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Jun 3, 2021
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It's public choice theory all the way down.

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Interesting review... It does leave something to be desired when it talks about population. Neither the Romans, the Mayans, nor the Chacoans had any form of birth control. Modern society does.

Babies are a positive externality. The benefits are diffuse to the rest of society.

In modern rich societies, babies are underprovided because the costs of them are localized to the families.

So, if you want more young people, you either subsidize babies by making free childcare, child cash bonuses, cheap housing, free education.... or you attract immigrants.

Those are your choices. Immigrants or paying families. There is no third option.

Also, I think the growing to a good place and stopping does have an example. The Nordic countries seem to have nailed their public policy.

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Every society has birth control. The "wrong hole" method works great. The pullout method is less reliable, but good enough to reduce the birth rate.

Generally speaking, preindustrial farmers have a high birth rate (because kids can start doing chores early), and preindustrial cities have a low birth rate (because it takes much longer for kids to start pulling their weight). The modern birth rate is low because we're more urban, and because farming has changed.

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I am unfamiliar with the "wrong hole" method. Can you elaborate?

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If you want to make a baby, you need to put a certain thing into a certain hole. But if you use a different hole, it doesn't work.

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I think this only explains a part of why fertility has declined, and the record for subsidizing children isn't that good, particularly over the long term (often such policies can have a temporary effect that fades in a few years).

Also, I can think of other options that might work besides the two you name, they're just not available to Western democracies at present, as they would require either constraining rights or modifying the flow of information in ways that would be perceived as reactionary and outside the Overton Window.

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Late empire Roman aristocrats were worried about low birth rates and men not being interested in marrying.

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> Those are your choices. Immigrants or paying families. There is no third option.

Isn't a cultural shift a third option? Some cultures have a higher emphasis on children than others (e.g. there's a high correlation between fertility and religion, even correcting for economic factors).

If societies tried to push a cultural shift towards having children, e.g. the same way that they pushed things like environmentalism or anti-smoking campaigns, I think that could have a meaningful impact on birth rates. Sure, maybe "just pay them" might be more effective, but it's not like government subsidy is the only way to shift a culture.

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If there's cultural variation within the society, you might expect that shift to take place every generation.

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I think it *is* a factor, but not the dominant factor since culture is only partially heritable (e.g. religious couples will have more children, but not all of them will inherit their parents religious views) - and there things like large changes in cultural zeitgeist and immigration that are going to have bigger effects on 'cultural demographics' than relative fertility between the different culture groups.

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The retention rate for the Amish seems to be increasing over time. Selection for plainness.

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Yeah, and the Amish culture is growing as rapidly as you'd expect given those circumstances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Amish_population

But there were only ~5000 of them in 1900, and so even with them doubling basically every generation, there's still only about a quarter million.

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Yes, but in a century or two, if these trends continue, they will be the single largest group. I once worked these figures out and it's true. Also, unlike other formerly fast-growing groups, they have not slowed down at all.

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My impression is that attempts to deliberately change the culture from the top down like that have not had very significant effects in the past.

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Paying doesn't work, as a look at the European countries which have all those things demonstrates. One problem is that raising children is expensive in ways which can't be solved with any reasonable amount of money; the parents have an essentially non-delegable responsibility for their children. Which means they must take personal charge, and take it seriously. Which is a task which takes the better part of 20 years (another change from earlier times with earlier ages of independence)

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Robin Hanson advocates changing the balance between parents & children to help boost fertility back up:

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/10/what-are-parents-owed.html

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Countries with better public healthcare, like the nordic countries, DO have a higher birth rate.

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Not true. The Scandinavian birth rate is well below even the USA's birth rate. And once you start comparing outside the developed world, forget about it.

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There is a third option. Remove women from the (full-time) workforce. Not very politically palatable, but China seems to be trying it currently, if informally so. Obviously not endorsing this.

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I was under the impression Japan had both low rates of both fertility & female employment (although the latter had been increasing more recently).

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I'd encourage you to check out the general trend. If you exclude poor African countries, there seems to be a clear trend. Why do I feel it's fair to exclude African countries? It's probably safe to say that the sort of work women are doing there is not so fulfilling that it would compel them not to get pregnant. No one is worried about putting their career on hold when it's backbreaking subsistence farming, etc.

Relatedly, employment is not the "problem" per se — it's a fulfilling career that induces many women to substitute away from having children. So you could hypothetically have extremely developed countries like Japan with low(er) female employment rates that have low fertility rates nonetheless because many of the women who are working are doing jobs they enjoy.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertility-and-female-labor-force-participation

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I did read something recently on how female employment works different in Africa. It seems geared to be compatible with having large families. Unfortunately I can't find it now.

