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.
Just because they are successful authoritarians doesn’t mean they are brilliant top-down reformers. A book was published in the nineties making the case that Deng's reforms consisted mostly of not sending successful rule-breakers to the laogai. While the CCP focused on a succession struggle after Mao's death, farmers in some areas of the countryside began “innovating” the collective farming system, allowing people to cultivate some private plots. By the time Deng had decisively defeated the Gang of Four for dominance, baochan daohu was sort of a forest fire. Deng's great virtue was the wisdom to allow this development rather than try to rev the cultural revolution back up and imprison enough people to get collective farming back within ideological boundaries. The author documents the attitudes to the top leadership using official party documents, which always toe the old line and reluctantly allow some exceptions while scolding the crazy farmers.
America is becoming even more dictatorial with its prisons holding holding 2.3 million mostly Black, Latino and Native Americans, a fragile and failing “democracy” in which the winner of the popular vote has two times in this century not taken office as president in addition to both Hillary and Trump claiming fraud, interference, demanding recount Tx and that the rlection was ‘stolen’ from them, a renewed focus on ideology on Netflix, in Hollywood and in the corporate Wall Street Capitalist press which first launched and then denounced Trump, more censorship especially with a new threatened domestic patriot act and more suppression of dissent especially of contrarian and Left Wing writers/sites like Glenn Greenwald ...
If you could choose a country to be born into tomorrow, would it be India or China? Depends on if you are more into statistics on literacy rate, infant mortality, life expectancy, infrastructure, transportation...or you care about expressing your views or religion somewhat more freely.
As an Indian, freedom of religion and expressing views openly is not a thing in India. India has an extremely extensive hate speech laws that can send you to jail for offending any other religion on Facebook. In a way, this is needed because we are always one word away from a deadly riot but in no way would I call this freedom of religion. For example, in the current government muslims can't broadcast namaz early in the morning since this tends to irritate Hindus and may lead to riots down the line. In the previous government, Hindus couldnt celebrate festivals like Ganesh Chaturthi (which requires a large procession) because generally Muslims uses to get angry and it led to large scale riots. Each government clearly supports one religion and opposes the other (the hindutva party supports Hinduism, the Congress supports Islam). Expressing views also, you can express views as long as it doesn't instigate a riot which is a very broad category, and as people have learnt gives the government an easy time in arresting their opposition.
I mean, Britain (or at least, the people who ran the East India Company) did pretty well out of it. It's not clear that "make India rich" was really what they were going for.
Was Khomeini ruthless and willing to shoot people? He had to be basically begged to return to the country and rule it, and I can imagine him disgusted at the way it all turned out.
In colonial India there were areas under direct British rule and areas under indirect rule with little direct British involvement (“native states”). The areas with indirect rule did better economically and have better outcomes in health and education today.
Plausible confounder: was the decision by the British whether to directly or indirectly rule driven by the competence & functionality of the existing authorities?
The British certainly made the claim in some cases that they were stepping in due to the incompetence of the local rulers. And I think there is a grain of truth here in that where a ruler had a well-established succession pattern and a firm control over his kingdom, British preferred to make allies to making enemies (a side-note here, while the princes often complained about the restrictions Britain made on them during the independence movement, for the top-tier princes British backing was often a pretty sweet deal. The Nizam of Hyderabad for instance was one of the wealthiest people in the world).
But comparing princely states to direct British rule is a bit complex because there was a range of influence through the British resident in the princely states. In some cases the resident effectively ran things, but in others the prince had the primary authority.
Was Napoleon really good at reforming? He turned the Republic into an Empire, but created Republican institutions in many other countries, while also installing monarchs in many of them. He went back and forth on anti-clericalism and Catholicism. How much of the good is attributable to Napoleon, and how much to the bureaucrats of the Revolution? Perhaps his populism tempered some of the excesses of the Revolution, but it's not obvious how much of the good came from him.
Taking the plunge here: I'm predicting that the states that had only their institutions (with a side of land reform) overhauled involuntarily by the French did better than the ones that didn't. The ones that felt a heavier revolutionary French hand, for whatever reason, I'm predicting did less well, but probably still (at least) about as well as those that retained all their indigenous features status quo ante. I doubt any of the unaffected states did better by a considerable margin than any affected state.
I'm cheating a bit because I studied this partly in undergrad, and I know that even the states that were defeated by but managed to retain the vast majority of their independence of the French (Prussia, Austria) adopted many reforms that the French had implemented in the Confederation of the Rhine, and certainly didn't roll them back in the lands they annexed or re-annexed after the final victory of the "counter"-revolution. I know also that the economic reforms, in particular, laid the groundwork for Germany's later economic boom in the second half of the 19th century.
My predictions: 40% effects not very large, 35% conquered better, 25% conquered worse. This includes savviness about which result Scott would write about, alas.
Prediction about what Scott would write about is why I didn't predict; what I thought he'd highlight went contrary to my gut, and so I knew I'd be especially mad at myself if I was wrong.
This is late, I've already read the article, but my prediction was "good, because I've never heard of Napoleon having skill failures in his command staff like Lysenko." I think picking competence is self-reinforcing, and I'd guessed that Napoleon would be an "A-lister hiring A-listers", as the saying goes.
You might want to check out how much less than A-list many of Napoleon's choices for kings of his new territories were. Coincidentally a lot of them were his family members.
They were however probably better than many of the rulers they supplanted.
Louis didn't do -terribly- in Holland, and Joseph was put in an impossible situation.
Murat was of course a terrible choice, but it's not like Napoleon's enemies did better picking Marshals - Bernadotte hardly did a bang-up job in Sweden, after all.
Mostly ignorant prediction: conquered areas with culture closer to France’s did about the same while more culturally independent areas were worse off. 65% confidence
Another country that avoided getting conquered by Napoleon was Russia. Didn't do so well over the ensuing 105 years.
But then, Russia is huge, which can make up for subpar institutions. The UK is not, so it needed good institutions to survive the war, and it had them. (Being an island was useful too.) Disclosure: I am from the UK, which is probably why I predicted that conquered states would do less well.
Russia was not really "conquered" by Napoleon in the same way that, say, the Rhineland was. He managed to invade it, but had to beat a very hasty (and incredibly bloody) retreat before he could impose any reforms.
Preregistering prediction: I think the reformed areas do worse for a while afterward, but then end up doing better in the longer term (like 10 years after).
Registering prediction in advance: Radically reformed patients (sorry, I see everything in terms of clinical trials now) performed slightly better in the short term (because backed by an empire), slightly worse in the medium term while dealing with unforeseen patient-specific consequences, and equally to slightly better in the long term.
Maybe this is because my politics are less libertarian than Scott's, but I struggle to understand the appeal of trying to classify "reforms" generally, or even "reforms imposed from outside," as good or bad. It seems like trying to classify "life events" as good or bad; it just depends on the individual thing, and they are so different that trying to cast judgment on them as a category doesn't reveal anything.
Interestingly though it’s a known result that ‘huge life events dont end up changing your happiness level very much’ regardless of the direction they were in. So there’s - something - to say sometimes even with only ‘magnitude’ as a variable.
I think if you are a non-expert who can't judge the value of a particular reform its helpful to have a prior about the relative value of evolved vs. designed systems. If your default assumption is "often there are good but counterintuitive reasons for the status quo" it raises the standard of evidence required to support a reform.
Is it the system itself that is evolved, or the solutions? Common law is considered evolutionary, but its skeleton consists of some fairly static principles. We’re those deduced a priori, or discovered empirically? Does it matter, so long as the result allows people to adapt to new circumstances?
It might be better if you classify life events as "rationally chosen" (like marriage, moving, taking a new job) vs "randomly imposed" (like being fired, disease, death of a family member). The former class is the sort that are intended to be good, but we might wonder whether they are actually good. Social reforms tend to be rationally chosen, and the question at hand is whether reformers are good at choosing reforms, or whether they are neutral, or whether they are as bad as randomly imposed changes.
This reminds me of a lesson I got out of studying Japan. For those who don't know, prior to the Meiji Restoration Japan was divided into about 300 mini-states. Unlike European feudal duchies, they really were statelets: centralized organized territories with salaried bureaucracies. This system kind of knew it was ending after the Opium War destroyed the local geopolitical order. And it really knew it was going to end after 1853. But the actual war didn't erupt until 1869. What happened in those intervening years? Well, each of these statelets tried to strengthen itself in the face of these changes.
Some embraced radical westernization, adopting European style institutions and even sending secret expeditions to study or cooperating with Europeans to smuggle in trade and books. Others instead reformed along traditionalist lines, seeking to strengthen traditional institutions and reform the state into earlier, superior forms. A few others took other paths. I was fascinated by two that took opposite paths: one state emulated Great Britain and another emulated Tang China. Both, of course, adapted it to their local conditions. Which fared better?
They both hugely outperformed expectations. A westernized army and economy apparently was about even with a modernized version of the Tang militia and economic system. The states that did poorly were the ones that failed to reform. All the states that reformed in any direction did pretty well, often in proportion to how much they could reform those institutions.
This made me consider that the capacity to reform and make a program work might be more important than the actual contents of the program. And I often think this is an underappreciated factor of analysis. Libertarianism is always the correct response to an ineffective or incompetent government. If the government's an idiot, it's best the government do as little as possible. It's only when the government is competent that we can debate whether private or public options are better. For example, with healthcare, there are two questions. Firstly, all the policy we actually talk about. Secondly, is the US government actually capable of getting it done? Think of the healthcare.gov website. That was just a straight capacity failure. No one was sitting there debating the advantages or disadvantages of having a functioning website. The government just couldn't get it done. And I think we don't talk about that kind of thing enough.
Enjoyed your comment and just want to nitpick your last conclusion. My view of the basic responsibilities of a state to its citizens isn’t mostly grounded in competence. (Ironically, that logic also underpins far left beliefs like “we should abolish the police entirely because the state can’t be trusted with their administration.”)
Even cases where the free market provides clear alternatives for some people (Kim Kardashian’s private wildfire-fighter squad comes to mind) don’t absolve the state’s obligations - it’s OK if the state does a crummier job then the best competitor as long as it provides some sort of baseline. We can disagree on where that line of obligation is in the first place, but I don’t think libertarianism is always the correct response to government incompetence, because sometimes, I want the government to be less incompetent, instead of alternatives gated to those who can afford them.
Everyone wants the government to be less corrupt, in which case it would be good for it to also exhibit competence. Extreme libertarians have given up on finding a systematic solution to preventing government corruption, in favor of trying to solve a similar problem of preventing competing governments from colluding. The moderate ones hope to solve the problem by reducing government responsibilities and rearranging them so that each relatively independent part has separate oversight. I guess that means that progressives and conservatives must be some sort of indifferent libertarians, as the only alternative seems to be the obvious straw man of “democratic governments are never corrupt.”
It's entirely possible that the costs imposed to ensure there's no corruption exceed those from the eliminated corruption. It's also possible that the anti-corruption measures reduce the ability to be effective as well.
Maybe it’s even worse. There is no person choosing on a margin who can assure that benefits exceed costs, and the choices aren’t necessarily the sort where if you spend a bit more you get a bit more. The only thing that is clear is that the existing constitutional arrangement fails to constrain the agents to please their principals. I suppose it is possible to hope that reducing constraints will actually increase compliance, but I would find that surprising. OTOH, politics is full of surprises. I would prefer that the experiment be performed ethically with participation strictly voluntary (and so excluding me).
You're smuggling the assumption an incompetent government can provide a baseline version. There's a legitimate debate to be had between the free market provisioning something unevenly but of superior quality vs the government provisioning something more evenly but of poorer quality. But the state doesn't necessarily need to rise to that level of competence. The state could simply fail to provide public goods in which case its attempts to do so are likely to be worse than doing nothing at all. The police, as you say, are a good example. Police that fail to provide public order can still fine and arrest people arbitrarily without doing anything to help crime, in which case abolishing the police might be the right response. I don't think it's where we are today in the US but it's a possible scenario.
My point is not that every government failure should lead to taking responsibility away from the government. My point is a government that repeatedly fails and makes things worse will create a libertarian response. And that's probably correct. See how rural areas went from being bullish on big government and bastions of progressivism to being libertarian basically for these reasons.
I've read once that the same is true for making changes to software development processes. Basically, any change tends to improve things in the short term.
A major reason might be that systems work best if they are adaptive on a smaller scale, where people don't blindly follow the rules, but instead use common sense, but that inflexible bureaucrats that abhor common sense tend to accumulate power over time. If you make reforms, the inflexible bureaucrats get pushed aside in favor of more flexible people.
However, a better solution may then be to target the actual problem and figure out a way to prevent the inflexible bureaucrats from gaining that power or to root them out, without needing senseless reforms.
There are 2 major issues that need to be addressed by software development processes: work distribution, and communication.
If you have a single developer working on a project for themselves, the process used doesn't matter - the developer (hopefully) knows all of the ins-and-outs of the project, and can adjust goals, design, etc., to fit their own needs.
Once you start having to distribute work, you start needing to be able to communicate how things work, the architecture, and the vision for the product. This requires process, if for no reason than to ensure sufficient documentation is produced. Likewise to ensure that the code produced fulfills the design goals.
You also need to communicate how things are going. This is a legibility requirement for various forms of management. People involved need to be able to synchronize and prioritize the work which they are doing. Process exists to allow that communication to occur.
You absolutely can get short-term gains by getting rid of the locally-inefficient process. But the costs are in long-term failures and systemic inefficiencies.
I do think "shaking things up" sometimes leads to good results regardless. But I'd say that the content of the reforms does matter ultimately. However, if you're nimble and adaptable then a bad reform becomes just a thing you tried rather than an ossified rule that handicaps you forever. Whereas if you're so sluggish it's going to be permanent or semi-permanent then you need to move with care. Not because that's generally wise but because you're effectively the head of a diseased body.
I think the evolved institutions are a kind of hill-climbing, and the top-down-imposed institutions allow you to get off a local maximum, but they don't guarantee that you'll end up better off in the end. When the radical change imposed from above is the metric system and the Napoleonic code, things work out a lot better than when the radical change imposed from above is murdering all the educated people and declaring that uneducated peasants will now be the doctors and engineers.
The good news about conqueror-imposed top-down changes is that they're usually well-tested aspects of the conqueror's society; the bad news is that you don't really know whether they'll translplant well to the new society they're being imposed on until you run the experiment.
I did notice the examples were, one, Revolutionary France and, two, the 20th Century United States. It seems to completely ignore, for example, colonialism, which certainly swept away local institutions and replaced them with radically different ones. Not ones meant to benefit the locals but if that's a limit, it's one they leave unstated. (And not one that Napoleon could necessarily claim either.) Just because a specific change is good doesn't mean all changes are good.
> This made me consider that the capacity to reform and make a program work might be more important than the actual contents of the program.
On a similar theme, the ability to stick to a diet has more predictive power for weight loss than which type of diet one sticks to. I don't know if this is actually true rather than just a truism, but the parallelism seemed strong to me.
This reminds me of a Maxim of Descartes' found in the Discourse on the Method:
"My second maxim was to be as firm and decisive in my actions as I could, and to follow even the most doubtful opinions, once I had adopted them, as constantly as if they had been quite certain.
In this I would be imitating travellers who find themselves lost in a forest: rather than wandering about in all directions or (even worse) staying in one place, they should keep walking as straight as they can in one direction, not turning aside for slight reasons, even if their choice of direction was a matter of mere chance in the first place; for even if this doesn’t bring them to where they want to go it will at least bring them to somewhere that is probably better for them than the middle of a forest.
Similarly, since in everyday life we often have to act without delay, it is a most certain truth that when we can’t pick out the truest opinions we should follow the most probable ones. And when no opinions appear more probable than any others, we should nevertheless adopt some; and then we should regard those as being—from a practical point of view—not doubtful but most true and certain, because the reason that made us pick on them is itself true and certain.
This maxim could free me from all the regrets and remorse that usually trouble the consciences of those weak and stumbling characters who set out on some supposedly good course of action and then later, in their inconstancy, judge it to be bad."
To me, it seems like the states who either went neither radically traditional or radically progressive in the face of changing times are like Descartes' "weak and stumbling characters." Maybe your political point here works on the individual level as well.
I think so. I'd add you need a goal or direction. But once you have that, even making wrong moves confidently will get you there faster than planning it to death.
Healthcare.gov is always treated as this big symbolic thing. But ultimately what happened was there were some bad news cycles when it was initially put in place as it had teething problems, but since then the system has mostly worked and delivered a lot of good outcomes
Honestly, I picked it not because I think healthcare.gov is uniquely bad or that the AMA is indefensible. I picked it because it was simple and obvious and uncontroversial. No one was stumping for a non-working website and there was no vested interest in making the website not work (or at least none among people that had input). The government just set a goal for itself and failed. It was an organizational rather than ideological or political failure. Better management, regardless of politics, could have overcome it.
But isn't it also, like, fine now? So it wasn't that the government didn't have the capacity to build that thing, they just got it wrong the first time, and now it's fine. Which, IDK, isn't uncommon for websites in general? And isn't that also true about reforms? You don't always get it right the first time, but you can keep iterating until you do? This doesn't seem to me like an argument against attempting reform.
It became fine not because the government redoubled its efforts but because they completely overhauled how they treated technology. In short, they built capacity independently of the problem. Which is my point: the ability of the government to do things well is important to success regardless of the object level reform.
I'd say total collapse like that is very rare. In particular it never happens with tech companies anymore. Healthcare.gov was an exception for another reason: the way they rescued it was by bringing in some very skilled but liberal Googlers who basically gave the government the sorry of expertise it could not buy, simply due to the ultra high profile nature of the failure and threat it posed to socialised healthcare in the USA.
Less than you'd think. It was mostly updates for modern technology or local conditions. For example, they used a similar system to raise military forces but organized them along 19th century warfare lines. It helped that the Tang were a highly commercialized, industrial, and trading dynasty. So you had things like industrial policy or trade law in there. There was even educational systems and the like, to which the modernizing Japanese added subjects like science.
In fact, in some ways the Tang copy was just plain better. The Tang had, in their three centuries, developed concepts about workers and peasants having rights. They also had concepts of private and public manufacturing and procurements. So the Tang copiers tended to focus on government supported industrialization and commercialization. Meanwhile, the Europeanizers in the south copied sugar plantations as a way to raise revenue, in some cases directly copying old slave codes and applying them to peasants or criminals they worked to death in the fields. They also just expropriated merchants or peasants to cram their reforms through. As a result some of the reactionaries, counterintuitively, became more industrialized.
Andrew Robert's Napoleon biography pushed me further in this direction. But in a world where Napoleon wins, I think WWI and WWII are replaced by a Soviet style collapse of empire at the beginning of the 20th century.
Obviously it's hard to say but I would expect a collapse of a French Empire after Napoleon had actually managed to rule for years or decades more in relative peace and set-up and train heirs and systems would probably resemble the collapse of the British empire more than the collapse of the USSR.
The British empire was overseas. The colonies thus had less direct impact on the home country. Some of this is related to "the gravity equation", but it's also related to states wanting geographic buffers next to them (Britain, as an island, has less need of this).
(For all of you worried about my memories of Yad Vashem, the link is to an alternate-history short story. It's a little heavy-handed at moments, but still enjoyable.)
I LOVED Robert's Napoleon biography. I'd always had a British-centric view of the Tyrant of Europe before, but I came out much more sympathetic to Bonaparte afterwards.
The only way would have been for him to put in place some kind of formalised system to select successors that had popular legitimacy. Like how many developing countries start with a "father of the nation" "president for life" who sets up institutions for elected successors.
I'm trying to think of how a Principate-style succession system would have worked for the Napoleonic empire, but I'm struggling to come up with even worth non-dynastic heirs. The most competent Frenchmen I can think of are either just skilled in the martial arena (Davout was a brilliant general but would he have been a competent emperor?) or politically totally impossible (Talleyrand).
I guess it's the same problem Augustus ran into - there's only one Augustus, only one Napoleon.
Sometimes I do wonder how much better off the world might have been if somebody had just shot Napoleon in the head in 1806. He was doing so much right up until then, for as much of a bastard as he was.
I wonder how much of the positive changes came from the specific technocratic/policy reforms the French enacted vs. just destroying the existing systems and letting new systems blossom. Considering this all happened right around the start of the industrial revolution, it was probably a good time for radical change no matter the political or ideological reforms that were enacted.
To put it more bluntly it seems destruction forces progress, which will often lead to better outcomes, but I doubt many people would want to have their entire communities and livelihoods destroyed just because it'll improve economic conditions in the area fifty years later.
I suspect that the breaking up of existing systems was the bigger contributor, and as you say especially with the timing around the Industrial Revolution.
Central Europe had become very ossified in those small principalities, and most reasonable systems would have been better than what was in place by that point.
That's a good point. It's possible that the short duration of Napoleonic rule might have had positive effects that allowed conquered places to, after Napoleon's abdication and exile, kinda pick and choose what reforms they wanted to keep vs discard, whereas if Napoleonic rule had lasted longer, things might not have looked so rosy. After all, Napoleon treated conquered nations as vassal states which were forced to feed money and men into the French war machine.
Reading the paper, what comes to mind is Henrich. The authors note that some of the destroyed reforms went even beyond 'guilds', and there was outright serfdom/slavery in some of the principalities. These were really bad states, and it's not surprising that the French modern synthesis Napoleon employed could appeal greatly to their inhabitants and steamroll them. If I were a German noble, I'd definitely have concerns about recruiting a huge serf army, training them in firearms and rapid march, augmented with artillery, and emphasizing high-speed tactics and flexibility in remote army divisions with considerable autonomy (plus an accompany ideology of egalitarianism & civil rights etc); forced to choose between risking defeat by the atheist republicans on the other side of the Rhine or the serfs...
So a synthesis of Scott's observations here is that we do not have here a counterexample of the success of utopian high-modernist technocratic officials imposing idealistic new policies by fiat and it turning out to be remarkably better than the Cryptic Wisdom Of Tradition. Instead, we have cultural selection (of just the sort that *created* the Wisdom of Tradition in the first place!): Napoleon didn't impose a bunch of brand new policies, but policies which reflected the latest and most successful traditions in France, which had proved their worth by enabling it to field these highly-effective armies and stunningly defeat its combined enemies. Things like Justinian or Napoleon's civil code aren't pulled out of thin air, but mostly *rationalize* and systematize all sorts of de facto rules which had evolved to get around antiquated outdated patchworks of de jure rules. Likewise, abolishing serfdom or guilds wasn't some dreamy new idea, but had visibly worked in creating the huge citizen-armies and French economy powering it all. And so on. Napoleon was installing a new Tradition which was superior, evolutionarily, to the old one.
This is also similar to the Meiji or other examples. Overimitating a highly-successful competitor, even when you're not sure which parts are the important parts (ties and business suits: not important, but come in as part of the package deal anyway, sadly), often works pretty well if you have the baseline capacity to reform at all. If you don't, well, if the difference is big enough, you'll get reformed anyway, one way or another...
This seems a really good point. Wonder if a really good filter for "radical reforms" being implemented on a national scale on a large nation would be "please point to somewhere this has been successful elsewhere." Encourage new ideas to tried first in smaller countries, in single states, or in test city zones.
Registering a prediction of 30% probability that the reformed areas did better. I'm counting a case where they both did equally well as a "No" for resolution. Predicting relatively low since the title of the post contains "consequences" which has a negative connotation thus biases me towards expecting poor results in the reformed constituencies. No other factors went into this prediction.
It seems likely that there's a strong selection effect in that the reforms studied were the famous Napoleonic reforms and not some random radical reforms that went really badly and no one thinks about anymore. After all, the anti-radical-reform argument isn't that it's *impossible* for radical top-down reform to go well, just that such reforms don't *tend* to go as well as evolved institutions. It seems like picking one of the most famous reforms in history, which instituted the Napoleonic code that French law is *still based on*, is stacking the deck a little.
(My prediction was that the occupied places did better (60%), despite my general skepticism of radical reform. This was based on googling "Napoleonic code," seeing that it's famous and still in use in modern France, and concluding that it must be pretty good since cultural evolution kept it around this long.)
Well, the reforms studied are "the aggregate of all reforms actually instituted by the conquering emperor".
You could argue that the fact that the conquest was successful is selecting for positive reforms, or maybe even that the choice of Napoleon rather than some other conquering emperor is cherry-picking, but it's not like they isolated the effects of just *some* of the reforms that Napoleon made.
Prediction: comparing principalities that were reformed or not reformed has the same methodological problems as comparisons on any not-very-random sorting.
Registering my prediction in advance: I predict that the non-reformed systems did at least 5% better (on whatever metric the researchers used), and I am 60% confident in this prediction.
> So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-their-traditions polities?
My immediate reaction was "oh, come on, what do you mean by 'better'?"
And the paper makes clear that their measure was... urbanization rates. (They also looked at GDP directly, but it sounds like their GDP data was so fuzzy and unreliable that they weren't comfortable using it as a measure.)
I wish the post had given this more attention. "Radical reform increases urbanization rates" is a) kind of unsurprising (modern ideas correlate strongly with urbanization for all kinds of reasons), b) not a refutation of anything in Seeing Like a State (the author kind of hates cities, right?), and c) not a sufficient basis for the kinds of value claims the post and the paper's authors seem inclined to make.
In other words, this is framed as an objective qualitative argument against James Scott's thesis, but it fails to convince because begs the question by reducing the problem to "legible" statistics and values. You had one job!
On reflection I think there's a lot to be said about this. There are other measures than economic which people factor into their quality of lives. If Napoleonic reforms were focused on economic growth, and they did so, that's great, it means they were rational. But that does *not* mean they were what the people on whom they got imposed wanted. The Soviet Union experienced a tremendous growth in economic and military power from 1922 to 1980 -- but I think the life of the ordinary person became much less happy. Obviously there's a limit to this, but people *do* value intangibles like liberty, stability, community substantially, perhaps in some cases more than sheer material wealth.
I'm vaguely reminded of the fairly radical notion I've heard that the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 or so years ago was, for most people, a disaster. To be sure, average wealth skyrocketed -- but at the cost of a large increase in workloads, disease burden, and existential anxiety, and a significant decrease in individual liberty. A hunter-gatherer tribe tends to work fairly little -- only few hours a day -- does not catch diseases very often, and tends to have high levels of individual liberty. After all, if you can live off the land, you can always just walk away from a tribal situation that doesn't suit you. By contrast a peasant in an early agricultural society has to work much harder, dawn to dusk, because so much of his production is siphoned off for general social benefit (and particularly for the wealthier classes). He is also unable to function as a unit, so he is stuck where he is, at the mercy of the city-state being run well.
Average wealth did not skyrocket after the Agricultural Revolution. In fact, defining wealth as "ability to realize your preferences", it went down. What went up was population, and eventually traders and government. Which meant, at some point, writing and art and civilization. But the fantastic increase in population means you can't go back to hunting and gathering.
On the other hand, hunting and gathering should not be romanticized. It now looks like significantly more than a few hours a day were needed to do all the work that kept body and soul together. And hunter-gatherers are social. Cutting ties with your band and just walking away is a much bigger deal than leaving Boston to take a job in Seattle.
Isn't the big downside of being a hunter-gatherer that your population sooner or later hits the carrying capacity of your little patch of territory and you need to either acquire new territory via conquest/annihilation or get a bunch of your own guys killed in the attempt?
No. The downside of foraging is that agriculturalists can outcompete you because they generate a surplus of food that can be locked up and used to raise an army, and that army can force you to give up your land.
The third alternative is to control your population. Many people in the field think that population was kept from increasing by long-term breastfeeding (which suppresses ovulation) and, when times were tough, infanticide.
Yes, I agree that the "wealth" of the typical individual may well have gone *down* -- that's the contrarian hypothesis to which I'm alluding. But people have spoken of the Agricultural Revolution for almost as long as I've been alive -- it was certainly a staple of my basic education 45 years ago -- as an unalloyed good, because of the tremendous increase in disposable wealth, that which enabled the building of cities and ships and pyramids. The idea that this might have been for the typical person the inverse of Galbraith's famous acerbic comment about the US ("private opulence and public squalor") -- i.e. public magnifence but private misery -- had never occurred to me, and yet, I think it's a question worth pondering.
I think that idea has become "conventional wisdom". A turning point may have been Jared Diamond's 1999 popularization, <href=https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race>The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race</a>. His Guns, Germs, and Steel had been published in 1997 and made him a celebrity intellectual, especially after it won a Pulitzer Prize the next year. (GGS has a few silly things in it but is basically a very good book.)
What would an objective argument using illegible statistics look like?
I don't think this is much of a referendum on "Seeing like a State" because its about a temporary disruption of an evolved order not a permanent imposition of a designed one. Napoleon was defeated in 1815 and the particular systems designed by high minded French revolutionaries were replaced by a variety of Congress of Vienna created governments. The future urbanization growth is not a consequence of the system Napoleon imposed, but of whatever was allowed to evolve once the Feudal system was burned away. If Napoleon wins Waterloo and keeps imposing top-down liberal reforms as he ages maybe things work out differently.
But it's notable that the eventual result was the aftermath of an initial radical liberal ideology (the initial revolution), tempered by an imperialist populist takeover (Napoleon), and then replaced by a conservative monarchist attempt at compromise (Congress of Vienna). We might not expect the same results if we had just one or two of these layers.
> In other words, this is framed as an objective qualitative argument against James Scott's thesis, but it fails to convince because begs the question by reducing the problem to "legible" statistics and values.
Not only that, it's doing it in ways that you would expect to have the legibility problem.
Suppose you introduce markets among other things. Now instead of spending $60 of your own labor building a chair to use, you buy one in the market for $50. This is a $10 gain, but if you're measuring it based on legible metrics (i.e. amount of commerce) then it gets put down as a $50 gain. If the same set of reforms also resulted in a separate $30 loss, the conclusion is inverted.
Plus, legible metrics are gamed. If reformers run around stamping out illegible activity (e.g. penalizing informal barter as tax evasion) then the loss of the value from all the prevented barter transactions is not measured but the potentially smaller gain from the legible replacement transactions is.
I very much agree. I find it easy to believe that if you fix one objective function (like economic growth), then drastic reforms can improve this objective function drastically.
But often that comes at a cost. People have all different kind of objective functions. Like, a lot of people have the objective function "I personally want to stay alive and not be hungry in the next year, and I don't care whether GDP takes off like crazy in 35 years, thank you very much". I also find it easy to believe that grown systems often (not always) do a fair job of taking a lot of these objectives into account.
Is it obvious that "breaking up guilds" is a good thing? For economic growth yes, absolutely. But was it the best for people living in these countries at that time? Perhaps still yes, but I think this is *way* less obvious. 20 years after being invaded, would a lot of people have said that it was a good thing? Or if they are too dumb to recognize, does GDP growth mean on some "objective" level that it was a good thing for these people? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. In any case, it seems to be a case where cost might be harder to quantify than benefits.
For our days, we face the same problem. GDP has grown a lot with globalisation. And yet, a significant amount of people does not express utmost gratitude about globalisation. This could either mean that these people are happier with globalisation than they would be without globalisation, but that they do not recognize it. (I mean it, that IS a possibility.) But it could also be that globalization inflicts costs on these people that are not captured well by the usual economic measures, and that globalisation is a net negative for them in their own personal objective function, even after accounting for their new shiny smartphones. In this case, we (as most of us are supporters of globalisation here) should acknowledge that the policy we want to enforce makes their lifes worse, and that they have every reason to fight it (e.g., by electing Trump). Of course, the optimal solution would be to find compromises and compensations, and so on (not just financial compensation, this requires making a true effort on finding out how the outcome can be improved in their individual objective functions). But the first step is to acknowledge that such a policy can cause bad losses for some people, and that the *sane and objectively best strategy* for them might be to elect Trump in order to put a stop to the policy.
A former boss of mine told me about a job he had in the early 80s, making tires. It sounded like pretty menial work in a factory, without much/any automation. He never went to college, and was able to do that work right out of high school with no special training. He made $12/hour in 1982. Plugging that into an inflation calculator, and that's about $70,000/year in today's money. As a single guy in his early 20s, he was making a good living, and bought whatever he wanted.
Fast forward to the 2000s, and he's making the same or less money after inflation. It looks like he's making more than double his previous income, but the cost of everything went up and he can't "get ahead." His job in management requires a significant understanding of regulatory rules and how to run a business. He can no longer afford to live beyond the means of a typical person in his age group (he lived at a fairly modest level for a guy with a family, house, kids).
No, he didn't have a smartphone, or probably any computer, and was much more limited on things like clothing, exotic foods, whatever. But he didn't know he was "missing" any of those things, because his mind had no concept of them. GDP went up significantly during that time frame, but not for him. He lost money, in terms of relative wealth, being able to purchase the things he wanted, and so on.
