Epistemic Arguments for Conservatism III: Computational Arguments

(Another one in the series promised here; I’m writing a paper. This is still somewhat muddled, so read at your own risk, though comments are greatly appreciated if you find this of interest.)

Many problems of social life have “solutions” that can be correct or incorrect. Determining whether someone is guilty or innocent of a violation of legal rules; allocating goods and services to their best uses; policing a neighbourhood so that potential violators of community norms are deterred; all of these things can be characterized as problems with solutions that can be said to be at least partially correct or incorrect, assuming there is broad agreement on the values a solution should promote. Different institutional solutions to these problems can thus be evaluated with respect to their epistemic power: the degree to which, on average, a given institution is able to reach the “correct answer” to the problem in question. A “computational” argument for a particular institutional solution to a problem is simply an argument that, given the incentives the institution provides for gathering or revealing information or knowledge important to the problem, the average capacities of the relevant decisionmakers to process this information or use this knowledge, and the rules or mechanisms it uses for aggregating their judgments, the institution in question has greater epistemic power than the alternatives (relative, of course, to a particular problem domain).

Consider, for example, the institution of trial by jury. Though jury trials have more than one justification, their epistemic power to determine violations of legal norms is often invoked as an argument for their use vis à vis, say, trials by ordeal or combat. A trial by jury is expected to be a better “truth tracker” than trials by ordeal or trials by combat in the sense that it is expected to better discriminate between violators and non-violators of legal norms (more precisely, it is expected to better identify non-violators, even at the expense of failing to identify violators) because, among other things, it may provide good incentives for the revelation of both inculpatory and exculpatory evidence via adversarial proceedings and may allow the judgments of individual jurors to be combined in ways that amplify their epistemic power (see, e.g., Condorcet’s jury theorem). By contrast, trials by ordeal or combat are supposed to be lousy discriminators between violators and non-violators of legal norms (or lousy ways of identifying non-violators), because they provide bad incentives for the revelation of the relevant information (though see Peter Leeson’s work for some interesting ideas on how trials by ordeal might have exploited widespread beliefs in “god’s judgment” to discriminate accurately between the guilty and the innocent). To be sure, even if the computational argument for jury trials is correct, we may still not want to use them to determine every violation of legal norms: considerations of cost, fairness, lack of suitable jurors, or speed, may reasonably limit their use. But the epistemic power of jury trials would surely be one important consideration for using them rather than other mechanisms in trying to figure out whether a particular person has violated a legal norm.

Now, the idea that some institutions are better than others at “social cognition” or “social information processing” is not  inherently conservative, as the example of jury trials indicates. “Computational” or “social cognition” arguments have been deployed in defence of a wide variety of institutions, from democracy to Wikipedia, and from markets to the common law, without necessarily bolstering a “conservative” position in politics, however conceived. (For a good discussion of the concepts of social cognition and social information processing, as well as a review of some of the research that attempts to untangle when and how social cognition is possible, see this short paper by Cosma Shalizi). But there is a set of arguments for “conservatism,” broadly understood, that argues for the epistemic power of some “default” solution to a social problem and against the epistemic power of an “explicit” intervention on computational grounds. The same contrast is sometimes expressed differently – e.g., in terms of decentralized vs. centralized institutions, “unplanned” vs. “planned” social interaction, or customary vs. explicit rules – but it always indicates something like the idea that some institutional solutions to a problem need not be explicitly produced by a single, identifiable agent like a government. A computational argument for conservatism thus makes the (implicit or explicit) claim that we can “conserve” on reason by relying on the computational services of such patterns of interaction or institutions to determine the solution to a problem of social life rather than attempting to explicitly compute the solution ourselves.

This can get confusing, for it is not always clear what would count as a “default” solution to a social problem, and “restoring” (or even implementing) the default solution may entail robust changes to a social system (amounting even to revolution in some cases). So bear with me while I engage in a classificatory exercise. Three options for defining the default seem possible: the pattern of interaction that has historically been the case (“custom” or “tradition”); the pattern of interaction that would have prevailed in the absence of explicit planning or design by one or more powerful actors (e.g., “the free market” as opposed to a system of economic allocation involving various degrees of centralized planning); and the pattern of interaction that “computes” the solution to the social problem implicitly rather than explicitly (compare, for example, a “cap and trade” market for carbon emissions with an administrative regulation setting a price for carbon emissions: both are designed, but the former computes the solution to the problem of the appropriate price for carbon implicitly rather than explicitly). We might call these options the “Burkean,” “Hayekian,” and (for lack of a better word) “Neoliberal” understandings of the relevant “default” pattern of interaction, which in turn define epistemic arguments for, respectively, the superiority of tradition over innovation, the superiority of spontaneous order over planned social orders, and the superiority of implicit systems of “parallel” social computation over explicit centralized systems of social computation. But what reasons do we have to think that any of these “default” patterns of interaction have greater epistemic power than the relevant alternatives, or rather, under what conditions are they computationally better than the relevant alternatives? 

Let us start with the last (“Neoliberal”) position, since it seems to me the easiest to analyze and at any rate is the farthest from conservatism in the usual sense of the term (the “Burkean” position is the closest to conservatism, while the “Hayekian” sits more or less in the middle; I'm leaving the analysis of "Burkean" arguments to another post). Here the relevant comparison is between two designed institutional solutions to a problem, one that aims to determine the solution to a social problem by setting the rules of interaction and letting the solution emerge from the interaction itself, and another that aims to induce a set of actors to consciously and intentionally produce the solution to the problem. Thus, for example, a “cap and trade” market in carbon emissions aims ultimately to efficiently allocate resources in an economy on the assumption that the economy should emit less than X amount of carbon into the atmosphere, but it does so by setting a cap on the amount of carbon that may be produced by all actors in the market and letting actors trade with one another, not by asking a set of people to directly calculate what the best allocation of resources would be (or even by directly setting the price of carbon). We might compare this solution to a sort of parallel computation: given a target amount of carbon emissions, the relevant computation concerning the proper allocation of resources is to be carried out in a decentralized fashion by economic actors in possession of private and sometimes difficult to articulate knowledge about their needs, production processes, and the like, who communicate with one another the essential information necessary to coordinate their allocation plans via the messaging system of “prices.” 

This sort of pattern of interaction will be computationally superior to a centralized computation of the solution to the same problem whenever the relevant knowledge and information to determine the solution is dispersed, poorly articulated, time-sensitive, and expensive or otherwise difficult to gather by centralized bodies (perhaps because actors have incentives not to truthfully disclose such information to centralized bodies), yet essential features of such knowledge are nevertheless communicable to other actors via decentralized and asynchronous message passing (like prices). (Hayek’s famous argument for markets and against central planning basically boils down to a similar claim). The problem can thus be decomposed into separate tasks that individual actors can easily solve on their own while providing enough information to other actors within appropriate time frames so that an overall solution can emerge.

But these conditions do not always hold. Consider, for example, the problem of designing an appropriate “cap and trade” market. Here the relevant knowledge is not dispersed, poorly articulated, and time-sensitive but is instead highly specialized and articulated (e.g., knowledge of “mechanism design” or “auction theory” in economics), is not as obviously time-sensitive, and cannot easily be divided. (Though the problem of discovering the truth about mechanism design or auctions might itself be best tackled in a decentralized manner).  We might perhaps learn here from computer science proper: some problems can be tackled by easily “parallelized” algorithms (algorithms that can be broken down into little tasks that can run in a decentralized fashion in thousands of different computers), but some problems cannot (the best available algorithm needs to run in a single processor, or the problem can only be broken down into steps that need to run sequentially, like the algorithms for calculating pi); in fact there seems to be an entire research programme trying to figure out which classes of problems can be parallelized and which cannot. (And this seems to be a deep and difficult question). Or we might speak here of “epistemic bottlenecks” that limit the degree to which a problem can be broken down into tasks that can be solved via a division of epistemic labor; the problem of designing an appropriate division of epistemic labor for a specific purpose might be one of these.

