This is my impression too: that England reformed gradually over the Stuart era (there was also that one not so gradual bit in the middle but the most radical elements got rolled back afterwards) whereas France did it all at once. Incrementalism vs Revolution.
Basically, with a complex system such as a society, there are lots of ways things can go wrong. On the other hand, if a societal practice has endured for a long time already, that's generally an indication that it works at least tolerably well. Overturning a long-standing practice is a high-risk, high-reward strategy -- you might get a more efficient system producing higher economic growth, or you might get mass famine because it turns out that farmers actually know more about farming than somebody whose main expertise is in the writings of Karl Marx. So, unless you're very sure that your reforms will have net-positive results (e.g., if the status quo is really so awful that almost any change would be a change for the better, or if similar reforms have worked in similar situations elsewhere), it's generally better to adopt a more cautious approach to minimise risk.
The heuristic that sweeping away traditions is bad needs to take into account the continuity of the conditions under which these traditions evolved. This paper finds that destroying feudal institutions on the eve of the industrial revolution was a positive in the long run, so maybe the heuristic should be something about matching the rate of institutional change to the rate of technological change?
"Unnatural" is a really bad heuristic, because *anything* that deviates from the norm gets called unnatural. Homosexuality gets called unnatural. In a monarchy, having a king is natural and peasants who want to not be repressed are deviating from the natural order.
The "coercive" part at least points to a specific error - revolutions seem to have a common failure mode of "instead of helping people we ended up shooting them as counter-revolutionaries" - but "unnatural" is the most abusable heuristic in the world, and I'd pick pretty much anything else. "Untested," maybe?
Change of institutions is not necessarily good or bad. What matters is what the revolution changes *conditions for ordinary people* and how that is done
This is what I went with, in large part due to hearing (as a kid, and neither confirmed nor contradicted since in my non-history-based life) that many of the reforms were undone afterwards, setting the legal system mostly "back to normal".
Obviously, I don't know with high probability how true this is, this is from the same schooling that said things like Columbus was the first to know the world was round.
I feel like for this to be true the benefits need to be much greater than 4x since the most successful societies look nothing like they did 50 years ago, let alone something you might call “traditional”
I put 60% on the same. My thinking was that the conquerors would be insufficiently incentivized to enforce policies beneficial to the conquered and that the conquerors would potentially lack the cooperation of local power structures and the populace, reducing the overall effectiveness of governance.
I put 70% on the same. But my thinking was that the conquerors would not be able to do better than reformers trying to reform their own countries, like Mao with the Great Leap Forward. I guess I was wrong to think about all the times reform has gone right – it does seem like "capitalist reform good" is more precise/accurate than "reform good" or "reform bad".
Wasn't part of the leadup to the Industrial Revolution in Britain the enclosure of previously commonly-owned peasant lands? That seems like both the archetypal sort of top-down-imposed change to evolved institutions that James Scott types would decry (in fact I remember some left-libertarians like Kevin Carson banging on a lot about the evils of enclosure back in the day) and something that could plausibly have contributed to the Great Enrichment by enabling more intensive economic exploitation of land.
Yep, 100%. Kirkpatrick Sale wrote one of the definitive takes on enclosure and the consequent Luddite rebellion (in modern parlance the Luddites are accused of being against technological progress, when the chief thing making them super mad was their lands being taken away to feed industrial progress, cutting them out of any of the benefits of technological progress)
> and something that could plausibly have contributed to the Great Enrichment by enabling more intensive economic exploitation of land.
I do have to disagree with this part though. There's no reason the factories could have been built under a land-as-common property scheme that would have allowed non-elites to share the wealth. As it was it was a great big handout by Big Government to their favored cronies in England's famously stratified class system, and the rebellions tell you exactly what the common people thought of it.
If you're against rent-seeking, private landownership (especially the kind that requires the violent seizure of previously commonly held lands) is kind of the very definition of it.
Obviously I'm outing myself as a Georgist with the above argument, so here's Progress & Poverty:
You can't build on common land. That's the point of it really. But your point is based on a wierd confusion of the agricultural revolution (where enclosure of common land allowed specialisation more easily) and the industrial revolution. Considering common land was never the majority of land in Britain and that it tended to be the more marginal situations than the actual farmed lands, I'd guess the majority of factories weren't built on former common land anyway.
But you can! As Henry George said, “it is not necessary to confiscate Land, it is only necessary to confiscate rent.”
You can retain some modern notions of private landownership without the rent seeking negative externalities that benefit a few to the exclusion of the many.
As for the rest of your comment I recommend you just read Sale’s account
George's scheme is exactly equivalent to the state owning all the land and leasing it all to the highest bidder with the right of first refusal to the existing leaseholder. This retains very little of private landownership.
Whether or not I agree with that, my point was to address Watchman's concern that "you can't build on common land." Under George's scheme, you absolutely can. In fact, it's the very point -- to encourage building.
Ireland? The renters didn't own the property, and there was no need to reimburse the renters for improvements they made. The result was that the renters didn't improve the property, resulting in massive poverty in Ireland.
Native American reservations? The reason why these areas are so destitute is because there is a lack of private property there. This means that you don't get the value back that you spend on improving the land. As a result, Native American reservations are grossly underdeveloped.
The same applies here.
The reason why private property is so important is because it creates an incentive to invest in the property. Without that incentive, there is no reason to invest.
This is one of the major reasons why socialism is such a failure as an ideology.
Georgism LOVES private property. What it detests is rent-seeking. Rent-seeking landlords exploit BOTH capital AND labor.
And actually the reason for the Irish famine, which George goes into in GREAT detail in Progress & Poverty, is absentee landlords who held both the title to the land, and to whom all the improved value of the land would accrue. The reason that the renters didn't improve the land was because improving the land WOULD ONLY CAUSE THE RENTS TO INCREASE by at least as much as the value of the improvements.
From Progress & Poverty:
> tenants... even if the rack-rents which they were forced to pay had permitted them, did not dare to make improvements which would have been but the signal for an increase of rent. Labor was thus applied in the most inefficient and wasteful manner.
Further:
> For when her population was at its highest, Ireland was a food-exporting country. Even during the famine, grain and meat and butter and cheese were carted for exportation along roads lined with the starving and past trenches in which the dead were piled.
> It went not as an exchange, but as a tribute – to pay the rent of absentee landlords; a levy wrung from producers by those who in no wise contributed to production... they lived on the potato, because rack-rents stripped everything else from them.
If I'm a tenant sharecropper and my land earns 100, and I invest in improvements that add +50 to it, then my landlord raises the rent to 150. It got to the point the Irish could afford nothing but the bare minimum it took to keep them alive (potatoes) and they were one blight away from danger.
Note also that you don't have to SEIZE public lands to ensure common ownership. It's the VALUE of the land that should be held in common, not necessarily the title. This is an important distinction.
I don't know what the particular land regulations are on Native American Indian reservations, but I will point out that forced privatization of land is precisely what kicked them off their ancestral territory in the first place, leaving them with the most marginal property left today.
The fact that any improvement made on the property became the property of the landlord is why they didn't invest in the land. Ulster had tenant right, which obligated landlords to compensate tenants for improvements on their land at the termination of the lease, which resulted in greater stability (because the landlords didn't want to have to pay for improvements) and greater prosperity. Ulster not coincidentally ended up with a below-average rate of population loss due to the famine.
Moreover, the whole "exporting food" thing is one of those Big Lies.
India tried to cut off all exports of food in 1943. Result? Millions of people starved in Bengal. Why? Because no exports also meant no imports. People starved because of lack of trade, as food couldn't be sold to where it was needed most.
Ireland was a net importer of food during the time of the famine, *not* a net exporter. More food came into Ireland than left it.
Moreover, the idea of it being "tribute" is simply false. The people who were exporting food were *not* the people who were starving. They were, in fact, the result of better off farmers with large amounts of land being able to produce large amounts of food.
The people who starved were the tenant farmers who were on tiny sublet plots of land. These plots were too small to really support much agriculture, so they grew the most energy dense crop possible - potatoes - and then would hire themselves out to do labor for others for pay to pay rent and to supplement their diet with other food.
When the potato crop failed, all their money had to go to food, which meant they couldn't pay rent. The middlemen kicked these people off their plots of land, which resulted in them being homeless and having no ability to grow food at all to supplement their income with nearly "free" calories. These people then often starved because their income was insufficient to pay for enough food.
The farmers who had tons of land to grow the money crops on that they were exporting did just fine. They weren't "paying tribute" - they were making money by engaging in commerce.
