovenian guest.)

Posted in Edward Luttwak, Policy, War | 1 Comment »

The Aftermath

Thursday, September 5th, 2013

What did Dorothy learn from the aftermath of The Wizard of Oz?

Tom the Dancing Bug

Posted in Media, Policy, War | 4 Comments »

Homeschooling Becomes More Popular in China

Wednesday, September 4th, 2013

Homeschooling and non-traditional schooling are becoming more popular in China:

According to the survey, among Chinese parents who choose to teach their kids at home, over half (54%) of them do so because they object to the teaching philosophy of traditional schools, which tends to be fairly rigid in nature. Others who choose to homeschool their kids think that in ordinary classrooms, the pace of lessons is too slow (10%) and that kids are not fully respected?7%). Another 7% said their kids were simply sick of traditional school life.

Still another 6% of parents, including a number of Christians, said they chose homeschooling for religious reasons, according to the survey.

Posted in Education, Policy | No Comments »

The Hundred Years’ War, Taxes, and the Modern State

Wednesday, September 4th, 2013

The Hundred Years’ War brought us modern taxes and the modern state:

Prior to the Hundred Years’ War, it was expected that monarchs would finance their governments out of their own pockets, specifically, from money generated from their extensive landholdings. Imagine that the Bushes had to fund the federal government with money produced by their compound in Kennebunkport and Crawford ranch. Yes, monarchs could supplement their income with indirect taxes by tapping into the funds of all royal subjects, but this was rare and done only in exceptional, emergency circumstances. There was a medieval legal maxim that prevented permanent taxation (one that should be tattooed on the foreheads of all politicians): “With the cause having ended, the consequence must end.” That is, once the emergency was over, the tax must end too.

But that legal rule would be consigned to the dustbin of history with the Hundred Years War. As you might imagine, financing a war over generations is quite expensive. Paying for armies to pillage and rape for decades doesn’t come cheap. Thus, given the duration and intensity of the war, direct taxes became a routine part of life. It was as if governments now existed in a state of permanent emergency. To give you an example of the change, during the reign of Henry III of England, which lasted almost 50 years from 1216 to 1272, direct taxes were levied only 5 times, an average of once a decade. However, during the reign of Edward III of England, which also lasted 50 years from 1327 to 1377, direct taxes were levied 27 times, more than every 2 years.

So the next time you make out that check to the IRS, you can thank a war fought for the French crown 560 years ago.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 1 Comment »

What Is a Mayor’s Job?

Tuesday, September 3rd, 2013

What is a mayor’s job? Ensuring freedom from fear, Myron Magnet says:

For New Yorkers of my generation, a keynote of our youth was fear. Deserted streets at night felt as ominous as a film noir, and if footsteps echoed behind you, they rang with menace. As you neared your apartment building’s entrance, your heart pounded as you fumbled to get your key at the ready, so you could unlock the front door and slam it behind you, before an unseen mugger could run up and push into the lobby behind you, as happened once to me — and I still don’t want to talk about it. This typical mugger’s trick befell one of my Morningside Heights neighbors, a bank computer programmer, much less lucky than I: his assailant didn’t just rob but also killed him.

Home, when you got there, was a mini-fortress. We had triple locks on our doors, and we were expert in the competing merits of the different varieties — the deadbolt, the Segal (though debates raged on the most pick-proof cylinder), and the top-of-the-line Fox Police Lock, with its four-foot steel bar wedging the door shut from a steel-lined hole in the floor. We had steel accordion-grates over any window that opened onto a fire escape. The fire department deemed them illegal, but our fear of death by fire was nil compared with our fear of death by housebreaker — all the more so, for me, when I found an inexplicable hatchet one morning on my seventh-floor fire escape. Still, all the locks in the world availed naught for a friend of mine mugged at gunpoint late one night on the Upper West Side. The robber emptied his wallet, saw from his ID that he lived just up Broadway, forced him to march there and unlock his door, tied him up, and stole everything he could bundle into the sheets stolen from his victim’s bed.

Late one night, unsettling sounds drew me to my apartment window. In the street below, a large black man fiercely swung a length of two-by-four at another, much smaller white man. Thwack! “Why are you doing this to me?” the victim cried. Thwack! “Why are you doing this to me?” The police came minutes after I called them, but a lot of damage can happen in a minute. Some years later, returning from the action thrills of the newest James Bond movie, I saw the flash of police-car lights and a crowd in the street outside my building, too thick to see what was happening. Entering my apartment, I found my wife and her sister with chairs drawn up to the dining-room window, watching spellbound as a rubber-gloved forensic cop bagged evidence, while the janitor of the building across the street hosed away the blood of a man just shot to death by the drug dealer he’d tried to cheat.