The “computational” argument for implicit over explicit computation depends on the identification of an epistemic bottleneck in explicit mechanisms of computation that are not present in the implicit mechanism. But it does not depend on a contrast between designed and undesigned solutions to a problem: both a carbon market and an administrative regulation are equally designed solutions to the same problem. In order to make the computational case for spontaneous order (as against “planned” order), one has to argue not only that there are epistemic bottlenecks in the explicit mechanism of computation, but that the problem of designing an order for computing the solution to the problem is itself subject to the epistemic bottlenecks that render explicit solutions unfeasible; and here, I am not sure that Hayek or anyone else has given a convincing argument yet. (One could, of course, give “selection” arguments for preferring spontaneous to designed orders; but that is a subject for another post).

The Ancient War between States and Non-state Peoples, Modern Botswana Edition

The NY Times has a really nice piece on the conflict between the San Bushmen and the Botswanan state that illustrates pretty well some of the things that Scott writes about in The Art of Not Being Governed. The Bushmen are a group of foraging peoples living in dry areas in and around the Kalahari desert. Much of their territory seems to have been pretty marginal for agriculture, and hence effectively stateless before the 20th century. For decades, they had moved back and forth between "civilization" and traditional hunter-gathering, depending on trade opportunities and the like, but in the 1960s the state decided they were "poor" and needed to be helped; and they could not be helped unless they were settled and legible. At first, the state tried carrots, drilling boreholes that freed them from the constant search for water in the desert; and many took the deal, taking up a more settled existence:

Botswana became independent in 1966, and the government’s eventual view was that the Bushmen were an impoverished minority living in rugged terrain that made them hard to help. Already, many were moving to Xade, a settlement within the reserve where a borehole had been drilled years before.

The Bushmen were pragmatists. Liberated from the strenuous pursuit of water, people began keeping goats and chickens while also scratching away at the sandy soil to grow gardens. The government provided a mobile health clinic, occasional food rations, a school.

Since the 1980s, however, the Botswanan state has tried harsher tactics in its quest to evict them from the areas they live in, which were designated a "game reserve" in 1961. Indeed, it used the fact that some Bushmen had voluntarily taken up agriculture against them:

Later on, these activities were commonly mentioned as reasons for removing the Bushmen. They “were abandoning their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle,” and even hunting with guns and horses, the government argued in a written explanation of its rationale.

So the state began to push harder to sedentarize the Bushment, with predictable consequences:

Since the 1980s, Botswana, a landlocked nation of two million people, has both coaxed and hounded the Bushmen to leave the game reserve, intending to restrict the area to what its name implies, a wildlife refuge empty of human residents. Withholding water is one tactic, and in July a High Court ruled that the government had every right to deny use of that modern oasis, the borehole. An appeal was filed in September.

These days, only a few hundred Bushmen live within the reserve, and a few, like Mr. Taoxaga, still survive largely through their inherited knowledge, the hunters pursuing antelope and spring hares, the gatherers collecting tubers and wild melons, tapping into the water concealed in buried plants.

But most of the Bushmen have moved to dreary resettlement areas on the outskirts, where they wait in line for water, wait on benches at the clinic, wait around for something to do, wait for the taverns to open so they can douse their troubles with sorghum beer. Once among the most self-sufficient people on earth, many of them now live on the dole, waiting for handouts.

“If there was only some magic to free me into the past, that’s where I would go,” said Pihelo Phetlhadipuo, an elderly Bushman living in a resettlement area called Kaudwane. “I once was a free man, and now I am not.”

 “I once was a free man, and now I am not." Yet the story has another side. Just as Scott says, the culture of the "valleys" (here, the core areas of the Botswanan state, as opposed to the "bush") has some allure for at least some of the Bushmen:

Families have come apart, most often with grandparents or a father staying in the reserve and a mother and children living in a resettlement area, near a school and a reliable supply of water. Gana Taoxaga, the old man who was among the last holdouts, the one completing his two-day walk, has six children and seven grandchildren in Kaudwane. “I miss them and they miss me,” he said.

Mr. Taoxaga did not know his own age. His brown coat was missing half its fabric. His leather shoes had no laces. Beside him on the journey, a younger man, Matsipane Mosethlanyane, led some donkeys with empty water jugs strapped across their backs. He said he was proud to be a Bushman and, boasting of his resourcefulness, he described how he had sometimes squeezed the moisture from animal dung to slake his thirst. Animals eat the flowers off the small trees, he said. The moisture from the dung was nutritious.

“But I don’t want to drink the dirty water any more,” he said. “That’s why we are walking today. I am used now to the new water, the modern water.”

As they say, read the whole thing.

Idle Queries: Exit and Voice in Economic and Political Life

In his classic Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Albert Hirshmann suggested that “voice” and “exit” are the two basic responses to organizational problems. When someone is dissatisfied with an organization, they can either express their dissatisfaction (voice) or try to leave (exit). Whether one takes one or the other course of action depends both on the relative costs of voice and exit (sometimes voice is punished, or exit is difficult) and on the strength of “loyalty.” (More loyal people may forgive faults in the organization more easily, though they may also prefer complaining to leaving). But these responses are not independent of one another: if lots of people “exit” an organization, the efficacy of voice is typically reduced, partly because the possibilities for coordinating are also reduced (though under some conditions, exit can serve as a “signal” that temporarily enhances “voice”: for a modern example taken from the dissolution of the GDR, see this earlier post). By contrast, a lack of exit options seems to boost voice; in more economic terminology, when the cost of exit relative to voice is low, exit will be the predominant response to dissatisfaction with an organization and vice-versa.

Now, democracy can be roughly conceptualized as a form of voice in organizations. Democracy is, to be sure, more than voice; for one thing, democratic voice is always at the very least formally equal (one person one vote, for example), and those with voice in a democratic organization are supposed to include the vast majority of its members. But for most of the history of the state, political voice of any kind did not really exist (at least not much – there are always exceptions); the usual response to oppression appears to have been “exit,” as James C. Scott documents in his The Art of Not Being Governed. Yet this was only possible because the pre-modern state had a limited reach: one could always take to the hills if one did not like the current ruler.

First query. Could one then argue that modern political democracy was made possible by the greater difficulty of exit in the modern state system? There does seem to be a correlation between the development of the modern state system and the emergence of institutions of voice, though this correlation is typically explained in terms of the “taxation bargains” that monarchs had to strike with their subjects; but what if the key parameter here is the increasing cost of exit from the state system? (The increasing wealth of state spaces relative to nonstate spaces may also play a role here.) And could democracy become less common if exit from the state system became more easily available? (This could take many forms: the emergence of more “ungoverned spaces” like the hills of Yemen, or the success of projects like “seasteading”). Does anybody know of work in this vein?

Second query. I did some reading on the Yugoslav workers’ councils for the post below, and it struck me as odd that similar organizational forms are not more popular in market economies. (The councils appear to have been quite popular while they lasted, despite their limited autonomy). Sure, “voice” exists in firms as labor unions, “codetermination” arrangements, “company unions,” and other such things; and I’m sure there’s a ton of literature on this problem, but I was idly wondering if the structure of a competitive capitalist economy hinders the development of voice within organizations because it lowers the cost of exit for the worker. In a well-functioning market economy, the dissatisfied worker can often go to another job, so voice might seem less important (though perhaps where workers have scarce skills, the costs of both voice and exit are lowered; the total effect might be indeterminate). Conversely, should we expect that in economies where unemployment is high or in firms where workers do not have scarce skills, exit costs would be higher, thus boosting the prospects for voice? (But perhaps the weaker bargaining position of workers there would increase the costs of both exit and voice, so that the overall effect would depend). Any pointers here? 

Third query. Is there a "moral reason" for preferring voice to exit? That is, should one work for voice even where exit is easily available? Or are voice and exit perfect "moral substitutes"?

Equality and Domination (A footnote on Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone).