And the whole "the value of land" thing is nonsense because land has no fixed value. The reason why land is valuable is almost always because it has been improved or is near improved land. The value of the land goes up due to the improvements. It is the person who is improving the land who gives it value.
This is the same reason why Native American reservations do not attract much in the way of business or industry.
Native Americans lost their land not due to "forced privatization" but due to land swaps and armed conflict. Had all the land that the tribes had simply been divided between the members of the tribe, they would have ended up better off (though a lot of them would have still lost their land anyway during the era of mechanization, as small farms eventually became economically non-viable). Tribal land is almost always held in trust for the tribe, rather than actually owned by individuals, which is precisely the problem. Many of the remaining tribes have fetishized the idea of land having intrinsic value, when in reality, land has value because of the use it is put to. Tribal policies disincentivize businesses from establishing themselves on tribal lands, which is a major reason why poverty rates are much higher on reservations than off of them. The result is that the land ends up not being very valuable because there's no reason to want that land or to want to put your business there.
It doesn't matter how "valuable" your land is in theory if no one wants to develop it. Holding low land in trust doesn't actually help people very much.
> The fact that any improvement made on the property became the property of the landlord is why they didn't invest in the land.
So we agree! The problem is that the value of improvements went to the absentee landlords whose ownership discouraged the development of the land.
> And the whole "the value of land" thing is nonsense because land has no fixed value. The reason why land is valuable is almost always because it has been improved or is near improved land. The value of the land goes up due to the improvements. It is the person who is improving the land who gives it value.
Again we agree! And this is the problem. If you improve the land next to mine, then I have an incentive to not develop my land because I can soak up the benefits of you improving YOUR land.
I seriously recommend you read Progress & Poverty and see if you still feel the same way. It directly addresses a lot of your assertions.
Vine Deloria Jr., in his book "Custer Died for Your Sins," touches on how privatization of native land parcels was combined with land theft. Common areas were parceled out, then some portion of the total land was confiscated.
There's lots of undeveloped land in the United States, even in places where the law is basically the same as the most developed areas. Which makes me question assigning 100% of the issue to legal frameworks. You know what they say about the Three Laws of Real Estate, right?
Well, some Native American reservations are practically undevelopable. I mean, the Navajo Nation is almost entirely Sonoran Desert, with a tiny rainfall and strong temperature extremes, both diurnal and annual. About all that's done there is sheep and goat herding, and mining sometimes. Even the part that isn't reservation has pretty limited development.
Why would a 19th century industrialist risk everything to build a factory on common land if he knew it was going to become common property? People take big risks with their money because they hope for great rewards.
The factory would remain his private property because it is capital. But the land belongs to the community. Specifically, the *value* of the land (not the title) would be common property. The way to implement this is the ground rent would be taxed but the value of the improvement (the factory) would not be.
I'd like to point out that the peasants were ignored, who certainly took "big risks" (many of them died, injured, or poisoned by the many negative externalities of the industrialists) and received no rewards whatsoever because they did not have the proper connections in government to get free handouts backed up by military force.
I do agree that development is good and we should encourage it. Industrialists are entitled to returns on their capital and labor, but not entitled to taking the pre-existing gifts of nature exclusively for themselves and denying them to others, especially when they had to wrest them away by force.
While I can accept this, the distinction seems overly fine: the thing making modern luddites super mad is having their jobs taken away and replaced with automation or outsourcing, cutting them out of any of the benefits of technological progress, again.
My main point was just to point out that most dismissals of the historical luddites ignores the fact that if you went back in time and asked them why they were mad "they took our land!" would be right up there with "machines took our jobs!"
And Henry George would argue that whether modern luddites realize it or not, the underlying problems aren't so different from the classic variety. "Ground rent" (rent attributable to just the land, not what's built on it) soaks up nearly all the value that the community at large provides. This creates a whole host of perverse incentives, but chief among them is that the community provides the value but private interests capture the benefit AND turn around and extract all that risen value on the community as a tax called rent.
>"Ground rent" (rent attributable to just the land, not what's built on it) soaks up nearly all the value that the community at large provides.
This seems to me the fatal flaw of the Single Tax; there's no principle by which to attribute the rent to land v. improvements, especially because neighboring improvements make land itself more valuable.
I think that's debatable, plenty of property tax assessments already separate the ground rent assessment vs. the improvements. If anything modern advances such as GIS and vast databases of comps make this easier to assess now than in the past. You also don't have to have a perfect 100% LVT to achieve some good effects.
True; I get just such a breakdown with my annual property tax notice. But the difference is, I have no reason to care how it's distributed since they're both taxed at the same mill rate. #inadequateequilibrium
Set the mill rate on improvements to zero and watch every single owner fight tooth & nail to attribute as much of their total assessed value as possible to the improvements.
They aren't the ones who are creating it, and you have no right to your job - your job is something you do for other people. You don't have the right to force other people to pay you to do something for you.
Moreover, the idea that they "aren't benefitting" is false on the face of it - everyone in society benefits from increased per capita productivity, as shown by the fact that we live in vastly, vastly better conditions.
The luddites are trying to stand in the way of progress and are rent-seeking.
> You don't have the right to force other people to pay you to do something for you.
It's great that we agree that landlords who charge rent for the improved value of their lands that accrue not due to their own work or investment, but that of their neighbors, is wrong!
Everyone in society does not benefit; society as a whole benefits. This is an important distinction; if the former were true, a person who loses their job to automation would see an improvement in their conditions as a consequence. That is not the case.
The person who loses their job will be much better off for other people having lost their jobs to automation. Multiply this by a hundred million, and you have modern day society, where everyone has lost their job to automation many times over, and we're massively better off. The poor are massively better off today than the middle class were in the 1500s, and in most ways are better off than the rich were back then as well.
For that to happen, people must lose their jobs to automation.
Thus, it is a net gain to live in a society where you sometimes lose your job to automation, even if you do lose your job to automation.
Moreover, very few people who lose their jobs to automation don't get new jobs. The overwhelming majority do so.
It seems to me you are still conflating society as a whole with individual people. Losing your job makes you worse off unless you get a better one or on a track that results in better ones than the old track; the overwhelming majority do not manage this much. This dominates their beliefs; the ability for people to get _any_ job is better then nothing but only actually _good_ from society's point of view.
Since we were talking about what other people believe, it is deeply weird to me that your baseline expectation seems to be that they should be happy with losing their jobs/houses/communities because this will somehow cause people to be better off 500 years from now.
This suggests I am confused; that can't possibly be your claim. Did you mistake me as being a luddite instead of describing them perhaps? For clarity's sake, I do not oppose automation; but I empathize with people that do.
My amateur reading of economic history is that the culture war flashpoint potential of the enclosures leads people to overstate its causal impact on the industrial revolution. Gregory Clark has a good synthesis where he lays out how early economic historians overestimate the returns to enclosure by not adjusting for general rent inflation and that people who enclosed land typically made subsequent capital investments. He thinks enclosure didn't have a big impact either on agricultural productivity or income distribution. But you know, I'm an amateur, its a paper from 98, beware the person of one study and all that.
Deirdre McCloskey argues that it ultimately derives from the Church of England and the Reformation, which prioritized an individual relationship to God over top-down Catholicism.
Would need to explain the long gap between the reformation and the industrial revolution. And why it didn't equally happen in mainland European countries that were protestant longer
Yea, enclosure style property reforms is also what Britain imposed on Palestinians when Zionists settled in Israel. European Jews who were familiar with Western legal systems navigated the system frictionlessly relative to Palestinians, causing more Palestinians to be displaced and the rest is history. Comparing Israel with surrounding nations, Israel clearly has higher GDP.
Here is a difference between breaking up guilds and enclosures.
The first created opportunities in the cities and pulled in peasants, whereas the latter pushed peasants away from the farms. It broke down safety nets and immiserated peasants. It made individuals fragile, even if it made the country anti-fragile. We should ask such questions about the Napoleonic reforms.
I recall that the basic model of enclosure & productivity went something like this:
1. Enclosure allowed landowners to receive a larger share of the gains from their lands.
2. Higher profit potential encouraged investment in capital, improving farm productivity and making farming less labor-intensive.
3. Lower demand for agricultural labor pushed many former farm laborers into the cities, where they became the industrial workforce.
In this model, higher agricultural productivity and capital acting as a substitute for labor are both necessary for industrialization. You have to be able to produce enough food for all those non-farmers, and you also need enough labor to man the factories.
Any given enclosure would generally be the work of a local landowner buying usage rights from poorer people by forced sale. Not so much top-down as middle-out.