A New York–born friend says that for him, the emblem of those days was the drug gang he’d pass on his daily walk across the scraggly dust bowl that neglected Central Park had become. He’d give the dealers a hard, law-and-order stare as he strode by, as if to say, “You can’t do this in my park.” But they would return a stare so murderously malevolent that they soon cowed him into dropping his eyes as he passed. It’s their park now, he concluded ruefully. On the street, too, and especially on the subway, we all studiously avoided eye contact. Who knew? — some maniac or monster might interpret a look as a challenge and answer with a knife or a box cutter. As for the dirt-caked, tangle-bearded homeless people — mostly deinstitutionalized or never-institutionalized madmen — they might be harmless, but one of them would push somebody in front of a subway regularly enough that you couldn’t be sure. So they’d make the adrenaline flow.

When taking a walk, you knew to carry as little cash as you might need, but not so little that a mugger, enraged at the paucity of his take, would punish you with violence. The official police message was: Never resist, never talk back, or else the robber might decide that he had to hurt you. It was easy pickings for the thieves, while the law-abiding felt like eunuchs. Reader, you cannot imagine the secret, guilty glee of New Yorkers when four young men tried to mug a skinny nerd on the subway in 1984, and, saying that he had five dollars for each of them, Bernhard Goetz stood up, reached into his pocket — for his gun — and shot them all.

So you can picture my incredulity when I read a New York Times story reporting that young New Yorkers now don’t know what a mugging is.

Posted in Crime, Policy, Urbanism | 1 Comment »

Fear of Extinction

Sunday, September 1st, 2013

Assad’s is a dying regime, the War Nerd says — and you don’t want to be the one to send it into extinction:

Why not, you ask? Isn’t Assad a bad guy? Isn’t his regime evil? I don’t really understand those questions as well as everybody else seems to. The Alawites have reason to expect the worst, to stick together, and to fear Sunni domination. Those fears go way back to Ottoman rule.

Under the Ottomans, Alawites were kaffir, “heretics.” That meant, basically, “fair game.” At the moment, there’s a lot of nonsense going around about how sweet and tolerant the Ottoman Empire was from people who read Said’s Orientalism, or at least got the gist from the back cover, and went from the old European cliché “Ottomans — evil” to a new one, “Ottomans — good.” It makes me tired, this binary crap. If you can’t handle anything more modulated than that, stick to tweeting “Miley Cyrus: Saint or Sinner?”

Yeah, the Ottomans were occasionally considerate of minorities who had powerful connections abroad, like Western Christians (not Armenian, of course) or who performed useful state functions, like some Jews (not all) — but groups like the Alawites, without powerful foreign connections, huddled in the coastal hills hoping not to be noticed, were prey in the Ottoman view. The Alawites only survived by sticking together, fighting the Sunni when attacked, and above all, hoping not to be noticed. If the local authorities were kindly, they’d just be taxed to death for their heresy. If the Pashas were in a bad mood, troops would descend on Alawite villages and carry off all likely-looking women and children to be sold as slaves.

Like a lot of weak tribes, the Alawites were in a better position to benefit from a new set of masters than the formerly strong tribe, the Sunni. The French came in 1920 and saw the usefulness of a tightly-organized, warlike group like the Alawites. The fact that these coastal minority people were despised by the Sunni majority just made them less likely to conspire with the Sunni against the French, more loyal to their new masters.

The Alawites, ruled for the first time in their history by people who didn’t despise them, took to modern military service eagerly, like hundreds of other minority tribes all over the French and British empires. The Army was their way out of those miserable paranoid villages in the hills. They outperformed other groups and filled the officer corps by the time Syria got its independence from France in 1946.

The post-war years were full of wild experiments in the Arab world. The only constant was that military coups were the rule. Leaders came from the army — Nasser, Ghadafi, Saddam. So when an officer with coup-making skills happened to come from a tightly-knit community, he was almost sure to end up in charge. Saddam had his Tikrit clan in Iraq; Ghadafi had his academy buddies in Libya; Hafez Assad had his Alawite kin in Syria. The Alawites were perfectly placed to take advantage of this coup-centered polity. T. E. Lawrence said about them, “One Nusairi [Alawite] would not betray another, and would hardly not betray an unbeliever.” With Alawite officers filling the armed services in Syria, it was inevitable that an Alawite would come to power, as Hafez Assad did in 1970. From that point, they did what they had to do to remain in power. When killing was necessary, they killed. And in Syria, it was necessary fairly often. But I don’t know of any records showing that the Alawites were particularly cruel by the standards of the time and place. In fact, from the start of their rule in Syria, the Alawites have tried, via Ba’ath Party secularism and a long-term attempt to make Alawite ritual and doctrine closer to Sunni norms, to integrate with their neighbors.