I should find this book more appealing. I mean, I am receptive to its basic thesis: that high inequality is bad for a society. I find it plausible to think that societies with a high level of status inequality and status competition do worse in a variety of ways than more equal societies, and in particular that large inequalities may induce bad health effects via elevated stress levels (as they apparently do in all hierarchical primate societies). (Indeed, I do not object to the kinds of comparisons between people and other primates that Wilkinson and Pickett use: they seem fruitful enough to me). But there is something that bothers me about it. Since I am supposed to say something about it from a political theory perspective in a “policy forum” here at VUW in a couple of weeks, consider the (extremely long) post below my attempt to make sense of why I find it unsatisfactory, or perhaps more accurately, my attempt to clear my mind about what it is that is problematic (or not) about inequality.

Before I get to the point, however, I should say that the book does not strike me as an example of good social science. To be sure, most claims in it are supported by an impressive array of footnotes to other research and scientific-looking scatterplots, but even for a lowly political theorist like me some problems were obvious: there is sample selection bias (why should places like South Korea, Israel, Hong Kong, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Taiwan be excluded from the analysis, even though they have per capita incomes comparable to if not higher than that of Portugal, which is included?); the graphs all represent static pictures, which fail to control for any factors which may interact with inequality, and often seem to be driven by one or two outliers; there is little discussion of time trends, and what little there is seems unduly focused on the UK and the USA and does not always support their argument; and there is a lot of dubious sociology (one thing that jumped at me is the claim that the Japanese level of income inequality means that Japan is a highly equal society; passing acquaintance with Japanese society indicates that though Japan may be a highly equal society in terms of income, it is also a highly hierarchical society, which would seem to conflict with the mechanism Wilkinson and Pickett identify as responsible for the bad effects of inequality).

I understand that some of these issues have to do with the availability of comparable data on income inequality, and that many of them would have been addressed in some of the studies they cite; but I find that these issues raised enough doubts in my mind to find critiques like Christopher Snowdon’s plausible (the title of Snowdon’s book tells you pretty much what he thinks of The Spirit Level: it’s called The Spirit Level Delusion). On issues that I know a little bit more about, though still not much – like the political science literature on the determinants of inequality, or the literature on happiness and income – I found their summary of other people’s research superficial and sometimes misleading. And obvious alternative mechanisms for the effects they see are simply not explored: for example, it may be that the key variable here is exposure to labor market competition; it is the fear of losing a job that generates stress and bad health effects, but this variable may be systematically associated with inequality. (I am not claiming that this is the case, but it seems like something worthy of investigation).

But I am not a specialist on the literature on health and inequality, and at any rate nothing hinges on any one study or picture. It is the cumulative evidence that matters, and I would not be surprised if something like the Wilkinson-Pickett thesis on inequality were reasonably close to the truth, though probably in a more qualified way. Inequality probably interacts with other factors, including “cultural” factors, in complicated ways; but I imagine that at least some of what they are saying reflects the broad trends of research on inequality (though I could be wrong). I do not, at any rate, have the time or inclination to fact-check the book and wade through the many studies they cite, so I shall take what they say as generally on target, even if subject to discounting.  

Moreover, it would be quite surprising if high levels of income inequality did not have any bad effects on social life. Income inequality may be a highly imperfect proxy for the main hierarchies of status and power that structure a complex society like our own, but it probably is correlated with such hierarchies; and highly status-stratified societies are unlikely to be “well integrated.” (The idea that there are “happy hierarchies” – of caste or occupation or the like, where “each is set in his own rank,” to use the words of an ancient defender of hierarchy – is a figment of the ideological imagination). To be sure, the kinds of status anxieties and status competition that Wilkinson and Pickett believe mediate the effects of income inequality on bad social outcomes are typically centered on one’s neighbours, not on distant rich others, but this does not prevent such competition from having effects across the entire hierarchy. I am reminded of some of the things Don Herzog describes in his book Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (discussed in a previous post): in the England of circa 1817, a highly unequal society in almost every respect, each social group sought to preserve its own status by despising those below them in the status hierarchy, a chain of contempt that was created by local effects yet had global implications. This was not merely a “psychological” reaction, but part of a system through which the “lower orders” were put in their place: inequality here was translated into domination and subordination.

But even if the specific mechanism that Wilkinson and Pickett favour to account for the effects of inequality (the induced stress resulting from higher levels of status competition in unequal societies) turns out to be wrong or highly exaggerated, the claim that wealth or income inequality (and not just poverty) is bad for societies has a long and distinguished pedigree. It is interesting to note that many defenders of hierarchy in the history of political thought – writers who did not think human beings are of equal moral worth in the sense that we think they are, and who were willing to defend slavery and other practices we would find abhorrent – thought that, among people who are presumptively equals (like free male citizens), large income inequalities were corrosive of political and social life and generally to be avoided. So there may be something to it.

Instead of debating the factual basis of Wilkinson and Pickett’s views, then, I want to ask about the reasons we should care about (income) inequality, and about how much we should care. Wilkinson and Pickett’s view for why we should care about income inequality is essentially consequentialist: we should care about inequality because having less of it would make us healthier and happier. But, even if we accept this consequentialist framing of the question (about which more in a minute), we would still have to ask how much less income inequality would we want, and at what cost to other values, including other forms of equality.

Consider a simple example. The communist societies of Eastern Europe typically had very low income inequalities, as Wilkinson and Pickett are well aware. And some of them even achieved relatively high levels of “development,” measured conventionally (e.g., East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Yugoslavia of Tito; Cuba is a non-European example today, with its high levels of “human development” – though the typical figures cited in this connection are more than a little dubious these days). Yet most of us would agree that the mechanism through which income equality was achieved in these cases violated rights that we would consider to be fundamental. Indeed, Wilkinson and Pickett say so. But more importantly for my purposes here, these societies were not really equal in an important sense of the term: though income differentials didn’t matter much for social life, inequalities of political access mattered enormously. Today North Korea serves as an extreme example of the sort of “caste” society that can emerge even in the almost complete absence of income differentials; where money has very little value, family background, regime loyalty, etc. can all become terribly important. (And even here, there are nuances and interesting complexities: since the famine in the 1990s, political controls have eroded, money and markets have become more important, and income inequality has increased. But this has been, on the whole, a good thing for a lot of people!).

Now, someone may object that this is obvious and irrelevant: nobody is arguing that we should implement a system of state socialism in order to diminish income inequality. Wilkinson and Pickett’s proposals tend more towards ideas for worker self-management within a democratic framework, though the political mechanisms through which they expect such a system to sustain itself remain woolly. (It is worth noting that however attractive such proposals may appear – and I am not immune to their charms – the most extensive and successful system of worker self-management, in Tito’s Yugoslavia, did not survive the partial democratization and collapse of the country at the political level, and indeed seems to have precipitated the enormous Yugoslav economic crisis of the early 1990s). At any rate, the levels of equality in Sweden or Japan – the countries that Wilkinson and Pickett single out as the most equal - can be achieved within the framework of a typical capitalist economy (something that Wilkinson and Pickett seem to forget in their last chapters, where they basically attack capitalism as such). No complete transformation of property relationships is needed to reduce income inequality substantially through taxes and transfers (within the limits given by the efficiency losses induced by high taxes, available technologies of tax evasion, the political resistance of the rich, and cultural ideas about what constitutes “excessive” taxation).

But the problem is that simple income equality is unlikely to be what we are really looking for, as Wilkinson and Pickett seem dimly aware of in their last chapters with their proposals on worker self-management. When money fails to serve as an indicator of distinction, other things may easily take its place. Consider the fact that Japanese CEOs get paid less in money than American CEOs (who many people consider to be obscenely overpaid relative to workers), but more in deference and perks. This may be good or bad, but it is not altogether obvious that one sort of inequality is preferable to the other, even if Japan is in fact a healthier society than the USA for any number of reasons. (Indeed, I rather prefer the money inequality to the status inequality in this case: at least the money inequality does not involve direct subordination. Marx himself considered the “cash nexus” of exploitative capitalism an advance over the sorts of paternalistic subordination typical of “feudal” relations). So if we are interested in equality, we need to think clearly about what, exactly, is bad about income inequality, and whether the means we could use to eliminate it simply introduce other perhaps even more invidious inequalities in their wake.