Personally, I think the high paying industrial core of the US during the 70s and 80s was more of an aberration than something to be expected, but I can't blame someone in his position for looking back on what he had before longingly. I don't know if he voted for Trump, but I could certainly see the incentive if he did.
Would it really kill economists to stick some reference to effect size in the abstracts of these things? If this were a clinical trial, and the authors were like "hey, good news, napoleolimumab increases modernization, now FDA-approved for your unsightly problems with Prussian stagnation" they'd have the common decency to say "10 years of french reforms increases the primary endpoint of urbanization in 1900 by 9% from 41% to 50%" But instead i had to hunt through the text for it like a goddamn animal (page 23, if you care. They also have a point estimate of 36% GDP increase.
But now that they forced me to go through the paper, some not-terribly informed thoughts:
1. I have the usual concerns about econ research -- were any of these analyses pre-specified? How many different analyses were tried before they went with this one, etc.
2. If I am reading this correctly, by 1850 no changes are seen. So all the positive effect of the new institutions is from 1850-1900. Interesting.
3. Riffing on '2' -- maybe this can be spun as another example of "industrialization changes everything" or "conservatism is a better default in the absence of massive scientific/technological change." Blowing up institutions in 700 AD does you no good, because there's no innovation to take advantage of, you just get chaos. Blowing up institutions in 1800 AD helps, because it enables social shifts to take advantage of new modes of production.
4. And just for honesty: my prediction was "can't discern an obvious effect" (which in retrospect was idiotic given that if it were a null effect it never would have been published)
re: item 2. Generally when you give a physical system a kick, it responds immediately and the effect dampens out from there.
But if this paper (and your reading) is correct, the kick lasted from roughly 1804 to 1815, but the actual effect slumbered for at least 35 years before making a difference for the succeeding 50?
Something else is going on here. The explanation that comes to mind is that the reforms made no difference under the economics of the early 1800s and only kicked in when other things changed - and yet nothing nudged the systems back in those 35 years. Not sure I believe it.
please, they aren't estimating any effects. the stats is all window dressing for their 'plausible' story. 1. is a lol. the measurement noise, model misspecification, etc. if accurately (impossible ofc) represented would make the bounds on the effects to large to write a paper about. but it is all a dog and pony show anyway.
I am ambivalent. The attempt to quantify and measure is admirable. It's one way to prevent yourself from spinning comforting stories that accord with your preconceptions. But, as you say, unless you're careful you end up with another story with the added prestige of 'studies show...' Acemoglu's a well known institutionalist, so it's not surprising that his studies show dramatic effects of institutional change. But of course, the arrow of causation can run in both directions -- I am sure Acemoglu would say he is an institutionalist *because* of the data, not that he interprets the data according to pre-existing biases. We all tend to believe this about our own beliefs, of course, and I am no different!
Prediction: 80% that the reformed states surpassed the non-reformed states, but only for a short (no more than a decade) time period before competition forced the other states to adapt.
Keep in mind that WWII era Germany and Japan went through radical reforms in the late 19th century, so I doubt they can be described as organically evolved societies.
The problem with this is a limited metric being used to derive a conclusion about a complex whole. If your measure of "better or worse" is simply aggregate economic growth this is an unsurprising result, even to many on the "traditionalist/evolved institutions" side. The trads (including me, and Burke) would argue, though, that there is a lot more to the health of a society, human happiness, and the common good than GDP.
So the state looked at a legible system (the conquered villages) and an illegible system (the unconquered villages), compared then according to its metrics (GDP, economic growth, etc.) and decided the legible system did better? Color me unimpressed. Almost every such reform looks better from the state's POV - that's the whole point of _Seeing Like a State_.
As Burke said, "The Revolution did not make France free, it made France formidable."
Bonapartism offered a sort of cautious version of the French Revolution, a hard-headed military man's version of rational modernization. It remained highly influential around the world for more than a century, such as in Bolivarism in Latin America, Kemalism in Turkey, and Nasserism in the Middle East.
Was gonna say 80% that radical (but well-intended) revolutions make matters worse short term (10 years) and 60% that they make room for necessary but impracticable in current system reforms. But then it dawned on me that "better-or-worse" is too heavily depended on the deciding criteria to form a meaningful opinion. China does just great economy-wise, but human rights and pollution are better left unsaid.
This paradigm bothers me. It seems implausible that there is some general, usually-applicable rule that entrenched institutions/traditions are either better or worse than systems imposed through radical reforms. Surely, an entrenched institution can be effective and efficient or ossified and redundant. And just as surely, a radical reform can be well-conceived or foolishly overconfident.
If that's right, then at best the paper here proves either that the French Revolution's reforms were well-devised or that the systems they replaced were weak, or both. Since the old systems were typically similar, and the reforms were all in the same direction if not literally the same, it suggests that *in this case* the reforms were an improvement. I don't see how we can possibly generalize from that result. Isn't the issue always case-specific?
I'd agree it's difficult to have a general rule, but the context of this is in response to people asserong the general rule that evolved institutions are better
My immediate thought when asked to make a prediction was "on what metric?" That basically sums up my frustration with this topic in general.
Evolved systems will, by nature, optimize, but there's no reason to think they will optimize on the metric that "we" want to optimize. In that sense, the problem with Brazilia wasn't poor optimization, it was misalignment between the metrics of the designers and the populace.
The same problem faces most modern reforms. We have broad disagreements about the different metrics Even if we totally agree about what a reform would do, different people will feel differently about it due to their different metrics. No policy is positive on all reasonable metrics, so no policy is universally agreed to be good.
That isn't to say agreeing on what the effects a reform will have is trivial. Even as a non-economist, I'm comfortable saying today's global economic system is a lot more complicated than that of pre-industrial France.
on what planet can we meaningfully say that the feudal system of europe "evolved." it evolved no more than Napoleon evolved his armies into those same places
I'm not sure what your objection is. What term would you use to describe how Europe arrived at the feudal system it had at the time of Napoleon's invasion? It hadn't existed forever, it developed over time...don't we typically call that "evolution"?
Prediction at the point of dare, before reading the rest: the reformed zones did initially better, but over 10-30 years returned to baseline, and no statistically significant difference is observed. More or less based on the idea that people are stimulated by New And Different and everyone tries harder, followed by Reversion To The Mean -- over a modest time (like 25 years) people fall into whatever rut suits their nature. (Long-term change only comes from technological or environmental changes.)
I feel like there's a good analogy with software systems. As large code bases grow, they tend to get messy: early architectural decisions are in conflict with new requirements; hacks and shortcuts never get fixed and snowball into monstrosities. So then there's always the question: do we rewrite from scratch and make it better this time?
Instead, the conventional advice is to always be refactoring opportunistically. Refactoring means you're not working from scratch: you're taking what exists and re-architecting it into something better. You might rewrite a chunk of code, but since it's a small piece, it's easier to be sure you're not missing functionality that already exists.
Although the opportunistic refactoring tends to be the superior approach, setting up incentives to make it happen is tricky. With pressure to meet deadlines and little recognition for it, refactoring often doesn't get done. When it comes to government, I think we see the same effect: the news doesn't cover small changes and politicians don't get a lot of credit for it, so there's not much "refactoring" of laws or institutions that gets done. Cruft accumulates, inefficient processes ossify, and eventually we get so fed up we want to do a "rewrite".
Code also runs automatically in the background retaining its original structure. Social institutions require continuous buy in from participants and are vulnerable to drift
75% reform. I think a lot of this is based this off the most salient data point in my mind: Japan, which shouldn't necessarily generalize to all forms of foreign-imposed reform. But it's clearly a good example that such a thing is possible and often overlooked.
Two hundred years of historical changes (in France, no less) summarized in one blog post and I'm supposed to come to some kind of conclusion about our culture?
The (so-called) Glorious Revolution of 1688 made England more economically dynamic by introducing modern practices from Amsterdam such as corporations.
The Republican Revolution of 1861, made possible by Southern Democrats walking away from their Senate majority, allowed the passage of many modernizing pieces of legislation that forward-thinking pro-business politicians like Henry Clay had been talking about since sometimes as long ago as 1812.
18th Century Enlightened Despotism in Central and Eastern Europe, carried out by pragmatic conservatives, was fairly successful as well.
>So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-their-traditions polities?
I'd guess the results would be dependent both on how long after the "conquer and reform" we look, and on a metric I don't really have a better name for than 'core v. periphery'. Conquest is inherently destructive, and the transition period is unlikely to create prosperity out of thin air whereas it can definitely do the opposite. On the other hand, I'd absolutely expect it to lead to massive gains in the medium-to-long term as the new philosophies both have greater freedom to adapt to new circumstances and simply because they're guaranteed to be replacing something that has failed in at least one key metric. I'd expect it to look something like an accelerated industrialization, which might be difficult to disentangle because if we're talking Napoleonic it'd be happening at the same time as 'conventional' industrialization. The destructive effects might be a little weaker at peripheral regions but the positive significantly less as well.
Hard to put a probability on something I'm guessing is going to vary in both space and time, but to take a swing at it: 80% of significant improvement in the 'core' regions on a timespan of up to a century. Comparatively little change on the periphery, maybe 60% chance of improvement in the same time scale with a preceding decline?
One thing to keep in mind about Edmund Burke was that, while he had a practical side, he also had a Romantic side. He was talented at romanticizing what was in the interests of the rich and powerful. Rationalists tend to be out of touch with the Romantic movement that arose from the mid-18th Century to the mid-19th Century in reaction to 18th Century Enlightenment Rationalism, although it led to some of the greatest works of art of all time.
I would hazard a guess that the radically reformed places did better, but I'm pretty unsure about this. Maybe 60%? That said, there definitely do seem like some confounding factors. Napoleon's empire didn't last forever, and when it was falling apart, maybe that affected places in it differently? Could be that the chaos hit there worse, could be that they started invading neighbors to recapture some of that early expansionary spirit. And when people were fighting against Napoleon, they'd probably treat the areas he conquered differently from the places downriver that weren't. Maybe?
My uncertainty stems from radical reform seeming dangerous, but the status quo being not ideal either, and my general ignorance of European history.
I feel like the call for predictions needs to be amended with dimensions... Like better on what axis? Wealth? Infant mortality?
I would say the reformed ones became slightly wealthier, but that may be tempered by the economic losses of being conquered and the associated destruction.
Also, I know almost nothing about Napoleonic legal codes.
I think what I got most strongly out of Seeing Like a State was the language of legibility and how that drives State reform. (J. C.) Scott selects certain schemes to increase legibility that fail catastrophically, of course, as the subtitle makes explicit, but the deeper concern I see from him is over _what gets lost_, which is illegible, and therefore never can be counted as a loss (which this study, of course, cannot account for, looking as it does at the exact same legible metrics that Napoleon was looking for). Of course, his examples are double-bounded, because they have to be _both_ examples of catastrophic failure _and_ examples which we can look back on legibly now and say 'oh yeah, shit... that was a terrible idea.' Which also means (and J.C. Scott is explicitly concerned about this) that those examples are poor examples anymore because we know so much more now and can avoid the mistakes...
In this respect, (J.C.) Scott seems similar to McIntyre (who, remember, was a diehard Marxist before he became a Thomist and Catholic–and I think it shows) and his After Virtue. You lose things, many of them perhaps permanently, with radical reform and centralization, you even lose the language in which to express and, finally, understand what has been lost and why it matters.
Samzdat's read of Seeing Like A State grapples more directly with this, as does most of Lou's writing there.
I think I disagree with Scott's initial sorting. Placing evolved institutions on one hand and complaints about vetocracy on the other strikes me as not wrong exactly, but incomplete. I think it's pretty clear that both threads have their answers to vetocracy, and I think they both recognize the problem. Vetocracy, after all, frequently prevents organic evolution of communities, societies, and institutions. Granted, I'd agree that erring on the side of evolution is more likely to result in the rise of vetocracies than centralized systems (since a vetocracy can be an organic evolution in the first place, but then prevents evolution).
I think this is borne out by the remainder of the essay. Scott points out the counter-example to the trend identified by Acemoglu as being the UK, the font of all modern organic evolution ideology and one that proves it can produce outcomes as good or better than any other system. I agree.
The difference is that the organic evolution in the UK tended (for reasons that are probably impossibly complex) to minimize or at least control the growth of vetocracy and the other malefic consequences of organic reform. The ossified German states that escaped the table-flip of the French Revolution had not just been entirely captured by the malefic side of evolution, but their ruling elites saw the maintenance of such as existential (even when their neighbors and social equals down the river and across the border did better in the long run and often in the short, too). As a result, and given the complete capture of political, economic, religious, and (frequently, but not always) cultural power in those small states and estates, the organic evolution that produced that elite class killed evolution.
And yes, of course, the clear liberalism of revolutionary French institutional reform is fairly obviously good from a standpoint of promoting human thriving (probably showing my bias here, but the massive growth of surplus and the the rapid reduction of poverty and all other forms of misery worldwide since the American/French/Industrial Revolutions seems like a track record well worth owning). Returning to theme, the UK had evolved most of this liberalism organically and didn't need a revolution to instantiate it or permit the industrial revolution to take off.
Tangent-ish: one of the things that fascinates me about Napoleon was the union of the liberal and totalitarian in one person. He was stridently in favor of liberalizing as far as possible (by the understanding of his time) all forms of ordinary day-to-day to existence, mainly commercial, social, and religious. On the other hand, he would tolerate absolutely no dissent from his subjects nor any neutral power in Europe. He had no use for civil or political liberty of any kind, and would imprison, torture, and kill any who dared to think independently in public. He could take criticism privately, though. But that was mainly from the officers he lived with on campaign, and on military matters only.
And then on the other hand, you have some places where some extremely radical reforms were imposed technocratically, and the results were terrible. Scott name-checks collective farming, but let's not forget Maoist China and the Khmer Rouge. So I disagree that the radicalness of reform has much to do with success. I think it has to do with correctness of reform. This would apply to post-fascist reconstruction of Europe and Japan.
By the same token, let's not forget the violent reaction of the European people to even the very modest (on average) counter-revolution imposed by the victors in the Napoleonic wars. That (along with the revolutionary forces unleashed by previous Ancien Regime excess) led to a century convulsed by many and serial (of admittedly varying intensity) revolutions in France, Spain, Germany, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Hungary, Poland, and even the UK (Chartists, etc.) That is, those were relatively non-radical reforms imposed fairly gently (again, on average; every counter-revolution was different), but they were clearly wrong, and so some more heads rolled. I think that had to do with correctness more than radicalness.
Final note: the economic core of Europe. By some analyses, France was not (and is not) in it. You might have heard of the blue banana. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana. It's a theory (that may have been concocted by a French dissident to critique his government's policy) that there's a large amount of easily accessible coal and iron in defined areas of Europe, and this was a primary driver of industrialization. The parts of France within the banana (Nord Pas-de-Calais, Picardie, and Alsace-Lorraine, primarily, and Rhone-Alpes secondarily) were/are some of the most industrialized areas of the country.
I don't know whether I agree with it, but it does seem that, after the end of the Napoleonic wars, France entered a sustained period of economic, political, and (especially) demographic decline, relative to the other nations of Europe. France's political unity and favorable position on the Atlantic coast allowed it to punch somewhat above its weight at one point, in seizing a large overseas empire during the New Imperialism, but other than that, it was fairly downhill until today, having joined the ranks of the Europoors with Italy and Spain. I'm only partially kidding about that.
What makes me skeptical of the theory is the motivated reasoning of its originator, whose purpose was to criticize excessive centralization in Paris, outside the banana. It still rings true to me, but I don't have a ton of confidence.
To the extent that the foregoing is just a re-writing of Scott's essay, I can only say I started writing this about half way through reading it.
From a position of ignorance, I would guess that the ones receiving the Napoleonic code were ~70% likely to do better. It seems like codes of laws that stuck were mostly centralised and European principalities weren't small enough to benefit from the effect of being a small community where everyone knows each other.
Having read the article, I think we're just trying too hard to impose grand patterns on the world when local specifics matter – though of course (James) Scott would argue that the state functions to impose grand patterns when they previously weren't there.
But 'grassroots' systems can just as easily be products of one local man's or family's whims or influece, and can be just as irrational. Maybe it's the case that good policies like 'having individual rights' work best when they come organically, which you could argue happened in England, but the second-best case is to impose them externally. Sometimes things just need a shakeup because they're ossified, sometimes a shakeup breaks things that were working.
I'm not convinced small European principalities were small enough to be considered traditionalist, grassroots societies – maybe they're better seen as a collection of little Prussias imposing their own orders, and Napoleon simply had better ones.
One could argue that the sprawling suburbs of Phoenix and the vast, unorganised urban townships of Nairobi or Lagos are the products of organic growth – can anyone say they're better than places with stronger central planning? NIMBYism is a fundamentally grassroots, traditionalist movement. It is often better when the state can build a subway line when it needs to.
I think 'sometimes centralised radical reform is good, sometimes bad, it depends on both the intended reforms and expecially on the execution' is not a very interesting take but a true one. To reach the kinds of conclusions we talk about here, we'd need a large scale study of _representative sample_ of radical reform, and even then I don't think a meaningful conclusion could be reached.
Radical reformers improved legible metrics like GDP per capita, lumber per acre farmed, and taxes collected. However, other metrics like quality of life, lifespan, and subjective happiness decreased. The length of time that the radical political was in effect did not last longer than the amount of time it was implemented (using Napolean's exile as 0 on the time axis).
My guess was 74% that the radical reforms would be net positive. In retrospect I think this was mostly a failure; given what I knew, I should have been able to be more confident in this.
Re the more general debate between radical reformers and traditionalism, I kind of like the analogy I made of society as a damped harmonic oscillator, which is probably the most stereotypically rationalist thing I've ever written
Same. In retrospect the only reason I had for not giving it 90+% confidence was that Scott was asking the question in a blog post, so it was more likely to have the counterintuitive conclusion. As part of a more general phenomenon. Eg if someone were to ask me out of the blue "do you think oaks are a type of tree?" the mere fact they are asking would make me think it wasn't the obvious answer (and that there was some technicality in the botanical definition of tree I missed, or whatever.)
Though in this case that heuristic took me in the wring direction. I guess Scott had given more credence to the conservative arguments than I thought
I think the discussion gets muddled by trying to compare such materially different places as Brasilia and Napoleonic France, especially in light of the stark differences between their stated goals. Comparing England's process of industrialization with that of the USSR and Communist china might be more fruitful, especially considering that Mao's revolution and later reforms were all (ostensibly) done to benefit a peasant class that existed under a very old-school feudal system.
But if all the successful instances of rapidly 'reforming' longstanding systems(post-war Japan, Napoleonic France, Germany etc) all basically neoliberal , then that tells us much more about neoliberalism than technocracy itself.
My take away is that the question "should my priors favor evolved systems over designed ones" is kind of silly, because a given policy's origins are completely incidental to its results.
Acemoglu measures the current status of conquered lands in 1850, 35 years after Waterloo, which was, apparently, long enough for the bad effects of the breaking things and killing people to recede.
Some of the shorter term effects of the Napoleonic Wars were dire. For example, the chaos caused by Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia in 1812 led to the breakdown of government wolf control efforts across Eastern Europe, which led to wolf packs running amok for a few decades until they could be brought under control again.
The Napoleonic Wars had the good side effect of being so bad that they discouraged Europeans from going to war with each other all that often from 1815-1913. They had the bad side effect of entrenching Reaction in control of much of Europe, discouraging British-style cautious democratic reforms until the second half of the 19th Century.
I think Russia is not the right counter-example. Unlike virtually every other power in continental Europe during the wars, it retained 100% of its independence from France. Certainly the revolutionary French never (truly) administered any of its territory, and instead only fought an incredibly destructive war on said territory.
That makes me curious about what happened in Portugal, which was also a battleground and whose politics were never very subservient to France. Indeed, to avoid a revolution, the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil. By some measures, they traded subservience to France for subservience to the UK, their traditional ally. Perhaps some good parallels could be drawn with Russia.
In Switzerland, most historians probably agree that the reforms imposed by Napoleon had an overall beneficial long-term effect. To some degree, elites the French drove away from power managed to return in some parts of Switzerland, but a return to the outdated political system was impossible and beneficial compromises were found. I suppose that apart from Switzerland, other areas profited in a similar way.
But I think we should be careful to extrapolate from this. One important point is, of course, that France was culturally very close to the European countries it modernized, and the French people who took an active role had intimate knowledge of these countries. I would suppose that the track record for imposed reforms („nation building“ etc.) with a much greated cultural distance is much worse. Sometimes, it can go well, but in many cases, it does not.
The other important point, which is also emphasized in the text, is that the reforms conducted under Napoleon were actually rather moderate, as far as their content was concerned. They did not aim at some far-fetched utopian goals. They may have been more radical than comparable cases in how much energy they put into removing old elites and outdated structures, but what they replaced it with looks rather moderate from today‘s perspective and probably also from a contemporary perspective.
Well Switzerland won that round. North of the Danube, the experience was poisonous. Clausewitz was a Prussian General. Napoleon taught Prussia everything he knew. They created a military machine from which sprang the most catastrophic wars in human history. Yes, they industrialized, but the world would have been a better happier place if they had stuck to potatoes, beer, and wurst.
"The evidence suggests that areas that were occupied by the French and that underwent radical institutional reform experienced more rapid urbanization and economic growth, especially after 1850. There is no evidence of a negative effect of French invasion. "
Let us see. The Franco-Prussian War, World War I, The Russian revolution, World War II, The Holocaust, the Iron Curtain. The Collapse of the Soviet Union. The butcher's bill, say on the order of 100 million.
Rather than looking simply formally at "reform or not," it's important to look at the substance of a reform. The Napoleonic Code was strongly influenced by the Justinian Code of the 6th century AD, itself a codification of older Roman Law. So while the Napoleonic Code may have been "new" to the little duchies outside of France upon which it was imposed, it was hardly radical from the perspective of Western legal tradition. Perhaps the only lesson here is that, as legal codes go, the Napoleonic Code was pretty good. This would also accord with the non-correlation of Great Britain, which already had a good legal system.
European legists used the Corpus Juris Civilis (which included Justinian's Code) as the raw material from which they created both the Canon Law of the Roman Church and the civil law of Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Europe. During that era, the civil law, known as jus commune, was in effect throughout Western and Central Europe (including Scotland) except in England and Wales. The Napoleonic Code was a codification, and rationalization of the jus commune. Adopting it was not disruptive. The one legal field that was disrupted was marriage and divorce which had been under the jurisdiction of the Church.
The first thread ("institutions have evolved to something like a time tested optimum and reform is hubristic, etc etc.") suggests an essentialism that plagues a lot of conservative philosophy. As if "work ethic" and "value" and "character" and economic outcomes were perfectly fixed features of physical reality and not dynamically shifting systems interacting and changing each other. There's no reason that the territory or the agents within it can't shift and mutate and render what worked however long ago obsolete. An organism can be perfectly evolved into its niche until one day a random amino acid gets swapped in a virus genome then suddenly that organism's time-tested mating ritual spreads a new deadly illness. This seems to be more or less what happened with anti-maskers and covid, the notion that something could shift so radically in the environment and suddenly make a lot of indoor commerce dangerous is not just unthinkable but *laughably* ridiculous to some people.
I think about this whenever I hear Lincoln Project conservatives like Tom Nichols smugly dismiss younger generations as entitled and whiny. As if it were like a cosmological constant that x units of Hard Work = housing/a car/stability or whatever and there are no larger forces reshaping the relationships of people to capital.
A personal pet peeve of mine is the assumption that unintended consequences and perverse incentives, the things that are supposed to render reform and central government action unworkable, are exclusive to reform. For example the very notion of "private property" seems to work very differently in theory compared to practice. In the libertarian ideal, in theory there'd be some sort of maximal respectful non-interference with the property of others barring extreme externalities, etc. In practice homeowners aggressively leverage whatever government power they can muster to shut down the construction of more housing on other lots of private property anywhere near them. In practice the idea of property in peoples' heads seems to be something like: "This property is my investment, I can and must do whatever is necessary to protect its appreciation, including restricting the supply of nearby housing through government force." Nimbyism is bipartisan but its especially ironic that many of these people consider themselves ardent capitalists.
Even more ironic is that they use socialist arguments, "People should not be able to do whatever they want with their property. They should be forced to use it in the public interest." Which in practice favors the already well-off (which is ironic, or perhaps a stronger word).
Early on I was keen on Acemoglu as someone digging into the questions Mencius Moldbug was interested in, and even recommended his work to Moldbug. Later, around the time of Why Nations Fail, I became much more skeptical of his work (and Johnson's).
I can't find the post where I made this critique now (it might have been in the comments) but I recall them supposedly teasing out the effects of colonialism... by using malaria as a proxy for certain kinds of colonial institutions, rather than comparing Ethiopia & Thailand to neighbors or even considering the possibility that malaria's direct effect was confounding their results. If you trace back the links on that Coyne post though, I do note that the Acemoglu paper is in the tradition of Mancur Olson, who was also writing after Germany & Japan surged after WW2 (and in contrast to someone like James Scott). Greg Cochran would say that's because places with high human capital can rather easily recover from destroyed physical capital.
I forgot to note that other studies have shown that lands included in the Habsburg empire appear to be better off than ones just across Habsburg borders. With the irony being that the Habsburg's are as good a representation of the ancien regime the French revolution was against as you'll find.
I predicted the non-reformed areas would do better. Looks like I was wrong, but how wrong.
I have some unformed ideas about the difference between being conquered by an external force and having a reforming faction win from within the existing society. As the review points out, post-conquering, if the new system is "good" it will work well and if not it won't. The given examples (Germany, Japan after WWII) are external-force examples and I suppose the Napoleon examples are external-force as well, though some of the same duchies were probably once under the control of Charlemagne, so maybe more of a high-water mark of French expansion than external-force per se.
Contractors seem to do well after and during military action. There are things to rebuild and replace. I don't know how to quantify "GDP due to replacing what was destroyed" versus "really new growth."
Civil wars to institute "reform" seem to go differently (even the French revolution came apart after a few decades, hence Napoleon). When a different societal faction becomes dominant, the now-subordinate faction will potentially not cease to exist after all and there may be ?a greater tendency to authoritarian dynamics to keep the new social order in place, which might stifle growth as well. The status quo ante may be closer after a civil war.
The French Revolution wiped away a lot of the remnants of feudalism, a system that had emerged 1000 years before to provide local security against raids by Vikings and other Roving Bandits by allowing Stationary Bandits to set up to defend local turf. It worked pretty well under the conditions of the late Dark Ages (e.g., terrible roads). But by the 18th Century, feudalism was obviously outdated, as the more recent Absolute Monarchs insisted.
And the feudal system of layering complex bargains on top of other complex bargains and so forth and so on for a thousand years had made getting much done legally awfully complicated. The British had a system of allowing judges to creatively misread the legal record of the common law, but more conscientious Continentals tend to be bogged down by the weight of the past. So, the streamlined Code Napoleon was welcome. But keep in mind that the Code Napoleon wasn't all that radical. It reflected the neoclassical feelings of the age, that this is what the wisest Romans would have done if they were around today.
Exactly. I've recently finished the first volume of Taine's Origins of Contemporary France (1875), which is about the ancien regime. Taine, no progressive or liberal even by XIX century standards, shows two things in this volume: first, that the mass of feudal rights and obligations that constituted the ancien regime was rational and salutary when it was growing up in early to high Middle Ages, and second, that by late XVII and even more so by XVIII century these same structures had outlived their usefulness and were causing great harm to France. Conditions in most European nations to the east of France were almost certainly similar. It is thus no great discovery that a "sovereign bankruptcy" and a thorough restructuring improved things. Incidentally, one of the harms Taine mentions - perhaps the greatest one - was the degeneration of the French nobility into a network of coteries that passed their time in putting on mythological theater pieces, philosophical speculation, and unrestrained dalliance, and whose contact with reality on the ground was minimal. By the time they had, under the influence of Enlightenment philosophes, woken up to the condition of France, they were too feeble to conduct the necessary reforms, or to control the country after their initial stabs at liberalization had opened the floodgates. In nations that engaged in what Acemoglu et al. call "defensive modernization", the nobility wasn't quite so useless, and thus the Prussian, Austrian and Meiji Japan reforms were successful. As for England, Taine himself uses it as a point of comparison, describing how despite having reformed away much of the outworn feudal structure earlier than France (French philosophes having been in fact largely inspired by the English example), English nobility took up new duties, kept in touch with its constituents and its former feudal subordinates, and in consequence was capable of governing the country themselves rather than foist the nasty and disagreeable task onto the bureaucracy of King's intendants and sub-delegates. English nobles didn't need to read XVIII century equivalents of "Hillbilly Elegy" and "Deer Hunting with Jesus" in comically futile attempts to understand the lower classes.
My primary worry about the radical reform paper, which you touched on but didn't state explicitly, is that if these places had similar pre-existing institutions and economic circumstances, and France enacted the same reforms in all of them, then of course there was a consistent pattern, and this is kind of like having a sample size of 1.
Their claim that reform failures can be blamed on not being radical enough seems absurd. All the most famous examples of top-down reforms gone catastrophically wrong were pretty radical, no? Or was the problem with the Great Leap Forward that Mao wasn't thinking big enough?
I settled on the prediction that the French-invaded places were equally likely to have gotten better as worse. Once I saw the answer, part of my brain was very insistent that I was really leaning towards the reformed places doing better all along. Dammit, brain.
I mean, the problem with all of that is that the simplest answer is also the correct one.
Lemme quote the question they ask at the end of it:
> "It is interesting that the German state after World War II, though devastated by the war and de-Nazification, was still able by the 1960s to largely re-build the infrastructure which the Allies had pulverized in the closing stages of the war. In contrast, the South African state has been unable in the same amount of time to get the poor people, who fought for the end of Apartheid and voted for it, out of shacks and shanty towns."
The answer to why this is is that the Germans had already built an advanced civilization. This had never happened in South Africa.
People are often confused about what caused the colonization of Africa. People love to think that colonization made Africa poor. But Africa was already very poor. In fact, it has become much better since colonization in every way.
Colonization didn't make Africa poor; Poverty is what created the conditions for colonization. The extreme poverty of Africa made it ripe for conquest by the advanced European powers.
Taking away colonization didn't make these countries rich because the problem wasn't colonization, colonization was an effect of poverty, as they lacked the power, organization, and technology to keep the Europeans at bay.
You need to read Scott's other book. "The Art of Not Being Governed." Seriously, with what's going on in Burma... it is important to understand why the Burmese state is having so much difficulty and the highland polities he talks about.
"So maybe the moral of the story is something like - replacing stagnation and entrenched interests with good reform is good, and with bad reform is bad. Which sounds obvious, but I do think that considerations of "is this potentially challenging a carefully evolved system of traditions?" is less important than I originally believed."
Isn't that a subset of the belief "life is complicated"? I'm being mildly facetious, but only mildly. The world when stacked end to end is full of disagreements. However, a lot of it boils down to "doing good things is good" & "doing bad things is bad", and then the rest becomes finding ways to make it easier to do good things, and harder to do bad things, and easier to reverse mistakenly doing bad things.
I know that sounds very over-simplistic, but there's a lot of muddling in the middle that makes sense, even if you have enough brainpower to chew on the big ideas.
Not disagreeing. But I feel like many people have ONE big theory when "it's complicated" is more likely to be true. The more educated one is, the more fleshed out their model of how "it's complicated" may be, but if the trend is to put a lot of things as "it's complicated", then finding another "complicated" thing isn't really shocking.
In fact, the shocking things are finding very simple but true things. (which do exist because society is garbage at processing information in many occasions)
Prediction before reading: 60% that the radically reformed polities did better.
> Second, isn't it sort of weird that Britain, the country that got least invaded by Napoleon and had some of the deepest-rooted institutions of all, was the one that really kicked off the Industrial Revolution?
My low-confidence understanding of this is that Industrial Revolution <= steam engine <= innovation spurred by having to get coal out of the ground <= deforestation leading the British to investigate costlier alternatives. So you could say the cause is material. But I've also heard that Britain emerged from the mercantilist era with the largest 'innovator / merchant' class – I believe it saw the greatest conversions of the aristocracy into an entrepreneurial class of the European nations.
This sounds a lot like survivorship bias: if the revolution lead to a huge improvement (define improvement...), then the researches give it some attention and include in the study, but how many revolutions there have been that didn't really change anything?
Doesn't the presumption that these systems "evolved" misstate how evolution works? Pre-some kind of phase change, like revolution, what you have is a system that is extremely well adapted to those who have held power, but is not particularly robust in the face of any significant change in circumstances--either from an internal or an external force. For it to be evolution, you'd have to have some kind of driver for fitness, which I would argue effectively doesn't or only minimally exists in monarchies/dictatorships. The argument that monarchical systems which have built up over time because they've existed for a long time are somehow evolved takes a horribly cramped view of what drives evolution.