I've come to question whether the Enclosure laws were actually a leadup to the Industrial Revolution except to the extent that they made self sufficiency more difficult, thus forcing people into the factories at lower wages. (There are other places where people leave the farms voluntarily for a better life in the city, but in England people were pushed.) In any case, a lot of intensively farmed common lands were turned into less productive pasture after the enclosure laws. It's hard to make a good argument that the land thefts led to increased productivity.
The Industrial Revolution began in Britain at about the time that the British were doing enclosure, but the Industrial Revolution spread to Britain's geographic and cultural neighbors without regard to whether there was anything like enclosure going on in those places. The Industrial Revolution took off in America at a time when America was giving free farmland (and the good stuff at that) to anyone who could be bothered to develop it. So the theory that the Industrial Revolution required a government in collusion with the capitalists, throwing the people off their land so they'd have no choice but to work in the Dark Satanic Mills(TM), seems to be based on one data point's worth of correlation with no evidence of causation.
Even when given the choice, even when offered free land via homestead, lots of people seem to have preferred working in factories to working in fields.
Just going to throw this out there: Economics has no real idea what caused the industrial revolution. Dierdre McCloskey probably has the best argument in that it was cultural norms, but there is no solid agreement on that or any of the other often conflicting claims. At this point Aliens man probably has a decent following.
Britain was also generally the most centrally controlled large country in Europe prior to Louis XIV, going back to William the Conqueror or at least the Tudors. It also abolished feudalism in the 17th Century (and in land-tenure terms, enclosure is a big part of this). It was less autocratic due to having a parliament, but a system where oligarchs all meet in one room is probably closer to absolutism than one in which various regional magnates all have separate power-bases.
You could just about argue that the French Revolution was a cultural-evolution style "copy the neighbouring tribe that's doing better than us" process, where the neighbouring tribe was Britain (centralised assembly decides everything, state control of the Church, one-size-fits-all conception of rights, largely free market). That could be why it was more successful than, say, the USSR.
Though interestingly, I spend a decent amount of time thinking about how radical reforms are dangerous, and did not actually realize I had the belief motivating this prediction until I thought about it.
I suspect some extra information crept in--the Rhineland, The Low Countries, and Po Valley have a reputation for being wealthy and urbanized.
Yeah, I ended up doing 75% on the side that radically-reformed areas outperform the others.
I was partially basing this on stuff I had read a while back that formerly colonized countries tended to perform better today (GDP/capita) in proportion to how long they were colonized. I recognize that only some of that effect was about structures imposed from the outside being better than whatever came before, but it was a hint of which direction to guess in.
Same here. Part of that is remembering what I learnt from the Revolutions Podcast, and how massively fragmented everything was, where taking a cart of goods to the next town over might have you pay multiple tariffs. Separate, overlapping layers, where two towns might be groups together in the same bishopric but be separated on the trade level.
Stuff like that would all get cleared away, so I was on the side of the reforms.
Here’s my comment with my prediction before reading on: 70% that the places that re-rolled on governance got better.
I have been told that in general some of the best things for economic growth are wars and natural disasters. (Indeed, I expect/hope to see something similar coming out of Covid.) On many levels, razing the current system and letting a new one grow allows it to get into a better equilibrium.
That said, if you do a big enough level of destruction (e.g. x-risk) everything is just dead and there’s nothing good left. You can destroy the FDA and expect a better thing to rise up, but I think just destroying the United States doesn’t get you a better United States.
My prediction here is that most of the places that got taken over and re-done got better. I’m 70% that was the outcome. Main reason why I’m wrong is if they didn’t get to do the things that the people wanted and instead that the French made them all do the same top-down things that the French wanted (e.g. losing a democracy and getting a totalitarian leader).
(One other reason why I’m wrong is that it turns out Scott wrote a fun, narratively twisty post where the answer is “Gotcha, assigning a probability here is fundamentally confused” and they got better in some ways and worse on others and it all comes down to whatever philosophical assumptions you bring to the table. And then I will feel a little silly.)
Alright, that’s my prediction. 70% that the places that re-rolled on government improved.
Check out Schumpeter. I think "re-rolled" is an excellent characterization and is similar to why my (not-pre-registered) guess was firmly that the places that got reformed would do better.
FWIW, I always interpreted the criticism from "Seeing Like a State" to be that individual people got totally rolled, not that reforms, in the long run, weren't good for things like GDP. After all, GDP is the kind of thing a state can measure, so it makes sense that if nothing else, their reforms would do well on that even if it ruined a bunch of other things.
You know, as someone who has used both Imperial and SI systems extensively, they each have their places. SI is far superior when working with complex units, moving between fields, communicating between nations, and as long almost all your computation is being done with computers or at least calculators.
But if you're working in some narrow little field, and doing a lot of the math in your head, SI is the pits, and Imperial really shines. So if I'm doing professional work, and trying to compute the polarizability of the H2 molecule and communicate it to someone else, SI it is. But if I'm at home trying to do a little light carpentry -- install crown moulding or something -- then Imperial is far easier. The units are more closely spaced and human-sized -- a foot isn't that much bigger than an inch, a pound isn't that much more than an ounce, while the gap between the cm and m, or between the g and kg, is uncomfortably large. It's hard to glance at a piece of lumber and immediately intuit whether the amount you have left is closer to 60 or 80 cm.
And you can divide measurements in your head more easily in base 12 (which has as natural divisors the very commonly desired 2, 3, and 4) than base 10 (which only has 2 and 5, and dividing by 5 isn't often useful). If I need to cut an 8 ft board into three pieces, that's easy to do in my head (8 x 4 = 32 in), but the equivalent in SI (244 cm ÷ 3) needs a calculator or piece of paper to be confident I got it right.
Of course I'm sure people who never work in anything else find it perfectly natural, so it might be a QWERTY v. Dvorak thing.
I think XKCD's look at temperature scales sums it up nicely. Fahrenheit works really well for temperatures people actual experience: 0 degrees is really cold, 100 is really hot, but at least in temperate zones that covers most of what you get. 0 in C is really cold, 100 is dead. Kelvin, dead and dead.
Actually what struck me about Fahrenheit's scale, when you read the history, is that it was much more practical for fieldwork (Fahrenheit was a working meterologist in the Baltic). He originally defined 0F as the temperature of an equilibrium mix of water, salt, and ice, a which being on the Baltic was readily available most times of the year, and 96F as body temperature, which, again, is pretty available. *Furthermore* when you do it that way, the freezing point of pure water becomes 32, and there are 32 degrees between your bottom and middle mark, and 64 between your middle and your top. What's magical about those two numbers are they are both powers of 2, which means you can construct all your divisions pretty accurately just be subdividing the interval with something as simple as a string, or straight edge and compass. In an era when precision measuring instruments were scarce and expensive, this is a big plus.
By contrast Celsius's scale is much less practical: the boiling point of water (100C) varies significantly with weather and altitude (as Fahrenheit knew because he was a weather guy), much more so than the freezing point (the temperature of an equilibrium mix of salt, ice, and water does not vary with pressure at all), and 100 divisions are more difficult to do accurately without precision instruments. So in the 1700s it would have been more practical for any random scientist to make an accurate Fahrenheit thermometer than Celsius thermometer, and I rather wonder if that's what accounted for its much greater use in that era.
It's kind of like the fact that we have a base-60 system for time, which at first glance seems odd, but if you have to do a lot of math with it in your head, it's brilliant. Base-10 is not an especially convenient number system, unless you're doing all your math on your fingers...
Dang – didn't know about the details of Fahrenheit's scale. Those are some engineer affordances he built in!
(I think the metric system is fine – it's effectively arbitrary, but a standard, so useful if for no other reason. But if we're jettisoning all of the 'ergonomics' of the old 'folk' units, why stick with the glaringly obvious 10 bias still there? Obviously, given the importance of computing, we should switch to a base of 2! Or if we want to _emphasize_ the arbitrariness, we could use an irrational base, like 𝒆 or 𝝅.)
60% chance the difference is surprisingly small to the point of irrelevancy, on general principle that most interesting studies of politics-adjacent interventions don't turn up much.
In event there's a relevant distinction, 65% in favor of top-down innovation being better than evolved wisdom. Mostly cause I suspect Europe around that time period leaned much more towards parasitic entrenched methods than effective evolved ones.
All we know is they ended up more economically developed. That’s usually bad — it’s ruining my city right now — but it’s not an unambiguous absolute evil. And it’s all we learn.
My dad’s a retired economist. When I mentioned to him how badly Gen Z is screwed, he told me that they had an incentive to be born earlier. Then he said, “but seriously, it’s good for the economy.”