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This is very speculative, but I've read that a lot of Africa is matriarchal and women do most of the productive work. So, it would make sense for them to have less of a problem keeping fertility high as their female population transitions into a modern careerist workforce. FWIW, I think we will basically converge with them, although we will take a bit of a circuitous route.

In the West, careers were designed for men willing to work very long and hard in order to secure same-class mates with high standards for partner single-earners. This led to a system where the middle class worked very hard, and the upper middle worked even harder (think of the insane hours lawyers and bankers [used to] put in); obviously, such a system is incredibly productive.

This level of dedication is in no way compatible with fertility if adopted by women, which is largely what is happening now. Something will have to give.

My guess is that what will "give" is how worker productivity. Women obviously work very hard. But men can work harder as a group, due to simple evolutionary psychology. If you're a woman, you only have to work as hard as it takes to provide for yourself and your family. If you're a man, you have to work as hard as it takes to attract a good mate and hold onto her. In the West, this level was generally much higher than the "provide for family" level, at least in the productive upper classes. As long as you have an environment where women demand yachts, men will do crazy things like work 18 hour days.

With the entrance of women into the workforce, the first thing you see is male performance go down, as they have less sexual motivation to work extremely hard; sexual motivation is probably most of the motivation men experience, so when women's earning standards go down due to less dependence, you expect men to be less excited about working 16 hour days. Empirically, you are seeing this — men are declining in educational attainment and on-the-job performance.

The second thing you'd expect is a gradual decrease in productivity. It's not that women are lazy, it's just they don't have a good (psychological) reason to work *extremely* hard. They're not excited about working 16 hour days either. So, you see pushes for "work-life balance" and "mental health awareness" and the like. Pretty soon, no one is working at the level that used to be the standard, and in the long-run you'd expect productivity to drastically decrease to roughly whatever is socially deemed "subsistence-level" (house in suburbs yes, yachts no). At this point, work standards will be so low for both genders that society will converge to the African/Soviet model where women work while maintaining fertility.

The only potential problem is that Western societies depend on a level of productivity that is much higher than that seen in Africa and the historic USSR. So, there might be a risk of societal collapse. More likely though, living standards will just plummet to those enjoyed in future Africa / past USSR with everyone blaming their favorite scapegoat for that development.

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There is a historical difference between societies where men plow fields vs ones where women can farm using hoes:

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2010/12/02/men-at-work-hoes-ploughs-and-steel/

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I thought the rule of thumb for bankers in the (mercilessly regulated) Bad Old Days was "3/6/3"? As in "pay 3% on deposits, lend out at 6% and hit the links no later than 3 PM".

And int he Bad Old Days, law firm partners kept bankers' hours.

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An interesting example : The German Democratic Republic managed to have both a much higher birth rate, and a much higher labor force participation of woman than west germany.

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Both the Romans and the Greeks practised infanticide for unwanted children. Plus, many newborns did not live very long - so much so that the Romans did not name them until around 9 days after birth.

That said, this has no bearing on modern, civilized societies (which is what I'm assuming the author means by the 'complex' euphemism).

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Almost every pre-industrial society had more or less tolerated ways of infanticide.

To mention one especially interesting example: In 18. century france and britain, infanticide was a crime, but mothers could offload their babies to foundling homes, which then would do the killing for them ( these foundling homes had horrible death rates).

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"Those are your choices. Immigrants or paying families. There is no third option."

One choice is to re-establish a clan-society. If raising the young is the duty of a whole extended family, people choose to have more kids, as I've heard. Because if you decide to have only two kids and your cousins all have four then you'll spend more of your money and free time on raising the cousins' children than your own.

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A weird reverse Tragedy of the Commons solution.

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That seems like it has the "if everyone would just..." problem. IE, everyone will not just anything. Increased immigration and increased benefits for parents/families are both things that are conceivable as government policies, whereas even if you somehow managed to elect a government that wanted to reestablish clans I'm not sure how they would do it.

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Oh, it's super easy. Just look at the private sector conveniences / laws / government benefits that managed to turn formerly clannish populations into presently non-clannish ones, then just tax / don't enforce / do a worse job providing those.

Heck, it's hard to fail at this really. Even if you fuck up SO badly that you accidentally collapse your own civilization, you will still have succeeded in reestablishing clans.