I don’t see simple evil in that story. Good luck, historically, turning suddenly into precarious luck, then, maybe, very bad luck. That’s all I get from that, or from most tribes’ stories. No good, and very little you’d call “evil,” though a lot of suffering and blood.

Maybe I’m missing something. But what I think a lot of people like John Kerry are missing is what drove the Alawites’ grimmer measures: the simple fear of extinction. It’s a risk to go, as they did, from total obscurity to power in a place as fierce as Syria. Because when you fall, it won’t be to go back to Texas to paint puppies like Dubya. You and your whole tribe can reasonably expect massacres, mass rapes, ethnic cleansing, the works. When the Sunni revolted against Alawite domination in Hama in 1982, one of the slogans of the Syrian Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood was “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the graveyard.” The SAA dealt with the revolt by blasting rebellious neighborhoods with artillery, killing thousands.

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

Map of America’s Racial Segregation

Friday, August 30th, 2013

This map draws on data from the 2010 U.S. Census to show one dot per person, color-coded by race — using this perfectly natural schema:

White people are shown with blue dots; African-Americans with green; Asians with red; and Latinos with orange, with all other race categories from the Census represented by brown.

Because it’s morally wrong to use white for white, etc.

New York City Racial Map

Posted in Policy, Urbanism | 1 Comment »

Devalued in the Military

Friday, August 30th, 2013

Walter E. Williams shares some statistics on women in the military:

The “USMA report on the Integration and Performance of Women at West Point”, cited by Mackubin Thomas Owens, in Proceedings (July 1998) reveals sex-norming schemes whereby women receive A grades for the same performance that earns a man a D. Navy women pass physical readiness tests by performing 11% fewer sit-ups, 53% fewer push-ups, and running 1.5 miles 27% slower than men. The Marine Corps discovered that only 45% of female Marines could toss a hand grenade beyond its burst radius; one Army study reported only 12% could. Navy studies show that only 12% of women can accomplish the two-person stretcher carry, a requirement critical to ship security. Women may be able to drive a five-ton truck, but need a man’s help if they must change a tire. Women can fire field artillery pieces but often can’t handle the ammunition.

Senator Olympia Snowe (R.ME) says, “Every time a woman is excluded from a position [in the military], she is devalued.” That’s the kind of stupid thinking that ignores important physical and psychological sex differences and has compromised our military readiness. A partial listing of those differences include: the average female soldier is five inches shorter than her male counter-part, has half the upper body strength, has significantly lower aerobic capacity (at her physical peak, ages 20 to 30, the average woman has the aerobic capacity of a 50-year-old male), and 37% less muscle mass. Women have a much lighter skeleton that means, among other things, she can’t pull G forces as well as men and is at greater risk of skeletal injuries.

Women soldiers are four times more likely to report ill. The percentage of women being medically non-available at any time is twice that of male soldiers. Then there’s pregnancy. Each year, between 10 and 17 percent of servicewomen become pregnant. In certain posts the rate is higher. In 1988, James Webb, Secretary of the Navy, said 51% of single Air Force and 48% of single Navy women stationed in Iceland were pregnant. During troop deployment in Bosnia, between December 1995 and July 1996, a woman had to be evacuated due to pregnancy every three days. These and other factors mean that women suffer a higher rate of attrition than men and because of the turnover they are not as profitable training investments.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of military social engineering is official coverup of failure. Officers who criticize double standards or expose official lies and deception, risk their careers.

Weapons Man points out that Williams’ piece is from 1998.

Posted in Fitness, Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Ibn Khaldun on the Rise and Decline of Corporate Empires

Tuesday, August 27th, 2013

It should come as no surprise that Paul Krugman, fan of Asimov’s Foundation novels, has become a fan of Peter Turchin and Ibn Kaldun and has applied their ideas to Microsoft’s recent fall:

Yep: the uncouth nerds who created Microsoft became incredibly rich, acquired couth, and lost their edge; Apple stayed edgy in part because of Steve Jobs, but also because it was a disappointment for so long. And if its plans to build a high-tech Versailles are any indication, the now super-successful Apple may be heading down the same road as its one-time nemesis.