As for the UK driving the Industrial Revolution, the UK had already had its revolution--in the English Civil War, and in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. So it's not surprising, if were using revolution-driven "evolution" as an indicator, that the Industrial Revolution started in the UK.
The driving force for selection would be things like conflicts between states. Fukuyama talks about this in the Political Order books. States that were in military competition with their neighbours tended to develop efficient meritocratic bureaucracies, becuase otherwise they'd have been conquered, and out compete others despite their starting positions (Prussia being the textbook example). Whereas states in more peaceful circumstances had enough slack that they could develop corruption and patronage in the system. You could make an analogy with private companies as well, with monopolies inevitably declining in quality
Though I do wonder if this is not at least partially due to the conquered territories simply becoming in effect part of "French economic zone" (as distinct from "economic core of Europe"), thus increasing interoperability - mobility of people, goods, and innovations. That it is, maybe it was not that the French imposed a better system, but that the French imposed _the same_ system in all of them, which was also not worse (as opposed to e.g. the one imposed by the Soviets in the Warsaw pact countries, where any potential standardization effects were offset by the shortcomings of the system).
Prediction: 80% the ones taken over by Napoleon did better. Reason: feudal system is trash and so the bar is already pretty low. By destroying the existing power structures you're mostly removing assholes that are making things worse.
I may be in danger of making the hypothesis untestable, but what hypotheses exactly are we comparing? The French-occupied lands are counted as instances of top-down design, and others are considered bottom-up? The post points out that some of the French reforms actually made things more bottom-up. Was Roman law completely eliminated from the French reforms, or just the parts that seemed not to fit?
I'm also going back and forth on using GDP as the measure. What other confounding factors might influence that? What measure would I use, if I could use anything at all? Utils? How long does it take the higher growth rate to amortize the blood and treasure spent to put the French in power? Is it possible to get the top-down reforms without paying the blood and treasure? Might there be less costly ways of destabilizing bad equilibria? Yes, I think I have a bias showing.
It seems possible to me that a poorly governed city might still have advantages for growth compared to the countryside, while coming out behind a comparable well governed city. If the laws are clear, stable, and fairly administered that might matter more than their origin, unless we think top-down/bottom-up delivers advantages in clarity and honesty.
Even good ideas can be implemented badly. I think what matters is whether people can innovate and adapt. Have I learned something new, or just moved the goalpost?
My advanced guess was that there is no significant correlation. But yeah, at least someone asked a testable question, and tried to answer it instead of logic about it, the pitfall LW-infused rats and postrats tend to succumb to.
Scott: in the future, would you consider leaving a top-level comment to which everybody who wanted to leave a prediction could reply, in order to collect and contain the predictions?
My prediction was 70% of conquered territories would do better.
I admittedly have read the entire article, but I did register a prediction (to myself) that the replaced systems would do better. My (no expertise) gut reasoning is that lots of economic things work better at bigger scales, and that the benefits of having a common legal/economic system "gifted" to you by a larger power probably has positive effects, regardless of the actual merit of those systems.
>>Are you sure you want to keep reading now? You’ll never get another chance to predict this from a position of ignorance!<<
Aarggh!
I truly don't know the answer.
In my youth I would have sided with the reformers. I had lots of solutions for the ills of the world. I still have solutions, but now I'm much more cautious about imposing them.
I am going to predict that the radically-reformed polities did better… not because of any philosophic leaning but because of what little I know about Napoleon's reforms
OK, I was right. I am bad at predictions so I forgot to give a probability. Anyway.
I think Scott is right that this is just a case of “the reforms were good”. Yes, breaking up the guilds was good. There are also some relevant passages towards the end of Margaret Jacob's *Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West*—I don't remember the details, but basically pre-Revolution France was very hierarchical and had this small cadre of authorities who controlled all industrial projects.
Britain didn't need this because they didn't have this problem and they solved the problem of guilds, etc. in their own way.
I honestly thought you were going to say "...but because I'm Jason 'Roots of Progress' Crawford". I love your essays on progress studies by the way; they're fantastically quotable.
>>The idea was that the occupying American forces couldn't care less about the entrenched power structure and vetocracy in Germany and Japan, so they rammed through whatever reforms seemed like good ideas at the time, and they were in fact mostly good ideas. On the other hand, the Soviet Union tried the same thing in East Germany and that went less well.<<
It is reasonable to presume that what you are imposing matters. In this case capitalism is better than collectivism, at least as measured by economic growth.
Everyone talks about the huge success the allies had imposing a better government on Germany after WW2, but nobody talks about the utter clusterfuck the allies left behind in Germany and the remnants of Austria-Hungary, which gave us Nazism (with some reasonably high chance we'd get Communism in Germany instead) and led to the second world war. A reasonable guess here is that imposing a new government from above is pretty hard to get right.
Well the French certainly were, and Wilson had perhaps already had a stroke and couldn't focus what was left of his brain on anything other than his magical League of Nations. One wonders what 20th century European history would look like if the leadership of the US at the end of *both* world wars hadn't been suddenly crippled.
Germany wasn't even occupied in WWI. If France/Britain/US had imposed a government then, it would have made it clear that Germany had lost. At the very least it would have removed the Nazi argument about a "knife in the back". The fact that the Germans never felt they had lost the war may have been the biggest factor in the rise of Nazism.
Hum... if by allies you include Communist Russia that might work. The case could be made (margin problem) that Nazism was the reaction to the International Communism, a form of Communist Russia colonialism?
As far as theories easily explained that may also be correct, this sounds accurate on first reading. History has these happen quite rarely compared to 1) conquests where the conqueror stays and 2) conquests where the conqueror is expelled without breaking up the local monopolies.
It's quite rare to have a conqueror with the power and longevity to change local power structures who goes away within a limited timeframe. You would need a more altruistic approach (US with Japan and Germany) or for a third party to defeat the conqueror (Napoleon by the British).
I think Seeing Like A State only applies to complex systems, which resolves some of the apparent contradictions here. Complex systems have many interacting components. Cities and agricultural systems, profiled in Seeing Like A State, are good examples. Top-down reform doesn't work in complex systems because they are inherently difficult to model. Breaking up oligarchies isn't in the same category. Economists can confidently recommend breaking up extractive institutions because the first order effects are so good. The second order impacts are just a rounding error. In contrast, a city is a complex system that is all about second and third order impacts. Evolved institutions can be irreplaceable in complex systems, but aren't necessarily better in other settings.
i think this comparison sort of highlights how this is a ridiculous question. it would depend almost entirely on what system was imposed, how it was imposed, surrounding conditions, nature of the place it was imposed on, and how you chose to measure what changes occurred, and what change you consider good.
Originally 0.7 on conquered dutchies outperforming non conquered ones but flipped my prediction after misremembering the title of this post to be "The Cost Of Radical Reform".
If we think of this as analogous to searching for a global minimum when one is currently stuck at a local minimum, then the question of whether radical reform is a good idea can be rephrased as asking whether we should try a large jump or a small one. There is no fully general solution to this problem, but we do have some heuristics.
One heuristic is, "How bad is our current equilibrium? Is it more or less ok, or are people really miserable?" This lets us distinguish between the cases of a healthy neighborhood where Robert Moses wants to build a highway and a crappy principality full of oppressed peasants.
Another, similar heuristic would be, "Are the people resisting change a small elite or a large underclass?" A small elite may just be trying to hold on to their rents, but broad support suggests that the current system is actually working reasonably well and shouldn't be lightly discarded.
Another hypothesis: Bottom-up evolutionary changes work better when the social/political/economic environment is changing fairly slowly, but top-down revolutionary changes work better when the environment has changed enough to render the current systems dysfunctional. Seems like this hypothesis is consistent with the findings: Napoleonic Europe wasn't exactly the most functional environment, so maybe the places that had French soldiers marching through had the advantage of clearing the dysfunction quicker.
Another observation: Napoleonic France had a wealth of examples of Things Not To Do in the ten years preceding the Coup of 18 Brumaire. (Example #1: The French Republican Calendar, where "Brumaire" was a thing.) So maybe the Napoleonic code had the advantage of a revolutionary framework, with most of the revolutionary rookie mistakes having already been made.
60% confidence that the reformed lands do better. However, I think this moment in history was somewhat unique, as it was on the eve of the industrial revolution. Going into the industrial revolution, it would have been uniquely beneficial to have a common legal system with one of the most powerful economic actors in Europe. So, while I think it's likely the reformed countries did better, I think we have to be a little careful about abstracting too much from it.
Might be worth pointing out that Napoleon already represented a step back from the most radical excesses of the French Revolution (no "rational" ten-day weeks or temples of Reason).
<i>Europe at the time had so many tiny duchies and principalities and so on that you can actually do a decent experiment on it - for every principality Napoleon conquered and reformed, there was another one just down the river which was basically identical but managed to escape conquest.</i>
Also, the German Confederation (basically the post-Napoleonic equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire) passed various economic reforms, most notably the customs union of 1834, which would have disproportionately benefitted the smaller German states -- states which, due to their size, had also proved easier for the French to conquer. I guess you could say that this was indirectly due to Napoleon, insofar as the German Confederation wouldn't have existed without him, but still, the appropriate conclusion wouldn't be "Radical, top-down reform is inherently good," but "Free trade is better for the economy than a series of tiny, protectionist micro-states."
And this would also explain why the effect was apparently most pronounced after 1850 -- the reforms take place a few decades after Napoleon, and it would presumably take a few years for their effects to become fully evident.
"So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-their-traditions polities? ... If you're really feeling bold, post a comment with your prediction before reading further."
To predict which will do better, I'd need to know how the authors will measure "better". I predict that the areas brought into the larger state with a unified legal system and government will do better economically, partly because the Code Napoleon was a pretty good code, but mostly because it's a lot easier to do business with people who have the same laws as you, and where you know how or whether law and contracts will be enforced.
But when I've read about various people living under Napoleon's occupying forces, they generally came to hate the French. So I'd guess that those areas were less happy.
I am, however, skeptical that the experiment can actually be run as described, because I've never heard anything about there being unoccupied pockets within French-held territory. And if there were, there must have been something unusual about those pockets, such as being too remote, inaccessible, or poor to bother with. That would wreck the experiment.
After reading on: yay! But I agree with the rest, that it’s hard to tell what broader conclusions one can draw from this. Was it because the reforms were radical, and thus, ‘radical reform = good’, or because they were, well good, so, ‘good reform = good’.
Integration into the empire's economy, language & market were my considerations (over the non-immediate term).
Relatedly, on colonialism there's evidence (from another paper by Acemoglu et al., though they tell a different narrative, and maybe other papers) that, in the long term, countries never colonized do worse than those colonized. I think being conquered over land where your population is integrated into the broader system is beneficial (e.g. Russia in Siberia, or Napoleon) whereas being exploited by a handful of officials (e.g. Congo, Hispaniola) is certainly less beneficial, maybe even detrimental.
Yeah well, you addressed the key concern in your writeup. Here's another prediction for you to make: suppose you successfully spread the meme that "radical reforms" are good, and "designed systems are better than evolved ones." This is true because "there was a study."
Do you think more free markets are likely to come of that?
This makes sense. I think Scott would agree that the larger "local knowledge gap" is not between one nation state and its neighbor, but between the hyperlocal community and the nation state it belongs to.
Maybe national governments are say 95% interchangable with their neighbors, and if the French policies were already proving their worth back home (compared to their old system), they would be quite likely to do better than their neighbor's old systems too.
Also, it seems the French policies mostly INCREASED the power and freedom of the local community members, instead of sweeping away and imposing new, maladaptive laws and practices on them.
I suspect even James Scott would correctly predict the findings of this paper.
Did they measure any social outcomes? GDP growth doesn't give a conclusive answer on whether it was a desirable outcome, and urbanization is not inherently good. Cities are dysgenic fertility shredders, so in the long run when all of Europe has either adopted these reforms or they've become irrelevant, then earlier urbanization should have negative effects.
Was too immensed in reading to think of a number, but I was pretty certain the invaded looked better. Retroactively, I'd rate myself at around 80%. It's in fact perfectly consistent with my priors. Authority structures ossify to serve the people on top, overthrowing them makes way for progress. Obviously.
I think the problem with contrasting economic accounts with Scott is that they're concerned with different things. Meaning, not mutually contradictory. Economists study "legible" data like GDP, Scott looks at the wellbeing of the downtrodden. It can simultaneously be true that the business is booming and that the people are immiserated, and the texbook example of this is precisely the (England's) Industrial Revolution. (Which we do have legible data for. People were shorter, their lives were shorter.)
The takeaway from Scott is not to cease progress, but to watch for the little men that get trampled by it. The two views can be reconciled by not trampling the little men in the first place. To be more precise, by carefully rejecting easily-ossifiable and exploitable structures of authority so that the little men don't have to carefully weave their lives around their idiosyncracies only to get them thrown into disarray by a sudden disruptive wave of necessary but careless top-down reforms. Scott himself is an anarchist, which, obviously. (Needless to say, so am I.)
(To extend a hand to the pro-capitalist libertarians which make up like a half of the readership here, I commend you for sharing the above intuition. You just need to stop refusing to accept that capitalism does not solve this problem, in fact, it's itself easily-ossifiable and exploitable.)
In a time of rapid technological change, destruction of the old order will usually be a net good.
Soviets are a special case. In their homeland they replaced a +/- feudal system with a quasi-modern one, which had some beneficial effects. In the states they invaded, they replaced an emerging modern free-market system with a planned economy, with disastrous effects.
So, it depends if you're upgrading or downgrading the social system, I guess, and you have no way to tell if both are recent.
Perhaps big picture changes, like opening up markets, work well when externally imposed. But small scale bureaucratic changes are also necessary, and these work best when there is time and flexibility for them to evolve to fit the local cultural norms. Just look at how democracy ( a great idea) didn't work well in Arab Spring countries.
Ok I'll bite: Before reading past the "prediction pause", I predict 60-40 that Napoleon's radical reforms did worse than the traditional ones.
My reasoning? I mostly buy the Seeing Like A State-style arguments for bottom-up, illegible policies; on the other hand, much of what I've heard about Napoleonic reforms--including driving on one side of the road only--seem very good to me. But back on the first hand again, I might expect hear about the best Napoleonic reforms and not to hear about all the missteps. So, 60-40 against radical reforms.
(Also, I'm a physicist with little background in history, so my confidence is not much better than 50-50.)
Actually, despite systematic anti-Brazilian propaganda being dispensed through the world for unconfessable reasons, Brasília is widely considered "a singular artistic achievement, a prime creation of the human genius" and, accordingly, was chosen as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
I wonder to what extent this is an artifact of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. To explain, some Dutch history:
From the latter part of the 17th century, a group of wealthy merchant families were able to mostly reserve Dutch government offices to themselves, resulting in a ruling class of 'regents,' who served their own interests. The result was dissatisfaction among the middle class, who revolted twice during the 18th century. The second revolt was put down by Prussian intervention. At this time, The Netherlands was a client state of the English and the Prussians, with immense debts, which were paid for with extreme austerity and high regressive taxes, while an elite was extremely wealthy. In 1794/5, Napoleon managed to conquer the country, helped by revolts against the regents. This resulted in The Netherlands becoming a client state of the French. It was not really ruled by the French, but nevertheless instituted huge reforms, like forming a unitary state, adopting some democracy, adopting (progressive) income and wealth taxes, etc.
Napoleon's main interest in The Netherlands was to get money to fuel his wars, military support and a place to launch attacks on Britain from. The Dutch pushed back against this, eventually making Napoleon so angry that he forced the Dutch to accept his brother as king: Louis Bonaparte.
However, Louis turned out to have ambitions of his own: to be a good king who served the interests of the Dutch. He adopted the Dutch nationality and demanded the same from his ministers. He did his best to learn Dutch and made Dutch the official language of the court. He didn't crack down on smugglers that evaded the Napoleonic economic blockade of Britain, which helped the Dutch economy a lot & he refused to institute conscription. He also refused to write off 2/3rds of Dutch loans to the French.
All in all, he was a good king. Napoleon said of him: ″Brother, when they say of some king or other that he is good, it means that he has failed in his rule.″
Napoleon deposed Louis, but two years later he made the ill-fated decision to invade Russia, which in turn led to his later defeat at Waterloo.
If Napoleon had not been defeated and had been able to use The Netherlands as a milk cow for a long time, burdening it with debts, forcing its people to become soldiers, etc; wouldn't The Netherlands have stagnated as long as it remained under that rule? Perhaps the Dutch got very lucky by getting the best of the French reforms, but without suffering that much from Napoleon's more abusive desires.
So perhaps the lesson here is to let reformers institute their most sensible reforms and then banish them to Elba.
It would be even more interesting to compel people to do it in a variety of bases, i.e. in addition to percent, choose on a scale of 1 to 12, or 1 to 5, or even -5 to +5, and see if the numbers match up mathematically. I am guessing they would *not* because I think too much psychosocial associations with the specific number creeps in.
I think some way to integrate those kinds of predictions into the post itself would be really interesting. Some widget to make a prediction on a (pre-defined) question after the introduction, and some summary of the community predictions at the end. I am not sure if the LW Style prediction widget would suffice already, my gut feeling is that only seeing the community predictions at the end of the post would be better, but the LW style widget might already provide some interesting insight, without spoiling the rest of the post. It could obviously be gamed, but you aren't really cheating anyone but yourself, so that doesn't seem like that much of a problem.
- In 1861 Italy was unified and 1871 Germany was unified
I wonder how the paper could claim that everything good was just because of the French invasion rather than the a general revolutionary spirit or pressure to change.
As a comparison, the modern success of Japan is usually due to the fact that foreign powers colonized/influenced their neighbours, while they escaped conquest.
Japan wasn't forcibly Westernized. XIX century colonial powers weren't interested in modernizing their colonies, and their Far Eastern colonialism was pretty thin on the ground. China wasn't modernized by the British, and Japan wasn't modernized by Americans and the French. Both nations had unequal treaties forced onto them, obliged to open ports for foreign trade, accept Western residents, and to grant extraterritoriality to Western subjects, making the latter a sort of super-nobility, but there was not anything like e.g. the British presence in Egypt, where Lord Cromer was ruler in all but name. The difference between Bakumatsu Japan and Qing China is that Japan found resources within itself to modernize of their own accord, whereas Qing China was both too weak in state capacity and too conceited to learn from barbarians.
It is typo, it should have been something like "it is usually attributed to the fact".
My point is that it is a common opinion that Japan did better than their neighbors because it was less influenced by foreign powers. China was also invaded by Japan, so it did not really escape foreign influence.
So, I was offering a counter-example (i.e., the success of Japan) to the claim of the paper.
China was invaded by Japan after Japan had spent the four decades after 1854 efficiently modernizing, while China, having had its rude awakening in 1839, 15 years before Japan, but apparently having missed its importance, had spent the interval thrashing about. As for being influenced by foreign powers, the extent of direct foreign influence in China and in Japan in mid-XIX century was small: in neither country was there anything like the colonial systems the British had in India or later in Egypt. Arguably, Japan had a better start in modernization than China because indirectly it was _more_ influenced by foreign powers, through the large numbers of rangaku students, who provided much of the cadre necessary for modernization. The Qing emperor had an office for barbarian intelligence, but IIRC Platt writes that the bureaucrats considered it a nasty and disagreeable appointment.
The deference shown to a "carefully evolved system of traditions" needs to consider whether the conditions under which the system evolved still hold. The early 1800s is around the time when a graph of GDP per capita throughout human history curves from essentially a flat line to a vertical one. Waterloo was in 1815 and the paper discusses growth post 1850, so it is likely that value of a French invasion is not the particular designed system they imposed, but the weakening of constraints on future adaptation.
I don't think it makes sense to have a fixed prior about the relative value of evolved vs. designed systems across all time and space without taking into account particular contexts.
> "The early 1800s is around the time when a graph of GDP per capita throughout human history curves from essentially a flat line to a vertical one."
Counterpoint. Historic GDP per capita of The Netherlands in 1990 dollars:
in 1500: $761
in 1700: $2130
in 1900: $3329
So per capita GDP growth was bigger from 1500 to 1700 then from 1700 to 1900.
Admittedly, this is an extremely cherrypicked example. The Netherlands was the richest country in the world in the 16th and 17th century, but underwent significant stagnation in the 18th century (GDP per capita was lower in 1820 than in 1700!). Nevertheless, the claim that GDP per capita was flat until 1800 clearly does not hold up. Though GDP growth did speed up around the 1800s, and even moreso in the 20th century.
My prediction was that areas conquered by Napoleon would have done much better. But honestly this wasn't much of a prediction, I spent most of my time trying to remember which areas Napoleon conquered. This includes most of the currently richest areas of Europe, making the answer kinda obvious.
"But then, isn't the whole point of Seeing Like A State that things which seem obviously true sometimes aren't?"
No, the point is that a top-down view misses local, tacit and embodied understandings. It only seems "obviously true" that rectangular grid squares are superior if you have a preference for rectangular grid squares. Very different things are "obviously true" from a local and embodied perspective.
"But then you would lose the right to apply Scott to most modern political debates, where there are no peasants to be found, and everything is the weird mix of extractive and altruistic typical of modern states."
Have you considered (the conflict theory perspective) that these "altruistic" policies are not altruistic? People get in a position of power and redistribute value from their opponents to their clients. Also, this is top-down imposed order. Some guys can obviously afford to pay taxes, other people are obviously too poor, lets put them in boxes according to how I evaluate their needs and surpluses.
You may find it relevant that GDP is an imperfect estimate of economic productivity. It seems easy to see why imposing a top-down system of legibility would result in a measured increase in GDP, for two reasons. You're moving value from illegible areas to legible areas, and you're requiring that that value be traded or documented somehow (whereas before value remained in the local illegible sphere).
Thoughts: It's said the Polish peasants weren't really bothered by the Partitions. They were just under new management.
The Congo and India and the Soviet Occupation Zone were set up as extractive colonies, whereas the Americans understood that a strong Japan and West Germany were the keys to containing Communism. The DDR did later become better supported, but the damage had been done.
"Daron Acemoglu is the most-cited economist of the past ten years, and I've never heard anyone say a bad word about him"
I'm not - really - an economist, and from what I know Acemoglu is far from being incompetent, but his "Why Nations Fail" was really weird to me in that it very clearly split historical periods and personalities into good (inclusive) and bad (extractive). He also seems to jump to the conclusion that democracy is always definitely better for inclusive institutions, and IDK how much I believe that.
But in general, I kind of agree with the idea about radical reform failing when it doesn't go far enough.
Regarding why Britain kick ass during the Industrial Revolution, it's worth reading Anton Howes' substack, since Britain certainly wouldn't seem to be the betting favourite before it all kicked off.
The reform principalities did somewhat better than the traditional ones, at about 65% sure. Lots of confounders and I am not sure how I would qualify 'better' - wealth is about the only objective measure.
Isn't the obvious explanation here that radical change comes with inherent problems, but that if the existing system is bad enough, it's still fairly possible to make large improvements? The French revolution swept aside feudal structures that were centuries behind their expiration date, and the Russian revolution might have worked out well if power hadn't ended up with people who were literally the worst (and even _those_ people managed to improve dramatically on industrial production).
Meanwhile, the combination of democracy, capitalism, science and markets mean that Western society seems fairly proof against that kind of ossification. In these cases, the problems with radical reforms would almost certainly outweigh the benefits.
I didn't even have to think about, it was so hundred percenty obvious. One of the reason why it worked is that the French are culturally not so much different than the European duchies they invaded, so what worked for the French also worked for them. For a comparison (not a one-to-one comparison but still) even though French wanted to make it a full state, French reforms didn't work as well in Algeria. Another reason it worked is that the changes were made in good faith to bring there a working system since they would be client states to Napoleonic France. Compare to for example Belgian Congo.
Re: Britain, there's a case that can be made about the Industrial Revolution really getting kicked off in Belgium and spreading to Britain, but in any case Britain became the flagbearer of Industrial Revolution anyway so I cannot dispute this a lot.
One last point which I know nobody here will like: The communist revolution in Russia is also a great example for this. Hate them as you like; those reforms transformed one of the poorest, most backward and technologically lagging countries in Europe to a fully electrified and industrialized superpower with extensively educated citizens in the matter of a few decades.
By the way my first paragraph also explains why communist reforms didn't work in East Germany, it wasn't made in good faith but to create a satellite state that was dependent on USSR, somewhat like how Belgian Congo worked. On the other hand, USA was trying to create a self sufficient West Germany that can hold its own at least for a while if the cold war turned hot, so made their reforms in good faith (better faith than the Soviets in East Germany).
For examples of the other kind, well USA also installed some reforms in bad faith for example in Chile or Panama.
"Does radical reform help or hurt" is a very, very different question than "would the implementation of modern legal systems including the Napoleonic Code raise GDP and urbanization vs. traditional legal systems in European polities."
For the record, my prediction as to the first question is "I have no earthly idea". I wouldn't even know how what to include in a data set to try to build a prediction off of, nor would I be able to quantify a value judgment as to whether the outcomes of reforms were "good" or "bad".
My prediction as to the second question is "yes, probably." I'm still not really willing to put a number on "probably" without knowing more specifics. Low confidence, though - maybe 60% - but part of that is admittedly because I expect to see counterintuitive results presented in this forum.
However, I think framing the question this way kind of gives away the answer. I mean, we know that "modern" legal systems are at least correlated with greater urbanization, so it would be kind of surprising if someone found that modernizing and standardizing legal codes resulted in decreased urbanization. We also have a plausible mechanism as to why and how modern, standard legal codes facilitate people living in larger cities in which they are more likely to have dealings with lots of strangers.
Also, in terms of the object question, I think you can see a clear mechanism where having standardized legal codes might facilitate trade (this even shows up now, in things like the US not importing foreign medications, and supply chain problems stemming from Brexit). So I think it's reasonable to predict that this would increase GDP.
After reading the results, I see that my interpretation of the question didn't exactly match the study, since the authors seem to be talking about destroying the institutional power of elites - which isn't exactly the same thing as implementing a standard code of laws. But that's exactly why I was reluctant to put a number on a prediction in the first place.
Finally, I think it's important to note that the choice of metrics here really matters. Why should greater rates of urbanization be counted as an indicator of successful reform? "Living in a city" isn't a terminal goal for most people, right? What was life like in these cities, compared with life in villages? What happened to life expectancy? Leisure time? Quality time with family? Number and quality of relationships? Mental health? I imagine the results would be more mixed here.
I also wonder to what extent our choice of metrics reflects a kind of survivorship bias. Development as reflected in GDP and urbanization may have produced competitive societies that were able to outcompete "traditional" societies, but as a result when we try to define "success" we're defining it based on "which societies won this competition" rather than "which societies were good for the people in them." There's a risk, in other words, that we're choosing metrics based on what we think success looks like starting with the assumption that we're the most successful and building outwards from there. I think the Johns Hopkins report (Global Health Security Index) shows the pitfalls of this kind of thinking - the metrics they chose were heavily biased in favor of the US and other "WEIRD" countries, and as a result some people were blindsided by the fact that the US had one of the worst pandemic responses in the world.
So I think in some sense when we're choosing metrics based on what we think makes a society successful we're in effect asking "will adopting [reforms that make societies more like ours] have the effect of [making societies more like ours]". And in that sense, it makes sense that the more radical the reform *in our direction*, the quicker will be the resultant move in our direction. But this tells us nothing about where future reforms will move us to.
he chose metrics based on what he could estimate (albeit poorly). much of economics seems to be people looking around for "interesting" data and then seeing how sweeping a claim they can get away with making based on it.
Prediction: Frenchies did well on whatever metrics the authors select. This is based on two things: one, Napoleon as a "make the trains run on time" sort of guy, two, we say "metrics" in this context, not "measures" – I presume there's a good reason the French word won out. Or, to summarize both of those things: seeing like a state actually works, in that a strong state with a powerful executive organ can actually get things done. 80%.
(Yes, I'm aware "measure" is French too – it's in Piers Plowman, OK? Norman not Napoleonic.)
This was a fun game, thanks Scott. To expand on my answer:
The way we think was shaped by the collapse of feudalism and "birth of modernity" that was essentially completed (in Western Europe) by the Napoleonic wars. The institution of pervasive systems of measurement marked this turn of the page. If something falls short on the metrics, it's "objectively inferior" and that's all there is to say about it. Sorry, Freigraf! Better get those numbers up. Also, don't you think it's about time you had a proper staff? Here's a list of guys. Yes, they're not exactly men of quality, but don't worry, they're not *peasants*…
If there's anything good outside of this, comme on dit, "metric system", it's going to be really, really hard to see from 2021.
Actually, rather than Napoleon vs the feudal lords or whatever, with Napoleon considered as a sort of prototypical Mussolini or Hitler, I think it'd be more interesting to talk about Napoleon vs von Metternich. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemens_von_Metternich
If nothing else, I know from history that a lot of places (especially in Germany) did not undo the reforms after Napoleon was defeated, and other unconquered places tried to imitate them. So this suggests that what Napoleon did was valuable.
On a theoretical level, we should expect the politic system a society adopts to depend on the rate of material change within that society. If your society changes less over time, you can have more veto points, because the slow leakage of ideas through the system matches the input. If your society is constantly varying, you should see fewer veto points, because folks are constantly inventing new carriages/methods of piracy/articles of clothing/siege strategies etc., and you can't afford to wait to respond to them. And the Napoleonic conquests happen to occur right about when the Industrial Revolution hit Continental Europe. So we should expect the ancien regimes to be adapted to the slow hierarchically-constrained change discussed at https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled/ and https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2010/08/notes-on-dynamics-of-human-civilization.html. Conversely, Napoleonic codes better match the pace of factory innovations.
Another worthwhile question is whether the states able to fend off Napolean were already healthier than those he conquered. Perhaps they already had the kind of anti-fragility Napolean introduced in conquered states, albeit likely not capitalist antifragility.
You could also have places that had better natural barriers or more insular and united local populations that made them harder to invade, which could confound your results either way,
My prediction was 70% confidence that the French reforms were beneficial. Obviously getting conquered isn't great, but textbook growth theory says that good institutions are the most important driver of economic growth and I had the unfair advantage (relative to people at the time) of knowing that the Napoleonic Code is still in use two hundred years later.
Ah yes, the French Revolution - so extraordinarily innovative that they ended up being too weak to fend off a clever popular strongman who eventually made himself Emperor self-crowned in the presence of the Pope in the cathedral of Notre Dame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_of_Napoleon_I Yep, that sure kicked out all those old dusty monarchical and imperial traditions! 😁
There's a reason you mention the Code Napoleon as the new legal code imported by the French into the occupied areas, and not the Code Robespierre or the Code Révolutionnaire, and it is because that after the fervour, ferment, and degradation of the Revolution into the Terror, it was easier for France and French institutions to slip back into the older, more stable, tradtional models. Yes, they did a lot of changes and reforms, but it wasn't feasible in the long run to be constantly and continually pulling down, sweeping away, and imposing hither, thither and yon.
Did the authors of this look at French colonial possessions alongside "yeah we had the French here for a while but then they left" in regards to how successful they were in the long run? (I am open to the argument that post-colonisation French possessions did better, but since most of Africa was colonised by everyone in the times of the Scramble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa , we can't really find a "this state was never colonised or occupied by outsiders" to be a control sample. Here, have a collaborative music video between Malian and French-Spanish musicians https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J43T8rEOg-I). Small duchies and principalities such as Liechtenstein, Monaco and Luxembourg managed to survive to this day.
The point about "being invaded and occupied isn't so bad, why your economy will get a boost!" has me wincing. Germany was a developed European country at the time, the occupying powers didn't do much meddling apart from "no more Nazis" and pouring in money for reconstruction, apart from glaring at each other as former allies separated again, and it ended up divided in two halves, and East Germany was supposed to be doing less well. Do our economists do a comparison here?
Japan was a nation that was more or less forcibly Westernised, but even pre-war it was very eager to throw off the past, modernise fast, and on the model of its Western inspirations, become a colonial power itself. Oops! The US occupation did do a heck of a lot more restructuring and interfering here, but again, I think this was (economically) more a matter of throwing fuel on the fire rather than build from the ground up and do away with old feudal Japan.
And the main points I'm taking away from this is that the occupying powers eventually left. The French are not still in control of European territories, the Allies and Soviets have both left Germany, and Japan is in charge of its own government.