Though 'great man' seems an unnecessary strawmanning. In our society there are a bunch of pent-up reforms that would be the obvious outcomes if reforms to remove entrenched minority control points (gerrymandering among them!) were pushed through.
And England had piles of its own radical reforms and disruptions. Pre-revolutionary France feels almost preactionary by contrast.
I noticed this, too. It feels like the presumption of a strongman reformer-king is just smuggled in. Would this characterization apply to contemporary majoritarian reforms like, for instance, filibuster abolition? It would be a dramatic and effectual reform without requiring anything like an FDR/Huey Long/Lyndon Johnson/etc figure.
Is filibuster reform majoritarian? I assume you mean removing the filibuster, that is. The filibuster allows a minority to block voting on a bill, but can be overridden by a sufficient number of votes. So with filibuster you need say 75% to definitely vote on/pass a bill, without filibuster you need only 51% to pass a bill. Is needing a smaller majority more majoritarian?
What? Yes, of course it is. The current cloture rules require a 3/5 vote, so 60 votes to end debate. This is empowers a minority to operate as a veto, rather than a constructive partner in legislation. Super-majority requirements, esp in a political environment where one faction does not have a positive agenda, is a de facto tyranny of the minority.
You will note, however, that only requiring say 30% of votes for something to pass would also allow for tyranny of the minority, no?
It is not enough to consider how many are needed for an action to pass, but whether it is an action or prevention of an action. Needing a smaller majority to pass a bill is not necessarily more majoritarian, since needing a larger majority means that there has to be more majority agreement. Or putting it another way, stopping tyranny is largely a function of preventing a tyrant from doing what it wants to everyone.
In other words, there is nothing magical about the 51% number. There are times you want more, and times you want less. I would be in favor of needing a super majority to pass legislation but a simple minority to repeal, for example.
You also might consider whether you are incorrectly conflating "not being able to make people do what we want" with being tyrannized. Being prevented from forcing people to do X or Y is not the same as forcing people to do X or Y.
Clearly 30% isn't a satisfactory executive percentage. 51% is "magical" in this context because it represents the minimum tranche of people to outnumber any other potential faction. It is useful in that basically axiomatic way.
Agreed re: states of exception, and thankfully, the founders of the country contemplated those and enacted them. Re: legislation, the filibuster was never an element of institutional design, a simple majority was. Your favored legislature design, to work, would require a fundamental restructuring of just about every other aspect of our political system, given the incentives built into our elections/factions.
To your final point, your point seems to reveal something of a libertarian set of political priorities, to which I have to unfortunately throw my hands up and declare that I prefer the problems of action to the problems of stagnation. The mont pelerine society be damned.
Fiiiiiine, I'll predict it from a position of ignorance. I have some vague memories of decimal time being imposed by some French revolutionary government or other, which obviously did not catch on. I have an even vaguer feeling that that was emblematic of all such programs, but I don't know if that is a memory or a gut instinct. As such, my wild guess is a three-quarters chance that the reformed polities did better than the others - simply because (no probabilities attached to this part) they had the advantage of being welcomed within the imperial trade network and protection, despite all of the terrible policies from on high they now had to deal with.
Kind of like the tension between a competition/antifragility dynamic vs. slack/coordination. It's tough to find a meta-rule to distinguish when to use which approach. Like, do we lean into federalism to defuse political tension, letting states compete and experiment; or do we abolish the filibuster and experiment nationally because of externalities and races-to-the-bottom?
Yeah! "At what level do you want antifragility?" is I think a tough question. I definitely want my cells to take damage when it makes my body stronger. Do I want individual people taking more risks to make communities stronger? States/cities taking damage to make their nation stronger? Nations sacrificing to make the world stronger? Antifragility says that the system is stronger when it's components are allowed to fail and be replaced. But that can suck for those components, and I'm not sure which system/level we want to prioritize.
Well, I guess Napoleon was pretty good at reforming. As was pointed out, though, Communists tended to suck at it. Was the British Empire any good at it?
It seems like lots of revolutions end up being taken over by the most radical and ruthless, because radicals are more willing to start shooting other revolutionaries once the original government is overthrown - see Stalin, Robespierre, Khomeini, Mao, etc.
The ruthless are, sure, but was Stalin more radical than Trotsky? He aligned himself with Bukharin against Zinoviev, and at the time Bukharin represented the right wing of the Bolsheviks. Was Khomeini more radical than Tudeh? Was the Directory more radical than Robespierre?
Being good at taking and holding power means... you are good at taking and holding power. You might be a hardcore radical, you might be a calm, stoic moderate. If anything I'd expect the moderates to tend to be better at taking and holding power, since "don't change anything" is the classic way to co-opt preexisting power structures. (But only just - history has plenty of revolutionaries doing the cold calculus necessary to take and hold power, after all.)
Hong Kong is one nice datapoint/cherry-pick in favor of British rule. But most of the rest of the former empire went fir squishy social democracy. But so did Britain. Was Cowperthwaite a genius or just lucky? What if Lord Keynes had been given that job instead?
Not really. India had a bloody mutual genocide that killed a million people after partition, but the Chinese Civil War killed several million. India became a democracy that, despite ruling one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse places on the planet, stayed intact and stable. China was taken over by communists who killed tens of millions by famine in the Great Leap Forward, destroyed the country's heritage in the Cultural Revolution, and sent opponents to labor camps. It's only well after Deng Xiaoping's opening up reforms in 1978 that China's quality of life started to exceed India's, but if China wants credit for that, it has to take responsibility for the decades of horror the communists inflicted. But in recent years China's growth is slowing, and India's is picking up. Also, even though India's democracy is backsliding, China is becoming even more dictatorial with its concentration camps holding 1 million Uyghurs, Xi's abolition of the 10 year presidential term limit, a renewed focus on ideology, more censorship and more suppression of dissent.
The whole article was premised on GDP comparison so that's the metric I was thinking of - after being in pretty similar deindustrialized states starting in the late 40s and going through everything you described China has ended up with 4 times the GDP per capita India has.
Really the two countries look like this "radical reform vs evolved institutions" debate writ large - China is lot more capable of radical reform, meaning they got a lot more of both the good and bad consequences. Famines and cultural chaos from trying to reform agriculture and... regular culture culture, but they kept tinkering and ultimately managed to engineer the greatest economic boom in world history.
I'm very skeptical of any statistics coming out of China, especially from the Mao years. Also, comparing GDP per capita alone is far more reasonable when the countries you're comparing are all European liberal democracies, far less reasonable when comparing China to India. But even taking GDP per capita statistics at face value: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GDP_per_capita_of_China_and_India.svg
...India was ahead of China until 1978.
I disagree that the Chinese "ultimately managed to engineer the greatest economic boom in world history". That may be true on an absolute level, but not per capita. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong (all former colonies, by the way) started from the same low level but transformed themselves into developed countries/territories in a single generation, something China has yet to do despite having decades longer to do it. I'd say the economic boom of the UK during the Industrial Revolution was also more impressive because they were pushing the frontiers of science and technology, not just playing catch-up.
This is my impression too: that England reformed gradually over the Stuart era (there was also that one not so gradual bit in the middle but the most radical elements got rolled back afterwards) whereas France did it all at once. Incrementalism vs Revolution.
What prediction are you responding to? It got deleted.
Yes, exactly.
Basically, with a complex system such as a society, there are lots of ways things can go wrong. On the other hand, if a societal practice has endured for a long time already, that's generally an indication that it works at least tolerably well. Overturning a long-standing practice is a high-risk, high-reward strategy -- you might get a more efficient system producing higher economic growth, or you might get mass famine because it turns out that farmers actually know more about farming than somebody whose main expertise is in the writings of Karl Marx. So, unless you're very sure that your reforms will have net-positive results (e.g., if the status quo is really so awful that almost any change would be a change for the better, or if similar reforms have worked in similar situations elsewhere), it's generally better to adopt a more cautious approach to minimise risk.
The heuristic that sweeping away traditions is bad needs to take into account the continuity of the conditions under which these traditions evolved. This paper finds that destroying feudal institutions on the eve of the industrial revolution was a positive in the long run, so maybe the heuristic should be something about matching the rate of institutional change to the rate of technological change?
"Unnatural" is a really bad heuristic, because *anything* that deviates from the norm gets called unnatural. Homosexuality gets called unnatural. In a monarchy, having a king is natural and peasants who want to not be repressed are deviating from the natural order.