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I guess if you're willing to fully reverse industrialization that might do it but holding power long enough to see that through to its conclusion would be challenging.

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Another way to spin this same thought is that in a nuclear family society, the parents have to be able to take care of the kids alone at all but the very highest needs times, while in an extended family society, you can have help whenever your kids are being most demanding, as long as you help your relatives whenever their kids are being most demanding. Having an extra kid might be more manageable if you know that you never have to deal with the worst alone, and you might gladly help someone else deal with their worst moments in exchange.

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Romans had plenty of birth control. Besides the ones Bullseye mentioned, there was also infanticide, which was widespread in most ancient societies and less controversial than abortion is today.

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I think you're ignoring the role that culture plays in fertility (Mormons vs Atheists), but I admit that's difficult for the state to influence in non-dystopian ways.

I was just looking at the data and it does seem like subsidising child-rearing actually works, Northern/Western European countries seem to be doing better than Southern/Eastern European countries, and while culture and immigration probably plays a role, the fact that the economy and social welfare programs are doing better in those parts of Europe must be making some contribution.

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The premise sounds reasonable (states or whatever get bigger and more complex until they get too unwieldy and expensive to maintain, then they fall apart) but the conclusions sound a bit off.

"The agriculture section is full of graphs that look like this, showing the more work you put in the less yield you get per unit of work"

Yeah, I really want to know more about this, because it sounds on the face of it like "the idyllic hunter-gatherer lifestyle where you just strolled around for a few hours, picked berries, shot a deer, and that's your day's work done, then some idiot invented agriculture where now mud-bedaubed peasants toiled for hours in the muck for a few bowls of gruel", and I don't know how well that holds up.

If there is productivity loss, that may be down to: (1) all the good land is now being farmed, so new farmers have to move onto the marginal land, which is less productive (2) population increase means that instead of 100 kg of rice for 10 families, now you have 100 kg of rice for 20 families which is less return on labour.

Looking up the collapse of the Maya, there seem to be a host of theories as to why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Maya_collapse

And would you call, for instance, the collapse of Egyptian civilisation under the onslaught of the Sea Peoples due to complexity?

Tainter's weak answer to "why don't societies just stop at the perfect size?" may be the only one available; there is no "perfect size" or if there is, we don't know it at the time, we can only look back afterwards and say "yeah, when the population was six million in that city, that was the best time to stop there". If you try keeping the population of the city down to six million at the time, well - look at current debates on immigration. And unless the city turns into Detroit so that there is natural shrinkage due to economic collapse, you are not going to be able to reduce surplus population (indeed, you get the opposite problem - too great a loss). *At the time*, there is no easy way (maybe no way at all?) to say to everyone who wants to move to the city "Thanks, but we have calculated the perfect number for our top population range and we've hit it, so you can't come in".

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>"Thanks, but we have calculated the perfect number for our top population range and we've hit it, so you can't come in". That's the way the Soviets did it, by the way. You couldn't just move to the city - and industrial plant or some other entity had to "sponsor" your move so that you could get a "propiska" (permit to change residence area). The terms were "limita" for people who were recently hired and immigrated to the city this way. Think the current quotas for foreign labor in most western countries.

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Somewhat incredibly, from what I hear, propiska is still around.

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It exists but it has become much, much less restrictive. The one thing that it does affect is your ability to draw local benefits - think being able to access some England-specific tax credit if you're originally from Scotland. You need to first establish your residence in the relevant region via some process.

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Propiska itself no longer exists, but residential registration with the Ministry of the Interior is mandatory, and needed for access to municipal services.

If you own your own place, then no problem: register yourself. If you rent, then in principle, your landlord is obligated to provide registration for you, but in practice, many landlords are reluctant, because they don’t understand that laws have become simpler, or because they don’t want to get caught not paying taxes on rental income. The easiest solution to this problem is to have a friend who owns his own place virtually register you, which can be done by filling out a form at the post office.

This last option is not however available to foreigners like me, so you have to jump through an additional hoop, such as getting a friend to go with you to the local office of the Ministry of the Interior.

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In China the Hukou system is based on the Soviets and is still alive and restrictive to stop overpopulation of tier 1 and 2 cities

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I think you have to break production and demand out into different processes in order to see this agricultural phenomenon in present society rather than talk about it in terms of a person's return on agricultural effort

On the production side, industrialized countries certainly aren't seeing a decline in calories-per-farmer-hour, but they are seeing an accellerating burden of complexity to sustain growth in crop outputs.