Economic development of an occupied territory is tricky and controversial business. One of our complaints over being colonised by Britain is that, post the Act of Union, Irish native industries were deliberately starved so as not to be competitors with British ones, and that the Irish market was treated as a dumping ground for British goods. We didn't get the same share of the Industrial Revolution, Northern Ireland with Belfast as the ship-building centre did that, and even Northern Ireland was more reliant on the linen industry which is not heavy manufacturing or high finance.
Indeed, even pre-Act of Union, this was a problem addressed by, amongst others, Dean Swift; we are still quoting his "Burn everything British but their coal". He wrote "A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture" in 1720, described as "a polemic on Irish affairs published anonymously by Jonathan Swift, his first such pamphlet after becoming Dean of St Patrick's. In it he attacks the English mercantilist policy which is draining Ireland of her wealth." https://celt.ucc.ie//published/E700001-024/
"It is the peculiar felicity and prudence of the people in this kingdom, that whatever commodities or productions lie under the greatest discouragements from England, those are what we are sure to be most industrious in cultivating and spreading. Agriculture, which hath been the principal care of all wise nations, and for the encouragement whereof there are so many statute laws in England, we countenance so well, that the landlords are everywhere by penal clauses absolutely prohibiting their tenants from ploughing; not satisfied to confine them within certain limitations, as it is the practice of the English; one effect of which is already seen in the prodigious dearness of corn, and the importation of it from London, as the cheaper market. And because people are the riches of a country, and that our neighbours have done, and are doing all that in them lie, to make our wool a drug to us, and a monopoly to them; therefore the politic gentlemen of Ireland have depopulated vast tracts of the best land, for the feeding of sheep.
(Footnote: Mr Lecky points out that in England, after the Revolution, the councils were directed by commercial influence. At the time there was an important woollen industry in England which, it was feared, the growing Irish woollen manufactures would injure. The English manufacturers petitioned for their total destruction, and the House of Lords, in response to the petition, represented to the King that ‘the growing manufacture of cloth in Ireland, both by the cheapness of all sorts of necessaries of life, and goodness of materials for making all manner of cloth, doth invite your subjects of England, with their families and servants, to leave their habitations to settle there, to the increase of the woollen manufacture in Ireland, which makes your loyal subjects in this kingdom very apprehensive that the further growth of it may greatly prejudice the said manufacture here.’ The Commons went further, and suggested the advisability of discouraging the industry by hindering the exportation of wool from Ireland to other countries and limiting it to England alone. The Act of 10 and 11 Will. III. c. 10, made the suggestion law and even prohibited entirely the exportation of Irish wool anywhere. Thus, as Swift puts it, ‘the politic gentlemen of Ireland have depopulated vast tracts of the best land, for the feeding of sheep.’)"
And for the "burn everything British", here is the provenance:
"I heard the late Archbishop of Tuam mention a pleasant observation of somebody's; ‘that Ireland would never be happy till a law were made for burning everything that came from England, except their people and their coals.’ Nor am I even yet for lessening the number of those exceptions.
Non tanti mitra est, non tanti judicis ostrum.
But I should rejoice to see a staylace from England be thought scandalous, and become a topic for censure at visits and tea-tables.
If the unthinking shopkeepers in this town had not been utterly destitute of common sense, they would have made some proposal to the Parliament, with a petition to the purpose I have mentioned; promising to improve the ‘cloths and stuffs of the nation into all possible degrees of fineness and colours, and engaging not to play the knave according to their custom, by exacting and imposing upon the nobility and gentry either as to the prices or the goodness.’ For I remember in London upon a general mourning, the rascally mercers and woollen-drapers, would in four-and-twenty hours raise their cloths and silks to above a double price; and if the mourning continued long, then come whining with petitions to the court, that they were ready to starve, and their fineries lay upon their hands.
I could wish our shopkeepers would immediately think on this proposal, addressing it to all persons of quality and others; but first be sure to get somebody who can write sense, to put it into form."
My guess: it won't change anything with a 50% certainty, and largely because to be in Europe in this revolutionary age means changing eventually.
Subsidiary is that it'll make things better at 20% because, if I remember properly, the Nepoleonic reforms were fairly standard stuff like 'let people work wherever they want' and 'peasants can wear whatever colors they want', and the reforms didn't touch the dangerous stuff, like family and religion (at least the Napoleonic reforms didn't, not after the terror).
30% it makes things worse largely on my general supposition that breaking apart institutions sucks and that being invaded sucks.
My prediction was that the Napoleon-reformed states gained a small but significant increase, of the order of around 10% of GDP. My reasoning was that having lots of incompatible weights and measures plus lots of fees and internal customs duties, cannot have helped trade.
How about positive effects from a bigger market? Created by unifying the conquered areas. Less obstacles to trade, lower barriers for entry, simply better capitalism...
You see that a lot in the mess that was early 19th c. Germany. Napoleon mediatized the Germanies into medium-sized states. Then the states formed various customs unions before the emergence of the Kaiserreich. (being as much political maneuvering between Austria, Prussia and the smaller states as it was a general trend towards greater economic efficnecy)
I'll predict that the conquered regions did better, but only because I've heard that after Napoleon was defeated, merchants in the liberated regions lobbied to keep Napoleonic law, arguing it was better for trade.
"is this potentially challenging a carefully evolved system of traditions?"
Interesting wording, which actually differentiates between these cases to a reasonable extent.
Peasants, after all, have had a lot longer to evolve good farming traditions than guilds had had to evolve good industrial traditions (Napoleon being, y'know, right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution). Peasants have had a lot longer to evolve good farming traditions than *anybody* has had to do *anything*, except maybe societal fabric traditions.
(Social traditions are a lot harder to nail down when and whether there has been this kind of paradigm shift. Of course, in the case of societal fabric the state of theory on what makes for good cohesion and effectiveness is kind of *notoriously terrible*, so it's hard to actually point to many cases of people trying to use theory (Social Justice, the Cultural Revolution and psychiatry probably count, but I can't think of much else).
What is permitted, what is forbidden, what is expected in how people interact with each other. Leviticus/Deuteronomy is one of the most explicit examples, but it's frequently largely implicit. Established religion is definitely part of this, of course, but the "established" is more important than the "religion"; gnosis-based spirituality is pretty much irrelevant here, while established non-religious philosophies (e.g. Confucianism) definitely are part of it.
While the stated aims of these traditions are usually random and made-up (evolution never knows what it's wrought, only that it works), the effects selected for here are things like "raise the birth rate", "foster community spirit", and "stop epidemics".
@SSC: comments are a mess: substantive comments drown in a sea of one-liner predictions. I suggest that when you call for predictions in a post not exclusively devoted to a call for predictions, make a comment thread specifically for predictions.
Yeah, this didn't work well, but I'm still glad Scott tried something new. A root comment for predictions would be good, or even an entirely separate post.
Where to start on this? Perhaps with a confession: I didn't make a prediction because as a still-practising historian it feels wrong to guess the answer to a historical question rather than look at some evidence and hypothesis. If had done I would have probably got the answer wrong though because I have a deep- seated aversion to modernist reforms, which would likely skew any other priors. This may be relevant to the critique that follows.
I would be concerned on the underlying methodology of this work, simply because I'm slightly stumped as to where you would find accurate comparable measures for GDP, urbanisation or anything else that would suit such an analysis in pre-Napoleonic Europe (it's not as if weights, measurements or even clocks and calendars were in any way standardised, so actual measurable economic measuresare expectedto be reconstructable?). These sort of statistics are only gathered by modern states not small feudal societies. So in this case they must have been invented, probably using existing data (comparability unknown) and some level of assumption. A twentieth/twenty-first-century creation of an eighteenth-century GDP for a small Rhineland duchy is not the same as a twentieth-century GDP measure for a Rhineland town, which is a serious methodological issue. Just because you want to compare something doesn't mean you can: the assumption you can do so is perhaps a sign that you are inclined to believe that states are quantifiable and manageable, which is likely to skew your conclusions. This is why professional historians tend not to produce theories like this: their reputation can survive most things, but being known for mishandling data to reach a conclusion is a serious problem akin to being a pseudo-historian.
I'd also note that the UK is not an outlier here, but rather was ahead of the curve. Whereas much of Europe had a new liberal order imposed by conquest around 1800, the English and Scots had forged theirs in the wars of the seventeenth-century, where absolutism was defeated and the commons asserted their authority over the aristocracy (you could argue there was a Dutch conquest in 1688 if you really want, but it was only really opposed in Ireland). Revolution, however glorious, had already happened for the UK, and indeed allowed the formation of the UK.
Acemoglu et al are also travelling in distinguished footsteps. Their thesis seems, purposefully or not, to justify Marx, who had already identified the importance of revolution in changing society. This might not be particularly significant as an academic discovery therefore: that the transition from feudalism to capitalism was regularly violent and beneficial is probably one of the most accepted (and possibly less original?) parts of Marx's analysis.
So in summary, this looks like a retread of Marx using the perennially dubious technique of trying to force data to tell you what you want to see, a methodological no-no in every field of thought. And if the finding is significant all it shows is that (in Marxist terms) it is beneficial to replace feudalism with capitalism, a summary that would have found few opponents in 1909 a century before it was reached. This may be unfair, and the conclusions reached seem likely enough from the priors that liberal economies do better than centralised feudal ones (for those thinking feudalism equals lack of economic control, check out the medieval legislation on prices and wages), and the rule of law is better than rule by decree. But from a histirian's perspective this looks like data mining to make a point, and this seems unacceptable methodologically. With that in mind I'd be inclined to doubt the book's conclusions are valid unless it becomes clear that there is good and reliable data being used. Especially because the conclusions can be used to justify violent revolution to achieve an aim now, whereas the revolution might be irrelevant and the changes that came about (however achieved - I think the Scandinavians got there without revolution?) are what is important.
Since I've no way to determine whether or not French reforms would improve things, I'd just wager that they increased fungibility of the state-machine. 11/9 odds that they improved the status quo
> If you're really feeling bold, post a comment with your prediction before reading further.
I am feeling bold, so 60% on the reformed systems performing at least somewhat better (expecting to be proven wrong, though, given the title and what I expect Scotts take on this to be).
Ok, so yeah, replacing things with better things is good, replacing things with worse things is bad, got it.
If true, that is actually very good news, because it means when we want to fix things we "only" have to compare the current system to the improvements we want to make and not worry too much about accidentally breaking some poorly understood miracle functionality of the old system.
Also wow, there are a lot of people at around the same level of confidence (and in the same direction). I had not anticipated that.
70% chance that the French-reformed areas did better. I vaguely remember reading something about the influences of French-imposed legal reforms in my AP European History class.
My conclusion from this debate of technocracy vs tradition is then that in order to predict which one will be better, you have to have economic theory (or whatever theory is appropriate). If you know that markets typically work better, then it's possible to predict that pro-market reform will likely improve things.
I suspect that modern urban design theory could also have predicted that Brasilia was a bad idea.
Requested prediction: my gut says that the conquered people did better along objectively measurable dimensions in the short term (greater production in monetary terms, fewer deaths by starvation?), but worse on squishier dimensions (lower subjective well-being, possibly higher rates of alcoholism and depression).
So the article makes it sound like occupation was a slam dunk, but so far only uses metrics of urbanization and economic growth. It does that "there is no evidence of a negative effect of French invasion", but in the absence of evidence specifically related to non-economic well-being of the conquered people, I'm not going to fully agree with the "all good, no bad" perspective (though I do adjust my assumptions significantly towards "it was good on the whole" and away from "a trade-off, possibly worse along some dimensions and better on others")
Prediction: reforms dramatically increased urbanization, since prerevolutionary Europe had systems that discouraged urbanization. Post industrial revolution, urbanized areas exploded in GDP, so I believe GDP would have gone up proportional to urbanization, but not any higher than can be explained by urbanization. Politically I'm conservative.
I was right on Urbanization, and it is unclear if the higher GDP was caused solely by urbanization, not free market reform. Wish we had other metrics as well
Oooh: Advanced prediction. For me the same as the top one I see. No substantial difference. Gears type explanation: They are both part of European culture which is the primary economic driver.
Possible confounder would be that the states reformed by France probably are on average physically closer to England, and thus the primary point from which industrial development diffused.
I think the places that underwent radical reform should exhibit much wider variance in outcome than places which didn’t undergo change. I’m 80% confident here.
I think at least some places that underwent radical reform should have performed better than they used to: I’m 70% confident here.
I think that at least 20% of the places that underwent radical reform should have performed worse than they used to. I’m 70% confident here.
I think there’s going to be a bunch of questions around metholodgy that will difficult to know or tell how much some places did or didn’t improve. I’m 90% confident these questions will exist and 80% confident they’ll be Enough to make it very difficult to concretely say much here besides “sometimes it works well, sometimes it really doesn’t,” with a slightly higher weight towards the “it doesn’t” end of the distribution.
Isn’t it the case that it’s the least successful entrenched systems that tend to get radically revolutionised? Well functioning successful ones less so - and are more likely to be the ones imposing revolutionary change on others.
I think if that’s true, it’s going to skew how likely it is that radical revolutions result in functional improvements
I didn't have the nerve to make a prediction, but I wondered if immigration/emigration would be a good test for which places had gotten better or worse.
I remember visiting the big castle in Salzburg and hearing the guide talk about all the improvements and new walls being built and wondering why on earth they keep building walls when it already looks impossible to take. So remember my reaction when I heard how it fell: Napoleon was moving through the area with his army, without any intention of going towards the city. So the city rulers hurried to send messengers after him to surrender.
Napoleon isn't exactly your average ruler - it's the kind of guy apparently you want to be conquered by. On the other hand I finished reading Conquest and Cultures, and a common pattern is that conquered people do A LOT better than their freer neighbors. And yet, east germany did (much) worse under the soviets. Why?
Well, one explanation is that being conquered exposes you to a higher level of civilization - after all, they managed to conquer you so they must be doing something better. And also bring you in a market of technology and exchange that is usually a lot better than you previous single country level. In East Germany's case it just happened that being conquered by Russia was just objectively worse than being conquered by the West - worse market, worse tech, (much) worse ideologies. After all, the betters conquering the worse is just an average tendency, not a rule. And Germany was once the kind of country that tried to conquer the world. So them losing that battle and getting divided up like a big pie is not the same phenomenon as a lone country getting gobbled up by an empire.
When writing about modern development, economists often talk about moving peasants off the land and into more productive work, e.g., factories. It strikes me that old European systems like common land allowed a lot of very marginal peasants to hang on in the countryside, where their inconsistent labor was of course not very productive. When the commons were abolished and the system rationalized, they could no longer feed themselves and moved to the cities. So it was easier for factory owners to find workers in places where the countryside had been de-feudalized, and industry grew faster. This makes perfect sense at an Econ 101 level. On the other hand the mechanism by which this was achieved was cleansing millions of people off the land, using the threat of starvation, and forcing them to move to places where by this argument their descendants did not really benefit until 50 years later. The time scale makes this data useless for talking about modern reforms, since nobody is going to wait 50 years for good results. Heck, the radical reforms in Russia may turn out in a century to have been great. Who cares?
I used to work in factory automation. When I first started somebody explained to me something about how bottom-up evolution interacts with top-down redesign:
Him: We're going to go to [place] and do major upgrades to a 20-year-old [assembly line].
Me: They'll be happy - the new [robotics gear] is way more efficient.
Him: No, it never goes that way. We design and install this new system that is obviously better. Then the client complains that their operation is less productive.
Me: How? The [robotics gear] is way faster than what we're replacing it with. And the [operator interfaces] aren't cobbled together out of old circuit boards and TV screens.
Him: It's the operators. They get *really good* at operating the line. They know all it's quirks. They do little hacks to make things work more smoothly, or they'll figure out a way to run [different product] through the line when it's otherwise idle.
Me: So they'll get more productive on this line, but not until they've worked on it for a while?
Him: Yeah, they'll be way ahead of where they were eventually. But they'll hate every moment of it, and curse us engineers for swooping in and disrupting their system that was working great.
---
Can we reconcile the top-down planning vs. bottom-up evolution in a similar way? Big reforms change which landscape you're on (for better or worse) and accumulation of metis moves you toward its highest point?
Whenever I recommend someone read Seeing Like a State I also recommend they read The Ghost Map or some other book where top down reform worked out very well. Sometimes coordination problems are hard and some order needs to be imposed.
But with regards to Britain specifically it wasn't so traditional as all that. There was enclosure, toll pikes, and all sorts of changes. But Britain had Parliament where different interests could bargain and change things in a way that incorporated some degree of bottom up knowledge. Pure autocracies can't do that and have to rely on tradition to a greater extent.
You will find that to be an important lesson as you try to run a business. When you have to judge each proposal as “good, let’s do it” or “bad, let’s not”, you should carefully consider the devil’s advocate position to make sure you aren’t missing something, but you have to hold in check the intellectual urge to give extra weight to counterintuitive arguments just because they are cool. A good idea is a good idea.
My prediction before reading is a bimodal distribution. Radically reformed small entities will 60% have done better and 40% have done worse. So in particular, the variance of outcomes will be higher.
Ok, prediction. Napoleonic conquest marginally positive, where disrupted communities relatively more open to subsequent urbanization and industrialization. And also to nationalism, state bureuacracy, and eventually EU. 60% confidence. Null case: Weber's iron cage enforces most of this anyway, so Napoleonic conquest not very significant.
I predicted "no effect" from radical reform, as I see a lot of commenters did, but most people aren't explaining their reasons so I will: I metagamed it. The fact that you're bothering to ask the question implies it has an interesting answer, and the most interesting answer after you set up the reasons to believe both pro and con is "haha, trick question, it doesn't matter!"
Just finished Joseph Henrich's "The Weirdest People in the World". He suggests it was a cultural psychology that changed due to first the Catholic church limiting cousin marriages among other things and then after due to Protestants promoting individualism,learning to read and friendly behavior to people other than your relatives. Lots more detail in the book of course and but super well researched. We are "WEIRD" (Western,Educated, Industrious,Rich Democracies)!
Part of me wonders if the answer is democracy. You do those things which seem intuitive (popular) if they work great, if they don’t then you vote the people out and do something else. It’s not perfect (good ideas implemented poorly go away) and it’s not like an authoritarian like Napoleon can’t get it right by accident, but it is probably why democracies are so much richer than non-democracies.
The weakness of the "evolved institutions" side of things for me has ways been that the only thing institutions are evolving to maximize is longevity. There's a good reason to think a system that has lasted a long time will last a lot longer, no reason to think that system is more beneficial than the alternatives.
In a peasant context, or any other individual or small community context, we can imagine that systems will evolve towards being useful to those carrying them out. In a larger societal context though where people can exploit each other and have divergent interests the system can easily be long lasting based on its benefits to some, even as it harms most.
<i>The weakness of the "evolved institutions" side of things for me has ways been that the only thing institutions are evolving to maximize is longevity. There's a good reason to think a system that has lasted a long time will last a lot longer, no reason to think that system is more beneficial than the alternatives.</i>
Generally speaking, though, really awful systems fall pretty quickly, simply because they're so awful. A long-lasting system might not be *optimal*, but it's at least going to be *tolerable*, whereas you don't know beforehand whether your plan to move everybody out of their home villages and move them into evenly-sized rectangular grids in your capital is going to create a wondrous futuristic techno-state or a hellish dystopia.
> Take a second to make a prediction here - a real prediction, with a probability attached.
I predict that 2/3 of the radically reformed polities did better than their left-to-their-traditions polities. I'm generally sympathetic to the Seeing Like a State argument, but my gut sense is that the polities in 19th century Europe were saddled with too much dead-weight tradition. So on balance, they needed some shaking up.
On “getting conquered by a foreign enemy is good for economic growth.” This is one of Sowell’s findings across lots of different groups far beyond Japan and Germany in Wealth, Poverty, and Politics.
But his argument was that it was isolation that kills and cultural exchange, regardless of whether it is forced, that creates prosperity.
A selection effect that's possibly worth pondering on when thinking about the French invasions: being invaded probably selects for not being powerful enough to resist invasion, which probably correlates with having a less effective economic/political system in place, which correlates with a higher probability that installing a new system causes general improvement.
Conquered areas didn't just do better than they had done before - they did better than unconquered areas. If unconquered areas had better institutions to begin with, that makes the contrast even more striking.
Ok I'll bite and make a prediction without reading past the break...
The areas conquered by Napoleon did better in long term progress indicators on average, 70% confidence.
A) These areas would have been on average more impacted by the wars and therefore stronger postwar catch-up growth (think post WW2 growth on a smaller scale).
B) The reforms that survived the process of 10-15 years of reform followed by a reaction could be some of the more effective.
The 30% goes to the many potential confounders, me overestimating A, me underestimating the downsides of B, or just missing something entirely.
0.7 makes things better. 0.5 it makes it better in a way that also creates some meaningful costs (more inequality or social strife or something like that).
Prediction: Since Daron Acemoglu is the author I'm guessing that authoritarian imposition of pro-democratic institutions are good, and since this is the case they brought up that's probably what happened here. In the wake of Napoleon, principalities were turned into polities with on average slightly more democratic institutions than before and they were better off for it.
It's a binary question, so without considering any evidence I should start at 50%. What kind of evidence can I consider? For one thing, the Napoleonic Code is even in this post called "modern", so it has at least endured, which is a point in it's favour- it's at least not so much worse that it's been abolished everywhere. It's been so socially ingrained that I even have trouble imagining not having a family name for people, so it's definitely been successful in the sense that it's enduring.
I'd think that the reformed policies make the principalities more legible compared to the unconquered ones, which should have an impact. I also think the reforms should take energy that would otherwise be used productively elsewhere, so I'm expecting at least an initial dip, which could possibly have a sustained impact through compound returns?
On the whole I personally just don't have enough background knowledge to be very certain, so I'll stay close to my starting point. Still, I think this is moderate evidence to positive impact, so I'll move a couple of decibans towards positive.
let's say 61% probability that the radically-reformed polities do better than the left-to-their-traditions polities.
To me it seemed obviously true that Napoleon’s interventions were an improvement. That is often the case with empires because they have to standardize trade and law in order to scale. Rome had a similar impact, as did the British empire.
Before reading, the reformer did better around 80% of the time, because traditionally, monarchy are really bad for the economy. They don't want train because they allow easier revolt, they don't care about progress because the powerful don't have any risk of becoming poor, and the way to become powerful is to suck up other powerful people
Prediction: there will be a bell-curve of outcomes, centered around slight improvements. Even though the reforms were top-down, they were made by people with similar cultures who had absorbed many of the improvements.
You psyched me out! I predicted that the kingdoms were sclerotic and inefficient and so with 75% confidence Napoleon’s reforms increased measurable qualities ... eventually. But I consciously factored in my belief about why you were asking and that overrode my small knowledge of history.
As to why the Industrial Revolution started in Britain and not France, Britain had a several hundred year lead on reforming their monarchy. The Magna Carta was a different sort of reform, but it began the diffusion of power from a narrow aristocracy to wider elite class, who went on to have lots of first sons who ran family businesses and third sons who had lots of free time to seek clout by inventing stuff.
I think the same thread runs through why Communism failed, and it’s a point Nassim Taleb makes in economic contexts; you can be brilliant and see five years into the future, or just some guy if you keep your options open because in five years the answer may be obvious. Command economies - like kingdoms but also communism - are fragile to planning problems. The Soviets accidentally killed tens of millions of their own people with farming edicts and missed the boat on computers. And as long as the guy in power refused to get it, the right thing might never evolve.
Of course, a diffusion of power can also experience the fragility of planning problem, if the big players collude. Revolutionary reform may be effective at breaking up those cozy relationships, and may endure if it thoughtfully distributes power instead of consolidating it.
I think the answer is some combination of “energy is required to leave some local maxima and reach a new, higher maxima” and “most random paths away from a local maxima do not lead higher on net.” Meaning, I wonder if 19th century Western Europe was particularly ripe for this in a way that other attempts at reform were not. And that the incoming reforms had a sufficient degree of objective betterness that most of the work was done in smashing up inert, entrenched power structures and less in railroading cultural shifts.
Perhaps there is a distinction to be drawn between frameworks that enable valuable organic developments to be rewarded and reinforced (e.g., the rule of law, or, more specifically, intellectual property law) versus frameworks privileging entrenched interests. The Napoleonic Code was a quantum advance over "what the king or prince or whatever says is the law is the law," and of course the development of the common law, well before the NC, was one of the major factors in priming Britain for its era of hegemony.
OK, from the perspective of someone who has lived in France for a long time and been involved with the country for forty years.
First, Napoleon and the Revolution are not the same thing, and the Revolution itself went through various stages. It's often forgotten that the original Revolution was just the kind of high-level imposition of new ideas on France itself that Scott talks about, and was often deeply and violently resented. Some of the really wacky ideas (decimal days and years for example) never really caught on. Even the metric system only really became accepted in the last century everywhere, and, even today, if you buy half a kilo (500 gm) of apples in the market, you generally ask for "une livre", the old, pre-revolutionary measure equating to the English pound.
Second, what matters is the objective. Scott's agricultural examples, also in his book "Against the Grain", refer to a system that had evolved over a very long period of time and reached a kind of stasis. The judgement about whether they worked is essentially technical. So-called "modern" systems, alleged to give a better result technically, did not do so. Indeed, in Europe at least, so-called "permaculture" systems are now coming into fashion. But political and economic change is very different, and hard to evaluate objectively. What is true is that the French invasions gave a helpful shove to a process which was anyway inevitable - the construction of larger political and economic units based on popular sovereignty rather than inherited royal prerogative. But this was coming anyway, and in certain countries, like England, it came more slowly and peacefully, since the English ruling classes took fright at the prospect of a revolution there. (Even today, though, much of the British political system is distinctly less "modern" than the French, to the point where one historian memorably desired Britain as "the last functioning medieval state in Europe." ) The same was true, incidentally, of Japan: they modernised in their own way and at their own pace, taking what was needed from outside. Japan was already a modern state before WW2, and the "changes" much talked about as a result of the US occupation were largely cosmetic. Essentially, the Japanese carried on as before. But this was because the balance of power was different (the Japanese had a highly literate and well-educated society with lots of social capital, and hardly any USians spoke Japanese). What happens today is that foreigners descend on a society, like some in Africa, where little is written down and much of life is regulated by custom, and replace (as I've seen) traditional practices in the market with a new code of commercial law, literally translated from German, or whatever, which requires an infrastructure of literate tradespeople, inspectors, lawyers and judges to enforce it, none of which exist.
If being conquered was good, the Roman Empire falling shouldn't have led to massive decreases in standard of living.
But it did.
Likewise, if you look at Eastern Europe vs Western Europe post World War II, Western Europe did vastly better than Eastern Europe. Why? Because Eastern Europe was controlled by the USSR.
Colonized countries generally did better than non-colonized countries - unless the colonized country was developed, in which case, the developed country did better.
There are an enormous number of examples of these things.
The main differentiator seems to be the quality of the culture that won out/conquered them.
The idea that organic systems are inherently good is obviously deeply flawed. That is why Chesterton's Fence is such an important heuristic.
<i>If being conquered was good, the Roman Empire falling shouldn't have led to massive decreases in standard of living.
But it did.</i>
I don't know where you're getting this idea from. In terms of population density, urbanisation, literacy, and long-distance trade, every part of the old Western Empire showed a long-term decline after the Empire's fall.
The Western Roman Empire fell apart because parts of it were conquered by various local tribes and groups. This resulted in a decline in standard of living.
Well, I can safely say that I made the worst prediction. Lessons for myself: think whether you accounted for all the relevant information, are answering the right question and are not spouting complete insanity.
Prediction: net GDP growth for reformed polities is higher than for non- reformed polities up to 1900, 70% confidence. Not going to bet on the effect size, though.
The experiment isn't really testing the hypothesis as described, however. It's just testing "did the Napoleonic reforms generally improve GDP, urbanization, etc., in provinces where they were implemented." You've got a good sample size testing that hypothesis, but if you want to test the hypothesis of "Do centralized authoritarian reforms do better than evolved organic change?" you'd need to test many different examples and see what happens. This is like doing an experiment determining that penicillin treats infection and and concluding "We find no evidence for the hypothesis that eating mold is bad for you."
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.
Just because they are successful authoritarians doesn’t mean they are brilliant top-down reformers. A book was published in the nineties making the case that Deng's reforms consisted mostly of not sending successful rule-breakers to the laogai. While the CCP focused on a succession struggle after Mao's death, farmers in some areas of the countryside began “innovating” the collective farming system, allowing people to cultivate some private plots. By the time Deng had decisively defeated the Gang of Four for dominance, baochan daohu was sort of a forest fire. Deng's great virtue was the wisdom to allow this development rather than try to rev the cultural revolution back up and imprison enough people to get collective farming back within ideological boundaries. The author documents the attitudes to the top leadership using official party documents, which always toe the old line and reluctantly allow some exceptions while scolding the crazy farmers.
How the Farmers Changed China, by Kate Xiao Zhou.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Farmers-Changed-China-Transitions/dp/0813326826
America is becoming even more dictatorial with its prisons holding holding 2.3 million mostly Black, Latino and Native Americans, a fragile and failing “democracy” in which the winner of the popular vote has two times in this century not taken office as president in addition to both Hillary and Trump claiming fraud, interference, demanding recount Tx and that the rlection was ‘stolen’ from them, a renewed focus on ideology on Netflix, in Hollywood and in the corporate Wall Street Capitalist press which first launched and then denounced Trump, more censorship especially with a new threatened domestic patriot act and more suppression of dissent especially of contrarian and Left Wing writers/sites like Glenn Greenwald ...
Look in the mirror, shall we ?
Sorry, but I'm not American.
If you could choose a country to be born into tomorrow, would it be India or China? Depends on if you are more into statistics on literacy rate, infant mortality, life expectancy, infrastructure, transportation...or you care about expressing your views or religion somewhat more freely.
If I could choose a country to be born into tomorrow, I'd choose China. If I could choose a country to be born into in 1960, I'd choose India.
I’m not “into” statistics. I am “into” people.
Where are the lives of ordinary people best lived based on access to the the resources needed for living life ... including self-actualization?
As an Indian, freedom of religion and expressing views openly is not a thing in India. India has an extremely extensive hate speech laws that can send you to jail for offending any other religion on Facebook. In a way, this is needed because we are always one word away from a deadly riot but in no way would I call this freedom of religion. For example, in the current government muslims can't broadcast namaz early in the morning since this tends to irritate Hindus and may lead to riots down the line. In the previous government, Hindus couldnt celebrate festivals like Ganesh Chaturthi (which requires a large procession) because generally Muslims uses to get angry and it led to large scale riots. Each government clearly supports one religion and opposes the other (the hindutva party supports Hinduism, the Congress supports Islam). Expressing views also, you can express views as long as it doesn't instigate a riot which is a very broad category, and as people have learnt gives the government an easy time in arresting their opposition.
I mean, Britain (or at least, the people who ran the East India Company) did pretty well out of it. It's not clear that "make India rich" was really what they were going for.
Which reforms/methods scale and which don’t?
Was Khomeini ruthless and willing to shoot people? He had to be basically begged to return to the country and rule it, and I can imagine him disgusted at the way it all turned out.
His supporters, on the other hand...
In colonial India there were areas under direct British rule and areas under indirect rule with little direct British involvement (“native states”). The areas with indirect rule did better economically and have better outcomes in health and education today.
Tyler Cowen wrote a column about this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-04-11/legacy-of-british-rule-is-still-holding-india-back
Plausible confounder: was the decision by the British whether to directly or indirectly rule driven by the competence & functionality of the existing authorities?
The British certainly made the claim in some cases that they were stepping in due to the incompetence of the local rulers. And I think there is a grain of truth here in that where a ruler had a well-established succession pattern and a firm control over his kingdom, British preferred to make allies to making enemies (a side-note here, while the princes often complained about the restrictions Britain made on them during the independence movement, for the top-tier princes British backing was often a pretty sweet deal. The Nizam of Hyderabad for instance was one of the wealthiest people in the world).
But comparing princely states to direct British rule is a bit complex because there was a range of influence through the British resident in the princely states. In some cases the resident effectively ran things, but in others the prince had the primary authority.
Was Napoleon really good at reforming? He turned the Republic into an Empire, but created Republican institutions in many other countries, while also installing monarchs in many of them. He went back and forth on anti-clericalism and Catholicism. How much of the good is attributable to Napoleon, and how much to the bureaucrats of the Revolution? Perhaps his populism tempered some of the excesses of the Revolution, but it's not obvious how much of the good came from him.
Taking the plunge here: I'm predicting that the states that had only their institutions (with a side of land reform) overhauled involuntarily by the French did better than the ones that didn't. The ones that felt a heavier revolutionary French hand, for whatever reason, I'm predicting did less well, but probably still (at least) about as well as those that retained all their indigenous features status quo ante. I doubt any of the unaffected states did better by a considerable margin than any affected state.