The "coercive" part at least points to a specific error - revolutions seem to have a common failure mode of "instead of helping people we ended up shooting them as counter-revolutionaries" - but "unnatural" is the most abusable heuristic in the world, and I'd pick pretty much anything else. "Untested," maybe?
Change of institutions is not necessarily good or bad. What matters is what the revolution changes *conditions for ordinary people* and how that is done
Registering my prediction in advance: I think on average there is no difference between the reformed and non-reformed systems.
That was my prediction as well.
This is what I went with, in large part due to hearing (as a kid, and neither confirmed nor contradicted since in my non-history-based life) that many of the reforms were undone afterwards, setting the legal system mostly "back to normal".
Obviously, I don't know with high probability how true this is, this is from the same schooling that said things like Columbus was the first to know the world was round.
This was my prediction as well, and I see it now as cowardice (on my own part, not necessarily on yours or anyone else's).
I thought the same
0.6 on the side of the radical reformers
This was my prediction as well. With 0.2 on no detectable change, and 0.2 on reform made things worse.
Traditional does better on average - 75%
I feel like for this to be true the benefits need to be much greater than 4x since the most successful societies look nothing like they did 50 years ago, let alone something you might call “traditional”
I put 60% on the same. My thinking was that the conquerors would be insufficiently incentivized to enforce policies beneficial to the conquered and that the conquerors would potentially lack the cooperation of local power structures and the populace, reducing the overall effectiveness of governance.
I put 70% on the same. But my thinking was that the conquerors would not be able to do better than reformers trying to reform their own countries, like Mao with the Great Leap Forward. I guess I was wrong to think about all the times reform has gone right – it does seem like "capitalist reform good" is more precise/accurate than "reform good" or "reform bad".
Wasn't part of the leadup to the Industrial Revolution in Britain the enclosure of previously commonly-owned peasant lands? That seems like both the archetypal sort of top-down-imposed change to evolved institutions that James Scott types would decry (in fact I remember some left-libertarians like Kevin Carson banging on a lot about the evils of enclosure back in the day) and something that could plausibly have contributed to the Great Enrichment by enabling more intensive economic exploitation of land.
Yep, 100%. Kirkpatrick Sale wrote one of the definitive takes on enclosure and the consequent Luddite rebellion (in modern parlance the Luddites are accused of being against technological progress, when the chief thing making them super mad was their lands being taken away to feed industrial progress, cutting them out of any of the benefits of technological progress)
https://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Against-Future-Industrial-Revolution/dp/0201407183
> and something that could plausibly have contributed to the Great Enrichment by enabling more intensive economic exploitation of land.
I do have to disagree with this part though. There's no reason the factories could have been built under a land-as-common property scheme that would have allowed non-elites to share the wealth. As it was it was a great big handout by Big Government to their favored cronies in England's famously stratified class system, and the rebellions tell you exactly what the common people thought of it.
If you're against rent-seeking, private landownership (especially the kind that requires the violent seizure of previously commonly held lands) is kind of the very definition of it.
Obviously I'm outing myself as a Georgist with the above argument, so here's Progress & Poverty:
http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm
You can't build on common land. That's the point of it really. But your point is based on a wierd confusion of the agricultural revolution (where enclosure of common land allowed specialisation more easily) and the industrial revolution. Considering common land was never the majority of land in Britain and that it tended to be the more marginal situations than the actual farmed lands, I'd guess the majority of factories weren't built on former common land anyway.
But you can! As Henry George said, “it is not necessary to confiscate Land, it is only necessary to confiscate rent.”
You can retain some modern notions of private landownership without the rent seeking negative externalities that benefit a few to the exclusion of the many.
As for the rest of your comment I recommend you just read Sale’s account
George's scheme is exactly equivalent to the state owning all the land and leasing it all to the highest bidder with the right of first refusal to the existing leaseholder. This retains very little of private landownership.
Whether or not I agree with that, my point was to address Watchman's concern that "you can't build on common land." Under George's scheme, you absolutely can. In fact, it's the very point -- to encourage building.
This is simply false.
Ireland? The renters didn't own the property, and there was no need to reimburse the renters for improvements they made. The result was that the renters didn't improve the property, resulting in massive poverty in Ireland.
Native American reservations? The reason why these areas are so destitute is because there is a lack of private property there. This means that you don't get the value back that you spend on improving the land. As a result, Native American reservations are grossly underdeveloped.
The same applies here.
The reason why private property is so important is because it creates an incentive to invest in the property. Without that incentive, there is no reason to invest.
This is one of the major reasons why socialism is such a failure as an ideology.
Georgism != Socialism
Georgism LOVES private property. What it detests is rent-seeking. Rent-seeking landlords exploit BOTH capital AND labor.
And actually the reason for the Irish famine, which George goes into in GREAT detail in Progress & Poverty, is absentee landlords who held both the title to the land, and to whom all the improved value of the land would accrue. The reason that the renters didn't improve the land was because improving the land WOULD ONLY CAUSE THE RENTS TO INCREASE by at least as much as the value of the improvements.
From Progress & Poverty:
> tenants... even if the rack-rents which they were forced to pay had permitted them, did not dare to make improvements which would have been but the signal for an increase of rent. Labor was thus applied in the most inefficient and wasteful manner.
Further:
> For when her population was at its highest, Ireland was a food-exporting country. Even during the famine, grain and meat and butter and cheese were carted for exportation along roads lined with the starving and past trenches in which the dead were piled.
> It went not as an exchange, but as a tribute – to pay the rent of absentee landlords; a levy wrung from producers by those who in no wise contributed to production... they lived on the potato, because rack-rents stripped everything else from them.
If I'm a tenant sharecropper and my land earns 100, and I invest in improvements that add +50 to it, then my landlord raises the rent to 150. It got to the point the Irish could afford nothing but the bare minimum it took to keep them alive (potatoes) and they were one blight away from danger.
Note also that you don't have to SEIZE public lands to ensure common ownership. It's the VALUE of the land that should be held in common, not necessarily the title. This is an important distinction.
I don't know what the particular land regulations are on Native American Indian reservations, but I will point out that forced privatization of land is precisely what kicked them off their ancestral territory in the first place, leaving them with the most marginal property left today.
The fact that any improvement made on the property became the property of the landlord is why they didn't invest in the land. Ulster had tenant right, which obligated landlords to compensate tenants for improvements on their land at the termination of the lease, which resulted in greater stability (because the landlords didn't want to have to pay for improvements) and greater prosperity. Ulster not coincidentally ended up with a below-average rate of population loss due to the famine.
Moreover, the whole "exporting food" thing is one of those Big Lies.
India tried to cut off all exports of food in 1943. Result? Millions of people starved in Bengal. Why? Because no exports also meant no imports. People starved because of lack of trade, as food couldn't be sold to where it was needed most.
Ireland was a net importer of food during the time of the famine, *not* a net exporter. More food came into Ireland than left it.
Moreover, the idea of it being "tribute" is simply false. The people who were exporting food were *not* the people who were starving. They were, in fact, the result of better off farmers with large amounts of land being able to produce large amounts of food.
The people who starved were the tenant farmers who were on tiny sublet plots of land. These plots were too small to really support much agriculture, so they grew the most energy dense crop possible - potatoes - and then would hire themselves out to do labor for others for pay to pay rent and to supplement their diet with other food.
When the potato crop failed, all their money had to go to food, which meant they couldn't pay rent. The middlemen kicked these people off their plots of land, which resulted in them being homeless and having no ability to grow food at all to supplement their income with nearly "free" calories. These people then often starved because their income was insufficient to pay for enough food.
The farmers who had tons of land to grow the money crops on that they were exporting did just fine. They weren't "paying tribute" - they were making money by engaging in commerce.
And the whole "the value of land" thing is nonsense because land has no fixed value. The reason why land is valuable is almost always because it has been improved or is near improved land. The value of the land goes up due to the improvements. It is the person who is improving the land who gives it value.
This is the same reason why Native American reservations do not attract much in the way of business or industry.
Native Americans lost their land not due to "forced privatization" but due to land swaps and armed conflict. Had all the land that the tribes had simply been divided between the members of the tribe, they would have ended up better off (though a lot of them would have still lost their land anyway during the era of mechanization, as small farms eventually became economically non-viable). Tribal land is almost always held in trust for the tribe, rather than actually owned by individuals, which is precisely the problem. Many of the remaining tribes have fetishized the idea of land having intrinsic value, when in reality, land has value because of the use it is put to. Tribal policies disincentivize businesses from establishing themselves on tribal lands, which is a major reason why poverty rates are much higher on reservations than off of them. The result is that the land ends up not being very valuable because there's no reason to want that land or to want to put your business there.