This is a point made more elegantly and generally by Michael Walzer in his book Spheres of Justice. In Walzer’s view, the different goods produced by social cooperation have different meanings that indicate the appropriate way to distribute them; principles of distribution make sense only in specific spheres. Grades should not be distributed according to wealth, or emergency healthcare according to ability to pay, and more generally, not everything should (or could!) be distributed according to money. But most goods can also “cross spheres,” money and political power being the most obvious cases. It is the convertibility of goods that raises problems; if money could never be converted into status, political power, personal domination, and so on, income inequality would be far less problematic. So an egalitarian society, in Walzer’s view, limits the convertibility of the various goods produced by social cooperation. In particular, an egalitarian society should limit political power from being easily transformed into wealth, and wealth from being easily transformed into political power and social status. But an egalitarian society would not, necessarily, limit inequalities in wealth except to the extent that such limitation arises endogenously from the attempt to prevent wealth from turning into political power, status, and domination over others (Walzer thinks, for example, that some forms of large-scale property are inherently political, and hence ought to be limited or regulated by “voice”). There are complications here, for political power and money are both special sorts of goods (they “seep” through all the other spheres of distribution, and sometimes what looks like one is really the other), and there appears to be no stable equilibrium that completely guarantees the nonconvertibility of coercive political power or dominating social status into personal income and vice-versa (indeed, there are some problems with the very coherence of Walzer’s proposals, but discussing them would take us too far afield).

But in general Walzer’s intuition is that when we say that we are interested in equality, what we (should) mean is that we are interested in nondomination, and this intuition seems reasonably sound. We are not actually interested in income equality or inequality (at least to the extent that we are not simply motivated by envy), but in not being dominated by those with money and in retaining our self-respect as equal citizens. A similar point was made in a very influential article by Elizabeth Anderson entitled “What is the Point of Equality?” Anderson was criticizing what she considered to be the pernicious position of “luck egalitarians” (a term she coined, but which has been embraced by proponents of this form of egalitarianism). Luck egalitarians argue that the point of justice is to neutralize those differences in welfare and resources for which an individual cannot be held responsible. In its most persuasive form, luck egalitarians start from the common intuition that luck (chance) neutralizes desert and responsibility: someone who inherited lots of wealth could not be said to “deserve” it, and someone who does badly because of factors that are outside his or her control cannot be said to be responsible for his or her misfortune. But, by the same token, we do not deserve our good fortune in the form of good parents, or natural talents, or place of birth, all of which are factors that greatly influence whether we make lots of money or not, and whether we live satisfying lives or not. Exactly what we “deserve” in this sense is difficult to say; some luck egalitarians like G. A. Cohen seem comfortable saying that we basically deserve nothing save perhaps a bit of our effort, though others are more generous. This already seems to miss the prospective elements of desert – maybe you eventually come to deserve those opportunities, as David Schmidtz argues – but the more controversial move that luck egalitarians make is to argue that justice requires that those who are fortunate in ways for which they cannot be held (ultimately) responsible compensate those who are less fortunate. Luck egalitarians thus argued for things like a universal “basic income” and for various sorts of subsidies to equalize the prospects of the fortunate and the unfortunate (an example, taken from Anderson’s article: subsidized or free plastic surgery for the ugly), though they mostly accepted the legitimacy of market societies (with some exceptions, like G. A. Cohen, who was a sort of Marxist), and suggested that once inequalities of fortune have been equalized, inequalities resulting from “bad choices” are to be tolerated (even if they turn out to be quite large).

Anderson argued that this position was open to all sorts of objections (which I won’t rehearse here), but her main point was that we should care about equality as a matter of justice (in contrast with charity or humanitarian concern) not because we are interested in fixing the great “cosmic injustice” of individual differences, but because we are interested in not being oppressed and dominated and treated contemptuously by others. Luck egalitarianism, in her view, fails to care about those things; it fixates on natural differences rather than on the ways in which societies transform human diversity into rungs of hierarchy, it privileges envy rather and contemptuous pity rather than self-respect as the key moral sentiments, and it promotes intrusive forms of paternalism in order to avoid excessively bad outcomes.

Extremely long story short, I agree with this; I take it that we should care about income inequality to the extent that income inequality undermines the possibility of a society of equals in the sense of people who cannot dominate one another, and hence can respect each other’s liberty. Now, there’s a great deal of dispute about exactly what is needed for such a life in a modern complex society (do we need a more equal distribution of the means of production? do we need a universalistic safety net or some kinds of public health? do we need a minimum wage?); accepting this view does not say much about which institutions best enable a society of equals. One can certainly imagine that, as income differentials increase, these are translated more easily into power and dominating social status, and there seems to be some evidence for this view. But the same can be true of interventions designed to decrease income inequality – they may also enhance the power or status of some over others in unjustified ways, especially if they take the form of opaque and bureaucratic administrative programs rather than simple transfers. At any rate, in the grand scheme of things, income inequalities seem to be less “coupled” with power and status inequalities in modern capitalist democracies than in many other kinds of society, even if they could do better.

Moreover, there are other considerations that should limit the reach of egalitarian measures. Considerations of ownership matter to our moral thinking, though they are not always decisive. The income that we propose to redistribute is always somebody’s income; can the redistribution be justified in ways that are reasonable? Just saying that the redistribution will probably make people healthier, or that the person “doesn’t really need” the income, is not obviously sufficient, though it may serve a purpose in the political debate over equality. Considerations of past injustice also matter. If Maori have lower income than others in New Zealand, or blacks in the US, the relevant consideration is not necessarily the income inequality, but the past injustice by which such lower income was produced, and which may need to be rectified.

So, does it matter very much if Wilkinson and Pickett are right and more (income-) equal societies are healthier? It would certainly be nicer to have healthier and happier societies, but I am wary of saying that we should engage in large-scale redistribution just because we might gain a little health and happiness (the effects Wilkinson and Pickett note seem to be quite small in absolute terms). The consequentialist frame is too thin to hang the argument for equality, and it is always at the mercy of other research showing that no, inequality is not really associated with worse health and happiness. To the extent, on the other hand, that there are specific inequalities that prevent some people from living the life of a self-respecting, equal citizens – or that enable some to transform political into economic power or vice-versa - then I am more receptive.

And if you, kind reader, have made it this far, you probably deserve a prize. But there isn’t one. Tough luck.   

Contempt and the Public Sphere (A Footnote on Don Herzog's "Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders")

Like many other people, when reading the political blogosphere I am often struck by the prevalence of expressions of contempt. It is not simply that the “political public sphere” in the internet hardly corresponds to the Habermasian ideal of deliberation in which only the force of the better argument prevails; rather, expressions of contempt for the views and sometimes persons of others thoroughly pervade political argument. It is common to find claims that certain others have no (moral) “right” to speak on certain issues, or that their views should be ridiculed or ignored rather than engaged.

I am less interested in condemning this state of affairs (a pointless exercise anyway) than in trying to understand whether contempt is inextricably linked with public political argument. The thought crossed my mind while reading Don Herzog’s interesting book Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, which I discovered via Adrian Vermeule’s Law and the Limits of Reason. Herzog’s book could be described as a look at the political blogosphere in the British Isles circa 1817; he seems to have looked at every political pamphlet, newspaper, minor novel, and even popular song published between 1789 and 1834, and examined how coffeehouses, alehouses, and hairdressers' shops functioned as sites of political debate. It’s impressive, though I do not envy the undertaking (just imagining trying to write the contemporary version of this book makes me nauseous). 

As Herzog makes clear (at sometimes excruciating length, in fact), the political public sphere of the time was as filled with expressions of contempt, or perhaps more so, than the current political public sphere. Contempt was directed towards women, blacks, Jews, workers, rich people, poor people, politicians, hairdressers, etc.; reading Herzog, in fact, one gets the impression that most political argument at the time was simply composed of expressions of contempt by contending parties. (So much for the good old days before the internet). Moreover, though Herzog stresses that contempt was tightly linked to the “conservative” project of preserving hierarchies and preventing the transformation of “subjects into citizens,” the book makes it clear that contempt was deployed both to sustain hierarchy and deference on the part of subordinate groups and to undermine such hierarchy and deference; it was not the specific property of particular parties or groups (though conservatives and radicals typically expressed contempt in different ways, and made use of it for different purposes).