I'm cheating a bit because I studied this partly in undergrad, and I know that even the states that were defeated by but managed to retain the vast majority of their independence of the French (Prussia, Austria) adopted many reforms that the French had implemented in the Confederation of the Rhine, and certainly didn't roll them back in the lands they annexed or re-annexed after the final victory of the "counter"-revolution. I know also that the economic reforms, in particular, laid the groundwork for Germany's later economic boom in the second half of the 19th century.
My predictions: 40% effects not very large, 35% conquered better, 25% conquered worse. This includes savviness about which result Scott would write about, alas.
Prediction about what Scott would write about is why I didn't predict; what I thought he'd highlight went contrary to my gut, and so I knew I'd be especially mad at myself if I was wrong.
This is late, I've already read the article, but my prediction was "good, because I've never heard of Napoleon having skill failures in his command staff like Lysenko." I think picking competence is self-reinforcing, and I'd guessed that Napoleon would be an "A-lister hiring A-listers", as the saying goes.
You might want to check out how much less than A-list many of Napoleon's choices for kings of his new territories were. Coincidentally a lot of them were his family members.
They were however probably better than many of the rulers they supplanted.
So it's just regression to the mean?
I'd say rather they were less autocratic even if less competent. You can't really regress to the mean after a proper revolution.
Louis didn't do -terribly- in Holland, and Joseph was put in an impossible situation.
Murat was of course a terrible choice, but it's not like Napoleon's enemies did better picking Marshals - Bernadotte hardly did a bang-up job in Sweden, after all.
Mostly ignorant prediction: conquered areas with culture closer to France’s did about the same while more culturally independent areas were worse off. 65% confidence
Another country that avoided getting conquered by Napoleon was Russia. Didn't do so well over the ensuing 105 years.
But then, Russia is huge, which can make up for subpar institutions. The UK is not, so it needed good institutions to survive the war, and it had them. (Being an island was useful too.) Disclosure: I am from the UK, which is probably why I predicted that conquered states would do less well.
Russia was not really "conquered" by Napoleon in the same way that, say, the Rhineland was. He managed to invade it, but had to beat a very hasty (and incredibly bloody) retreat before he could impose any reforms.
Preregistering prediction: I think the reformed areas do worse for a while afterward, but then end up doing better in the longer term (like 10 years after).
Registering prediction in advance: Radically reformed patients (sorry, I see everything in terms of clinical trials now) performed slightly better in the short term (because backed by an empire), slightly worse in the medium term while dealing with unforeseen patient-specific consequences, and equally to slightly better in the long term.
Maybe this is because my politics are less libertarian than Scott's, but I struggle to understand the appeal of trying to classify "reforms" generally, or even "reforms imposed from outside," as good or bad. It seems like trying to classify "life events" as good or bad; it just depends on the individual thing, and they are so different that trying to cast judgment on them as a category doesn't reveal anything.
Cancer is bad.
Getting cancer is bad. Having it go into remission is good. Both are major life-changing events.
Interestingly though it’s a known result that ‘huge life events dont end up changing your happiness level very much’ regardless of the direction they were in. So there’s - something - to say sometimes even with only ‘magnitude’ as a variable.
Turns out this is not true - see under "Hedonic adaptation and happiness" at https://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/.
I think if you are a non-expert who can't judge the value of a particular reform its helpful to have a prior about the relative value of evolved vs. designed systems. If your default assumption is "often there are good but counterintuitive reasons for the status quo" it raises the standard of evidence required to support a reform.
Is it the system itself that is evolved, or the solutions? Common law is considered evolutionary, but its skeleton consists of some fairly static principles. We’re those deduced a priori, or discovered empirically? Does it matter, so long as the result allows people to adapt to new circumstances?
It might be better if you classify life events as "rationally chosen" (like marriage, moving, taking a new job) vs "randomly imposed" (like being fired, disease, death of a family member). The former class is the sort that are intended to be good, but we might wonder whether they are actually good. Social reforms tend to be rationally chosen, and the question at hand is whether reformers are good at choosing reforms, or whether they are neutral, or whether they are as bad as randomly imposed changes.
This reminds me of a lesson I got out of studying Japan. For those who don't know, prior to the Meiji Restoration Japan was divided into about 300 mini-states. Unlike European feudal duchies, they really were statelets: centralized organized territories with salaried bureaucracies. This system kind of knew it was ending after the Opium War destroyed the local geopolitical order. And it really knew it was going to end after 1853. But the actual war didn't erupt until 1869. What happened in those intervening years? Well, each of these statelets tried to strengthen itself in the face of these changes.
Some embraced radical westernization, adopting European style institutions and even sending secret expeditions to study or cooperating with Europeans to smuggle in trade and books. Others instead reformed along traditionalist lines, seeking to strengthen traditional institutions and reform the state into earlier, superior forms. A few others took other paths. I was fascinated by two that took opposite paths: one state emulated Great Britain and another emulated Tang China. Both, of course, adapted it to their local conditions. Which fared better?
They both hugely outperformed expectations. A westernized army and economy apparently was about even with a modernized version of the Tang militia and economic system. The states that did poorly were the ones that failed to reform. All the states that reformed in any direction did pretty well, often in proportion to how much they could reform those institutions.
This made me consider that the capacity to reform and make a program work might be more important than the actual contents of the program. And I often think this is an underappreciated factor of analysis. Libertarianism is always the correct response to an ineffective or incompetent government. If the government's an idiot, it's best the government do as little as possible. It's only when the government is competent that we can debate whether private or public options are better. For example, with healthcare, there are two questions. Firstly, all the policy we actually talk about. Secondly, is the US government actually capable of getting it done? Think of the healthcare.gov website. That was just a straight capacity failure. No one was sitting there debating the advantages or disadvantages of having a functioning website. The government just couldn't get it done. And I think we don't talk about that kind of thing enough.
Enjoyed your comment and just want to nitpick your last conclusion. My view of the basic responsibilities of a state to its citizens isn’t mostly grounded in competence. (Ironically, that logic also underpins far left beliefs like “we should abolish the police entirely because the state can’t be trusted with their administration.”)
Even cases where the free market provides clear alternatives for some people (Kim Kardashian’s private wildfire-fighter squad comes to mind) don’t absolve the state’s obligations - it’s OK if the state does a crummier job then the best competitor as long as it provides some sort of baseline. We can disagree on where that line of obligation is in the first place, but I don’t think libertarianism is always the correct response to government incompetence, because sometimes, I want the government to be less incompetent, instead of alternatives gated to those who can afford them.
Everyone wants the government to be less corrupt, in which case it would be good for it to also exhibit competence. Extreme libertarians have given up on finding a systematic solution to preventing government corruption, in favor of trying to solve a similar problem of preventing competing governments from colluding. The moderate ones hope to solve the problem by reducing government responsibilities and rearranging them so that each relatively independent part has separate oversight. I guess that means that progressives and conservatives must be some sort of indifferent libertarians, as the only alternative seems to be the obvious straw man of “democratic governments are never corrupt.”
It's entirely possible that the costs imposed to ensure there's no corruption exceed those from the eliminated corruption. It's also possible that the anti-corruption measures reduce the ability to be effective as well.
Maybe it’s even worse. There is no person choosing on a margin who can assure that benefits exceed costs, and the choices aren’t necessarily the sort where if you spend a bit more you get a bit more. The only thing that is clear is that the existing constitutional arrangement fails to constrain the agents to please their principals. I suppose it is possible to hope that reducing constraints will actually increase compliance, but I would find that surprising. OTOH, politics is full of surprises. I would prefer that the experiment be performed ethically with participation strictly voluntary (and so excluding me).
You're smuggling the assumption an incompetent government can provide a baseline version. There's a legitimate debate to be had between the free market provisioning something unevenly but of superior quality vs the government provisioning something more evenly but of poorer quality. But the state doesn't necessarily need to rise to that level of competence. The state could simply fail to provide public goods in which case its attempts to do so are likely to be worse than doing nothing at all. The police, as you say, are a good example. Police that fail to provide public order can still fine and arrest people arbitrarily without doing anything to help crime, in which case abolishing the police might be the right response. I don't think it's where we are today in the US but it's a possible scenario.
My point is not that every government failure should lead to taking responsibility away from the government. My point is a government that repeatedly fails and makes things worse will create a libertarian response. And that's probably correct. See how rural areas went from being bullish on big government and bastions of progressivism to being libertarian basically for these reasons.
I've read once that the same is true for making changes to software development processes. Basically, any change tends to improve things in the short term.
A major reason might be that systems work best if they are adaptive on a smaller scale, where people don't blindly follow the rules, but instead use common sense, but that inflexible bureaucrats that abhor common sense tend to accumulate power over time. If you make reforms, the inflexible bureaucrats get pushed aside in favor of more flexible people.
However, a better solution may then be to target the actual problem and figure out a way to prevent the inflexible bureaucrats from gaining that power or to root them out, without needing senseless reforms.
There are 2 major issues that need to be addressed by software development processes: work distribution, and communication.
If you have a single developer working on a project for themselves, the process used doesn't matter - the developer (hopefully) knows all of the ins-and-outs of the project, and can adjust goals, design, etc., to fit their own needs.
Once you start having to distribute work, you start needing to be able to communicate how things work, the architecture, and the vision for the product. This requires process, if for no reason than to ensure sufficient documentation is produced. Likewise to ensure that the code produced fulfills the design goals.
You also need to communicate how things are going. This is a legibility requirement for various forms of management. People involved need to be able to synchronize and prioritize the work which they are doing. Process exists to allow that communication to occur.
You absolutely can get short-term gains by getting rid of the locally-inefficient process. But the costs are in long-term failures and systemic inefficiencies.
I do think "shaking things up" sometimes leads to good results regardless. But I'd say that the content of the reforms does matter ultimately. However, if you're nimble and adaptable then a bad reform becomes just a thing you tried rather than an ossified rule that handicaps you forever. Whereas if you're so sluggish it's going to be permanent or semi-permanent then you need to move with care. Not because that's generally wise but because you're effectively the head of a diseased body.
I think the evolved institutions are a kind of hill-climbing, and the top-down-imposed institutions allow you to get off a local maximum, but they don't guarantee that you'll end up better off in the end. When the radical change imposed from above is the metric system and the Napoleonic code, things work out a lot better than when the radical change imposed from above is murdering all the educated people and declaring that uneducated peasants will now be the doctors and engineers.
The good news about conqueror-imposed top-down changes is that they're usually well-tested aspects of the conqueror's society; the bad news is that you don't really know whether they'll translplant well to the new society they're being imposed on until you run the experiment.
I did notice the examples were, one, Revolutionary France and, two, the 20th Century United States. It seems to completely ignore, for example, colonialism, which certainly swept away local institutions and replaced them with radically different ones. Not ones meant to benefit the locals but if that's a limit, it's one they leave unstated. (And not one that Napoleon could necessarily claim either.) Just because a specific change is good doesn't mean all changes are good.
I think that the data shows that all systems become more Beurocratic and inflexible as time passes. At least, I don't know of any counter examples.
> This made me consider that the capacity to reform and make a program work might be more important than the actual contents of the program.
On a similar theme, the ability to stick to a diet has more predictive power for weight loss than which type of diet one sticks to. I don't know if this is actually true rather than just a truism, but the parallelism seemed strong to me.
I think this is a subspecies of execution is more important than ideas.
This reminds me of a Maxim of Descartes' found in the Discourse on the Method:
"My second maxim was to be as firm and decisive in my actions as I could, and to follow even the most doubtful opinions, once I had adopted them, as constantly as if they had been quite certain.
In this I would be imitating travellers who find themselves lost in a forest: rather than wandering about in all directions or (even worse) staying in one place, they should keep walking as straight as they can in one direction, not turning aside for slight reasons, even if their choice of direction was a matter of mere chance in the first place; for even if this doesn’t bring them to where they want to go it will at least bring them to somewhere that is probably better for them than the middle of a forest.
Similarly, since in everyday life we often have to act without delay, it is a most certain truth that when we can’t pick out the truest opinions we should follow the most probable ones. And when no opinions appear more probable than any others, we should nevertheless adopt some; and then we should regard those as being—from a practical point of view—not doubtful but most true and certain, because the reason that made us pick on them is itself true and certain.
This maxim could free me from all the regrets and remorse that usually trouble the consciences of those weak and stumbling characters who set out on some supposedly good course of action and then later, in their inconstancy, judge it to be bad."
To me, it seems like the states who either went neither radically traditional or radically progressive in the face of changing times are like Descartes' "weak and stumbling characters." Maybe your political point here works on the individual level as well.
I really enjoyed this comment!
I think so. I'd add you need a goal or direction. But once you have that, even making wrong moves confidently will get you there faster than planning it to death.
Healthcare.gov is always treated as this big symbolic thing. But ultimately what happened was there were some bad news cycles when it was initially put in place as it had teething problems, but since then the system has mostly worked and delivered a lot of good outcomes
Honestly, I picked it not because I think healthcare.gov is uniquely bad or that the AMA is indefensible. I picked it because it was simple and obvious and uncontroversial. No one was stumping for a non-working website and there was no vested interest in making the website not work (or at least none among people that had input). The government just set a goal for itself and failed. It was an organizational rather than ideological or political failure. Better management, regardless of politics, could have overcome it.
But isn't it also, like, fine now? So it wasn't that the government didn't have the capacity to build that thing, they just got it wrong the first time, and now it's fine. Which, IDK, isn't uncommon for websites in general? And isn't that also true about reforms? You don't always get it right the first time, but you can keep iterating until you do? This doesn't seem to me like an argument against attempting reform.
It became fine not because the government redoubled its efforts but because they completely overhauled how they treated technology. In short, they built capacity independently of the problem. Which is my point: the ability of the government to do things well is important to success regardless of the object level reform.
I'd say total collapse like that is very rare. In particular it never happens with tech companies anymore. Healthcare.gov was an exception for another reason: the way they rescued it was by bringing in some very skilled but liberal Googlers who basically gave the government the sorry of expertise it could not buy, simply due to the ultra high profile nature of the failure and threat it posed to socialised healthcare in the USA.
I wonder how much work the "modernized" in "modernized Tang economy and military" is doing.
Less than you'd think. It was mostly updates for modern technology or local conditions. For example, they used a similar system to raise military forces but organized them along 19th century warfare lines. It helped that the Tang were a highly commercialized, industrial, and trading dynasty. So you had things like industrial policy or trade law in there. There was even educational systems and the like, to which the modernizing Japanese added subjects like science.
In fact, in some ways the Tang copy was just plain better. The Tang had, in their three centuries, developed concepts about workers and peasants having rights. They also had concepts of private and public manufacturing and procurements. So the Tang copiers tended to focus on government supported industrialization and commercialization. Meanwhile, the Europeanizers in the south copied sugar plantations as a way to raise revenue, in some cases directly copying old slave codes and applying them to peasants or criminals they worked to death in the fields. They also just expropriated merchants or peasants to cram their reforms through. As a result some of the reactionaries, counterintuitively, became more industrialized.
My prediction is they are probably about the same but will have some statistical differences that are noticeable but not overwhelming.
Huh, stronger difference than anticipated.
This further reinforces my point of view that where history really went wrong is not with WW1 or Hitler but when Napoleon lost at Waterloo.
Andrew Robert's Napoleon biography pushed me further in this direction. But in a world where Napoleon wins, I think WWI and WWII are replaced by a Soviet style collapse of empire at the beginning of the 20th century.
Obviously it's hard to say but I would expect a collapse of a French Empire after Napoleon had actually managed to rule for years or decades more in relative peace and set-up and train heirs and systems would probably resemble the collapse of the British empire more than the collapse of the USSR.
The British empire was overseas. The colonies thus had less direct impact on the home country. Some of this is related to "the gravity equation", but it's also related to states wanting geographic buffers next to them (Britain, as an island, has less need of this).
You mean like that time (http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/scholes_11_07/) Hitler saved the Jews by sparking The War for Democratic Change?
(For all of you worried about my memories of Yad Vashem, the link is to an alternate-history short story. It's a little heavy-handed at moments, but still enjoyable.)
I LOVED Robert's Napoleon biography. I'd always had a British-centric view of the Tyrant of Europe before, but I came out much more sympathetic to Bonaparte afterwards.
I love me some Napoleon, but he had no competent heirs.
So the empire would likely have run into the same problems as most empires (or even most nouveaux riche), that of the second and third generation.
The only way would have been for him to put in place some kind of formalised system to select successors that had popular legitimacy. Like how many developing countries start with a "father of the nation" "president for life" who sets up institutions for elected successors.
I'm trying to think of how a Principate-style succession system would have worked for the Napoleonic empire, but I'm struggling to come up with even worth non-dynastic heirs. The most competent Frenchmen I can think of are either just skilled in the martial arena (Davout was a brilliant general but would he have been a competent emperor?) or politically totally impossible (Talleyrand).
I guess it's the same problem Augustus ran into - there's only one Augustus, only one Napoleon.
His loss at Waterloo is way too late. You're thinking of his invasion of Russia.
Russia is way too late.
You're thinking of his invasion of Spain.
Sometimes I do wonder how much better off the world might have been if somebody had just shot Napoleon in the head in 1806. He was doing so much right up until then, for as much of a bastard as he was.
70% that radical reforms did better.
I wonder how much of the positive changes came from the specific technocratic/policy reforms the French enacted vs. just destroying the existing systems and letting new systems blossom. Considering this all happened right around the start of the industrial revolution, it was probably a good time for radical change no matter the political or ideological reforms that were enacted.
To put it more bluntly it seems destruction forces progress, which will often lead to better outcomes, but I doubt many people would want to have their entire communities and livelihoods destroyed just because it'll improve economic conditions in the area fifty years later.
I suspect that the breaking up of existing systems was the bigger contributor, and as you say especially with the timing around the Industrial Revolution.
Central Europe had become very ossified in those small principalities, and most reasonable systems would have been better than what was in place by that point.
That's a good point. It's possible that the short duration of Napoleonic rule might have had positive effects that allowed conquered places to, after Napoleon's abdication and exile, kinda pick and choose what reforms they wanted to keep vs discard, whereas if Napoleonic rule had lasted longer, things might not have looked so rosy. After all, Napoleon treated conquered nations as vassal states which were forced to feed money and men into the French war machine.
Reading the paper, what comes to mind is Henrich. The authors note that some of the destroyed reforms went even beyond 'guilds', and there was outright serfdom/slavery in some of the principalities. These were really bad states, and it's not surprising that the French modern synthesis Napoleon employed could appeal greatly to their inhabitants and steamroll them. If I were a German noble, I'd definitely have concerns about recruiting a huge serf army, training them in firearms and rapid march, augmented with artillery, and emphasizing high-speed tactics and flexibility in remote army divisions with considerable autonomy (plus an accompany ideology of egalitarianism & civil rights etc); forced to choose between risking defeat by the atheist republicans on the other side of the Rhine or the serfs...
So a synthesis of Scott's observations here is that we do not have here a counterexample of the success of utopian high-modernist technocratic officials imposing idealistic new policies by fiat and it turning out to be remarkably better than the Cryptic Wisdom Of Tradition. Instead, we have cultural selection (of just the sort that *created* the Wisdom of Tradition in the first place!): Napoleon didn't impose a bunch of brand new policies, but policies which reflected the latest and most successful traditions in France, which had proved their worth by enabling it to field these highly-effective armies and stunningly defeat its combined enemies. Things like Justinian or Napoleon's civil code aren't pulled out of thin air, but mostly *rationalize* and systematize all sorts of de facto rules which had evolved to get around antiquated outdated patchworks of de jure rules. Likewise, abolishing serfdom or guilds wasn't some dreamy new idea, but had visibly worked in creating the huge citizen-armies and French economy powering it all. And so on. Napoleon was installing a new Tradition which was superior, evolutionarily, to the old one.
This is also similar to the Meiji or other examples. Overimitating a highly-successful competitor, even when you're not sure which parts are the important parts (ties and business suits: not important, but come in as part of the package deal anyway, sadly), often works pretty well if you have the baseline capacity to reform at all. If you don't, well, if the difference is big enough, you'll get reformed anyway, one way or another...
This seems a really good point. Wonder if a really good filter for "radical reforms" being implemented on a national scale on a large nation would be "please point to somewhere this has been successful elsewhere." Encourage new ideas to tried first in smaller countries, in single states, or in test city zones.
Registering a prediction of 30% probability that the reformed areas did better. I'm counting a case where they both did equally well as a "No" for resolution. Predicting relatively low since the title of the post contains "consequences" which has a negative connotation thus biases me towards expecting poor results in the reformed constituencies. No other factors went into this prediction.
Napoleonic does better by a relatively small margin. - 90%
It seems likely that there's a strong selection effect in that the reforms studied were the famous Napoleonic reforms and not some random radical reforms that went really badly and no one thinks about anymore. After all, the anti-radical-reform argument isn't that it's *impossible* for radical top-down reform to go well, just that such reforms don't *tend* to go as well as evolved institutions. It seems like picking one of the most famous reforms in history, which instituted the Napoleonic code that French law is *still based on*, is stacking the deck a little.
(My prediction was that the occupied places did better (60%), despite my general skepticism of radical reform. This was based on googling "Napoleonic code," seeing that it's famous and still in use in modern France, and concluding that it must be pretty good since cultural evolution kept it around this long.)
Well, the reforms studied are "the aggregate of all reforms actually instituted by the conquering emperor".
You could argue that the fact that the conquest was successful is selecting for positive reforms, or maybe even that the choice of Napoleon rather than some other conquering emperor is cherry-picking, but it's not like they isolated the effects of just *some* of the reforms that Napoleon made.
Prediction: comparing principalities that were reformed or not reformed has the same methodological problems as comparisons on any not-very-random sorting.
And, since this is an SSC/AST book review, the answer will be: "it's fraught, it's complicated".
"Daron Acemoglu is the most-cited economist of the past ten years, and I've never heard anyone say a bad word about him"
For some skeptical words about Acemoglu's self-confidence in his own big picture analyses, see:
https://www.unz.com/?s=Acemoglu&Action=Search&authors=steve-sailer&ptype=isteve
My prediction: the invaded countries do better, 70%
Registering my prediction in advance: I predict that the non-reformed systems did at least 5% better (on whatever metric the researchers used), and I am 60% confident in this prediction.
> So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-their-traditions polities?
My immediate reaction was "oh, come on, what do you mean by 'better'?"
And the paper makes clear that their measure was... urbanization rates. (They also looked at GDP directly, but it sounds like their GDP data was so fuzzy and unreliable that they weren't comfortable using it as a measure.)
I wish the post had given this more attention. "Radical reform increases urbanization rates" is a) kind of unsurprising (modern ideas correlate strongly with urbanization for all kinds of reasons), b) not a refutation of anything in Seeing Like a State (the author kind of hates cities, right?), and c) not a sufficient basis for the kinds of value claims the post and the paper's authors seem inclined to make.
In other words, this is framed as an objective qualitative argument against James Scott's thesis, but it fails to convince because begs the question by reducing the problem to "legible" statistics and values. You had one job!
On reflection I think there's a lot to be said about this. There are other measures than economic which people factor into their quality of lives. If Napoleonic reforms were focused on economic growth, and they did so, that's great, it means they were rational. But that does *not* mean they were what the people on whom they got imposed wanted. The Soviet Union experienced a tremendous growth in economic and military power from 1922 to 1980 -- but I think the life of the ordinary person became much less happy. Obviously there's a limit to this, but people *do* value intangibles like liberty, stability, community substantially, perhaps in some cases more than sheer material wealth.
I'm vaguely reminded of the fairly radical notion I've heard that the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 or so years ago was, for most people, a disaster. To be sure, average wealth skyrocketed -- but at the cost of a large increase in workloads, disease burden, and existential anxiety, and a significant decrease in individual liberty. A hunter-gatherer tribe tends to work fairly little -- only few hours a day -- does not catch diseases very often, and tends to have high levels of individual liberty. After all, if you can live off the land, you can always just walk away from a tribal situation that doesn't suit you. By contrast a peasant in an early agricultural society has to work much harder, dawn to dusk, because so much of his production is siphoned off for general social benefit (and particularly for the wealthier classes). He is also unable to function as a unit, so he is stuck where he is, at the mercy of the city-state being run well.
Average wealth did not skyrocket after the Agricultural Revolution. In fact, defining wealth as "ability to realize your preferences", it went down. What went up was population, and eventually traders and government. Which meant, at some point, writing and art and civilization. But the fantastic increase in population means you can't go back to hunting and gathering.
On the other hand, hunting and gathering should not be romanticized. It now looks like significantly more than a few hours a day were needed to do all the work that kept body and soul together. And hunter-gatherers are social. Cutting ties with your band and just walking away is a much bigger deal than leaving Boston to take a job in Seattle.
Since James C. Scott has come up a number of times, his recent <a href=https://www.amazon.com/Against-Grain-History-Earliest-States/dp/030024021X/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=James+c.+scott&qid=1615303977&s=books&sr=1-2>Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States</a> may be of interest.
Isn't the big downside of being a hunter-gatherer that your population sooner or later hits the carrying capacity of your little patch of territory and you need to either acquire new territory via conquest/annihilation or get a bunch of your own guys killed in the attempt?
No. The downside of foraging is that agriculturalists can outcompete you because they generate a surplus of food that can be locked up and used to raise an army, and that army can force you to give up your land.
The third alternative is to control your population. Many people in the field think that population was kept from increasing by long-term breastfeeding (which suppresses ovulation) and, when times were tough, infanticide.
<quote>"ability to realize your preferences", it went down. What went up was population</quote>
In other words, agriculture favored the people for which having children was a preference, and wealth increased for them by your own definition.
Yes, I agree that the "wealth" of the typical individual may well have gone *down* -- that's the contrarian hypothesis to which I'm alluding. But people have spoken of the Agricultural Revolution for almost as long as I've been alive -- it was certainly a staple of my basic education 45 years ago -- as an unalloyed good, because of the tremendous increase in disposable wealth, that which enabled the building of cities and ships and pyramids. The idea that this might have been for the typical person the inverse of Galbraith's famous acerbic comment about the US ("private opulence and public squalor") -- i.e. public magnifence but private misery -- had never occurred to me, and yet, I think it's a question worth pondering.
I think that idea has become "conventional wisdom". A turning point may have been Jared Diamond's 1999 popularization, <href=https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race>The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race</a>. His Guns, Germs, and Steel had been published in 1997 and made him a celebrity intellectual, especially after it won a Pulitzer Prize the next year. (GGS has a few silly things in it but is basically a very good book.)
I read GGS a long time ago and quite enjoyed it. Haven't read the newer book but perhaps I will.
What would an objective argument using illegible statistics look like?
I don't think this is much of a referendum on "Seeing like a State" because its about a temporary disruption of an evolved order not a permanent imposition of a designed one. Napoleon was defeated in 1815 and the particular systems designed by high minded French revolutionaries were replaced by a variety of Congress of Vienna created governments. The future urbanization growth is not a consequence of the system Napoleon imposed, but of whatever was allowed to evolve once the Feudal system was burned away. If Napoleon wins Waterloo and keeps imposing top-down liberal reforms as he ages maybe things work out differently.
The systems that came after were heavily influenced by the Napoleonic reforms, according to Wikipedia.
But it's notable that the eventual result was the aftermath of an initial radical liberal ideology (the initial revolution), tempered by an imperialist populist takeover (Napoleon), and then replaced by a conservative monarchist attempt at compromise (Congress of Vienna). We might not expect the same results if we had just one or two of these layers.
> In other words, this is framed as an objective qualitative argument against James Scott's thesis, but it fails to convince because begs the question by reducing the problem to "legible" statistics and values.
Not only that, it's doing it in ways that you would expect to have the legibility problem.
Suppose you introduce markets among other things. Now instead of spending $60 of your own labor building a chair to use, you buy one in the market for $50. This is a $10 gain, but if you're measuring it based on legible metrics (i.e. amount of commerce) then it gets put down as a $50 gain. If the same set of reforms also resulted in a separate $30 loss, the conclusion is inverted.
Plus, legible metrics are gamed. If reformers run around stamping out illegible activity (e.g. penalizing informal barter as tax evasion) then the loss of the value from all the prevented barter transactions is not measured but the potentially smaller gain from the legible replacement transactions is.
I very much agree. I find it easy to believe that if you fix one objective function (like economic growth), then drastic reforms can improve this objective function drastically.
But often that comes at a cost. People have all different kind of objective functions. Like, a lot of people have the objective function "I personally want to stay alive and not be hungry in the next year, and I don't care whether GDP takes off like crazy in 35 years, thank you very much". I also find it easy to believe that grown systems often (not always) do a fair job of taking a lot of these objectives into account.
Is it obvious that "breaking up guilds" is a good thing? For economic growth yes, absolutely. But was it the best for people living in these countries at that time? Perhaps still yes, but I think this is *way* less obvious. 20 years after being invaded, would a lot of people have said that it was a good thing? Or if they are too dumb to recognize, does GDP growth mean on some "objective" level that it was a good thing for these people? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. In any case, it seems to be a case where cost might be harder to quantify than benefits.
For our days, we face the same problem. GDP has grown a lot with globalisation. And yet, a significant amount of people does not express utmost gratitude about globalisation. This could either mean that these people are happier with globalisation than they would be without globalisation, but that they do not recognize it. (I mean it, that IS a possibility.) But it could also be that globalization inflicts costs on these people that are not captured well by the usual economic measures, and that globalisation is a net negative for them in their own personal objective function, even after accounting for their new shiny smartphones. In this case, we (as most of us are supporters of globalisation here) should acknowledge that the policy we want to enforce makes their lifes worse, and that they have every reason to fight it (e.g., by electing Trump). Of course, the optimal solution would be to find compromises and compensations, and so on (not just financial compensation, this requires making a true effort on finding out how the outcome can be improved in their individual objective functions). But the first step is to acknowledge that such a policy can cause bad losses for some people, and that the *sane and objectively best strategy* for them might be to elect Trump in order to put a stop to the policy.
A former boss of mine told me about a job he had in the early 80s, making tires. It sounded like pretty menial work in a factory, without much/any automation. He never went to college, and was able to do that work right out of high school with no special training. He made $12/hour in 1982. Plugging that into an inflation calculator, and that's about $70,000/year in today's money. As a single guy in his early 20s, he was making a good living, and bought whatever he wanted.
Fast forward to the 2000s, and he's making the same or less money after inflation. It looks like he's making more than double his previous income, but the cost of everything went up and he can't "get ahead." His job in management requires a significant understanding of regulatory rules and how to run a business. He can no longer afford to live beyond the means of a typical person in his age group (he lived at a fairly modest level for a guy with a family, house, kids).
No, he didn't have a smartphone, or probably any computer, and was much more limited on things like clothing, exotic foods, whatever. But he didn't know he was "missing" any of those things, because his mind had no concept of them. GDP went up significantly during that time frame, but not for him. He lost money, in terms of relative wealth, being able to purchase the things he wanted, and so on.
Personally, I think the high paying industrial core of the US during the 70s and 80s was more of an aberration than something to be expected, but I can't blame someone in his position for looking back on what he had before longingly. I don't know if he voted for Trump, but I could certainly see the incentive if he did.
Would it really kill economists to stick some reference to effect size in the abstracts of these things? If this were a clinical trial, and the authors were like "hey, good news, napoleolimumab increases modernization, now FDA-approved for your unsightly problems with Prussian stagnation" they'd have the common decency to say "10 years of french reforms increases the primary endpoint of urbanization in 1900 by 9% from 41% to 50%" But instead i had to hunt through the text for it like a goddamn animal (page 23, if you care. They also have a point estimate of 36% GDP increase.
But now that they forced me to go through the paper, some not-terribly informed thoughts:
1. I have the usual concerns about econ research -- were any of these analyses pre-specified? How many different analyses were tried before they went with this one, etc.
2. If I am reading this correctly, by 1850 no changes are seen. So all the positive effect of the new institutions is from 1850-1900. Interesting.
3. Riffing on '2' -- maybe this can be spun as another example of "industrialization changes everything" or "conservatism is a better default in the absence of massive scientific/technological change." Blowing up institutions in 700 AD does you no good, because there's no innovation to take advantage of, you just get chaos. Blowing up institutions in 1800 AD helps, because it enables social shifts to take advantage of new modes of production.
4. And just for honesty: my prediction was "can't discern an obvious effect" (which in retrospect was idiotic given that if it were a null effect it never would have been published)
re: item 2. Generally when you give a physical system a kick, it responds immediately and the effect dampens out from there.
But if this paper (and your reading) is correct, the kick lasted from roughly 1804 to 1815, but the actual effect slumbered for at least 35 years before making a difference for the succeeding 50?