Both states and corporations are, at some fundamental level, cooperative enterprises, Turchin explains:

In the beginning we start with small groups of entrepreneurs randomly thrown together by chance. The vast majority of these incipient firms fail. Most of these groups will contain uncooperative selfish knaves. All such groups will fail with 100% probability; only groups consisting entirely of cooperators have a chance. However, the majority of such potentially cooperative groups will still fail because they will be unable to hit upon the right combination of social norms and institutions to enable them to cooperate effectively. As an example, people coming from different ethnic backgrounds often find it difficult to concert a cooperative action, simply because different cultures evolved different ways of cooperating, and these may not work well when thrown together.

In the next step, the majority of even those groups that consist of cooperators and have acquired effective cooperative institutions will fail — because they don’t have the right product, or perhaps because they are simply unlucky. But at least they have a chance, whereas groups with knaves and lacking the right institutions have no chance at all.

This is a typical cultural evolution scenario. At this stage we have a lot of variation, with all kinds of incipient firms churned out, and a selection mechanism that weeds the ones that don’t cut the mustard. This is completely analogous to the Ibn Khaldun situation of the stateless ‘desert’ where groups that can’t cooperate together in defense (and predation on other groups!) are rapidly eliminated.

Only those Bedouin groups that wield a lot of asabiya survive and thrive in the competitive desert. Analogously, only those start-ups that have a lot of — well, asabiya — survive and thrive in the competitive markets.

So that’s how high asabiya firms are generated. What happens next? Next they need to expand without losing asabiya. That means that they need to be very picky about accepting new members (keep those knaves out) and have another set of institutions that would allow them to assimilate newbies to the firm’s social norms of cooperation. If they surmount this challenge, they will expand and become a huge corporation.

But eventually the rot sets in. More and more knaves weasel their way in. The institutions that sustained cooperation begin to be undermined by the selfish behavior of freeriders. Moralistic cooperators, in response, withdraw their cooperation, because they don’t want to be taken advantage of. Prosocial founders and early joiners leave the company and join more cooperative ones, or start new businesses.

Eventually knaves reign and the company is really moribund. However, it’s big and has a lot of inertia and so it survives — for a while. Then, however, a particularly greedy set of executives, or a market downturn, exposes its inherent weakness and the corporation goes under. You can substitute ‘executives’ with the ‘elites’ and ‘corporation’ with ‘empire’ and you have the gist of my theory of why empires collapse (however, the time scale on which firms rise and fall is much faster than that for empires).

And that’s how I see the fall and decline of imperial corporations, when looked though the lens of Ibn Khaldun’s theory. I won’t name names, but I am sure we all can think of a number of examples of such moribund corporations.

This matches Carol Quigly’s notion of institutional imperative, which T. Greer summarizes:

According to this imperative, organizations are formed as a means to accomplishing a stated goal. These organizations are thus instruments whose role is limited to the function they were designed to perform. Over time these instruments tend to denigrate into institutions — organizations who exist for their own sake, devoting resources to protecting their position instead of directing resources towards the fulfillment of their designed role.”

He continues:

What I find most interesting about tying the institutional imperative directly to asabiyah is cycles – or rather, the cycles within cycles. In the case of American business, you have the larger asabiyah cycle of American society as a whole (visible among our top executives today – they are far less ‘pro-social’ than their counterparts in the 60s), but then smaller cycles of specific organizations within American society itself (in this case individual firms).

The neat thing about free markets is that is allows “moribund corporations” to break apart without the dreadful consequences we usually associate with the collapse of nations and states. Indeed, because these corporations are usually replaced by their more instrumental peers, the business asabiyah cycle is a great boon to larger society.
I imagine similar cycles are present in all human organizations, including most bureaucracies. The lean, can-do OSS of the Second World War slowly morphs into the moribund CIA of today, and so forth. Only difference is that there are no Bendouin rival bureaucracies to push them out.

Gene Anderson adds a few more points:

One might add that asabiya doesn’t just happen; in Ibn Khaldun’s theory, it requires a leader with charisma, concerted ability to manage force, and generosity, who emerges in a competitive situation where the best leader unites the biggest force and therefore wins. Then when an established, mature government appears, charisma, generosity and whatever aren’t so much use — establishment sets in, dull gray figures take over, and things unwind. Ibn Khaldun figured about 100 years per cycle.

The best possible combination for collective action might be a Machiavellian leader and completely prosocial followers, Turchin notes.