What makes the book interesting, beyond its account of the historical debates that shaped the emergence of a distinctively modern “conservatism” in Britain during those decades, is the way Herzog links the question of contempt with questions about epistemic authority: who is worth listening to, and who is not, and what norms should apply to apply to political debate.

Norms of political debate are not neutral with respect to epistemic authority. The Habermasian ideal of deliberation, for example, implicitly grants all citizens equal epistemic authority: all arguments are to be judged on the merits, not with respect to any characteristics of the person making them. This may imply, among other things, that one should deploy arguments sincerely rather than strategically, be open to correction, and extend interpretive charity to the positions of others (at least ideally).

But what if one thinks that the characteristics of some people – e.g., people who are far from me politically – are useful proxies for the likelihood that their arguments are worth listening to? (Life is short, after all – do I really have to listen to what everyone has to say?) And what do we do about people who violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the norms of debate – deploying arguments dishonestly or strategically, “concern-trolling,” refusing to accept evidence, etc.? Do we engage with them or punish them through expressions of contempt etc.? (And it is not always possible to determine who is behaving strategically and who is not; what looks like trolling to some may look like perfectly reasonable argument to others). Or how about people who have more influence than their (actual, rather than perceived) epistemic authority warrants? (What if we think, for example, that particular bloggers we dislike are more influential than their arguments warrant?) Do we engage with their views sincerely, in the confidence that “the truth will out,” or try to diminish their influence by attacking their epistemic authority by other means – ridicule, contempt, ad hominem argument, etc.? (Consider here debates about climate change or creationism in schools).

Herzog’s key idea (and here I sense a criticism of Habermas, though AFAIK Habermas is not mentioned in the book) is that distinctively political debate is always in part about the distribution of epistemic authority, i.e., about who has a “right” to speak and whose views are worth being listened to. Conservatives and radicals in the England of 1817 disagreed not merely about the merits of particular proposals (about suffrage, etc.), but about whether certain groups of people were worth taking seriously. And there is no neutral standpoint to determine who can or cannot be admitted to the public sphere, no neutral view that reveals the true distribution of knowledge and indicates what the true distribution of political influence should be; political debate is always (among other things) the attempt to shape the distribution of epistemic authority, and this attempt seems to be inescapably accompanied by the deployment of contempt. (Consider, by contrast, debates where epistemic authority is relatively uncontroversial, as in some purely scientific debates: the debate is non-political to the extent that the standards for evidence and argument are widely shared among participants, and hence to the extent that there is wide agreement among participants regarding who is or is not worth listening to).

The point I am trying to get at goes beyond the observation that party boundaries in politics are typically policed by expressions of contempt, and partisanship is inescapable in democratic politics (and at any rate there are good things to be said for partisanship in the public sphere). The question is whether one can one imagine a deliberative form of politics that is not underpinned by the deployment of contempt towards those who are not considered to be worth listening to? Are judgments that some people are not worth listening to necessarily expressions of contempt? And are the sanctions that we may think are necessary to keep debate healthy necessarily contemptuous?

I do not know the answers to these questions, but I suspect that it is impossible to police any set of norms of debate without using sanctions that express contempt. To the extent that the public sphere is a political sphere, it will be pervaded by contempt (though to a greater or lesser extent), and hence the lamentations about the quality of our public discourse will always be with us. Democracy, in other words, may be structurally unsatisfying, no matter how deliberative it may be; a public sphere without contempt would be a public sphere from which politics properly has been excluded, either because of an accidental harmony of interests among its participants, or through the kind of coercion that prevents certain people from participating in it.

The Ancient Ones

R. John Parkes, a researcher at the University of Cardiff, Wales, studies microbes found in core samples collected by the Ocean Drilling Program from rocks deep below the ocean floor. “For a long time, these deep sediments were thought to be devoid of any life at all,” he says. There’s life down there, all right, but talk about slow metabolism: When Parke analyzed 4.7 million-year-old organic sediment in the Mediterranean, he estimated the average time it took for resident microbes to reproduce by cell division at 120,000 years. And he reported finding living bacteria just over a mile below the seafloor, in sediments 111 million years old and at temperatures of 140 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

More here.

Too many gods

The pot is a god. The winnowing fan is a god. The stone in the street is a god. The comb is a god. The bowstring is also a god. The bushel is a god and the spouted cup is a god.

Gods, gods, there are so many there’s no place left for a foot.

Quoted here, from the 12th century South Indian poet Basavanna.

Hills and Valleys in Greek Speculative History (Or, Prolegomena to a Sketch of an Anarchist History of Western Political Theory)

(Warning: 2000 words or so on the place of “hills” and “valleys” in Greek political thought).

As I mentioned in a previous post, reading Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia pointed me in the direction of thinking about the place of “hills” and “valleys,” state spaces and stateless places, in political theory. Scott claims that both Southeast Asian and Western political thought have stigmatized those hill-dwellers who have no permanent residence (p. 101), and identified civilization with the settled states of the valleys (pp. 100-101), though he also pays homage to Ibn Khaldoun’s Muqaddimah (p. 20), a work which does not stigmatize the stateless (at least so far as I remember; it’s been a while). He even notes that Aristotle famously argued that human beings were political animals, i.e., animals that live in poleis or cities, a characterization that suggests that people who do not live in cities are not fully human (p. 101 – though Scott fails to note that for Aristotle such people can be both above and below the level of humanity). I cannot speak about Southeast Asian political theory, but it seems to me that at least with respect to Western political theory the picture is a bit more complicated, even if Scott is correct overall.

For example, Aristotle’s famous pronouncement about the polis-nature of human beings is complicated by the fact that the polis was most certainly not an agrarian state – the “statelessness” of the polis is well known, though some of the larger poleis did eventually develop something like police forces and other aspects of statehood – and that Aristotle did not define the polis in contrast to nomadic life and in terms of settled habitation, but in contrast to the family and in terms of its purpose. Indeed, he takes pains to distinguish the polis both from the great empires of his time (which were true extractive agrarian states of the sort that Scott discusses in his book) and from mere settlements (whose focus on “mere life” did not qualify them for civilization). The barbarian empires were “uncivilized” despite their possession of large and powerful states, and the city-less are low less because they are scattered than because they have no “clan” and are “lovers of war,” i.e., because they are insufficiently social.

Thus, though Aristotle does seem to indicate that nomadic peoples are “primitive” (the Cyclops, who are traditionally represented as a nonsedentary people, appear as an instance of the “old ways” of political organization), there is no clear indication that sedentary existence per se is necessary to the polis, or that it is in itself valuable. In this Aristotle is in keeping with what I take to be the traditional Greek way of thinking, where not the physical location but the citizens constituted the city: “For the men, not the walls nor the empty galleys, are the city,” and so “Wherever you settle, you will be a polis” as Nikias tells his soldiers in a speech Thucydides either invented or recreated for his History of the Peloponnesian War. To be sure, this is still consistent with the story that Scott tells about the importance of men, rather than land, in the construction of states; but it ought to put a wrinkle in the “stigma” thesis.

But it is in Plato that we find an explicit consideration of the valence of “hills and valleys” in the sense that Scott is really concerned with. In book III of his long dialogue Laws, Plato develops the contrast between the hills and the valleys through a speculative history which he uses to isolate those factors that gave rise to politeiai (political organization) and laws, both of which are associated with the cities of the plain and the states they controlled. (Ancient speculative histories are fascinating. I suspect they functioned among ancient thinkers much as economists’ or political scientists’ models function today: as interesting simplifications with some explanatory value that isolate general reasons for action operating in particular contexts.).