On the consumption side, there is a population to be fed which was bred up rather quickly to feed the demands of Fordist industry a large fraction of whom have little to contribute to growing and sustaining that complexity.

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"And would you call, for instance, the collapse of Egyptian civilisation under the onslaught of the Sea Peoples due to complexity?"

I believe Tainter would suggest that the Sea People are the proximate cause, but that the ultimate cause is declining marginal returns. Eventually they become sclerotic, overextended and unresponsive to threats and opportunities. A similar answer could be applied to the various theories on the Mayan collapse.

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In my review I brought up the Mycenean Greek civilization collapsing with the invasion of the Dorian Greeks. It's been years since I read Tainter, but I think he discussed that example but still insisted it followed his rule for collapses.

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If you put in more work to extract resources *by the same method*, you get diminishing returns. But modern agriculture makes us fat with only a small percentage of the population producing food; this used to be completely impossible.

This looks to me like a major hole in Tainter's theory, though I haven't read the book myself.

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I think that the implicit assumption is that things like the "green revolution" are finite and will one day be exhausted, leading to diminishing returns and unsustainable complexity

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I don't think it's a hole - I think these sort of technology improvements shift the graph *up* (by increasing complexity), but it still has the same shape: increased effort leads to declining yields.

You can produce much more food with a fraction of the effort with modern techniques, but eventually they still hit diminishing returns when you have to start cultivating inferior land or whatever.

Which is why it's an overall race between our ability to increase complexity and push the graph up in order to keep up with the needs. I think currently (contra malthus), we've got a really good lead in that race, so I don't think it's a super pressing concern , but the fundamental dynamic sounds correct to me.

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To be fair to him, Tainter does mention that science (and therefore engineering) also has diminishing returns, so that each agricultural advance has lower ROI than the next.

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This seems untrue. The Green Revolution didn't have lower ROI than previous revolutions in insecticides or pesticides.

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I mean no one would make the claim that each is strictly lower. What he probably means is that returns to tech progress are a supermartingale

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> Yeah, I really want to know more about this, because it sounds on the face of it like "the idyllic hunter-gatherer lifestyle where you just strolled around for a few hours, picked berries, shot a deer, and that's your day's work done, then some idiot invented agriculture where now mud-bedaubed peasants toiled for hours in the muck for a few bowls of gruel", and I don't know how well that holds up.

The point is *within a given system* more effort leads to diminishing returns.

Like you pick a few berries, that's great and easy. But very quickly the nearby berries are exhausted and you have to traveling farther and farther to find more berries. You need a change in system (an increase in complexity) to get more yields.

> And would you call, for instance, the collapse of Egyptian civilisation under the onslaught of the Sea Peoples due to complexity?

Yeah, he does. I went to refresh my memory on the Bronze Age Collapse, and the Wikipedia page actually cites Tainter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse#General_systems_collapse

> In the specific context of the Middle East, a variety of factors – including population growth, soil degradation, drought, cast bronze weapon and iron production technologies – could have combined to push the relative price of weaponry (compared to arable land) to a level unsustainable for traditional warrior aristocracies. In complex societies that were increasingly fragile and less resilient, the combination of factors may have contributed to the collapse.

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I also don't quite understand it. Don't we have lots of food now, and very few people working on producing food? https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture

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The answer to why societies don't just stop at the optimum size is that the optimum size is dynamic, you can be at optimum size with policies to hold at optimum size and then the big drought comes and diminishes your ability to collect energy via photosynthesis and thus the entire basis of your society is undermined. In modern society this can be other limiting factors causing fluctuations in required inputs, fossil fuel energy returns in energy invested, or imports, or supply chain disruptions etc ...

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> the collapse of a society is a response to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity.

I once knew a guy who used to go on about this...

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"The USA’s reliance on immigration to supply young people who can keep the economy running seems a little alarming just because it can’t be kept up as the USA’s relative desirability declines, but it doesn’t have declining marginal returns, exactly."

And

"The US national debt is growing. That seems obviously concerning to me..."

The USA doesn't need young people to keep the economy running, it needs young people to keep the ponzi scheme running. Debt is a word that implies repayment. There is no debt, for the national debt will never - and you can quote me - ever be repaid. Or at least not in the way that you think. Maybe it will be repaid someday, and that will be suddenly and climactically, all at once, with interest on interest accrued and due with all interest and principal and from each citizen, immediately. The declining marginal return (or diminishing return) is absolutely apparent once you realize that the importation of more immigrants to keep the house of cards intact becomes less efficacious when you import more people while simultaneously spending the new imports' futures as well, and at a new logarithmic rate. I wonder if immigrants realize that their futures are also being sold out from underneath them and at a faster rate than the native citizens they're being brought in to vouchsafe pensions and retirements for.