Something else is going on here. The explanation that comes to mind is that the reforms made no difference under the economics of the early 1800s and only kicked in when other things changed - and yet nothing nudged the systems back in those 35 years. Not sure I believe it.
This was my first thought too. Further consideration got me to: "I guess a lag in effect on something like institutional reform is not implausible."
please, they aren't estimating any effects. the stats is all window dressing for their 'plausible' story. 1. is a lol. the measurement noise, model misspecification, etc. if accurately (impossible ofc) represented would make the bounds on the effects to large to write a paper about. but it is all a dog and pony show anyway.
I am ambivalent. The attempt to quantify and measure is admirable. It's one way to prevent yourself from spinning comforting stories that accord with your preconceptions. But, as you say, unless you're careful you end up with another story with the added prestige of 'studies show...' Acemoglu's a well known institutionalist, so it's not surprising that his studies show dramatic effects of institutional change. But of course, the arrow of causation can run in both directions -- I am sure Acemoglu would say he is an institutionalist *because* of the data, not that he interprets the data according to pre-existing biases. We all tend to believe this about our own beliefs, of course, and I am no different!
the degrees of freedom in the analysis make it largely the same as "spinning comforting stories"
Pre-specification is the way!
Prediction: 80% that the reformed states surpassed the non-reformed states, but only for a short (no more than a decade) time period before competition forced the other states to adapt.
Keep in mind that WWII era Germany and Japan went through radical reforms in the late 19th century, so I doubt they can be described as organically evolved societies.
The problem with this is a limited metric being used to derive a conclusion about a complex whole. If your measure of "better or worse" is simply aggregate economic growth this is an unsurprising result, even to many on the "traditionalist/evolved institutions" side. The trads (including me, and Burke) would argue, though, that there is a lot more to the health of a society, human happiness, and the common good than GDP.
So the state looked at a legible system (the conquered villages) and an illegible system (the unconquered villages), compared then according to its metrics (GDP, economic growth, etc.) and decided the legible system did better? Color me unimpressed. Almost every such reform looks better from the state's POV - that's the whole point of _Seeing Like a State_.
As Burke said, "The Revolution did not make France free, it made France formidable."
Bonapartism offered a sort of cautious version of the French Revolution, a hard-headed military man's version of rational modernization. It remained highly influential around the world for more than a century, such as in Bolivarism in Latin America, Kemalism in Turkey, and Nasserism in the Middle East.
Was gonna say 80% that radical (but well-intended) revolutions make matters worse short term (10 years) and 60% that they make room for necessary but impracticable in current system reforms. But then it dawned on me that "better-or-worse" is too heavily depended on the deciding criteria to form a meaningful opinion. China does just great economy-wise, but human rights and pollution are better left unsaid.
This paradigm bothers me. It seems implausible that there is some general, usually-applicable rule that entrenched institutions/traditions are either better or worse than systems imposed through radical reforms. Surely, an entrenched institution can be effective and efficient or ossified and redundant. And just as surely, a radical reform can be well-conceived or foolishly overconfident.
If that's right, then at best the paper here proves either that the French Revolution's reforms were well-devised or that the systems they replaced were weak, or both. Since the old systems were typically similar, and the reforms were all in the same direction if not literally the same, it suggests that *in this case* the reforms were an improvement. I don't see how we can possibly generalize from that result. Isn't the issue always case-specific?
I'd agree it's difficult to have a general rule, but the context of this is in response to people asserong the general rule that evolved institutions are better
My immediate thought when asked to make a prediction was "on what metric?" That basically sums up my frustration with this topic in general.
Evolved systems will, by nature, optimize, but there's no reason to think they will optimize on the metric that "we" want to optimize. In that sense, the problem with Brazilia wasn't poor optimization, it was misalignment between the metrics of the designers and the populace.
The same problem faces most modern reforms. We have broad disagreements about the different metrics Even if we totally agree about what a reform would do, different people will feel differently about it due to their different metrics. No policy is positive on all reasonable metrics, so no policy is universally agreed to be good.
That isn't to say agreeing on what the effects a reform will have is trivial. Even as a non-economist, I'm comfortable saying today's global economic system is a lot more complicated than that of pre-industrial France.
on what planet can we meaningfully say that the feudal system of europe "evolved." it evolved no more than Napoleon evolved his armies into those same places
I'm not sure what your objection is. What term would you use to describe how Europe arrived at the feudal system it had at the time of Napoleon's invasion? It hadn't existed forever, it developed over time...don't we typically call that "evolution"?
what i'm objecting to is calling one "natural." the process of arriving at the governments napoleon displaced was in many cases abrupt and violent.
Prediction at the point of dare, before reading the rest: the reformed zones did initially better, but over 10-30 years returned to baseline, and no statistically significant difference is observed. More or less based on the idea that people are stimulated by New And Different and everyone tries harder, followed by Reversion To The Mean -- over a modest time (like 25 years) people fall into whatever rut suits their nature. (Long-term change only comes from technological or environmental changes.)
Now to read the rest...
I feel like there's a good analogy with software systems. As large code bases grow, they tend to get messy: early architectural decisions are in conflict with new requirements; hacks and shortcuts never get fixed and snowball into monstrosities. So then there's always the question: do we rewrite from scratch and make it better this time?
The conventional advice is never rewrite from scratch (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/). Sure, you'll design it better the second time, but it's going to take a long time before you work out all the kinks and replicate all the features in the old code.
Instead, the conventional advice is to always be refactoring opportunistically. Refactoring means you're not working from scratch: you're taking what exists and re-architecting it into something better. You might rewrite a chunk of code, but since it's a small piece, it's easier to be sure you're not missing functionality that already exists.
Although the opportunistic refactoring tends to be the superior approach, setting up incentives to make it happen is tricky. With pressure to meet deadlines and little recognition for it, refactoring often doesn't get done. When it comes to government, I think we see the same effect: the news doesn't cover small changes and politicians don't get a lot of credit for it, so there's not much "refactoring" of laws or institutions that gets done. Cruft accumulates, inefficient processes ossify, and eventually we get so fed up we want to do a "rewrite".
Code does not actively defend itself from being refactored.
Yet
Code also runs automatically in the background retaining its original structure. Social institutions require continuous buy in from participants and are vulnerable to drift
You've clearly never tried to refactor an awful codebase, lol!
75% reform. I think a lot of this is based this off the most salient data point in my mind: Japan, which shouldn't necessarily generalize to all forms of foreign-imposed reform. But it's clearly a good example that such a thing is possible and often overlooked.
Two hundred years of historical changes (in France, no less) summarized in one blog post and I'm supposed to come to some kind of conclusion about our culture?
Yup, definitely just filed this post into my brain under "interesting anecdotes that may not even be true"
The (so-called) Glorious Revolution of 1688 made England more economically dynamic by introducing modern practices from Amsterdam such as corporations.
The Republican Revolution of 1861, made possible by Southern Democrats walking away from their Senate majority, allowed the passage of many modernizing pieces of legislation that forward-thinking pro-business politicians like Henry Clay had been talking about since sometimes as long ago as 1812.
18th Century Enlightened Despotism in Central and Eastern Europe, carried out by pragmatic conservatives, was fairly successful as well.
>So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-their-traditions polities?
I'd guess the results would be dependent both on how long after the "conquer and reform" we look, and on a metric I don't really have a better name for than 'core v. periphery'. Conquest is inherently destructive, and the transition period is unlikely to create prosperity out of thin air whereas it can definitely do the opposite. On the other hand, I'd absolutely expect it to lead to massive gains in the medium-to-long term as the new philosophies both have greater freedom to adapt to new circumstances and simply because they're guaranteed to be replacing something that has failed in at least one key metric. I'd expect it to look something like an accelerated industrialization, which might be difficult to disentangle because if we're talking Napoleonic it'd be happening at the same time as 'conventional' industrialization. The destructive effects might be a little weaker at peripheral regions but the positive significantly less as well.
Hard to put a probability on something I'm guessing is going to vary in both space and time, but to take a swing at it: 80% of significant improvement in the 'core' regions on a timespan of up to a century. Comparatively little change on the periphery, maybe 60% chance of improvement in the same time scale with a preceding decline?
One thing to keep in mind about Edmund Burke was that, while he had a practical side, he also had a Romantic side. He was talented at romanticizing what was in the interests of the rich and powerful. Rationalists tend to be out of touch with the Romantic movement that arose from the mid-18th Century to the mid-19th Century in reaction to 18th Century Enlightenment Rationalism, although it led to some of the greatest works of art of all time.
Guessing the reforms were good, mostly because countries are still described as having "Napoleonic" civil law at the present time.
I would hazard a guess that the radically reformed places did better, but I'm pretty unsure about this. Maybe 60%? That said, there definitely do seem like some confounding factors. Napoleon's empire didn't last forever, and when it was falling apart, maybe that affected places in it differently? Could be that the chaos hit there worse, could be that they started invading neighbors to recapture some of that early expansionary spirit. And when people were fighting against Napoleon, they'd probably treat the areas he conquered differently from the places downriver that weren't. Maybe?
My uncertainty stems from radical reform seeming dangerous, but the status quo being not ideal either, and my general ignorance of European history.
I feel like the call for predictions needs to be amended with dimensions... Like better on what axis? Wealth? Infant mortality?
I would say the reformed ones became slightly wealthier, but that may be tempered by the economic losses of being conquered and the associated destruction.
Also, I know almost nothing about Napoleonic legal codes.
I think what I got most strongly out of Seeing Like a State was the language of legibility and how that drives State reform. (J. C.) Scott selects certain schemes to increase legibility that fail catastrophically, of course, as the subtitle makes explicit, but the deeper concern I see from him is over _what gets lost_, which is illegible, and therefore never can be counted as a loss (which this study, of course, cannot account for, looking as it does at the exact same legible metrics that Napoleon was looking for). Of course, his examples are double-bounded, because they have to be _both_ examples of catastrophic failure _and_ examples which we can look back on legibly now and say 'oh yeah, shit... that was a terrible idea.' Which also means (and J.C. Scott is explicitly concerned about this) that those examples are poor examples anymore because we know so much more now and can avoid the mistakes...
In this respect, (J.C.) Scott seems similar to McIntyre (who, remember, was a diehard Marxist before he became a Thomist and Catholic–and I think it shows) and his After Virtue. You lose things, many of them perhaps permanently, with radical reform and centralization, you even lose the language in which to express and, finally, understand what has been lost and why it matters.
Samzdat's read of Seeing Like A State grapples more directly with this, as does most of Lou's writing there.
I think I disagree with Scott's initial sorting. Placing evolved institutions on one hand and complaints about vetocracy on the other strikes me as not wrong exactly, but incomplete. I think it's pretty clear that both threads have their answers to vetocracy, and I think they both recognize the problem. Vetocracy, after all, frequently prevents organic evolution of communities, societies, and institutions. Granted, I'd agree that erring on the side of evolution is more likely to result in the rise of vetocracies than centralized systems (since a vetocracy can be an organic evolution in the first place, but then prevents evolution).
I think this is borne out by the remainder of the essay. Scott points out the counter-example to the trend identified by Acemoglu as being the UK, the font of all modern organic evolution ideology and one that proves it can produce outcomes as good or better than any other system. I agree.
The difference is that the organic evolution in the UK tended (for reasons that are probably impossibly complex) to minimize or at least control the growth of vetocracy and the other malefic consequences of organic reform. The ossified German states that escaped the table-flip of the French Revolution had not just been entirely captured by the malefic side of evolution, but their ruling elites saw the maintenance of such as existential (even when their neighbors and social equals down the river and across the border did better in the long run and often in the short, too). As a result, and given the complete capture of political, economic, religious, and (frequently, but not always) cultural power in those small states and estates, the organic evolution that produced that elite class killed evolution.
And yes, of course, the clear liberalism of revolutionary French institutional reform is fairly obviously good from a standpoint of promoting human thriving (probably showing my bias here, but the massive growth of surplus and the the rapid reduction of poverty and all other forms of misery worldwide since the American/French/Industrial Revolutions seems like a track record well worth owning). Returning to theme, the UK had evolved most of this liberalism organically and didn't need a revolution to instantiate it or permit the industrial revolution to take off.
Tangent-ish: one of the things that fascinates me about Napoleon was the union of the liberal and totalitarian in one person. He was stridently in favor of liberalizing as far as possible (by the understanding of his time) all forms of ordinary day-to-day to existence, mainly commercial, social, and religious. On the other hand, he would tolerate absolutely no dissent from his subjects nor any neutral power in Europe. He had no use for civil or political liberty of any kind, and would imprison, torture, and kill any who dared to think independently in public. He could take criticism privately, though. But that was mainly from the officers he lived with on campaign, and on military matters only.
And then on the other hand, you have some places where some extremely radical reforms were imposed technocratically, and the results were terrible. Scott name-checks collective farming, but let's not forget Maoist China and the Khmer Rouge. So I disagree that the radicalness of reform has much to do with success. I think it has to do with correctness of reform. This would apply to post-fascist reconstruction of Europe and Japan.
By the same token, let's not forget the violent reaction of the European people to even the very modest (on average) counter-revolution imposed by the victors in the Napoleonic wars. That (along with the revolutionary forces unleashed by previous Ancien Regime excess) led to a century convulsed by many and serial (of admittedly varying intensity) revolutions in France, Spain, Germany, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Hungary, Poland, and even the UK (Chartists, etc.) That is, those were relatively non-radical reforms imposed fairly gently (again, on average; every counter-revolution was different), but they were clearly wrong, and so some more heads rolled. I think that had to do with correctness more than radicalness.
Final note: the economic core of Europe. By some analyses, France was not (and is not) in it. You might have heard of the blue banana. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana. It's a theory (that may have been concocted by a French dissident to critique his government's policy) that there's a large amount of easily accessible coal and iron in defined areas of Europe, and this was a primary driver of industrialization. The parts of France within the banana (Nord Pas-de-Calais, Picardie, and Alsace-Lorraine, primarily, and Rhone-Alpes secondarily) were/are some of the most industrialized areas of the country.
I don't know whether I agree with it, but it does seem that, after the end of the Napoleonic wars, France entered a sustained period of economic, political, and (especially) demographic decline, relative to the other nations of Europe. France's political unity and favorable position on the Atlantic coast allowed it to punch somewhat above its weight at one point, in seizing a large overseas empire during the New Imperialism, but other than that, it was fairly downhill until today, having joined the ranks of the Europoors with Italy and Spain. I'm only partially kidding about that.
What makes me skeptical of the theory is the motivated reasoning of its originator, whose purpose was to criticize excessive centralization in Paris, outside the banana. It still rings true to me, but I don't have a ton of confidence.
To the extent that the foregoing is just a re-writing of Scott's essay, I can only say I started writing this about half way through reading it.
From a position of ignorance, I would guess that the ones receiving the Napoleonic code were ~70% likely to do better. It seems like codes of laws that stuck were mostly centralised and European principalities weren't small enough to benefit from the effect of being a small community where everyone knows each other.
Having read the article, I think we're just trying too hard to impose grand patterns on the world when local specifics matter – though of course (James) Scott would argue that the state functions to impose grand patterns when they previously weren't there.
But 'grassroots' systems can just as easily be products of one local man's or family's whims or influece, and can be just as irrational. Maybe it's the case that good policies like 'having individual rights' work best when they come organically, which you could argue happened in England, but the second-best case is to impose them externally. Sometimes things just need a shakeup because they're ossified, sometimes a shakeup breaks things that were working.
I'm not convinced small European principalities were small enough to be considered traditionalist, grassroots societies – maybe they're better seen as a collection of little Prussias imposing their own orders, and Napoleon simply had better ones.
One could argue that the sprawling suburbs of Phoenix and the vast, unorganised urban townships of Nairobi or Lagos are the products of organic growth – can anyone say they're better than places with stronger central planning? NIMBYism is a fundamentally grassroots, traditionalist movement. It is often better when the state can build a subway line when it needs to.
I think 'sometimes centralised radical reform is good, sometimes bad, it depends on both the intended reforms and expecially on the execution' is not a very interesting take but a true one. To reach the kinds of conclusions we talk about here, we'd need a large scale study of _representative sample_ of radical reform, and even then I don't think a meaningful conclusion could be reached.
Radical reformers improved legible metrics like GDP per capita, lumber per acre farmed, and taxes collected. However, other metrics like quality of life, lifespan, and subjective happiness decreased. The length of time that the radical political was in effect did not last longer than the amount of time it was implemented (using Napolean's exile as 0 on the time axis).
65%?
My guess was 74% that the radical reforms would be net positive. In retrospect I think this was mostly a failure; given what I knew, I should have been able to be more confident in this.
Re the more general debate between radical reformers and traditionalism, I kind of like the analogy I made of society as a damped harmonic oscillator, which is probably the most stereotypically rationalist thing I've ever written
https://shakeddown.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/modeling-society-as-a-damped-harmonic-oscillator/
Same. In retrospect the only reason I had for not giving it 90+% confidence was that Scott was asking the question in a blog post, so it was more likely to have the counterintuitive conclusion. As part of a more general phenomenon. Eg if someone were to ask me out of the blue "do you think oaks are a type of tree?" the mere fact they are asking would make me think it wasn't the obvious answer (and that there was some technicality in the botanical definition of tree I missed, or whatever.)
Though in this case that heuristic took me in the wring direction. I guess Scott had given more credence to the conservative arguments than I thought
I think the discussion gets muddled by trying to compare such materially different places as Brasilia and Napoleonic France, especially in light of the stark differences between their stated goals. Comparing England's process of industrialization with that of the USSR and Communist china might be more fruitful, especially considering that Mao's revolution and later reforms were all (ostensibly) done to benefit a peasant class that existed under a very old-school feudal system.
But if all the successful instances of rapidly 'reforming' longstanding systems(post-war Japan, Napoleonic France, Germany etc) all basically neoliberal , then that tells us much more about neoliberalism than technocracy itself.
My take away is that the question "should my priors favor evolved systems over designed ones" is kind of silly, because a given policy's origins are completely incidental to its results.
Acemoglu measures the current status of conquered lands in 1850, 35 years after Waterloo, which was, apparently, long enough for the bad effects of the breaking things and killing people to recede.
Some of the shorter term effects of the Napoleonic Wars were dire. For example, the chaos caused by Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia in 1812 led to the breakdown of government wolf control efforts across Eastern Europe, which led to wolf packs running amok for a few decades until they could be brought under control again.
The Napoleonic Wars had the good side effect of being so bad that they discouraged Europeans from going to war with each other all that often from 1815-1913. They had the bad side effect of entrenching Reaction in control of much of Europe, discouraging British-style cautious democratic reforms until the second half of the 19th Century.
I think Russia is not the right counter-example. Unlike virtually every other power in continental Europe during the wars, it retained 100% of its independence from France. Certainly the revolutionary French never (truly) administered any of its territory, and instead only fought an incredibly destructive war on said territory.
That makes me curious about what happened in Portugal, which was also a battleground and whose politics were never very subservient to France. Indeed, to avoid a revolution, the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil. By some measures, they traded subservience to France for subservience to the UK, their traditional ally. Perhaps some good parallels could be drawn with Russia.
In Switzerland, most historians probably agree that the reforms imposed by Napoleon had an overall beneficial long-term effect. To some degree, elites the French drove away from power managed to return in some parts of Switzerland, but a return to the outdated political system was impossible and beneficial compromises were found. I suppose that apart from Switzerland, other areas profited in a similar way.
But I think we should be careful to extrapolate from this. One important point is, of course, that France was culturally very close to the European countries it modernized, and the French people who took an active role had intimate knowledge of these countries. I would suppose that the track record for imposed reforms („nation building“ etc.) with a much greated cultural distance is much worse. Sometimes, it can go well, but in many cases, it does not.
The other important point, which is also emphasized in the text, is that the reforms conducted under Napoleon were actually rather moderate, as far as their content was concerned. They did not aim at some far-fetched utopian goals. They may have been more radical than comparable cases in how much energy they put into removing old elites and outdated structures, but what they replaced it with looks rather moderate from today‘s perspective and probably also from a contemporary perspective.
Well Switzerland won that round. North of the Danube, the experience was poisonous. Clausewitz was a Prussian General. Napoleon taught Prussia everything he knew. They created a military machine from which sprang the most catastrophic wars in human history. Yes, they industrialized, but the world would have been a better happier place if they had stuck to potatoes, beer, and wurst.
"The evidence suggests that areas that were occupied by the French and that underwent radical institutional reform experienced more rapid urbanization and economic growth, especially after 1850. There is no evidence of a negative effect of French invasion. "
Let us see. The Franco-Prussian War, World War I, The Russian revolution, World War II, The Holocaust, the Iron Curtain. The Collapse of the Soviet Union. The butcher's bill, say on the order of 100 million.
Napoleon should have stayed home.
That is a hard pass.
Rather than looking simply formally at "reform or not," it's important to look at the substance of a reform. The Napoleonic Code was strongly influenced by the Justinian Code of the 6th century AD, itself a codification of older Roman Law. So while the Napoleonic Code may have been "new" to the little duchies outside of France upon which it was imposed, it was hardly radical from the perspective of Western legal tradition. Perhaps the only lesson here is that, as legal codes go, the Napoleonic Code was pretty good. This would also accord with the non-correlation of Great Britain, which already had a good legal system.
European legists used the Corpus Juris Civilis (which included Justinian's Code) as the raw material from which they created both the Canon Law of the Roman Church and the civil law of Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Europe. During that era, the civil law, known as jus commune, was in effect throughout Western and Central Europe (including Scotland) except in England and Wales. The Napoleonic Code was a codification, and rationalization of the jus commune. Adopting it was not disruptive. The one legal field that was disrupted was marriage and divorce which had been under the jurisdiction of the Church.
The first thread ("institutions have evolved to something like a time tested optimum and reform is hubristic, etc etc.") suggests an essentialism that plagues a lot of conservative philosophy. As if "work ethic" and "value" and "character" and economic outcomes were perfectly fixed features of physical reality and not dynamically shifting systems interacting and changing each other. There's no reason that the territory or the agents within it can't shift and mutate and render what worked however long ago obsolete. An organism can be perfectly evolved into its niche until one day a random amino acid gets swapped in a virus genome then suddenly that organism's time-tested mating ritual spreads a new deadly illness. This seems to be more or less what happened with anti-maskers and covid, the notion that something could shift so radically in the environment and suddenly make a lot of indoor commerce dangerous is not just unthinkable but *laughably* ridiculous to some people.
I think about this whenever I hear Lincoln Project conservatives like Tom Nichols smugly dismiss younger generations as entitled and whiny. As if it were like a cosmological constant that x units of Hard Work = housing/a car/stability or whatever and there are no larger forces reshaping the relationships of people to capital.
A personal pet peeve of mine is the assumption that unintended consequences and perverse incentives, the things that are supposed to render reform and central government action unworkable, are exclusive to reform. For example the very notion of "private property" seems to work very differently in theory compared to practice. In the libertarian ideal, in theory there'd be some sort of maximal respectful non-interference with the property of others barring extreme externalities, etc. In practice homeowners aggressively leverage whatever government power they can muster to shut down the construction of more housing on other lots of private property anywhere near them. In practice the idea of property in peoples' heads seems to be something like: "This property is my investment, I can and must do whatever is necessary to protect its appreciation, including restricting the supply of nearby housing through government force." Nimbyism is bipartisan but its especially ironic that many of these people consider themselves ardent capitalists.
Even more ironic is that they use socialist arguments, "People should not be able to do whatever they want with their property. They should be forced to use it in the public interest." Which in practice favors the already well-off (which is ironic, or perhaps a stronger word).
Unfortunately, I cannot guess in advance because I'd already blogged about the paper. Multiple times, in fact!
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/chris-coyne-sort-of-responds-to-acemoglu/
Early on I was keen on Acemoglu as someone digging into the questions Mencius Moldbug was interested in, and even recommended his work to Moldbug. Later, around the time of Why Nations Fail, I became much more skeptical of his work (and Johnson's).
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/stephen-broadberrys-accounting-for-the-great-divergence/
I can't find the post where I made this critique now (it might have been in the comments) but I recall them supposedly teasing out the effects of colonialism... by using malaria as a proxy for certain kinds of colonial institutions, rather than comparing Ethiopia & Thailand to neighbors or even considering the possibility that malaria's direct effect was confounding their results. If you trace back the links on that Coyne post though, I do note that the Acemoglu paper is in the tradition of Mancur Olson, who was also writing after Germany & Japan surged after WW2 (and in contrast to someone like James Scott). Greg Cochran would say that's because places with high human capital can rather easily recover from destroyed physical capital.
I forgot to note that other studies have shown that lands included in the Habsburg empire appear to be better off than ones just across Habsburg borders. With the irony being that the Habsburg's are as good a representation of the ancien regime the French revolution was against as you'll find.
I predicted the non-reformed areas would do better. Looks like I was wrong, but how wrong.
I have some unformed ideas about the difference between being conquered by an external force and having a reforming faction win from within the existing society. As the review points out, post-conquering, if the new system is "good" it will work well and if not it won't. The given examples (Germany, Japan after WWII) are external-force examples and I suppose the Napoleon examples are external-force as well, though some of the same duchies were probably once under the control of Charlemagne, so maybe more of a high-water mark of French expansion than external-force per se.
Contractors seem to do well after and during military action. There are things to rebuild and replace. I don't know how to quantify "GDP due to replacing what was destroyed" versus "really new growth."
Civil wars to institute "reform" seem to go differently (even the French revolution came apart after a few decades, hence Napoleon). When a different societal faction becomes dominant, the now-subordinate faction will potentially not cease to exist after all and there may be ?a greater tendency to authoritarian dynamics to keep the new social order in place, which might stifle growth as well. The status quo ante may be closer after a civil war.
Good food for thought.
People who keep mentioning Brasilia: try working for a month in Rio.
The French Revolution wiped away a lot of the remnants of feudalism, a system that had emerged 1000 years before to provide local security against raids by Vikings and other Roving Bandits by allowing Stationary Bandits to set up to defend local turf. It worked pretty well under the conditions of the late Dark Ages (e.g., terrible roads). But by the 18th Century, feudalism was obviously outdated, as the more recent Absolute Monarchs insisted.
And the feudal system of layering complex bargains on top of other complex bargains and so forth and so on for a thousand years had made getting much done legally awfully complicated. The British had a system of allowing judges to creatively misread the legal record of the common law, but more conscientious Continentals tend to be bogged down by the weight of the past. So, the streamlined Code Napoleon was welcome. But keep in mind that the Code Napoleon wasn't all that radical. It reflected the neoclassical feelings of the age, that this is what the wisest Romans would have done if they were around today.
Exactly. I've recently finished the first volume of Taine's Origins of Contemporary France (1875), which is about the ancien regime. Taine, no progressive or liberal even by XIX century standards, shows two things in this volume: first, that the mass of feudal rights and obligations that constituted the ancien regime was rational and salutary when it was growing up in early to high Middle Ages, and second, that by late XVII and even more so by XVIII century these same structures had outlived their usefulness and were causing great harm to France. Conditions in most European nations to the east of France were almost certainly similar. It is thus no great discovery that a "sovereign bankruptcy" and a thorough restructuring improved things. Incidentally, one of the harms Taine mentions - perhaps the greatest one - was the degeneration of the French nobility into a network of coteries that passed their time in putting on mythological theater pieces, philosophical speculation, and unrestrained dalliance, and whose contact with reality on the ground was minimal. By the time they had, under the influence of Enlightenment philosophes, woken up to the condition of France, they were too feeble to conduct the necessary reforms, or to control the country after their initial stabs at liberalization had opened the floodgates. In nations that engaged in what Acemoglu et al. call "defensive modernization", the nobility wasn't quite so useless, and thus the Prussian, Austrian and Meiji Japan reforms were successful. As for England, Taine himself uses it as a point of comparison, describing how despite having reformed away much of the outworn feudal structure earlier than France (French philosophes having been in fact largely inspired by the English example), English nobility took up new duties, kept in touch with its constituents and its former feudal subordinates, and in consequence was capable of governing the country themselves rather than foist the nasty and disagreeable task onto the bureaucracy of King's intendants and sub-delegates. English nobles didn't need to read XVIII century equivalents of "Hillbilly Elegy" and "Deer Hunting with Jesus" in comically futile attempts to understand the lower classes.
Thanks.
My primary worry about the radical reform paper, which you touched on but didn't state explicitly, is that if these places had similar pre-existing institutions and economic circumstances, and France enacted the same reforms in all of them, then of course there was a consistent pattern, and this is kind of like having a sample size of 1.
Their claim that reform failures can be blamed on not being radical enough seems absurd. All the most famous examples of top-down reforms gone catastrophically wrong were pretty radical, no? Or was the problem with the Great Leap Forward that Mao wasn't thinking big enough?
I settled on the prediction that the French-invaded places were equally likely to have gotten better as worse. Once I saw the answer, part of my brain was very insistent that I was really leaning towards the reformed places doing better all along. Dammit, brain.
They also complained about South African reforms not going far enough. Which made me think of Zimbabwe:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/why-a-nation-that-fails-to-be-a-nation-fails-or-does-it/
I mean, the problem with all of that is that the simplest answer is also the correct one.
Lemme quote the question they ask at the end of it:
> "It is interesting that the German state after World War II, though devastated by the war and de-Nazification, was still able by the 1960s to largely re-build the infrastructure which the Allies had pulverized in the closing stages of the war. In contrast, the South African state has been unable in the same amount of time to get the poor people, who fought for the end of Apartheid and voted for it, out of shacks and shanty towns."
The answer to why this is is that the Germans had already built an advanced civilization. This had never happened in South Africa.
People are often confused about what caused the colonization of Africa. People love to think that colonization made Africa poor. But Africa was already very poor. In fact, it has become much better since colonization in every way.
Colonization didn't make Africa poor; Poverty is what created the conditions for colonization. The extreme poverty of Africa made it ripe for conquest by the advanced European powers.
Taking away colonization didn't make these countries rich because the problem wasn't colonization, colonization was an effect of poverty, as they lacked the power, organization, and technology to keep the Europeans at bay.
Yeah, Timur Kuran also made that point about colonization when attempting to explain "The Long Divergence".
You need to read Scott's other book. "The Art of Not Being Governed." Seriously, with what's going on in Burma... it is important to understand why the Burmese state is having so much difficulty and the highland polities he talks about.
"So maybe the moral of the story is something like - replacing stagnation and entrenched interests with good reform is good, and with bad reform is bad. Which sounds obvious, but I do think that considerations of "is this potentially challenging a carefully evolved system of traditions?" is less important than I originally believed."
Isn't that a subset of the belief "life is complicated"? I'm being mildly facetious, but only mildly. The world when stacked end to end is full of disagreements. However, a lot of it boils down to "doing good things is good" & "doing bad things is bad", and then the rest becomes finding ways to make it easier to do good things, and harder to do bad things, and easier to reverse mistakenly doing bad things.
I know that sounds very over-simplistic, but there's a lot of muddling in the middle that makes sense, even if you have enough brainpower to chew on the big ideas.
Yes, but as a reply to the claim "evolved institutions are better" the answer "it depends" is still meaningful
Not disagreeing. But I feel like many people have ONE big theory when "it's complicated" is more likely to be true. The more educated one is, the more fleshed out their model of how "it's complicated" may be, but if the trend is to put a lot of things as "it's complicated", then finding another "complicated" thing isn't really shocking.
In fact, the shocking things are finding very simple but true things. (which do exist because society is garbage at processing information in many occasions)
Prediction before reading: 60% that the radically reformed polities did better.
> Second, isn't it sort of weird that Britain, the country that got least invaded by Napoleon and had some of the deepest-rooted institutions of all, was the one that really kicked off the Industrial Revolution?
My low-confidence understanding of this is that Industrial Revolution <= steam engine <= innovation spurred by having to get coal out of the ground <= deforestation leading the British to investigate costlier alternatives. So you could say the cause is material. But I've also heard that Britain emerged from the mercantilist era with the largest 'innovator / merchant' class – I believe it saw the greatest conversions of the aristocracy into an entrepreneurial class of the European nations.
75% reform, because Doylistically, you wouldn’t be posting about this paper if it didn’t contradict Scott.
This sounds a lot like survivorship bias: if the revolution lead to a huge improvement (define improvement...), then the researches give it some attention and include in the study, but how many revolutions there have been that didn't really change anything?
No significant effect/no difference made by Napoleonic laws. 0.65
Doesn't the presumption that these systems "evolved" misstate how evolution works? Pre-some kind of phase change, like revolution, what you have is a system that is extremely well adapted to those who have held power, but is not particularly robust in the face of any significant change in circumstances--either from an internal or an external force. For it to be evolution, you'd have to have some kind of driver for fitness, which I would argue effectively doesn't or only minimally exists in monarchies/dictatorships. The argument that monarchical systems which have built up over time because they've existed for a long time are somehow evolved takes a horribly cramped view of what drives evolution.