The narrative is more or less as follows. The Athenian Stranger (the leading character in the dialogue) asks his interlocutors to imagine a situation where, thanks to some massive flood, the states of the plains were destroyed, leaving only a slight remnant of pastoralists high up in the hills (677a-b). This catastrophe not only radically simplified technology (most arts and sciences are lost), but also greatly reduced exposure to the various forms of greed and morally dubious competition prevalent in cities (677b-c). In fact, the catastrophe destroyed the memory of cities and politeiai and laws: the hill peoples are clearly stateless in a radical sense (678a). But laws and political life are not necessarily good; the Athenian stresses that with laws and political life properly speaking you can get both virtue and vice (and more often the latter than the former, especially in the form of warfare). By contrast, the hill peoples are naïve or artless (εὐήθεις; literally having “good habits”), not educated (or mis-educated) by urban artifice, and rather peaceful.

Indeed, war is presented in the story as an artefact of civilization (678d-e); so long as land is abundant, and the memory of catastrophe is recent (the “fear of the plain”), the hill peoples do not fight (and at any rate they do not have much of the technology and arts of war, so their fighting is not, the Athenian speculates, highly destructive). On the contrary, they welcome each other (679a) and have pleasure in each other’s company (given low population densities, they do not meet each other that often), and because their societies are less unequal than urban societies (with less of both poverty and wealth, as well as less hierarchy and subordination), they develop in an environment that ultimately makes them more courageous, moderate and just than urban peoples (679d-e). It’s an idyllic picture (and not a terribly bad description of forager/pastoralist societies in the absence of states, either, though idealized in some respects). How do laws emerge, then? What are they for?

The first step towards law and political life is made possible, in this speculative story, by the very naïveté or artlessness of the hill peoples. Because they did not have the cunning and scepticism of urban peoples (who are experienced about deception, both as agents and subjects of it), they believed any old story that they were told about “gods and men” (679c), and adopted these stories as the basis of their customs. (Note the dig here towards all mythical stories of founding and legitimation; most of these stories are simply nonsense, in the Athenian’s view). These customs were not yet laws; their orality disqualified them from this status. (The hill peoples are illiterate, 680a). But they did not need to be laws in order to regulate their social life, which was still quite self-contained.

Their self-containment could be interpreted as a form of “savagery” (680b-d), or perhaps more accurately a lack of “domestication,” as the Athenian notes by comparing such hill peoples to the mythical Cyclops described in Homer. Yet he does not himself endorse the comparison, which seems at any rate inconsistent with his previous praise of the justice and moderation of the hill peoples; the one who proposes it is Megillos, the representative of the slave-holding valley state par excellence, Sparta (680d3), which was also known for its "savagery" (cf. 666e, where the Athenian calls the Spartan system "savage"). To be civilized, for Megillos, is to become domesticated; but the metaphor of domestication is not altogether unambiguous in Plato (sheep and pigs are also domesticated, after all).

But this self-containment cannot last. As the memory of the initial cataclysm fades (perhaps an echo of a collective memory of an old fear of the cities of the plain? Fears of slave-raiding, for example, as Scott suggests in his discussion of the stories of hill peoples from Thailand and Burma? Not that Plato mentions such fears), hill peoples move down, and some turn to farming and a sedentary life (681a), coming in contact with other recent transplants from the hills. But now they need to coordinate regarding which of their various and incompatible customs (based on the random stories mentioned earlier) is to regulate their common life; and here we have the origins of legislation properly speaking (681b-d).

From here the Athenian shifts from speculating about the origin of valley states to recounting the history of the first Greek valley states, in particular the Dorian states (Sparta, Argos, and Messene), a history that would have been familiar to his two interlocutors (the Spartan Megillos and the Cretan Kleinias). This narrative is then put to use in order to understand why in some states (Sparta) the rulers were more constrained by laws than in others (Argos and Messene), despite their various similarities. This is perhaps the first systematic empirical comparison in political science, using a “most similar cases” design, but the Athenian no longer mentions hill peoples, so I shall not summarize the rest here.

This speculative history is notable in two ways. First, it marks a contrast between the natural but “naïve” or “artless” goodness of the peoples of the hills and the potential for both virtue and corruption of the cities. The hill peoples do not need “technical” or "artificial" virtue to live well; their natural virtue is enough. But cities do need such “artificial” virtue (or rather, they need real knowledge), and it is not obvious that this is not a curse, since such knowledge is exceedingly scarce. As the Athenian notes in the “historical” part of his narrative, life in most valley states seems to end in some form or another or tyranny due to a lack of knowledge and virtue; the hill peoples had it better in that respect.

But second, the narrative suggests that short of a major cataclysm, there is no going back to hill life. Indeed, the point of the Athenian’s political theory in this part of the dialogue is to find a way to realistically mitigate the evils of life in settled valley societies; and for this, he will introduce for the first time a systematic theory of the “mixed constitution” - the ancient predecessor of our theories of the “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” (though the theory is in many ways quite different from our modern equivalents; more in a future post, probably). It is precisely the possession of something like a “mixed constitution” that enabled Sparta to become a relatively law-governed state, in contrast to the situation in Argos and Messene, which degenerated, in the Athenian’s telling, into more arbitrary regimes. But this did not make Sparta perfect; on the contrary, he had criticized it earlier as an “armed camp” more than a city (666e).

One could note that the Athenian’s narrative is still valley-centric; there is no mention of flight into the hills, for example, and certainly the background fact of slavery as a requirement of the valley states is kept deep in the background. At any rate, it seems that, from the point of view of a fourth century Greek like Plato, the hill frontier had more or less closed, or had become an unrealistic option (or perhaps it was all only a thought experiment to begin with). And the full flourishing of human life does seem to go through urban life, but in Plato (in contrast, perhaps, to Aristotle’s more optimistic take later on) this is a road that is almost certain to lead to disappointment. The hill peoples had it better.

Now, it is possible that canonical thinkers like Plato and Aristotle were not representative of the tenor of Greek political thought on the question of the valence of hills and valleys. One probably would have to scour a much larger sample of writings, and our sources are often fragmentary and biased. And though the “anarchism” of the early Stoics and Cynics is reasonably well attested, as well as the antipolitical attitudes of the Epicureans (or at least as well attested as the meagre fragments of their texts that survive allow), these attitudes clearly soften in later thinkers identified with these schools (and more from these later people survive). Moreover, the evidence of etymology supports the “stigma” thesis; the word asteios, for example, which originally meant something like “urban” in a neutral sense, eventually came to mean something like “good.” At any rate, canonical thinkers like Plato clearly tend to be unrepresentative; that is part of the reason why their thought can be continuously re-appropriated by later generations, and why it remains interesting beyond the narrow context in which it emerged. But still, in general it seems that there was more ambivalence about the identification of states and civilization in Greek political theory than Scott suggests, and this ambivalence does not simply die off. Beyond Plato to Augustine to Rousseau there is a strand of Western political theory that is willing to call most states “bands of robbers” and has difficulty making its peace with them; and as with Rousseau, this strand sometimes comes close to saying that a stateless existence would be better, even if they also acknowledge its impossibility in a world where the valley states are dominant.

Footnotes on things I've been reading: James C. Scott's "The Art of Not Being Governed"

I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s latest, The Art of Not Being Governed: an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, which had been highly recommended to me by a number of people. All I can say is, what are you waiting for? Go read it! It’s great!

Scott starts from a couple of observations that are obvious when you think about them but are illuminating when stated explicitly and applied systematically. First, the vast majority of the subjects of pre-modern states (in all parts of the world, not just Southeast Asia) have been unfree – slaves, bondsmen, serfs, etc. In fact, the pre-modern state (a problematic term, but let’s let that pass for the moment) was basically a technology for coercively extracting surpluses from sedentary agricultural laborers. Second, for most of human history the geographical reach of any state was sharply limited by the characteristics of the terrain, especially elevation (moving grain by oxcart quickly becomes prohibitively expensive over relatively long distances or as the elevation increases, for example).