It doesn't matter how "valuable" your land is in theory if no one wants to develop it. Holding low land in trust doesn't actually help people very much.
> The fact that any improvement made on the property became the property of the landlord is why they didn't invest in the land.
So we agree! The problem is that the value of improvements went to the absentee landlords whose ownership discouraged the development of the land.
> And the whole "the value of land" thing is nonsense because land has no fixed value. The reason why land is valuable is almost always because it has been improved or is near improved land. The value of the land goes up due to the improvements. It is the person who is improving the land who gives it value.
Again we agree! And this is the problem. If you improve the land next to mine, then I have an incentive to not develop my land because I can soak up the benefits of you improving YOUR land.
I seriously recommend you read Progress & Poverty and see if you still feel the same way. It directly addresses a lot of your assertions.
Vine Deloria Jr., in his book "Custer Died for Your Sins," touches on how privatization of native land parcels was combined with land theft. Common areas were parceled out, then some portion of the total land was confiscated.
There's lots of undeveloped land in the United States, even in places where the law is basically the same as the most developed areas. Which makes me question assigning 100% of the issue to legal frameworks. You know what they say about the Three Laws of Real Estate, right?
Well, some Native American reservations are practically undevelopable. I mean, the Navajo Nation is almost entirely Sonoran Desert, with a tiny rainfall and strong temperature extremes, both diurnal and annual. About all that's done there is sheep and goat herding, and mining sometimes. Even the part that isn't reservation has pretty limited development.
Why would a 19th century industrialist risk everything to build a factory on common land if he knew it was going to become common property? People take big risks with their money because they hope for great rewards.
The factory would remain his private property because it is capital. But the land belongs to the community. Specifically, the *value* of the land (not the title) would be common property. The way to implement this is the ground rent would be taxed but the value of the improvement (the factory) would not be.
I'd like to point out that the peasants were ignored, who certainly took "big risks" (many of them died, injured, or poisoned by the many negative externalities of the industrialists) and received no rewards whatsoever because they did not have the proper connections in government to get free handouts backed up by military force.
I do agree that development is good and we should encourage it. Industrialists are entitled to returns on their capital and labor, but not entitled to taking the pre-existing gifts of nature exclusively for themselves and denying them to others, especially when they had to wrest them away by force.
While I can accept this, the distinction seems overly fine: the thing making modern luddites super mad is having their jobs taken away and replaced with automation or outsourcing, cutting them out of any of the benefits of technological progress, again.
My main point was just to point out that most dismissals of the historical luddites ignores the fact that if you went back in time and asked them why they were mad "they took our land!" would be right up there with "machines took our jobs!"
And Henry George would argue that whether modern luddites realize it or not, the underlying problems aren't so different from the classic variety. "Ground rent" (rent attributable to just the land, not what's built on it) soaks up nearly all the value that the community at large provides. This creates a whole host of perverse incentives, but chief among them is that the community provides the value but private interests capture the benefit AND turn around and extract all that risen value on the community as a tax called rent.
>"Ground rent" (rent attributable to just the land, not what's built on it) soaks up nearly all the value that the community at large provides.
This seems to me the fatal flaw of the Single Tax; there's no principle by which to attribute the rent to land v. improvements, especially because neighboring improvements make land itself more valuable.
I think that's debatable, plenty of property tax assessments already separate the ground rent assessment vs. the improvements. If anything modern advances such as GIS and vast databases of comps make this easier to assess now than in the past. You also don't have to have a perfect 100% LVT to achieve some good effects.
True; I get just such a breakdown with my annual property tax notice. But the difference is, I have no reason to care how it's distributed since they're both taxed at the same mill rate. #inadequateequilibrium
Set the mill rate on improvements to zero and watch every single owner fight tooth & nail to attribute as much of their total assessed value as possible to the improvements.
Except the entire idea is false to begin with.
They aren't the ones who are creating it, and you have no right to your job - your job is something you do for other people. You don't have the right to force other people to pay you to do something for you.
Moreover, the idea that they "aren't benefitting" is false on the face of it - everyone in society benefits from increased per capita productivity, as shown by the fact that we live in vastly, vastly better conditions.
The luddites are trying to stand in the way of progress and are rent-seeking.
> You don't have the right to force other people to pay you to do something for you.
It's great that we agree that landlords who charge rent for the improved value of their lands that accrue not due to their own work or investment, but that of their neighbors, is wrong!
Except they aren't forcing anyone to pay for anything. Renting their space is optional.
Everyone in society does not benefit; society as a whole benefits. This is an important distinction; if the former were true, a person who loses their job to automation would see an improvement in their conditions as a consequence. That is not the case.
The person who loses their job will be much better off for other people having lost their jobs to automation. Multiply this by a hundred million, and you have modern day society, where everyone has lost their job to automation many times over, and we're massively better off. The poor are massively better off today than the middle class were in the 1500s, and in most ways are better off than the rich were back then as well.
For that to happen, people must lose their jobs to automation.
Thus, it is a net gain to live in a society where you sometimes lose your job to automation, even if you do lose your job to automation.
Moreover, very few people who lose their jobs to automation don't get new jobs. The overwhelming majority do so.
It seems to me you are still conflating society as a whole with individual people. Losing your job makes you worse off unless you get a better one or on a track that results in better ones than the old track; the overwhelming majority do not manage this much. This dominates their beliefs; the ability for people to get _any_ job is better then nothing but only actually _good_ from society's point of view.
Since we were talking about what other people believe, it is deeply weird to me that your baseline expectation seems to be that they should be happy with losing their jobs/houses/communities because this will somehow cause people to be better off 500 years from now.
This suggests I am confused; that can't possibly be your claim. Did you mistake me as being a luddite instead of describing them perhaps? For clarity's sake, I do not oppose automation; but I empathize with people that do.
Pseudoerasmus (citing Pomeranz) claims that China was actually more "efficient" in terms of enclosing common land than Europe:
https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/11/10/history-manifesto-errors/
England is treated as the exception.
My amateur reading of economic history is that the culture war flashpoint potential of the enclosures leads people to overstate its causal impact on the industrial revolution. Gregory Clark has a good synthesis where he lays out how early economic historians overestimate the returns to enclosure by not adjusting for general rent inflation and that people who enclosed land typically made subsequent capital investments. He thinks enclosure didn't have a big impact either on agricultural productivity or income distribution. But you know, I'm an amateur, its a paper from 98, beware the person of one study and all that.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2566254?read-now=1&seq=28#page_scan_tab_contents
Deirdre McCloskey argues that it ultimately derives from the Church of England and the Reformation, which prioritized an individual relationship to God over top-down Catholicism.
Would need to explain the long gap between the reformation and the industrial revolution. And why it didn't equally happen in mainland European countries that were protestant longer
Would need to explain the long gap between planting seedlings and a mature forest ...
Well, she *did* write three books explaining it so...
Greg Clark had an explanation, which McCloskey rejected in a review which revealed ignorance of how regression to the mean works. https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/deirdre-mccloskey-on-farewell-to-alms/
Yea, enclosure style property reforms is also what Britain imposed on Palestinians when Zionists settled in Israel. European Jews who were familiar with Western legal systems navigated the system frictionlessly relative to Palestinians, causing more Palestinians to be displaced and the rest is history. Comparing Israel with surrounding nations, Israel clearly has higher GDP.
Here is a difference between breaking up guilds and enclosures.
The first created opportunities in the cities and pulled in peasants, whereas the latter pushed peasants away from the farms. It broke down safety nets and immiserated peasants. It made individuals fragile, even if it made the country anti-fragile. We should ask such questions about the Napoleonic reforms.
What is peasant did *not* want to be “pulled in” to city “opportunities” ...?
I recall that the basic model of enclosure & productivity went something like this:
1. Enclosure allowed landowners to receive a larger share of the gains from their lands.
2. Higher profit potential encouraged investment in capital, improving farm productivity and making farming less labor-intensive.
3. Lower demand for agricultural labor pushed many former farm laborers into the cities, where they became the industrial workforce.
In this model, higher agricultural productivity and capital acting as a substitute for labor are both necessary for industrialization. You have to be able to produce enough food for all those non-farmers, and you also need enough labor to man the factories.
Any given enclosure would generally be the work of a local landowner buying usage rights from poorer people by forced sale. Not so much top-down as middle-out.