Posted in Business, Economics, Policy | 2 Comments »

There is no hope of democracy in the Middle East

Monday, August 26th, 2013

There is no hope of democracy in the Middle East, Ed West contends:

Libya is still unstable, while even Tunisia, the country where the revolutions began, faces an uncertain future. When the first protests in the region began, following the self-immolation of market trader Mohamed Bouazizi in January 2011, who could have predicted that it would end like this? Well, pretty much everyone did, with the exception of most western governments, the BBC and the rest of the liberal media.

From the start of the uprisings the narrative has been that the Arab world is moving towards democracy and freedom.

Even the name, reminiscent of the Prague Spring of 1968, suggested things would get better; more likely precedents would be 1789, 1917 or the 1979 Iranian revolution, all of which led to far worse horrors.

And yet Barack Obama, David Cameron and much of the media greeted events with almost child-like innocence.

Back in February 2011 David Cameron told the Kuwaiti parliament it was “prejudice” to say that democracy would not work in the Arab world. His statement was an example of the enfeebled western mindset, where even considering a possible thesis that could smack of “prejudice” must be discounted before the evidence is assessed, so that we approach a problem blinkered from any unpleasant reality.

This does not imply our superiority; much of the region’s problems stem from western policy, from handing Arabia to the Wahhabist House of Saud, to the 1953 coup in Iran and support for kleptocratic dictators, which have left a legacy of bitterness.

BUT that is not the only obstacle that democracy faces in the Middle East. Everyone born in countries like ours is, historically speaking, a lottery winner. Most people, in other times and other places, have lived in societies more like Game of Thrones than Borgen, clannish rather than democratic, where people feel their loyalty and duty is towards other members of their extended family or religious community. To get people to work in the best interests of strangers so that you accept their authority when they get more people into the polling booth than you, is an achievement, not a natural state.

Liberal democracy needs certain conditions to flourish, most of which are absent across the Arab world.

In our country it took a long, long time. Around the date of the next general election we will celebrate 800 years since Magna Carta, the beginning of the painful process whereby British democracy evolved.

Libya, by contrast, was artifi-cially constructed in the 20th century, and is home to Berber tribes who still have a thin sense of nationhood. Egypt is an ancient civilisation but it is a clannish society and, like most countries in the region, has a youth bulge and high unemployment. These are all factors that make democracy improbable, if not impossible.

Egypt is also missing two vital conditions without which democracy will not flourish, the rule of law and economic freedom.

Liberal democracy needs certain conditions to flourish, most of which are absent across the Arab world
It is no coincidence that democracy emerged in those societies where capitalism had developed, where contracts could be legally enforced and people could own their own property, which the authorities could not snatch without due process. These are to democracy as foundations are to a house.

Add to this, in the case of Syria, the demographic balance.

It is very difficult for ethnically diverse countries to make democracy work, for the simple reason that voting becomes a tribal headcount. So whatever the atrocities of the Assad family, it is perfectly rational for his fellow Alawites to fight to the death to prevent a Sunni tyranny.

Likewise Iraq; home to a civilisation even older than Egypt’s, their ancestors invented everything from written laws to beer, but the modern state was arti-ficially carved out of three Turkish provinces, and contains various religious communities and tribes and clans within. The spread of democracy was a utopian idea, based not on reason or evidence, but on a worldview of humanity that emerged after the Second World War in which not only would liberal democracy and liberal ideas spread around the world, but that they were the norm, because we are all essentially interchangeable.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Kill the Department of Defense

Monday, August 26th, 2013

Kill the Department of Defense, Lynn C. Rees suggests:

Where FDR understood that politics is the division of power and shaped government in ways that allowed the internecine feuding of the inevitable private fiefdoms and tribes arising in any human institution be channeled into salutary channels, his successors committed four major fallacies of politics:

  • the appeal to virtue: if we only get the right people people in there, politics will be banished through virtue
  • the appeal to Führerprinzip: if we only get the right leader in there, politics will be banished through leadership
  • the appeal to de-duplication: if we only eliminate duplicate efforts, politics will be banished by reducing multiple competing centers to one harmonious center
  • the appeal to boxes and straight lines: if we only have the right boxes connected by the right lines, politics will be banished by rational compartmentalization and proper channels

So they folded the old Navy and War Departments coupled with an independent Air Force liberated from the Army into one organization under a single Secretary of Defense. This allowed the services to continue their age old war of land vs. sea vs. air as before but now they had enough consolidated interest to band together as needed to shield their parochial turf battles from from outside meddlers.

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

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