Going up (or into swamps or other inaccessible terrain) thus meant going out of what Scott nicely calls “state space.” It is worth stressing that stateless spaces do not imply a lack of sociality, or a horrendous Hobbesian "state of nature." Stateless societies tend to be relatively egalitarian, small, mobile, and based more on gift exchanges than on the coercive extraction of resources – just like the forager bands that dominated human history for most of the 100,000 years or so since Homo Sapiens Sapiens emerged as a distinct species of primate. In comparison to many pre-modern states, the stateless hill societies Scott describes had a more varied diet and more leisure, and in general they could be said to be far “freer” (less hierarchy and subordination, not to speak of taxes, corvée labor, strict gender roles, and the like). Leaving the state has not been a very bad thing for most people for most of human history, pace Hobbes.

Thus, so long as terrain imposes significant limits to state-building projects, you get a situation where many “subjects” of the state can and often do exercise their “exit” option: they can move to the hills. And state-makers, in turn, try to prevent them from moving, especially since under the typical conditions prevailing in most of human history (e.g., limited military specialization) manpower is identical with power. The primary project of pre-modern state-building has been to “sedentarize” people – to keep them near at hand to the ruler so that they can be mobilized for his purposes and his glory. (The “problem” posed by people leaving – for state-makers, not for the emigrants themselves - is not confined to pre-modern states; the communist regimes went to great lengths to try to prevent people from leaving as well, and like pre-modern states, they collapsed when they could not manage to keep them in.)

One might think that one way of preventing people from leaving would be to produce good government. And indeed, Scott notes how the desperate need for people of most Southeast Asian rulers produced a great deal of “social mobility” in what are otherwise highly hierarchical societies, and a certain amount of redistribution of material resources: slaves quickly became regular exploited peasants, for example, and there was lots of redistributive feasting. And there were some attractions to being near the culture of the court. But when there are always other petty tyrants busy trying to build their own tiny empires (full of "cosmologial bluster" about universal rule), there is a strong incentive for each of them to steal other people’s people. Pre-modern warfare (not only in Southeast Asia, but also in the Mediterranean world) is thus often indistinguishable from pure slave-raiding.

Moreover, producing good government is often actually contrary to the interests of the ruler. The ruler is interested less in the total amount of production (GDP) than on the total amount of accessible resources – men and storable crops; and these were often (and are often) very different things. While the farmer might want to plant root crops (which are not easily visible to the state officials), practice less labor-intensive swidden (“slash and burn”) agriculture, and in general have a more varied diet and life, the ruler would prefer that he stick to planting rice, which is easily surveyed and seized. (This continues a theme of Scott’s other great book, Seeing like a State; state-making has been historically concerned above all with making things visible to state officials so that they can be more easily controlled and seized). Indeed, rice made states in Asia; no rice, no states. (I wonder if the fact that Australia is and has been pretty dry explains why it was, until extremely recently in historical time, basically a stateless area; concentrated agriculture of the kind that can make states was probably not worth the trouble, and so political entrepreneurs intent on creating durable hierarchies simply did not have the sorts of resources necessary for the task).

Thus, at least in Southeast Asia, people often had both the incentive and the opportunity to escape states. But the availability of exit didn’t necessarily produce “good government,” though it might have mitigated petty tyrannies occasionally, and it certainly produced states that where cultural assimilation was possible and often quick. Competition between state-builders did not produce good Tiebout effects but rather a lot of what Weber called “booty capitalism” (and, it seems, a lot of misery; the history he tells is at bottom a dismal chronicle). More importantly for Scott, this dynamic also led to the formation of hill societies that were extremely concerned with avoiding the state. I haven’t gotten this far yet, but from the earlier sections it seems clear that Scott argues that, far from being “primitive,” many features of these societies – their forms of agriculture, their social structures, even their orality – are basically designed to prevent their incorporation into valley states – to become less legible and less controllable. The culture of the hills is the art of not being governed.

Yet I suspect that Scott makes too much of the “primitive”/ “civilized” dichotomy; the art of not being governed seems suspiciously like the art of living like a forager band, even if the hill societies he is interested in are not necessarily foragers (they practice swidden – “slash and burn” – agriculture, for example).

A couple of things I was thinking as I was reading. First, how far could you go in refining and formalizing Scott’s implicit model of statemaking? Scott is a classical “thick description” scholar, distrustful of simplified models, but I’m an unreconstructed theorist, and would like to understand more about the parameters governing the significance of exit and voice in the development of tolerable or bearable states. Maybe “voice” (e.g., democracy) only becomes a significant possibility once the possibility of exit is foreclosed yet production technologies are such that states cannot simply survey and seize productive resources at will?

And what about the significance of different technologies? Scott argues that his analysis does not apply today, when “distance destroying technologies” – helicopters, all-weather roads, etc. – make extending state spaces easier than ever, but those who wish to avoid the state are not standing still either; one thinks of the many ways in which financial technologies serve to take production away from the reach of the state, even as at the same time newer military technologies make the state less dependent on manpower and so less intent on "fixing" people in place.

I was also thinking about the hill/valley relationship in political thought. Scott notes how Ibn Khaldoun’s great work, the Muqaddimah (which is great, by the way!), is basically concerned with the complex dialectical relationship between state and non-state spaces, the Bedouin and the “civilized;” but he basically claims that for the most part political thought has simply reiterated the basic dichotomy of hill and valley (or civilized and barbarian, “raw” and “cooked,” and so on), valuing the valleys and dismissing the hills. This may be true in the aggregate, yet I kept thinking of the speculative histories of the origin of the state in Plato, especially the Laws, with its complex and by no means one sided evaluation of the virtues of the hills and the vices of the cities. (More on this later).

Anyway, there’s much more to it (I’m not finished with it yet), and it’s well written to boot. (I love the term “cosmological bluster,” for example). I'm considering assigning it to my honours seminar in political theory, even though it's not really a political theory text; yet it really makes you think about the nature of states from a "universal history" perspective that is too often obscured in the usual texts and debates on power and the state in contemporary political theory. 

Hermes, Lord of Robbers (Homeric Hymn #4)

As a picture book. Nancy found it in the public library, and we read it to our daughter. It is a fairly complete (and very nice) translation of the short fourth Homeric Hymn (to Hermes, Lord - or Leader - of Robbers - or Thieves), with some truly lovely illustrations. Some bits and pieces are missing (stuff about sacrificial meat that would be hard to explain in any book, an episode about Hermes' invention of fire that is incomplete in the original), but I suspect it is all the better for it (the original hymn lacks some thematic unity).

Hermes is born and the first thing he wants to do is steal Apollo's cattle, which he succeeds in doing that very night. He is clever and thus makes the cattle walk backwards, so that they leave tracks that point in the wrong direction, but he is seen by an old man, so Apollo quickly learns who stole his cattle. He goes to seek Hermes and accuses him, and some funny banter ensures (Hermes: "I was only born yesterday! My feet are soft, and the ground is hard!"). Apollo is not amused, and wants to beat Hermes up. Hermes appeals to Zeus, who laughs at his fibs and tells him to go get Apollo's cattle ("Dad, I really didn't do it. Zeus: ok, now go get the cattle"). They go (big brother and little brother: Apollo and Hermes are sons of Zeus) but Apollo discovers that Hermes has slain two of his cows (this is a bit abrupt in the picture book, since the stuff about sacrifice is omitted), so he gets really mad again and wants to beat Hermes up. But Hermes is clever again, and soothes him by playing music - and giving Apollo the lyre he had fashioned out of a turtle's shell. Apollo, grateful for the music, decides to let the matter go, and gives him a staff and tells him that he shall always be known as the prince of robbers - and so given the tribute and recognition he had craved since he was born (the day before). Hermes promises never to steal anything from Apollo's house. (I don't tell the story well enough. It really is charming, in a cheerfully amoral way, and the illustrations in the book are beautiful).

The hymn depicts a world that is truly different from our own - a world where Hermes' excellence lies in his ability to steal Apollo's cattle and then charm him so that Apollo does not beat him up, where political authority - including the authority of Zeus - is at best the authority of mediators, not enforcers, where population densities are low and the natural world is intensely present; it's a world closer to the world of nomadic foragers than to the world of farmers and cities of later antiquity. (This is a very old piece of poetry, a survival in writing of an even older oral tradition; one can apparently learn much from Homer's epic poetry and the Homeric hymns about Bronze-age society). Hermes is praised as the prince of cattle-raiders, not condemned; he is excellent because his cleverness is beautiful, not because he is a good boy. (There is something in Nietzsche about this, I think - which I am probably misremembering). We quite enjoyed it, though I can see why Plato thought the Homer-heavy popular culture of his time was very corrupting; the poem reminds me a bit of Roald Dahl's tales.