I've come to question whether the Enclosure laws were actually a leadup to the Industrial Revolution except to the extent that they made self sufficiency more difficult, thus forcing people into the factories at lower wages. (There are other places where people leave the farms voluntarily for a better life in the city, but in England people were pushed.) In any case, a lot of intensively farmed common lands were turned into less productive pasture after the enclosure laws. It's hard to make a good argument that the land thefts led to increased productivity.
The Industrial Revolution began in Britain at about the time that the British were doing enclosure, but the Industrial Revolution spread to Britain's geographic and cultural neighbors without regard to whether there was anything like enclosure going on in those places. The Industrial Revolution took off in America at a time when America was giving free farmland (and the good stuff at that) to anyone who could be bothered to develop it. So the theory that the Industrial Revolution required a government in collusion with the capitalists, throwing the people off their land so they'd have no choice but to work in the Dark Satanic Mills(TM), seems to be based on one data point's worth of correlation with no evidence of causation.
Even when given the choice, even when offered free land via homestead, lots of people seem to have preferred working in factories to working in fields.
Just going to throw this out there: Economics has no real idea what caused the industrial revolution. Dierdre McCloskey probably has the best argument in that it was cultural norms, but there is no solid agreement on that or any of the other often conflicting claims. At this point Aliens man probably has a decent following.
Britain was also generally the most centrally controlled large country in Europe prior to Louis XIV, going back to William the Conqueror or at least the Tudors. It also abolished feudalism in the 17th Century (and in land-tenure terms, enclosure is a big part of this). It was less autocratic due to having a parliament, but a system where oligarchs all meet in one room is probably closer to absolutism than one in which various regional magnates all have separate power-bases.
You could just about argue that the French Revolution was a cultural-evolution style "copy the neighbouring tribe that's doing better than us" process, where the neighbouring tribe was Britain (centralised assembly decides everything, state control of the Church, one-size-fits-all conception of rights, largely free market). That could be why it was more successful than, say, the USSR.
60% confidence napoleon ones do better, not much confidence I know
At least I was on the right side
I predicted the same. Was not bold enough to put it here though.
Advance prediction: 70% confident that the radically-reformed areas on average outperformed the control group.
My advance prediction was the same.
Though interestingly, I spend a decent amount of time thinking about how radical reforms are dangerous, and did not actually realize I had the belief motivating this prediction until I thought about it.
I suspect some extra information crept in--the Rhineland, The Low Countries, and Po Valley have a reputation for being wealthy and urbanized.
Yeah, I ended up doing 75% on the side that radically-reformed areas outperform the others.
I was partially basing this on stuff I had read a while back that formerly colonized countries tended to perform better today (GDP/capita) in proportion to how long they were colonized. I recognize that only some of that effect was about structures imposed from the outside being better than whatever came before, but it was a hint of which direction to guess in.
Same.
Same here. Part of that is remembering what I learnt from the Revolutions Podcast, and how massively fragmented everything was, where taking a cart of goods to the next town over might have you pay multiple tariffs. Separate, overlapping layers, where two towns might be groups together in the same bishopric but be separated on the trade level.
Stuff like that would all get cleared away, so I was on the side of the reforms.
Yeah, that and the Age of Napoleon podcast biased me to know that it was more successful than not but I still was low confidence.
Here’s my comment with my prediction before reading on: 70% that the places that re-rolled on governance got better.
I have been told that in general some of the best things for economic growth are wars and natural disasters. (Indeed, I expect/hope to see something similar coming out of Covid.) On many levels, razing the current system and letting a new one grow allows it to get into a better equilibrium.
That said, if you do a big enough level of destruction (e.g. x-risk) everything is just dead and there’s nothing good left. You can destroy the FDA and expect a better thing to rise up, but I think just destroying the United States doesn’t get you a better United States.
My prediction here is that most of the places that got taken over and re-done got better. I’m 70% that was the outcome. Main reason why I’m wrong is if they didn’t get to do the things that the people wanted and instead that the French made them all do the same top-down things that the French wanted (e.g. losing a democracy and getting a totalitarian leader).
(One other reason why I’m wrong is that it turns out Scott wrote a fun, narratively twisty post where the answer is “Gotcha, assigning a probability here is fundamentally confused” and they got better in some ways and worse on others and it all comes down to whatever philosophical assumptions you bring to the table. And then I will feel a little silly.)
Alright, that’s my prediction. 70% that the places that re-rolled on government improved.
How long after razing the old does the break even point come?
Check out Schumpeter. I think "re-rolled" is an excellent characterization and is similar to why my (not-pre-registered) guess was firmly that the places that got reformed would do better.
FWIW, I always interpreted the criticism from "Seeing Like a State" to be that individual people got totally rolled, not that reforms, in the long run, weren't good for things like GDP. After all, GDP is the kind of thing a state can measure, so it makes sense that if nothing else, their reforms would do well on that even if it ruined a bunch of other things.
80% on Napoleonic reform, but I think I'd heard something about this case before, so that might be tainted.
Prediction: 80% chance Napoleonic reforms improved things (I probably mostly am basing this on positive associations with the metric system)
If only the metric calendar had caught on.
My thoughts exactly.
You know, as someone who has used both Imperial and SI systems extensively, they each have their places. SI is far superior when working with complex units, moving between fields, communicating between nations, and as long almost all your computation is being done with computers or at least calculators.
But if you're working in some narrow little field, and doing a lot of the math in your head, SI is the pits, and Imperial really shines. So if I'm doing professional work, and trying to compute the polarizability of the H2 molecule and communicate it to someone else, SI it is. But if I'm at home trying to do a little light carpentry -- install crown moulding or something -- then Imperial is far easier. The units are more closely spaced and human-sized -- a foot isn't that much bigger than an inch, a pound isn't that much more than an ounce, while the gap between the cm and m, or between the g and kg, is uncomfortably large. It's hard to glance at a piece of lumber and immediately intuit whether the amount you have left is closer to 60 or 80 cm.
And you can divide measurements in your head more easily in base 12 (which has as natural divisors the very commonly desired 2, 3, and 4) than base 10 (which only has 2 and 5, and dividing by 5 isn't often useful). If I need to cut an 8 ft board into three pieces, that's easy to do in my head (8 x 4 = 32 in), but the equivalent in SI (244 cm ÷ 3) needs a calculator or piece of paper to be confident I got it right.
Of course I'm sure people who never work in anything else find it perfectly natural, so it might be a QWERTY v. Dvorak thing.
I think XKCD's look at temperature scales sums it up nicely. Fahrenheit works really well for temperatures people actual experience: 0 degrees is really cold, 100 is really hot, but at least in temperate zones that covers most of what you get. 0 in C is really cold, 100 is dead. Kelvin, dead and dead.
Actually what struck me about Fahrenheit's scale, when you read the history, is that it was much more practical for fieldwork (Fahrenheit was a working meterologist in the Baltic). He originally defined 0F as the temperature of an equilibrium mix of water, salt, and ice, a which being on the Baltic was readily available most times of the year, and 96F as body temperature, which, again, is pretty available. *Furthermore* when you do it that way, the freezing point of pure water becomes 32, and there are 32 degrees between your bottom and middle mark, and 64 between your middle and your top. What's magical about those two numbers are they are both powers of 2, which means you can construct all your divisions pretty accurately just be subdividing the interval with something as simple as a string, or straight edge and compass. In an era when precision measuring instruments were scarce and expensive, this is a big plus.
By contrast Celsius's scale is much less practical: the boiling point of water (100C) varies significantly with weather and altitude (as Fahrenheit knew because he was a weather guy), much more so than the freezing point (the temperature of an equilibrium mix of salt, ice, and water does not vary with pressure at all), and 100 divisions are more difficult to do accurately without precision instruments. So in the 1700s it would have been more practical for any random scientist to make an accurate Fahrenheit thermometer than Celsius thermometer, and I rather wonder if that's what accounted for its much greater use in that era.
It's kind of like the fact that we have a base-60 system for time, which at first glance seems odd, but if you have to do a lot of math with it in your head, it's brilliant. Base-10 is not an especially convenient number system, unless you're doing all your math on your fingers...
Dang – didn't know about the details of Fahrenheit's scale. Those are some engineer affordances he built in!
(I think the metric system is fine – it's effectively arbitrary, but a standard, so useful if for no other reason. But if we're jettisoning all of the 'ergonomics' of the old 'folk' units, why stick with the glaringly obvious 10 bias still there? Obviously, given the importance of computing, we should switch to a base of 2! Or if we want to _emphasize_ the arbitrariness, we could use an irrational base, like 𝒆 or 𝝅.)
Registered prediction:
60% chance the difference is surprisingly small to the point of irrelevancy, on general principle that most interesting studies of politics-adjacent interventions don't turn up much.