As for the UK driving the Industrial Revolution, the UK had already had its revolution--in the English Civil War, and in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. So it's not surprising, if were using revolution-driven "evolution" as an indicator, that the Industrial Revolution started in the UK.
And the Dutch? My history is weak but weren’t they always getting invaded?
'Always' is a bit of an exaggeration.
Yes, it is.
The driving force for selection would be things like conflicts between states. Fukuyama talks about this in the Political Order books. States that were in military competition with their neighbours tended to develop efficient meritocratic bureaucracies, becuase otherwise they'd have been conquered, and out compete others despite their starting positions (Prussia being the textbook example). Whereas states in more peaceful circumstances had enough slack that they could develop corruption and patronage in the system. You could make an analogy with private companies as well, with monopolies inevitably declining in quality
They were good at surviving, which isn't the same as providing for human flourishing, but isn't nothing.
Conquered better: 80%
Conquered worse: 15%
Inconclusive/other: 5%
Though I do wonder if this is not at least partially due to the conquered territories simply becoming in effect part of "French economic zone" (as distinct from "economic core of Europe"), thus increasing interoperability - mobility of people, goods, and innovations. That it is, maybe it was not that the French imposed a better system, but that the French imposed _the same_ system in all of them, which was also not worse (as opposed to e.g. the one imposed by the Soviets in the Warsaw pact countries, where any potential standardization effects were offset by the shortcomings of the system).
Prediction: 80% the ones taken over by Napoleon did better. Reason: feudal system is trash and so the bar is already pretty low. By destroying the existing power structures you're mostly removing assholes that are making things worse.
I may be in danger of making the hypothesis untestable, but what hypotheses exactly are we comparing? The French-occupied lands are counted as instances of top-down design, and others are considered bottom-up? The post points out that some of the French reforms actually made things more bottom-up. Was Roman law completely eliminated from the French reforms, or just the parts that seemed not to fit?
I'm also going back and forth on using GDP as the measure. What other confounding factors might influence that? What measure would I use, if I could use anything at all? Utils? How long does it take the higher growth rate to amortize the blood and treasure spent to put the French in power? Is it possible to get the top-down reforms without paying the blood and treasure? Might there be less costly ways of destabilizing bad equilibria? Yes, I think I have a bias showing.
It seems possible to me that a poorly governed city might still have advantages for growth compared to the countryside, while coming out behind a comparable well governed city. If the laws are clear, stable, and fairly administered that might matter more than their origin, unless we think top-down/bottom-up delivers advantages in clarity and honesty.
Even good ideas can be implemented badly. I think what matters is whether people can innovate and adapt. Have I learned something new, or just moved the goalpost?
My advanced guess was that there is no significant correlation. But yeah, at least someone asked a testable question, and tried to answer it instead of logic about it, the pitfall LW-infused rats and postrats tend to succumb to.
Scott: in the future, would you consider leaving a top-level comment to which everybody who wanted to leave a prediction could reply, in order to collect and contain the predictions?
My prediction was 70% of conquered territories would do better.
A poll would also be good. If that's not possible natively in substack could easily be a link to another site
I admittedly have read the entire article, but I did register a prediction (to myself) that the replaced systems would do better. My (no expertise) gut reasoning is that lots of economic things work better at bigger scales, and that the benefits of having a common legal/economic system "gifted" to you by a larger power probably has positive effects, regardless of the actual merit of those systems.
Preregistered prediction: Napolean-affected areas did better on average. 80% confidence.
>>Are you sure you want to keep reading now? You’ll never get another chance to predict this from a position of ignorance!<<
Aarggh!
I truly don't know the answer.
In my youth I would have sided with the reformers. I had lots of solutions for the ills of the world. I still have solutions, but now I'm much more cautious about imposing them.
I am going to predict that the radically-reformed polities did better… not because of any philosophic leaning but because of what little I know about Napoleon's reforms
OK, I was right. I am bad at predictions so I forgot to give a probability. Anyway.
I think Scott is right that this is just a case of “the reforms were good”. Yes, breaking up the guilds was good. There are also some relevant passages towards the end of Margaret Jacob's *Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West*—I don't remember the details, but basically pre-Revolution France was very hierarchical and had this small cadre of authorities who controlled all industrial projects.
Britain didn't need this because they didn't have this problem and they solved the problem of guilds, etc. in their own way.
I honestly thought you were going to say "...but because I'm Jason 'Roots of Progress' Crawford". I love your essays on progress studies by the way; they're fantastically quotable.
Ha, thanks!
>>The idea was that the occupying American forces couldn't care less about the entrenched power structure and vetocracy in Germany and Japan, so they rammed through whatever reforms seemed like good ideas at the time, and they were in fact mostly good ideas. On the other hand, the Soviet Union tried the same thing in East Germany and that went less well.<<
It is reasonable to presume that what you are imposing matters. In this case capitalism is better than collectivism, at least as measured by economic growth.
Everyone talks about the huge success the allies had imposing a better government on Germany after WW2, but nobody talks about the utter clusterfuck the allies left behind in Germany and the remnants of Austria-Hungary, which gave us Nazism (with some reasonably high chance we'd get Communism in Germany instead) and led to the second world war. A reasonable guess here is that imposing a new government from above is pretty hard to get right.
After WWI, the allies were actively trying to leave a clusterfuck behind.
Well the French certainly were, and Wilson had perhaps already had a stroke and couldn't focus what was left of his brain on anything other than his magical League of Nations. One wonders what 20th century European history would look like if the leadership of the US at the end of *both* world wars hadn't been suddenly crippled.
Germany wasn't even occupied in WWI. If France/Britain/US had imposed a government then, it would have made it clear that Germany had lost. At the very least it would have removed the Nazi argument about a "knife in the back". The fact that the Germans never felt they had lost the war may have been the biggest factor in the rise of Nazism.
Hum... if by allies you include Communist Russia that might work. The case could be made (margin problem) that Nazism was the reaction to the International Communism, a form of Communist Russia colonialism?
Theory: Being conquered for a short period can be helpful but only if the conqueror withdraws after breaking up the local monopolies.
As far as theories easily explained that may also be correct, this sounds accurate on first reading. History has these happen quite rarely compared to 1) conquests where the conqueror stays and 2) conquests where the conqueror is expelled without breaking up the local monopolies.
It's quite rare to have a conqueror with the power and longevity to change local power structures who goes away within a limited timeframe. You would need a more altruistic approach (US with Japan and Germany) or for a third party to defeat the conqueror (Napoleon by the British).
I think Seeing Like A State only applies to complex systems, which resolves some of the apparent contradictions here. Complex systems have many interacting components. Cities and agricultural systems, profiled in Seeing Like A State, are good examples. Top-down reform doesn't work in complex systems because they are inherently difficult to model. Breaking up oligarchies isn't in the same category. Economists can confidently recommend breaking up extractive institutions because the first order effects are so good. The second order impacts are just a rounding error. In contrast, a city is a complex system that is all about second and third order impacts. Evolved institutions can be irreplaceable in complex systems, but aren't necessarily better in other settings.
So can we find an analogous situation if we examine the effect of imposing Roman Law?
i think this comparison sort of highlights how this is a ridiculous question. it would depend almost entirely on what system was imposed, how it was imposed, surrounding conditions, nature of the place it was imposed on, and how you chose to measure what changes occurred, and what change you consider good.
Originally 0.7 on conquered dutchies outperforming non conquered ones but flipped my prediction after misremembering the title of this post to be "The Cost Of Radical Reform".
If we think of this as analogous to searching for a global minimum when one is currently stuck at a local minimum, then the question of whether radical reform is a good idea can be rephrased as asking whether we should try a large jump or a small one. There is no fully general solution to this problem, but we do have some heuristics.
One heuristic is, "How bad is our current equilibrium? Is it more or less ok, or are people really miserable?" This lets us distinguish between the cases of a healthy neighborhood where Robert Moses wants to build a highway and a crappy principality full of oppressed peasants.
Another, similar heuristic would be, "Are the people resisting change a small elite or a large underclass?" A small elite may just be trying to hold on to their rents, but broad support suggests that the current system is actually working reasonably well and shouldn't be lightly discarded.
I'm not very good at thinking about probabilities for my beliefs, but I'm thinking something like:
20% the radical reforms fared much better
60% the radical reforms fared slightly better
20% the traditional systems fared slightly better
Another hypothesis: Bottom-up evolutionary changes work better when the social/political/economic environment is changing fairly slowly, but top-down revolutionary changes work better when the environment has changed enough to render the current systems dysfunctional. Seems like this hypothesis is consistent with the findings: Napoleonic Europe wasn't exactly the most functional environment, so maybe the places that had French soldiers marching through had the advantage of clearing the dysfunction quicker.
Another observation: Napoleonic France had a wealth of examples of Things Not To Do in the ten years preceding the Coup of 18 Brumaire. (Example #1: The French Republican Calendar, where "Brumaire" was a thing.) So maybe the Napoleonic code had the advantage of a revolutionary framework, with most of the revolutionary rookie mistakes having already been made.
60% confidence that the reformed lands do better. However, I think this moment in history was somewhat unique, as it was on the eve of the industrial revolution. Going into the industrial revolution, it would have been uniquely beneficial to have a common legal system with one of the most powerful economic actors in Europe. So, while I think it's likely the reformed countries did better, I think we have to be a little careful about abstracting too much from it.
Feelings Bold - 60% that being conquered by Napoleon is positively correlated with GDP in the present day. Let's say, 10% better on average.
Going back to the post now.
Ok seem I did fine, though the paper wasn't really about the modern day, so I'll not give myself XP over this.
0.5 that conquered and reformed states did significantly better.
0.3 that they did only slightly better.
0.2 that they did worse.
Might be worth pointing out that Napoleon already represented a step back from the most radical excesses of the French Revolution (no "rational" ten-day weeks or temples of Reason).
<i>Europe at the time had so many tiny duchies and principalities and so on that you can actually do a decent experiment on it - for every principality Napoleon conquered and reformed, there was another one just down the river which was basically identical but managed to escape conquest.</i>
I don't think this is accurate -- if you look at the map of Napoleon's conquests ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_French_Empire#/media/File:French_Empire_(1812).svg ), pretty much all the tiny little duchies ended up as part of Napoleon's empire.
Also, the German Confederation (basically the post-Napoleonic equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire) passed various economic reforms, most notably the customs union of 1834, which would have disproportionately benefitted the smaller German states -- states which, due to their size, had also proved easier for the French to conquer. I guess you could say that this was indirectly due to Napoleon, insofar as the German Confederation wouldn't have existed without him, but still, the appropriate conclusion wouldn't be "Radical, top-down reform is inherently good," but "Free trade is better for the economy than a series of tiny, protectionist micro-states."
And this would also explain why the effect was apparently most pronounced after 1850 -- the reforms take place a few decades after Napoleon, and it would presumably take a few years for their effects to become fully evident.
Prediction comment:
I want to hedge and say that in short-ish term unreformed were better and in long-ish term reformed win; 0.7 for either of those in separation.
"So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-their-traditions polities? ... If you're really feeling bold, post a comment with your prediction before reading further."
To predict which will do better, I'd need to know how the authors will measure "better". I predict that the areas brought into the larger state with a unified legal system and government will do better economically, partly because the Code Napoleon was a pretty good code, but mostly because it's a lot easier to do business with people who have the same laws as you, and where you know how or whether law and contracts will be enforced.
But when I've read about various people living under Napoleon's occupying forces, they generally came to hate the French. So I'd guess that those areas were less happy.
I am, however, skeptical that the experiment can actually be run as described, because I've never heard anything about there being unoccupied pockets within French-held territory. And if there were, there must have been something unusual about those pockets, such as being too remote, inaccessible, or poor to bother with. That would wreck the experiment.
70% confidence that reform outperforms tradition.
prediction: Napoleonic reforms / modernisations improve things drastically in the longer run - 80%
SPOILERS
After reading on: yay! But I agree with the rest, that it’s hard to tell what broader conclusions one can draw from this. Was it because the reforms were radical, and thus, ‘radical reform = good’, or because they were, well good, so, ‘good reform = good’.
I predicted 80% conquered areas do better.
Integration into the empire's economy, language & market were my considerations (over the non-immediate term).
Relatedly, on colonialism there's evidence (from another paper by Acemoglu et al., though they tell a different narrative, and maybe other papers) that, in the long term, countries never colonized do worse than those colonized. I think being conquered over land where your population is integrated into the broader system is beneficial (e.g. Russia in Siberia, or Napoleon) whereas being exploited by a handful of officials (e.g. Congo, Hispaniola) is certainly less beneficial, maybe even detrimental.
Yeah well, you addressed the key concern in your writeup. Here's another prediction for you to make: suppose you successfully spread the meme that "radical reforms" are good, and "designed systems are better than evolved ones." This is true because "there was a study."
Do you think more free markets are likely to come of that?
This makes sense. I think Scott would agree that the larger "local knowledge gap" is not between one nation state and its neighbor, but between the hyperlocal community and the nation state it belongs to.
Maybe national governments are say 95% interchangable with their neighbors, and if the French policies were already proving their worth back home (compared to their old system), they would be quite likely to do better than their neighbor's old systems too.
Also, it seems the French policies mostly INCREASED the power and freedom of the local community members, instead of sweeping away and imposing new, maladaptive laws and practices on them.
I suspect even James Scott would correctly predict the findings of this paper.
Prediction: reformed is only slightly better on average (60%), and has lower variance (ie both the best and worst systems are traditional) (70%)
Did they measure any social outcomes? GDP growth doesn't give a conclusive answer on whether it was a desirable outcome, and urbanization is not inherently good. Cities are dysgenic fertility shredders, so in the long run when all of Europe has either adopted these reforms or they've become irrelevant, then earlier urbanization should have negative effects.
Was too immensed in reading to think of a number, but I was pretty certain the invaded looked better. Retroactively, I'd rate myself at around 80%. It's in fact perfectly consistent with my priors. Authority structures ossify to serve the people on top, overthrowing them makes way for progress. Obviously.
I think the problem with contrasting economic accounts with Scott is that they're concerned with different things. Meaning, not mutually contradictory. Economists study "legible" data like GDP, Scott looks at the wellbeing of the downtrodden. It can simultaneously be true that the business is booming and that the people are immiserated, and the texbook example of this is precisely the (England's) Industrial Revolution. (Which we do have legible data for. People were shorter, their lives were shorter.)
The takeaway from Scott is not to cease progress, but to watch for the little men that get trampled by it. The two views can be reconciled by not trampling the little men in the first place. To be more precise, by carefully rejecting easily-ossifiable and exploitable structures of authority so that the little men don't have to carefully weave their lives around their idiosyncracies only to get them thrown into disarray by a sudden disruptive wave of necessary but careless top-down reforms. Scott himself is an anarchist, which, obviously. (Needless to say, so am I.)
(To extend a hand to the pro-capitalist libertarians which make up like a half of the readership here, I commend you for sharing the above intuition. You just need to stop refusing to accept that capitalism does not solve this problem, in fact, it's itself easily-ossifiable and exploitable.)
I predict that radically-reformed areas perform better, 70% confident.
In a time of rapid technological change, destruction of the old order will usually be a net good.
Soviets are a special case. In their homeland they replaced a +/- feudal system with a quasi-modern one, which had some beneficial effects. In the states they invaded, they replaced an emerging modern free-market system with a planned economy, with disastrous effects.
So, it depends if you're upgrading or downgrading the social system, I guess, and you have no way to tell if both are recent.
My probability was .7 that the reformed ones did better, for essentially the same reasons of legal cruft and rent-seeking.
Perhaps big picture changes, like opening up markets, work well when externally imposed. But small scale bureaucratic changes are also necessary, and these work best when there is time and flexibility for them to evolve to fit the local cultural norms. Just look at how democracy ( a great idea) didn't work well in Arab Spring countries.
Ok I'll bite: Before reading past the "prediction pause", I predict 60-40 that Napoleon's radical reforms did worse than the traditional ones.
My reasoning? I mostly buy the Seeing Like A State-style arguments for bottom-up, illegible policies; on the other hand, much of what I've heard about Napoleonic reforms--including driving on one side of the road only--seem very good to me. But back on the first hand again, I might expect hear about the best Napoleonic reforms and not to hear about all the missteps. So, 60-40 against radical reforms.
(Also, I'm a physicist with little background in history, so my confidence is not much better than 50-50.)
Oopsie doopsie, but at least I accepted my own lack of confidence in my conclusion ex ante.
Actually, despite systematic anti-Brazilian propaganda being dispensed through the world for unconfessable reasons, Brasília is widely considered "a singular artistic achievement, a prime creation of the human genius" and, accordingly, was chosen as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/445/ .
I get the impression most critics of Brasilia aren't criticizing it as art, but rather, as a place to live.
Maybe it is better than Rio de Janeiro's slums or Compton.
I wonder to what extent this is an artifact of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. To explain, some Dutch history:
From the latter part of the 17th century, a group of wealthy merchant families were able to mostly reserve Dutch government offices to themselves, resulting in a ruling class of 'regents,' who served their own interests. The result was dissatisfaction among the middle class, who revolted twice during the 18th century. The second revolt was put down by Prussian intervention. At this time, The Netherlands was a client state of the English and the Prussians, with immense debts, which were paid for with extreme austerity and high regressive taxes, while an elite was extremely wealthy. In 1794/5, Napoleon managed to conquer the country, helped by revolts against the regents. This resulted in The Netherlands becoming a client state of the French. It was not really ruled by the French, but nevertheless instituted huge reforms, like forming a unitary state, adopting some democracy, adopting (progressive) income and wealth taxes, etc.
Napoleon's main interest in The Netherlands was to get money to fuel his wars, military support and a place to launch attacks on Britain from. The Dutch pushed back against this, eventually making Napoleon so angry that he forced the Dutch to accept his brother as king: Louis Bonaparte.
However, Louis turned out to have ambitions of his own: to be a good king who served the interests of the Dutch. He adopted the Dutch nationality and demanded the same from his ministers. He did his best to learn Dutch and made Dutch the official language of the court. He didn't crack down on smugglers that evaded the Napoleonic economic blockade of Britain, which helped the Dutch economy a lot & he refused to institute conscription. He also refused to write off 2/3rds of Dutch loans to the French.
All in all, he was a good king. Napoleon said of him: ″Brother, when they say of some king or other that he is good, it means that he has failed in his rule.″
Napoleon deposed Louis, but two years later he made the ill-fated decision to invade Russia, which in turn led to his later defeat at Waterloo.
If Napoleon had not been defeated and had been able to use The Netherlands as a milk cow for a long time, burdening it with debts, forcing its people to become soldiers, etc; wouldn't The Netherlands have stagnated as long as it remained under that rule? Perhaps the Dutch got very lucky by getting the best of the French reforms, but without suffering that much from Napoleon's more abusive desires.
So perhaps the lesson here is to let reformers institute their most sensible reforms and then banish them to Elba.
Meta-comment: a surprising number of commenters (including me) picked *exactly* 70% in favor of reform.
I chose it because it seems right for "strong intuitions, but epistemic humility because this topic is complicated". Perhaps others thought alike.
A histogram of peoples' prediction values would be interesting.
It would be even more interesting to compel people to do it in a variety of bases, i.e. in addition to percent, choose on a scale of 1 to 12, or 1 to 5, or even -5 to +5, and see if the numbers match up mathematically. I am guessing they would *not* because I think too much psychosocial associations with the specific number creeps in.
I said "Napoleonic code is way better, 80%". I should have said 90%.
Napoleon-conquered did better, 70%
I think some way to integrate those kinds of predictions into the post itself would be really interesting. Some widget to make a prediction on a (pre-defined) question after the introduction, and some summary of the community predictions at the end. I am not sure if the LW Style prediction widget would suffice already, my gut feeling is that only seeing the community predictions at the end of the post would be better, but the LW style widget might already provide some interesting insight, without spoiling the rest of the post. It could obviously be gamed, but you aren't really cheating anyone but yourself, so that doesn't seem like that much of a problem.
I have not read the paper, but considering that:
- Napoleon fell in 1815
- 1848 was a famous year of revolutions
- In 1861 Italy was unified and 1871 Germany was unified
I wonder how the paper could claim that everything good was just because of the French invasion rather than the a general revolutionary spirit or pressure to change.
As a comparison, the modern success of Japan is usually due to the fact that foreign powers colonized/influenced their neighbours, while they escaped conquest.
"Usually due to the fact"?
Japan wasn't forcibly Westernized. XIX century colonial powers weren't interested in modernizing their colonies, and their Far Eastern colonialism was pretty thin on the ground. China wasn't modernized by the British, and Japan wasn't modernized by Americans and the French. Both nations had unequal treaties forced onto them, obliged to open ports for foreign trade, accept Western residents, and to grant extraterritoriality to Western subjects, making the latter a sort of super-nobility, but there was not anything like e.g. the British presence in Egypt, where Lord Cromer was ruler in all but name. The difference between Bakumatsu Japan and Qing China is that Japan found resources within itself to modernize of their own accord, whereas Qing China was both too weak in state capacity and too conceited to learn from barbarians.
> "Usually due to the fact"?
It is typo, it should have been something like "it is usually attributed to the fact".
My point is that it is a common opinion that Japan did better than their neighbors because it was less influenced by foreign powers. China was also invaded by Japan, so it did not really escape foreign influence.
So, I was offering a counter-example (i.e., the success of Japan) to the claim of the paper.
China was invaded by Japan after Japan had spent the four decades after 1854 efficiently modernizing, while China, having had its rude awakening in 1839, 15 years before Japan, but apparently having missed its importance, had spent the interval thrashing about. As for being influenced by foreign powers, the extent of direct foreign influence in China and in Japan in mid-XIX century was small: in neither country was there anything like the colonial systems the British had in India or later in Egypt. Arguably, Japan had a better start in modernization than China because indirectly it was _more_ influenced by foreign powers, through the large numbers of rangaku students, who provided much of the cadre necessary for modernization. The Qing emperor had an office for barbarian intelligence, but IIRC Platt writes that the bureaucrats considered it a nasty and disagreeable appointment.
The deference shown to a "carefully evolved system of traditions" needs to consider whether the conditions under which the system evolved still hold. The early 1800s is around the time when a graph of GDP per capita throughout human history curves from essentially a flat line to a vertical one. Waterloo was in 1815 and the paper discusses growth post 1850, so it is likely that value of a French invasion is not the particular designed system they imposed, but the weakening of constraints on future adaptation.
I don't think it makes sense to have a fixed prior about the relative value of evolved vs. designed systems across all time and space without taking into account particular contexts.
> "The early 1800s is around the time when a graph of GDP per capita throughout human history curves from essentially a flat line to a vertical one."
Counterpoint. Historic GDP per capita of The Netherlands in 1990 dollars:
in 1500: $761
in 1700: $2130
in 1900: $3329
So per capita GDP growth was bigger from 1500 to 1700 then from 1700 to 1900.
Admittedly, this is an extremely cherrypicked example. The Netherlands was the richest country in the world in the 16th and 17th century, but underwent significant stagnation in the 18th century (GDP per capita was lower in 1820 than in 1700!). Nevertheless, the claim that GDP per capita was flat until 1800 clearly does not hold up. Though GDP growth did speed up around the 1800s, and even moreso in the 20th century.
My prediction was that areas conquered by Napoleon would have done much better. But honestly this wasn't much of a prediction, I spent most of my time trying to remember which areas Napoleon conquered. This includes most of the currently richest areas of Europe, making the answer kinda obvious.
"But then, isn't the whole point of Seeing Like A State that things which seem obviously true sometimes aren't?"
No, the point is that a top-down view misses local, tacit and embodied understandings. It only seems "obviously true" that rectangular grid squares are superior if you have a preference for rectangular grid squares. Very different things are "obviously true" from a local and embodied perspective.
"But then you would lose the right to apply Scott to most modern political debates, where there are no peasants to be found, and everything is the weird mix of extractive and altruistic typical of modern states."
Have you considered (the conflict theory perspective) that these "altruistic" policies are not altruistic? People get in a position of power and redistribute value from their opponents to their clients. Also, this is top-down imposed order. Some guys can obviously afford to pay taxes, other people are obviously too poor, lets put them in boxes according to how I evaluate their needs and surpluses.
You may find it relevant that GDP is an imperfect estimate of economic productivity. It seems easy to see why imposing a top-down system of legibility would result in a measured increase in GDP, for two reasons. You're moving value from illegible areas to legible areas, and you're requiring that that value be traded or documented somehow (whereas before value remained in the local illegible sphere).
0.7 radical reform worked
Thoughts: It's said the Polish peasants weren't really bothered by the Partitions. They were just under new management.
The Congo and India and the Soviet Occupation Zone were set up as extractive colonies, whereas the Americans understood that a strong Japan and West Germany were the keys to containing Communism. The DDR did later become better supported, but the damage had been done.
"Daron Acemoglu is the most-cited economist of the past ten years, and I've never heard anyone say a bad word about him"
I'm not - really - an economist, and from what I know Acemoglu is far from being incompetent, but his "Why Nations Fail" was really weird to me in that it very clearly split historical periods and personalities into good (inclusive) and bad (extractive). He also seems to jump to the conclusion that democracy is always definitely better for inclusive institutions, and IDK how much I believe that.
But in general, I kind of agree with the idea about radical reform failing when it doesn't go far enough.
that paper and book are trash
Prediction: most likely (~80 %) no significant difference or somewhat mixed.
Whoopsie
Regarding why Britain kick ass during the Industrial Revolution, it's worth reading Anton Howes' substack, since Britain certainly wouldn't seem to be the betting favourite before it all kicked off.
https://antonhowes.substack.com/
The reform principalities did somewhat better than the traditional ones, at about 65% sure. Lots of confounders and I am not sure how I would qualify 'better' - wealth is about the only objective measure.
Isn't the obvious explanation here that radical change comes with inherent problems, but that if the existing system is bad enough, it's still fairly possible to make large improvements? The French revolution swept aside feudal structures that were centuries behind their expiration date, and the Russian revolution might have worked out well if power hadn't ended up with people who were literally the worst (and even _those_ people managed to improve dramatically on industrial production).
Meanwhile, the combination of democracy, capitalism, science and markets mean that Western society seems fairly proof against that kind of ossification. In these cases, the problems with radical reforms would almost certainly outweigh the benefits.
I'm boldly saying, before reading, that the duchies Napoleon conquered did better. Now back to reading.
I didn't even have to think about, it was so hundred percenty obvious. One of the reason why it worked is that the French are culturally not so much different than the European duchies they invaded, so what worked for the French also worked for them. For a comparison (not a one-to-one comparison but still) even though French wanted to make it a full state, French reforms didn't work as well in Algeria. Another reason it worked is that the changes were made in good faith to bring there a working system since they would be client states to Napoleonic France. Compare to for example Belgian Congo.
Re: Britain, there's a case that can be made about the Industrial Revolution really getting kicked off in Belgium and spreading to Britain, but in any case Britain became the flagbearer of Industrial Revolution anyway so I cannot dispute this a lot.
One last point which I know nobody here will like: The communist revolution in Russia is also a great example for this. Hate them as you like; those reforms transformed one of the poorest, most backward and technologically lagging countries in Europe to a fully electrified and industrialized superpower with extensively educated citizens in the matter of a few decades.
By the way my first paragraph also explains why communist reforms didn't work in East Germany, it wasn't made in good faith but to create a satellite state that was dependent on USSR, somewhat like how Belgian Congo worked. On the other hand, USA was trying to create a self sufficient West Germany that can hold its own at least for a while if the cold war turned hot, so made their reforms in good faith (better faith than the Soviets in East Germany).
For examples of the other kind, well USA also installed some reforms in bad faith for example in Chile or Panama.
"Does radical reform help or hurt" is a very, very different question than "would the implementation of modern legal systems including the Napoleonic Code raise GDP and urbanization vs. traditional legal systems in European polities."
For the record, my prediction as to the first question is "I have no earthly idea". I wouldn't even know how what to include in a data set to try to build a prediction off of, nor would I be able to quantify a value judgment as to whether the outcomes of reforms were "good" or "bad".
My prediction as to the second question is "yes, probably." I'm still not really willing to put a number on "probably" without knowing more specifics. Low confidence, though - maybe 60% - but part of that is admittedly because I expect to see counterintuitive results presented in this forum.
However, I think framing the question this way kind of gives away the answer. I mean, we know that "modern" legal systems are at least correlated with greater urbanization, so it would be kind of surprising if someone found that modernizing and standardizing legal codes resulted in decreased urbanization. We also have a plausible mechanism as to why and how modern, standard legal codes facilitate people living in larger cities in which they are more likely to have dealings with lots of strangers.
Also, in terms of the object question, I think you can see a clear mechanism where having standardized legal codes might facilitate trade (this even shows up now, in things like the US not importing foreign medications, and supply chain problems stemming from Brexit). So I think it's reasonable to predict that this would increase GDP.
After reading the results, I see that my interpretation of the question didn't exactly match the study, since the authors seem to be talking about destroying the institutional power of elites - which isn't exactly the same thing as implementing a standard code of laws. But that's exactly why I was reluctant to put a number on a prediction in the first place.
Finally, I think it's important to note that the choice of metrics here really matters. Why should greater rates of urbanization be counted as an indicator of successful reform? "Living in a city" isn't a terminal goal for most people, right? What was life like in these cities, compared with life in villages? What happened to life expectancy? Leisure time? Quality time with family? Number and quality of relationships? Mental health? I imagine the results would be more mixed here.
I also wonder to what extent our choice of metrics reflects a kind of survivorship bias. Development as reflected in GDP and urbanization may have produced competitive societies that were able to outcompete "traditional" societies, but as a result when we try to define "success" we're defining it based on "which societies won this competition" rather than "which societies were good for the people in them." There's a risk, in other words, that we're choosing metrics based on what we think success looks like starting with the assumption that we're the most successful and building outwards from there. I think the Johns Hopkins report (Global Health Security Index) shows the pitfalls of this kind of thinking - the metrics they chose were heavily biased in favor of the US and other "WEIRD" countries, and as a result some people were blindsided by the fact that the US had one of the worst pandemic responses in the world.
So I think in some sense when we're choosing metrics based on what we think makes a society successful we're in effect asking "will adopting [reforms that make societies more like ours] have the effect of [making societies more like ours]". And in that sense, it makes sense that the more radical the reform *in our direction*, the quicker will be the resultant move in our direction. But this tells us nothing about where future reforms will move us to.
he chose metrics based on what he could estimate (albeit poorly). much of economics seems to be people looking around for "interesting" data and then seeing how sweeping a claim they can get away with making based on it.
Prediction: Frenchies did well on whatever metrics the authors select. This is based on two things: one, Napoleon as a "make the trains run on time" sort of guy, two, we say "metrics" in this context, not "measures" – I presume there's a good reason the French word won out. Or, to summarize both of those things: seeing like a state actually works, in that a strong state with a powerful executive organ can actually get things done. 80%.
(Yes, I'm aware "measure" is French too – it's in Piers Plowman, OK? Norman not Napoleonic.)
This was a fun game, thanks Scott. To expand on my answer:
The way we think was shaped by the collapse of feudalism and "birth of modernity" that was essentially completed (in Western Europe) by the Napoleonic wars. The institution of pervasive systems of measurement marked this turn of the page. If something falls short on the metrics, it's "objectively inferior" and that's all there is to say about it. Sorry, Freigraf! Better get those numbers up. Also, don't you think it's about time you had a proper staff? Here's a list of guys. Yes, they're not exactly men of quality, but don't worry, they're not *peasants*…
If there's anything good outside of this, comme on dit, "metric system", it's going to be really, really hard to see from 2021.
Actually, rather than Napoleon vs the feudal lords or whatever, with Napoleon considered as a sort of prototypical Mussolini or Hitler, I think it'd be more interesting to talk about Napoleon vs von Metternich. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemens_von_Metternich
The reformed places did better. (85%)
If nothing else, I know from history that a lot of places (especially in Germany) did not undo the reforms after Napoleon was defeated, and other unconquered places tried to imitate them. So this suggests that what Napoleon did was valuable.
On a theoretical level, we should expect the politic system a society adopts to depend on the rate of material change within that society. If your society changes less over time, you can have more veto points, because the slow leakage of ideas through the system matches the input. If your society is constantly varying, you should see fewer veto points, because folks are constantly inventing new carriages/methods of piracy/articles of clothing/siege strategies etc., and you can't afford to wait to respond to them. And the Napoleonic conquests happen to occur right about when the Industrial Revolution hit Continental Europe. So we should expect the ancien regimes to be adapted to the slow hierarchically-constrained change discussed at https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled/ and https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2010/08/notes-on-dynamics-of-human-civilization.html. Conversely, Napoleonic codes better match the pace of factory innovations.