Fun with visualizations 2: Growth and Democracy

William Easterly recently had a post on the "mystery of the benevolent autocrat" that illustrated the fact that non-democratic countries seem to have a higher variance in growth rates than democratic countries. Since I've been playing with visualization software, I thought I'd try to replicate his analysis and produce some pretty graphs that I could use in my dictatorships class. The results are here (make sure to click - the full-screen versions are much prettier than the embedded versions below, and the software has some nice features that make it easy to explore the data).

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The first view replicates Easterly's scatterplot, but using data from the Penn World Table from 1950-2007. (At least, I think it does. My econometric skills are obviously much worse than those of a former World Bank economist, so take that with a grain of salt). It adds, however, a color for the Polity2 score - greener is more democratic here - and the size of each dot is proportional to the number of years of data available for the comparison (some countries have only a few years of data available, others have more than 50). I use the same transformation of the Polity2 score that Easterly uses - Polity2/(11-Polity2). As you can see, countries that have been on average autocratic have a higher growth variance - some have had very large growth rates over the period in question, others have had very low rates. Democracies, however, seem to be clustered towards the average growth rate of the world economy - around 2.5% per year or so or so.

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The second view shows the same scatterplot, except using the average of the raw Polity2 score rather than Easterly's transformation. The greatest amount of variance seems to be found in the countries that have an average Polity2 score between 1 and -5 or so - the more autocratic "anocracies" (many of them "hybrid regimes") rather than the full "autocracies" of Polity's classification (though of course a scatterplot is not a statistical analysis).

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The last view shows the data on a map, where the size of the dot corresponds to the average (geometric mean) of the growth rate over the period in question, and the color corresponds to the average Polity2 score - green is more democratic (at least in the Polity2 scheme).

Why do non-democracies seem to have greater growth variance than democracies? I suspect the incentives of leaders in democracies prevent large policy changes (both good and bad), whereas more autocratic systems may have greater variance in the quality of leadership and in the incentives they provide to these leaders. (Maybe I will try a more fine-grained visualization using data on types of political regime to see what comes out - later).

Changes small and large: Epistemic Arguments for Conservatism II

One epistemic argument for conservatism (or rather, gradualism) goes more or less like this. We have grave epistemic limitations that prevent us from understanding the consequences of institutional change, and the bigger the change, the more these limitations apply. All things considered, it is harder to predict the consequences of major institutional change than of minor institutional tinkering. Moreover, even when we are in error about the consequences of minor change, the potential damage to our social life from such errors is also likely to be minor and easily contained, whereas when we are in error about major changes, the damages may be devastating. Hence we should try to avoid wholesale change to our institutions.

The key idea is that ex ante we have a better idea of the risks of small changes than we do of the risks of large changes, and ex post we can contain the damage of small changes better than the damage of large changes. Given reasonable loss aversion in the face of genuine uncertainty, this implies that we should be more careful about larger than about smaller changes to our institutions. Note that the argument is not that major changes will have bad effects, but that we should be more uncertain about the effects of major changes than about the effects of minor changes, and that this asymmetric uncertainty should make us more cautious about undertaking these larger changes.

There is a whole question here about how to define “small” and “large,” but let’s let that slide for the moment, since there are clearly some cases where the argument seems to make sense. Something like it forms part of Burke’s case against revolution: there are many potential bad consequences from trying to completely change an entire form of life, but given our epistemic limitations we can hardly know which major changes will be on balance good and which will be on balance bad. And today we might see this argument deployed to justify less action than some economists might like on restarting the global economy, or less action on climate change than some environmentalists might like, though whether the argument works in these cases depends in part on our estimates of the costs of inaction, estimates that may also be subject to our epistemic limitations. (A full formal investigation of the problems here would presumably use Bayesian analysis. But here I reveal my on epistemic limitations – I do not know enough to use it).

This is a sort of “selection” argument for conservatism, though it does not look like one at first sight. In order for this argument to justify gradualism, however, rather than rigid immobility, we have to assume that small deleterious changes are either eliminated quickly or else that they cannot accumulate and interact in collectively very harmful ways. For example, a firm that produces bad products should go bankrupt without affecting the ability of other firms to operate too much, and small regulatory changes that do not work must be quickly identified and eliminated through some explicit mechanism (e.g., litigation, as in some defences of the common law). Whenever there is no selection mechanism to get rid of such minor but potentially harmful changes (and there may not be one, especially if the changes are only truly harmful in connection with many other changes), they can accumulate until they reach a kind of threshold (when they become really bad). The point is that if our epistemic limitations are binding with respect to the consequences of large “revolutionary” changes, they are also binding with respect to the consequences of collections of small changes that interact in complex ways with one another. Thus, in the absence of knowledge about the interactions of many small changes, the argument would seem to justify rigid immobility, not gradualism.

Indeed, an awareness of this problem seems to have led most classical political thinkers to a position that is in a sense the reverse of the Burkean “gradualist” position, i.e., willing to contemplate major changes to institutions under some limited circumstances (when the legislator has good knowledge) but extremely wary of small changes that might accumulate and interact in unexpected ways (since the presence of knowledgeable individuals capable of understanding their effects in the long run cannot be assumed). Plato, for example, while quite willing to recommend radical institutional innovation in cities (e.g., equal education for men and women, major censorship, new religious institutions, etc.) insisted that a city must be very careful about changing its “educational” laws, in part because the deleterious effects of any minor changes would not be visible until many years later, and they could easily accumulate in destructive ways. Similarly, Aristotle was not shy about recommending large institutional changes to political communities, but nevertheless urged cities to be vigilant about institutional drift, the minor changes that seem harmless individually but may collectively lead to the destruction of a politeia.

The point is not that they believed that major change was epistemically “safe” while gradual change was not; they thought both major and minor change was epistemically problematic. (Plato’s insistence on the need for knowledge in politics is grounded precisely on an extreme distrust of normal human epistemic capacities; we would only need philosopher kings if we were effectively incompetent in political matters). But they did not think gradual change was any less exempt from the problems caused by human epistemic limitations than revolutionary change, since they did not think that there were appropriate “selection mechanisms” able to weed out deleterious gradual institutional change under normal circumstances (other than “state death,” which is of course not especially ideal from the point of view of the state in question; as Josiah Ober has noted, whereas bankruptcy may be the consequence of “failure” in a market economy, “state death” in the classical world typically implied the death or enslavement of much of the population). From this point of view, major but planned institutional change had a slight “epistemic advantage” over unplanned, gradual change, at least so long as gradual changes could accumulate and interact in deleterious ways that could not be easily identified either at the time or in advance. 

Fun with visualizations 1

I've been playing around in the last few days with free visualization software, trying to think of ways to create interesting visualizations for my dictatorships and revolutions class next year. Some of it is quite impressive but few free packages seem to be able to do a temporally animated map (where color values for a country change year by year, for example, according to regime type), at least not in a way I can easily figure out. I eventually found this free alternative (openheatmap) that is easy to use and renders fast, though it has few options.

Here's a map of authoritarian regime types, 1946-2002, using data from Jennifer Gandhi's book "Political Institutions Under Dictatorship" (thanks to Prof. Gandhi for kindly sharing her dataset):



(Click here for a larger version. Yellow means "civilian dictatorship," red means "military dictatorship" and blue means "monarchy.")

The map isn't perfect: you need to code the Soviet Union as Russia and East Germany as Germany, for example. I suppose with professional GIS software and a good set of shapefiles you could have the borders move as well, but hey, this is free and fast.

Now, what I would really like to see is a map of regime types that displays a little picture of the dictator as it plays and a little flash (accompanied by a sound of guns, perhaps?) when there is a coup.

Any suggestions for free visualization software able to do animated maps?