In event there's a relevant distinction, 65% in favor of top-down innovation being better than evolved wisdom. Mostly cause I suspect Europe around that time period leaned much more towards parasitic entrenched methods than effective evolved ones.
I predict the Napoleonized states probably did about the same.
But I’m always wrong.
...as the non-Napoleonated states.
But then you never answer the question!
All we know is they ended up more economically developed. That’s usually bad — it’s ruining my city right now — but it’s not an unambiguous absolute evil. And it’s all we learn.
My dad’s a retired economist. When I mentioned to him how badly Gen Z is screwed, he told me that they had an incentive to be born earlier. Then he said, “but seriously, it’s good for the economy.”
70% confidence that radically reformed areas did better.
Though 'great man' seems an unnecessary strawmanning. In our society there are a bunch of pent-up reforms that would be the obvious outcomes if reforms to remove entrenched minority control points (gerrymandering among them!) were pushed through.
And England had piles of its own radical reforms and disruptions. Pre-revolutionary France feels almost preactionary by contrast.
I noticed this, too. It feels like the presumption of a strongman reformer-king is just smuggled in. Would this characterization apply to contemporary majoritarian reforms like, for instance, filibuster abolition? It would be a dramatic and effectual reform without requiring anything like an FDR/Huey Long/Lyndon Johnson/etc figure.
Is filibuster reform majoritarian? I assume you mean removing the filibuster, that is. The filibuster allows a minority to block voting on a bill, but can be overridden by a sufficient number of votes. So with filibuster you need say 75% to definitely vote on/pass a bill, without filibuster you need only 51% to pass a bill. Is needing a smaller majority more majoritarian?
What? Yes, of course it is. The current cloture rules require a 3/5 vote, so 60 votes to end debate. This is empowers a minority to operate as a veto, rather than a constructive partner in legislation. Super-majority requirements, esp in a political environment where one faction does not have a positive agenda, is a de facto tyranny of the minority.
You will note, however, that only requiring say 30% of votes for something to pass would also allow for tyranny of the minority, no?
It is not enough to consider how many are needed for an action to pass, but whether it is an action or prevention of an action. Needing a smaller majority to pass a bill is not necessarily more majoritarian, since needing a larger majority means that there has to be more majority agreement. Or putting it another way, stopping tyranny is largely a function of preventing a tyrant from doing what it wants to everyone.
In other words, there is nothing magical about the 51% number. There are times you want more, and times you want less. I would be in favor of needing a super majority to pass legislation but a simple minority to repeal, for example.
You also might consider whether you are incorrectly conflating "not being able to make people do what we want" with being tyrannized. Being prevented from forcing people to do X or Y is not the same as forcing people to do X or Y.
Clearly 30% isn't a satisfactory executive percentage. 51% is "magical" in this context because it represents the minimum tranche of people to outnumber any other potential faction. It is useful in that basically axiomatic way.
Agreed re: states of exception, and thankfully, the founders of the country contemplated those and enacted them. Re: legislation, the filibuster was never an element of institutional design, a simple majority was. Your favored legislature design, to work, would require a fundamental restructuring of just about every other aspect of our political system, given the incentives built into our elections/factions.
To your final point, your point seems to reveal something of a libertarian set of political priorities, to which I have to unfortunately throw my hands up and declare that I prefer the problems of action to the problems of stagnation. The mont pelerine society be damned.
Not just pre-revolutionary France, but the Holy Roman Empire, which was absolutely creaky, especially in some of the tiny independent holdings.
better: 50-60% confidence
70% reform
Fiiiiiine, I'll predict it from a position of ignorance. I have some vague memories of decimal time being imposed by some French revolutionary government or other, which obviously did not catch on. I have an even vaguer feeling that that was emblematic of all such programs, but I don't know if that is a memory or a gut instinct. As such, my wild guess is a three-quarters chance that the reformed polities did better than the others - simply because (no probabilities attached to this part) they had the advantage of being welcomed within the imperial trade network and protection, despite all of the terrible policies from on high they now had to deal with.
Well, looks like I was right for the wrong reasons. Such is life...annoyingly often.
Oh, duh, Mx kjz is absolutely right that the metric system stuck around.
Kind of like the tension between a competition/antifragility dynamic vs. slack/coordination. It's tough to find a meta-rule to distinguish when to use which approach. Like, do we lean into federalism to defuse political tension, letting states compete and experiment; or do we abolish the filibuster and experiment nationally because of externalities and races-to-the-bottom?
Yeah! "At what level do you want antifragility?" is I think a tough question. I definitely want my cells to take damage when it makes my body stronger. Do I want individual people taking more risks to make communities stronger? States/cities taking damage to make their nation stronger? Nations sacrificing to make the world stronger? Antifragility says that the system is stronger when it's components are allowed to fail and be replaced. But that can suck for those components, and I'm not sure which system/level we want to prioritize.
Well, I guess Napoleon was pretty good at reforming. As was pointed out, though, Communists tended to suck at it. Was the British Empire any good at it?
It seems like lots of revolutions end up being taken over by the most radical and ruthless, because radicals are more willing to start shooting other revolutionaries once the original government is overthrown - see Stalin, Robespierre, Khomeini, Mao, etc.
Brutal, genocidal, extractive, addicting conquest is, then, “a good thing” to quote Martha Stewart ... ?
The ruthless are, sure, but was Stalin more radical than Trotsky? He aligned himself with Bukharin against Zinoviev, and at the time Bukharin represented the right wing of the Bolsheviks. Was Khomeini more radical than Tudeh? Was the Directory more radical than Robespierre?
Being good at taking and holding power means... you are good at taking and holding power. You might be a hardcore radical, you might be a calm, stoic moderate. If anything I'd expect the moderates to tend to be better at taking and holding power, since "don't change anything" is the classic way to co-opt preexisting power structures. (But only just - history has plenty of revolutionaries doing the cold calculus necessary to take and hold power, after all.)
Hong Kong is one nice datapoint/cherry-pick in favor of British rule. But most of the rest of the former empire went fir squishy social democracy. But so did Britain. Was Cowperthwaite a genius or just lucky? What if Lord Keynes had been given that job instead?
I am not convinced Hong Kong would have scaled up to all of China. India and China would be a more fair comparison.
That comparison makes Britain look very very bad
Not really. India had a bloody mutual genocide that killed a million people after partition, but the Chinese Civil War killed several million. India became a democracy that, despite ruling one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse places on the planet, stayed intact and stable. China was taken over by communists who killed tens of millions by famine in the Great Leap Forward, destroyed the country's heritage in the Cultural Revolution, and sent opponents to labor camps. It's only well after Deng Xiaoping's opening up reforms in 1978 that China's quality of life started to exceed India's, but if China wants credit for that, it has to take responsibility for the decades of horror the communists inflicted. But in recent years China's growth is slowing, and India's is picking up. Also, even though India's democracy is backsliding, China is becoming even more dictatorial with its concentration camps holding 1 million Uyghurs, Xi's abolition of the 10 year presidential term limit, a renewed focus on ideology, more censorship and more suppression of dissent.
The whole article was premised on GDP comparison so that's the metric I was thinking of - after being in pretty similar deindustrialized states starting in the late 40s and going through everything you described China has ended up with 4 times the GDP per capita India has.
Looking at these life expectancy stats I think we have good reason to think China's pulling ahead of India started at least as early as the early 60s: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=IN-CN
Really the two countries look like this "radical reform vs evolved institutions" debate writ large - China is lot more capable of radical reform, meaning they got a lot more of both the good and bad consequences. Famines and cultural chaos from trying to reform agriculture and... regular culture culture, but they kept tinkering and ultimately managed to engineer the greatest economic boom in world history.
"One Child" can do wonders for your per-capita GDP, at least over some time horizon.
I'm very skeptical of any statistics coming out of China, especially from the Mao years. Also, comparing GDP per capita alone is far more reasonable when the countries you're comparing are all European liberal democracies, far less reasonable when comparing China to India. But even taking GDP per capita statistics at face value: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GDP_per_capita_of_China_and_India.svg
...India was ahead of China until 1978.
I disagree that the Chinese "ultimately managed to engineer the greatest economic boom in world history". That may be true on an absolute level, but not per capita. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong (all former colonies, by the way) started from the same low level but transformed themselves into developed countries/territories in a single generation, something China has yet to do despite having decades longer to do it. I'd say the economic boom of the UK during the Industrial Revolution was also more impressive because they were pushing the frontiers of science and technology, not just playing catch-up.