Now I'm going to go read the rest of the article.
Another worthwhile question is whether the states able to fend off Napolean were already healthier than those he conquered. Perhaps they already had the kind of anti-fragility Napolean introduced in conquered states, albeit likely not capitalist antifragility.
You could also have places that had better natural barriers or more insular and united local populations that made them harder to invade, which could confound your results either way,
My prediction was 70% confidence that the French reforms were beneficial. Obviously getting conquered isn't great, but textbook growth theory says that good institutions are the most important driver of economic growth and I had the unfair advantage (relative to people at the time) of knowing that the Napoleonic Code is still in use two hundred years later.
Ah yes, the French Revolution - so extraordinarily innovative that they ended up being too weak to fend off a clever popular strongman who eventually made himself Emperor self-crowned in the presence of the Pope in the cathedral of Notre Dame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_of_Napoleon_I Yep, that sure kicked out all those old dusty monarchical and imperial traditions! 😁
There's a reason you mention the Code Napoleon as the new legal code imported by the French into the occupied areas, and not the Code Robespierre or the Code Révolutionnaire, and it is because that after the fervour, ferment, and degradation of the Revolution into the Terror, it was easier for France and French institutions to slip back into the older, more stable, tradtional models. Yes, they did a lot of changes and reforms, but it wasn't feasible in the long run to be constantly and continually pulling down, sweeping away, and imposing hither, thither and yon.
Did the authors of this look at French colonial possessions alongside "yeah we had the French here for a while but then they left" in regards to how successful they were in the long run? (I am open to the argument that post-colonisation French possessions did better, but since most of Africa was colonised by everyone in the times of the Scramble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa , we can't really find a "this state was never colonised or occupied by outsiders" to be a control sample. Here, have a collaborative music video between Malian and French-Spanish musicians https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J43T8rEOg-I). Small duchies and principalities such as Liechtenstein, Monaco and Luxembourg managed to survive to this day.
The point about "being invaded and occupied isn't so bad, why your economy will get a boost!" has me wincing. Germany was a developed European country at the time, the occupying powers didn't do much meddling apart from "no more Nazis" and pouring in money for reconstruction, apart from glaring at each other as former allies separated again, and it ended up divided in two halves, and East Germany was supposed to be doing less well. Do our economists do a comparison here?
Japan was a nation that was more or less forcibly Westernised, but even pre-war it was very eager to throw off the past, modernise fast, and on the model of its Western inspirations, become a colonial power itself. Oops! The US occupation did do a heck of a lot more restructuring and interfering here, but again, I think this was (economically) more a matter of throwing fuel on the fire rather than build from the ground up and do away with old feudal Japan.
And the main points I'm taking away from this is that the occupying powers eventually left. The French are not still in control of European territories, the Allies and Soviets have both left Germany, and Japan is in charge of its own government.
Economic development of an occupied territory is tricky and controversial business. One of our complaints over being colonised by Britain is that, post the Act of Union, Irish native industries were deliberately starved so as not to be competitors with British ones, and that the Irish market was treated as a dumping ground for British goods. We didn't get the same share of the Industrial Revolution, Northern Ireland with Belfast as the ship-building centre did that, and even Northern Ireland was more reliant on the linen industry which is not heavy manufacturing or high finance.
Indeed, even pre-Act of Union, this was a problem addressed by, amongst others, Dean Swift; we are still quoting his "Burn everything British but their coal". He wrote "A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture" in 1720, described as "a polemic on Irish affairs published anonymously by Jonathan Swift, his first such pamphlet after becoming Dean of St Patrick's. In it he attacks the English mercantilist policy which is draining Ireland of her wealth." https://celt.ucc.ie//published/E700001-024/
"It is the peculiar felicity and prudence of the people in this kingdom, that whatever commodities or productions lie under the greatest discouragements from England, those are what we are sure to be most industrious in cultivating and spreading. Agriculture, which hath been the principal care of all wise nations, and for the encouragement whereof there are so many statute laws in England, we countenance so well, that the landlords are everywhere by penal clauses absolutely prohibiting their tenants from ploughing; not satisfied to confine them within certain limitations, as it is the practice of the English; one effect of which is already seen in the prodigious dearness of corn, and the importation of it from London, as the cheaper market. And because people are the riches of a country, and that our neighbours have done, and are doing all that in them lie, to make our wool a drug to us, and a monopoly to them; therefore the politic gentlemen of Ireland have depopulated vast tracts of the best land, for the feeding of sheep.
(Footnote: Mr Lecky points out that in England, after the Revolution, the councils were directed by commercial influence. At the time there was an important woollen industry in England which, it was feared, the growing Irish woollen manufactures would injure. The English manufacturers petitioned for their total destruction, and the House of Lords, in response to the petition, represented to the King that ‘the growing manufacture of cloth in Ireland, both by the cheapness of all sorts of necessaries of life, and goodness of materials for making all manner of cloth, doth invite your subjects of England, with their families and servants, to leave their habitations to settle there, to the increase of the woollen manufacture in Ireland, which makes your loyal subjects in this kingdom very apprehensive that the further growth of it may greatly prejudice the said manufacture here.’ The Commons went further, and suggested the advisability of discouraging the industry by hindering the exportation of wool from Ireland to other countries and limiting it to England alone. The Act of 10 and 11 Will. III. c. 10, made the suggestion law and even prohibited entirely the exportation of Irish wool anywhere. Thus, as Swift puts it, ‘the politic gentlemen of Ireland have depopulated vast tracts of the best land, for the feeding of sheep.’)"
And for the "burn everything British", here is the provenance:
"I heard the late Archbishop of Tuam mention a pleasant observation of somebody's; ‘that Ireland would never be happy till a law were made for burning everything that came from England, except their people and their coals.’ Nor am I even yet for lessening the number of those exceptions.
Non tanti mitra est, non tanti judicis ostrum.
But I should rejoice to see a staylace from England be thought scandalous, and become a topic for censure at visits and tea-tables.
If the unthinking shopkeepers in this town had not been utterly destitute of common sense, they would have made some proposal to the Parliament, with a petition to the purpose I have mentioned; promising to improve the ‘cloths and stuffs of the nation into all possible degrees of fineness and colours, and engaging not to play the knave according to their custom, by exacting and imposing upon the nobility and gentry either as to the prices or the goodness.’ For I remember in London upon a general mourning, the rascally mercers and woollen-drapers, would in four-and-twenty hours raise their cloths and silks to above a double price; and if the mourning continued long, then come whining with petitions to the court, that they were ready to starve, and their fineries lay upon their hands.
I could wish our shopkeepers would immediately think on this proposal, addressing it to all persons of quality and others; but first be sure to get somebody who can write sense, to put it into form."
My guess: it won't change anything with a 50% certainty, and largely because to be in Europe in this revolutionary age means changing eventually.
Subsidiary is that it'll make things better at 20% because, if I remember properly, the Nepoleonic reforms were fairly standard stuff like 'let people work wherever they want' and 'peasants can wear whatever colors they want', and the reforms didn't touch the dangerous stuff, like family and religion (at least the Napoleonic reforms didn't, not after the terror).
30% it makes things worse largely on my general supposition that breaking apart institutions sucks and that being invaded sucks.
My prediction was that the Napoleon-reformed states gained a small but significant increase, of the order of around 10% of GDP. My reasoning was that having lots of incompatible weights and measures plus lots of fees and internal customs duties, cannot have helped trade.
I predict the reformed states did slightly better on average with lower variance. Although I'm dubious that this is measurable.
My prediction was 70% that traditional polities did better.
Prediction: 65% chance Napoleon made things better.
How about positive effects from a bigger market? Created by unifying the conquered areas. Less obstacles to trade, lower barriers for entry, simply better capitalism...
You see that a lot in the mess that was early 19th c. Germany. Napoleon mediatized the Germanies into medium-sized states. Then the states formed various customs unions before the emergence of the Kaiserreich. (being as much political maneuvering between Austria, Prussia and the smaller states as it was a general trend towards greater economic efficnecy)
I'll predict that the conquered regions did better, but only because I've heard that after Napoleon was defeated, merchants in the liberated regions lobbied to keep Napoleonic law, arguing it was better for trade.
"is this potentially challenging a carefully evolved system of traditions?"
Interesting wording, which actually differentiates between these cases to a reasonable extent.
Peasants, after all, have had a lot longer to evolve good farming traditions than guilds had had to evolve good industrial traditions (Napoleon being, y'know, right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution). Peasants have had a lot longer to evolve good farming traditions than *anybody* has had to do *anything*, except maybe societal fabric traditions.
(Social traditions are a lot harder to nail down when and whether there has been this kind of paradigm shift. Of course, in the case of societal fabric the state of theory on what makes for good cohesion and effectiveness is kind of *notoriously terrible*, so it's hard to actually point to many cases of people trying to use theory (Social Justice, the Cultural Revolution and psychiatry probably count, but I can't think of much else).
What counts as societal fabric traditions? I'd say definitely language. Religion? Music?
On the first pass, I thought you meant literal fabric.
What is permitted, what is forbidden, what is expected in how people interact with each other. Leviticus/Deuteronomy is one of the most explicit examples, but it's frequently largely implicit. Established religion is definitely part of this, of course, but the "established" is more important than the "religion"; gnosis-based spirituality is pretty much irrelevant here, while established non-religious philosophies (e.g. Confucianism) definitely are part of it.
While the stated aims of these traditions are usually random and made-up (evolution never knows what it's wrought, only that it works), the effects selected for here are things like "raise the birth rate", "foster community spirit", and "stop epidemics".
65% Napoleon was a net positive.
@SSC: comments are a mess: substantive comments drown in a sea of one-liner predictions. I suggest that when you call for predictions in a post not exclusively devoted to a call for predictions, make a comment thread specifically for predictions.
Yeah, this didn't work well, but I'm still glad Scott tried something new. A root comment for predictions would be good, or even an entirely separate post.
Where to start on this? Perhaps with a confession: I didn't make a prediction because as a still-practising historian it feels wrong to guess the answer to a historical question rather than look at some evidence and hypothesis. If had done I would have probably got the answer wrong though because I have a deep- seated aversion to modernist reforms, which would likely skew any other priors. This may be relevant to the critique that follows.
I would be concerned on the underlying methodology of this work, simply because I'm slightly stumped as to where you would find accurate comparable measures for GDP, urbanisation or anything else that would suit such an analysis in pre-Napoleonic Europe (it's not as if weights, measurements or even clocks and calendars were in any way standardised, so actual measurable economic measuresare expectedto be reconstructable?). These sort of statistics are only gathered by modern states not small feudal societies. So in this case they must have been invented, probably using existing data (comparability unknown) and some level of assumption. A twentieth/twenty-first-century creation of an eighteenth-century GDP for a small Rhineland duchy is not the same as a twentieth-century GDP measure for a Rhineland town, which is a serious methodological issue. Just because you want to compare something doesn't mean you can: the assumption you can do so is perhaps a sign that you are inclined to believe that states are quantifiable and manageable, which is likely to skew your conclusions. This is why professional historians tend not to produce theories like this: their reputation can survive most things, but being known for mishandling data to reach a conclusion is a serious problem akin to being a pseudo-historian.
I'd also note that the UK is not an outlier here, but rather was ahead of the curve. Whereas much of Europe had a new liberal order imposed by conquest around 1800, the English and Scots had forged theirs in the wars of the seventeenth-century, where absolutism was defeated and the commons asserted their authority over the aristocracy (you could argue there was a Dutch conquest in 1688 if you really want, but it was only really opposed in Ireland). Revolution, however glorious, had already happened for the UK, and indeed allowed the formation of the UK.
Acemoglu et al are also travelling in distinguished footsteps. Their thesis seems, purposefully or not, to justify Marx, who had already identified the importance of revolution in changing society. This might not be particularly significant as an academic discovery therefore: that the transition from feudalism to capitalism was regularly violent and beneficial is probably one of the most accepted (and possibly less original?) parts of Marx's analysis.
So in summary, this looks like a retread of Marx using the perennially dubious technique of trying to force data to tell you what you want to see, a methodological no-no in every field of thought. And if the finding is significant all it shows is that (in Marxist terms) it is beneficial to replace feudalism with capitalism, a summary that would have found few opponents in 1909 a century before it was reached. This may be unfair, and the conclusions reached seem likely enough from the priors that liberal economies do better than centralised feudal ones (for those thinking feudalism equals lack of economic control, check out the medieval legislation on prices and wages), and the rule of law is better than rule by decree. But from a histirian's perspective this looks like data mining to make a point, and this seems unacceptable methodologically. With that in mind I'd be inclined to doubt the book's conclusions are valid unless it becomes clear that there is good and reliable data being used. Especially because the conclusions can be used to justify violent revolution to achieve an aim now, whereas the revolution might be irrelevant and the changes that came about (however achieved - I think the Scandinavians got there without revolution?) are what is important.
Since I've no way to determine whether or not French reforms would improve things, I'd just wager that they increased fungibility of the state-machine. 11/9 odds that they improved the status quo
> If you're really feeling bold, post a comment with your prediction before reading further.
I am feeling bold, so 60% on the reformed systems performing at least somewhat better (expecting to be proven wrong, though, given the title and what I expect Scotts take on this to be).
Ok, so yeah, replacing things with better things is good, replacing things with worse things is bad, got it.
If true, that is actually very good news, because it means when we want to fix things we "only" have to compare the current system to the improvements we want to make and not worry too much about accidentally breaking some poorly understood miracle functionality of the old system.
Also wow, there are a lot of people at around the same level of confidence (and in the same direction). I had not anticipated that.
2/3rds that the non-conquered did better.
I guess sometimes a useless fence is just a useless fence.
70% chance that the French-reformed areas did better. I vaguely remember reading something about the influences of French-imposed legal reforms in my AP European History class.
My conclusion from this debate of technocracy vs tradition is then that in order to predict which one will be better, you have to have economic theory (or whatever theory is appropriate). If you know that markets typically work better, then it's possible to predict that pro-market reform will likely improve things.
I suspect that modern urban design theory could also have predicted that Brasilia was a bad idea.
Prediction: probably depends on the reforms, but Napoleonic (being mostly good and modern) will be positive.
Call this the _The Mouse that Roared_ hypothesis.
(You could even cast Peter Sellers as Napoleon if he weren't dead)
I think traditional does better on average, with a 65% probability. (TL;DR: I am reading Seeing Like A State)
Requested prediction: my gut says that the conquered people did better along objectively measurable dimensions in the short term (greater production in monetary terms, fewer deaths by starvation?), but worse on squishier dimensions (lower subjective well-being, possibly higher rates of alcoholism and depression).
So the article makes it sound like occupation was a slam dunk, but so far only uses metrics of urbanization and economic growth. It does that "there is no evidence of a negative effect of French invasion", but in the absence of evidence specifically related to non-economic well-being of the conquered people, I'm not going to fully agree with the "all good, no bad" perspective (though I do adjust my assumptions significantly towards "it was good on the whole" and away from "a trade-off, possibly worse along some dimensions and better on others")
Prediction: reforms dramatically increased urbanization, since prerevolutionary Europe had systems that discouraged urbanization. Post industrial revolution, urbanized areas exploded in GDP, so I believe GDP would have gone up proportional to urbanization, but not any higher than can be explained by urbanization. Politically I'm conservative.
I was right on Urbanization, and it is unclear if the higher GDP was caused solely by urbanization, not free market reform. Wish we had other metrics as well
Oooh: Advanced prediction. For me the same as the top one I see. No substantial difference. Gears type explanation: They are both part of European culture which is the primary economic driver.
Possible confounder would be that the states reformed by France probably are on average physically closer to England, and thus the primary point from which industrial development diffused.
Pre-read predictions:
I think the places that underwent radical reform should exhibit much wider variance in outcome than places which didn’t undergo change. I’m 80% confident here.
I think at least some places that underwent radical reform should have performed better than they used to: I’m 70% confident here.
I think that at least 20% of the places that underwent radical reform should have performed worse than they used to. I’m 70% confident here.
I think there’s going to be a bunch of questions around metholodgy that will difficult to know or tell how much some places did or didn’t improve. I’m 90% confident these questions will exist and 80% confident they’ll be Enough to make it very difficult to concretely say much here besides “sometimes it works well, sometimes it really doesn’t,” with a slightly higher weight towards the “it doesn’t” end of the distribution.
Isn’t it the case that it’s the least successful entrenched systems that tend to get radically revolutionised? Well functioning successful ones less so - and are more likely to be the ones imposing revolutionary change on others.
I think if that’s true, it’s going to skew how likely it is that radical revolutions result in functional improvements
I didn't have the nerve to make a prediction, but I wondered if immigration/emigration would be a good test for which places had gotten better or worse.
I remember visiting the big castle in Salzburg and hearing the guide talk about all the improvements and new walls being built and wondering why on earth they keep building walls when it already looks impossible to take. So remember my reaction when I heard how it fell: Napoleon was moving through the area with his army, without any intention of going towards the city. So the city rulers hurried to send messengers after him to surrender.
Napoleon isn't exactly your average ruler - it's the kind of guy apparently you want to be conquered by. On the other hand I finished reading Conquest and Cultures, and a common pattern is that conquered people do A LOT better than their freer neighbors. And yet, east germany did (much) worse under the soviets. Why?
Well, one explanation is that being conquered exposes you to a higher level of civilization - after all, they managed to conquer you so they must be doing something better. And also bring you in a market of technology and exchange that is usually a lot better than you previous single country level. In East Germany's case it just happened that being conquered by Russia was just objectively worse than being conquered by the West - worse market, worse tech, (much) worse ideologies. After all, the betters conquering the worse is just an average tendency, not a rule. And Germany was once the kind of country that tried to conquer the world. So them losing that battle and getting divided up like a big pie is not the same phenomenon as a lone country getting gobbled up by an empire.
When writing about modern development, economists often talk about moving peasants off the land and into more productive work, e.g., factories. It strikes me that old European systems like common land allowed a lot of very marginal peasants to hang on in the countryside, where their inconsistent labor was of course not very productive. When the commons were abolished and the system rationalized, they could no longer feed themselves and moved to the cities. So it was easier for factory owners to find workers in places where the countryside had been de-feudalized, and industry grew faster. This makes perfect sense at an Econ 101 level. On the other hand the mechanism by which this was achieved was cleansing millions of people off the land, using the threat of starvation, and forcing them to move to places where by this argument their descendants did not really benefit until 50 years later. The time scale makes this data useless for talking about modern reforms, since nobody is going to wait 50 years for good results. Heck, the radical reforms in Russia may turn out in a century to have been great. Who cares?
65% that reformed principalities do better
I used to work in factory automation. When I first started somebody explained to me something about how bottom-up evolution interacts with top-down redesign:
Him: We're going to go to [place] and do major upgrades to a 20-year-old [assembly line].
Me: They'll be happy - the new [robotics gear] is way more efficient.
Him: No, it never goes that way. We design and install this new system that is obviously better. Then the client complains that their operation is less productive.
Me: How? The [robotics gear] is way faster than what we're replacing it with. And the [operator interfaces] aren't cobbled together out of old circuit boards and TV screens.
Him: It's the operators. They get *really good* at operating the line. They know all it's quirks. They do little hacks to make things work more smoothly, or they'll figure out a way to run [different product] through the line when it's otherwise idle.
Me: So they'll get more productive on this line, but not until they've worked on it for a while?
Him: Yeah, they'll be way ahead of where they were eventually. But they'll hate every moment of it, and curse us engineers for swooping in and disrupting their system that was working great.
---
Can we reconcile the top-down planning vs. bottom-up evolution in a similar way? Big reforms change which landscape you're on (for better or worse) and accumulation of metis moves you toward its highest point?
Whenever I recommend someone read Seeing Like a State I also recommend they read The Ghost Map or some other book where top down reform worked out very well. Sometimes coordination problems are hard and some order needs to be imposed.
But with regards to Britain specifically it wasn't so traditional as all that. There was enclosure, toll pikes, and all sorts of changes. But Britain had Parliament where different interests could bargain and change things in a way that incorporated some degree of bottom up knowledge. Pure autocracies can't do that and have to rely on tradition to a greater extent.
You will find that to be an important lesson as you try to run a business. When you have to judge each proposal as “good, let’s do it” or “bad, let’s not”, you should carefully consider the devil’s advocate position to make sure you aren’t missing something, but you have to hold in check the intellectual urge to give extra weight to counterintuitive arguments just because they are cool. A good idea is a good idea.
My prediction before reading is a bimodal distribution. Radically reformed small entities will 60% have done better and 40% have done worse. So in particular, the variance of outcomes will be higher.
Ok, prediction. Napoleonic conquest marginally positive, where disrupted communities relatively more open to subsequent urbanization and industrialization. And also to nationalism, state bureuacracy, and eventually EU. 60% confidence. Null case: Weber's iron cage enforces most of this anyway, so Napoleonic conquest not very significant.
I predicted "no effect" from radical reform, as I see a lot of commenters did, but most people aren't explaining their reasons so I will: I metagamed it. The fact that you're bothering to ask the question implies it has an interesting answer, and the most interesting answer after you set up the reasons to believe both pro and con is "haha, trick question, it doesn't matter!"
Just finished Joseph Henrich's "The Weirdest People in the World". He suggests it was a cultural psychology that changed due to first the Catholic church limiting cousin marriages among other things and then after due to Protestants promoting individualism,learning to read and friendly behavior to people other than your relatives. Lots more detail in the book of course and but super well researched. We are "WEIRD" (Western,Educated, Industrious,Rich Democracies)!
Here's a review of the "The Weirdest People in the World" with more info: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-henrich-weird-people/615496/
Part of me wonders if the answer is democracy. You do those things which seem intuitive (popular) if they work great, if they don’t then you vote the people out and do something else. It’s not perfect (good ideas implemented poorly go away) and it’s not like an authoritarian like Napoleon can’t get it right by accident, but it is probably why democracies are so much richer than non-democracies.
The weakness of the "evolved institutions" side of things for me has ways been that the only thing institutions are evolving to maximize is longevity. There's a good reason to think a system that has lasted a long time will last a lot longer, no reason to think that system is more beneficial than the alternatives.
In a peasant context, or any other individual or small community context, we can imagine that systems will evolve towards being useful to those carrying them out. In a larger societal context though where people can exploit each other and have divergent interests the system can easily be long lasting based on its benefits to some, even as it harms most.
<i>The weakness of the "evolved institutions" side of things for me has ways been that the only thing institutions are evolving to maximize is longevity. There's a good reason to think a system that has lasted a long time will last a lot longer, no reason to think that system is more beneficial than the alternatives.</i>
Generally speaking, though, really awful systems fall pretty quickly, simply because they're so awful. A long-lasting system might not be *optimal*, but it's at least going to be *tolerable*, whereas you don't know beforehand whether your plan to move everybody out of their home villages and move them into evenly-sized rectangular grids in your capital is going to create a wondrous futuristic techno-state or a hellish dystopia.
60% that "traditional" ones did better
> Take a second to make a prediction here - a real prediction, with a probability attached.
I predict that 2/3 of the radically reformed polities did better than their left-to-their-traditions polities. I'm generally sympathetic to the Seeing Like a State argument, but my gut sense is that the polities in 19th century Europe were saddled with too much dead-weight tradition. So on balance, they needed some shaking up.
On “getting conquered by a foreign enemy is good for economic growth.” This is one of Sowell’s findings across lots of different groups far beyond Japan and Germany in Wealth, Poverty, and Politics.
But his argument was that it was isolation that kills and cultural exchange, regardless of whether it is forced, that creates prosperity.
A selection effect that's possibly worth pondering on when thinking about the French invasions: being invaded probably selects for not being powerful enough to resist invasion, which probably correlates with having a less effective economic/political system in place, which correlates with a higher probability that installing a new system causes general improvement.
Conquered areas didn't just do better than they had done before - they did better than unconquered areas. If unconquered areas had better institutions to begin with, that makes the contrast even more striking.
Ah right of course! That does make it more striking.
Ok I'll bite and make a prediction without reading past the break...
The areas conquered by Napoleon did better in long term progress indicators on average, 70% confidence.
A) These areas would have been on average more impacted by the wars and therefore stronger postwar catch-up growth (think post WW2 growth on a smaller scale).
B) The reforms that survived the process of 10-15 years of reform followed by a reaction could be some of the more effective.
The 30% goes to the many potential confounders, me overestimating A, me underestimating the downsides of B, or just missing something entirely.
0.7 makes things better. 0.5 it makes it better in a way that also creates some meaningful costs (more inequality or social strife or something like that).
Prediction: Since Daron Acemoglu is the author I'm guessing that authoritarian imposition of pro-democratic institutions are good, and since this is the case they brought up that's probably what happened here. In the wake of Napoleon, principalities were turned into polities with on average slightly more democratic institutions than before and they were better off for it.
Ahh, nice. Granted, only reason I got this somewhat right was because I already knew what Acemoglu would be likely to say..
> Take a second to make a prediction here
61% in favor of radically-reformed polities
thought process:
It's a binary question, so without considering any evidence I should start at 50%. What kind of evidence can I consider? For one thing, the Napoleonic Code is even in this post called "modern", so it has at least endured, which is a point in it's favour- it's at least not so much worse that it's been abolished everywhere. It's been so socially ingrained that I even have trouble imagining not having a family name for people, so it's definitely been successful in the sense that it's enduring.
I'd think that the reformed policies make the principalities more legible compared to the unconquered ones, which should have an impact. I also think the reforms should take energy that would otherwise be used productively elsewhere, so I'm expecting at least an initial dip, which could possibly have a sustained impact through compound returns?
On the whole I personally just don't have enough background knowledge to be very certain, so I'll stay close to my starting point. Still, I think this is moderate evidence to positive impact, so I'll move a couple of decibans towards positive.
let's say 61% probability that the radically-reformed polities do better than the left-to-their-traditions polities.
Let's see how I do.
To me it seemed obviously true that Napoleon’s interventions were an improvement. That is often the case with empires because they have to standardize trade and law in order to scale. Rome had a similar impact, as did the British empire.
Traditional does better at first, but then Reform catches up and surpasses. Probability 65%.
Before reading, the reformer did better around 80% of the time, because traditionally, monarchy are really bad for the economy. They don't want train because they allow easier revolt, they don't care about progress because the powerful don't have any risk of becoming poor, and the way to become powerful is to suck up other powerful people
Predicting that the reformed polities did modestly better overall, with 65% confidence.
Prediction: there will be a bell-curve of outcomes, centered around slight improvements. Even though the reforms were top-down, they were made by people with similar cultures who had absorbed many of the improvements.
You psyched me out! I predicted that the kingdoms were sclerotic and inefficient and so with 75% confidence Napoleon’s reforms increased measurable qualities ... eventually. But I consciously factored in my belief about why you were asking and that overrode my small knowledge of history.
As to why the Industrial Revolution started in Britain and not France, Britain had a several hundred year lead on reforming their monarchy. The Magna Carta was a different sort of reform, but it began the diffusion of power from a narrow aristocracy to wider elite class, who went on to have lots of first sons who ran family businesses and third sons who had lots of free time to seek clout by inventing stuff.
I think the same thread runs through why Communism failed, and it’s a point Nassim Taleb makes in economic contexts; you can be brilliant and see five years into the future, or just some guy if you keep your options open because in five years the answer may be obvious. Command economies - like kingdoms but also communism - are fragile to planning problems. The Soviets accidentally killed tens of millions of their own people with farming edicts and missed the boat on computers. And as long as the guy in power refused to get it, the right thing might never evolve.
Of course, a diffusion of power can also experience the fragility of planning problem, if the big players collude. Revolutionary reform may be effective at breaking up those cozy relationships, and may endure if it thoughtfully distributes power instead of consolidating it.
I think the answer is some combination of “energy is required to leave some local maxima and reach a new, higher maxima” and “most random paths away from a local maxima do not lead higher on net.” Meaning, I wonder if 19th century Western Europe was particularly ripe for this in a way that other attempts at reform were not. And that the incoming reforms had a sufficient degree of objective betterness that most of the work was done in smashing up inert, entrenched power structures and less in railroading cultural shifts.
In other words I am a Scott, except when I’m not.
Perhaps there is a distinction to be drawn between frameworks that enable valuable organic developments to be rewarded and reinforced (e.g., the rule of law, or, more specifically, intellectual property law) versus frameworks privileging entrenched interests. The Napoleonic Code was a quantum advance over "what the king or prince or whatever says is the law is the law," and of course the development of the common law, well before the NC, was one of the major factors in priming Britain for its era of hegemony.
OK, from the perspective of someone who has lived in France for a long time and been involved with the country for forty years.
First, Napoleon and the Revolution are not the same thing, and the Revolution itself went through various stages. It's often forgotten that the original Revolution was just the kind of high-level imposition of new ideas on France itself that Scott talks about, and was often deeply and violently resented. Some of the really wacky ideas (decimal days and years for example) never really caught on. Even the metric system only really became accepted in the last century everywhere, and, even today, if you buy half a kilo (500 gm) of apples in the market, you generally ask for "une livre", the old, pre-revolutionary measure equating to the English pound.
Second, what matters is the objective. Scott's agricultural examples, also in his book "Against the Grain", refer to a system that had evolved over a very long period of time and reached a kind of stasis. The judgement about whether they worked is essentially technical. So-called "modern" systems, alleged to give a better result technically, did not do so. Indeed, in Europe at least, so-called "permaculture" systems are now coming into fashion. But political and economic change is very different, and hard to evaluate objectively. What is true is that the French invasions gave a helpful shove to a process which was anyway inevitable - the construction of larger political and economic units based on popular sovereignty rather than inherited royal prerogative. But this was coming anyway, and in certain countries, like England, it came more slowly and peacefully, since the English ruling classes took fright at the prospect of a revolution there. (Even today, though, much of the British political system is distinctly less "modern" than the French, to the point where one historian memorably desired Britain as "the last functioning medieval state in Europe." ) The same was true, incidentally, of Japan: they modernised in their own way and at their own pace, taking what was needed from outside. Japan was already a modern state before WW2, and the "changes" much talked about as a result of the US occupation were largely cosmetic. Essentially, the Japanese carried on as before. But this was because the balance of power was different (the Japanese had a highly literate and well-educated society with lots of social capital, and hardly any USians spoke Japanese). What happens today is that foreigners descend on a society, like some in Africa, where little is written down and much of life is regulated by custom, and replace (as I've seen) traditional practices in the market with a new code of commercial law, literally translated from German, or whatever, which requires an infrastructure of literate tradespeople, inspectors, lawyers and judges to enforce it, none of which exist.
The last part sounds a bit like E. F. Schumacher
If being conquered was good, the Roman Empire falling shouldn't have led to massive decreases in standard of living.
But it did.
Likewise, if you look at Eastern Europe vs Western Europe post World War II, Western Europe did vastly better than Eastern Europe. Why? Because Eastern Europe was controlled by the USSR.
Colonized countries generally did better than non-colonized countries - unless the colonized country was developed, in which case, the developed country did better.
There are an enormous number of examples of these things.
The main differentiator seems to be the quality of the culture that won out/conquered them.
The idea that organic systems are inherently good is obviously deeply flawed. That is why Chesterton's Fence is such an important heuristic.
<i>If being conquered was good, the Roman Empire falling shouldn't have led to massive decreases in standard of living.
But it did.</i>
I don't know where you're getting this idea from. In terms of population density, urbanisation, literacy, and long-distance trade, every part of the old Western Empire showed a long-term decline after the Empire's fall.
Uh, that's exactly what I said.
The Western Roman Empire fell apart because parts of it were conquered by various local tribes and groups. This resulted in a decline in standard of living.
Sorry, I missed the word "falling" and read that as "The Roman Empire shouldn't have led to massive decreases..."
Chance the reforms were destructive: 99%
Well, I can safely say that I made the worst prediction. Lessons for myself: think whether you accounted for all the relevant information, are answering the right question and are not spouting complete insanity.
Prediction: net GDP growth for reformed polities is higher than for non- reformed polities up to 1900, 70% confidence. Not going to bet on the effect size, though.
The experiment isn't really testing the hypothesis as described, however. It's just testing "did the Napoleonic reforms generally improve GDP, urbanization, etc., in provinces where they were implemented." You've got a good sample size testing that hypothesis, but if you want to test the hypothesis of "Do centralized authoritarian reforms do better than evolved organic change?" you'd need to test many different examples and see what happens. This is like doing an experiment determining that penicillin treats infection and and concluding "We find no evidence for the hypothesis that eating mold is bad for you."
I left a comment here and it posted twice. I then deleted one copy and both copies were deleted. Something needs to be fixed.
70% reforms turned out better