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Like the IQ shredder argument. Michael Brendan Dougherty has characterized it similarly, although just in terms of fertility rather than IQ.

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This is a frequent topic of discussion at Marginal Revolution in the comments section. My position on this subject as been quite developed and unchanging for some time.

Something that cannot go on forever won't. You don't have to look at the USA or China for signs of a coming demographic calamity, and not everyone on planet earth will be able to made US citizens, most certainly not without someone with the intelligence and money to make a bet against the US economy and dollar noticing such an opportunity. The US is currently paying to import foreign fertility because foreign fertility is currently cheaper, for now.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Billion_Americans

I wish substack had the clap emoji so I could do this properly: One. Billion. Americans.

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I was not aware of this book. The premise seems unfeasible and self-centered, but thank you.

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👏 is just Unicode.

You can type it and it 👏 just 👏 shows 👏 up.

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Bless U+1F647

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Does the IQ shredder actually hold up in terms of conditional fertility?

That is, while (fertility|Singaporean resident) < (fertility|origin state resident), for the IQ-shredder argument to hold what you need is (fertility|IQ150 Singaporean nth-generation immigrant) < (fertility|IQ150 origin state resident); has the latter been demonstrated?

(If the latter is not true, then either Singapore's native population just suck and are successfully replacing themselves with fertile, clever immigrants *or* IQ is actually self-shredding.)

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"Just suck" was probably not the best choice of words. Suck at reproduction is what I meant.

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My understanding is that conditional fertility is indeed lower in big cities (which were also notorious population sinks prior to modern sanitation systems). Fertility also seems to be more affected by years of education rather than IQ.

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"Fertility also seems to be more affected by years of education rather than IQ."

This. I've seen this stated elsewhere. The world over most women with an undergraduate degree (or its equivalent) are not going to get into anything serious with a high-school graduate (its equivalent or less), or a woman with a post-grad getting serious with an undergrad.

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I don't think it's a simple matter of mate choice. Instead there's a sort of extended adolescence and delay of childbearing during the most fertile years. There's an idea of marriage & childbearing as a "capstone" event once you've got everything else in order. That contrasts with the mothers profiled in "Promises I Can Keep".

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/our-conjugal-class-divide

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Yes I think that's part of it. I was also speaking more broadly that statistics seem to show that rising education in women globally seems to portend lower fertility rates. For US, Canadian, and European women I think the 'capstone' idea holds, but there are other places where the cultural phenomenon isn't present, yet higher rates of female education produce the same results.

Hypergamy, for any reason, does not select down.

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Yeah, but those are basically irrelevant to the IQ-shredder hypothesis (someone who's capable of emigrating to Singapore is probably in a big city anyway, and is already educated).

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It's relevant to the general pattern of 1st world countries with below replacement fertility importing people from countries with higher fertility rates. Often those people will have higher fertility rates after they immigrate than most of the population of their new country... but their children are another story. I haven't discussed the cultural aspect of fertility, but that's a big deal, and unless people adopt some form of cultural separatism (like Anabaptists or ultra-orthodox Jews) they will tend to be absorbed into the larger culture.

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"Debt is a word that implies repayment. There is no debt, for the national debt will never - and you can quote me - ever be repaid. "

Debt is being repaid every day. Go to treasurydirect.gov and you'll notice that every bond has a maturity date on which their face value is repaid to the bondholder. The US has never, in its entire history, missed a payment. It is true that the US will always have some outstanding debt, but that's no more concerning than you always having a balance on our credit card.

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The balance on the credit card (being a revolver) is A) not a fiscally sound policy and B) is not feasible if the cost of borrowing that money changes (and it will someday) and C) doesn't really = "being repaid" if you keep adding to the balance, and the interest, every single year.

The US has never, in its entire history, missed a payment but it will someday, and that day will be will be, putting it lightly, quite memorable.

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Yes, national debt is a problem if it's large, keeps on growing faster than GDP, and the cost of borrowing increases. Granted, those will probably be true for the USA for the forseeable future. But it's a growing debt burden that's the problem, not the fact that the debt will never be repaid. A small debt that's never repaid is no problem whatsoever.

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What do you define as a "small debt"?

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For the sake of argument, let's say $1 billion. There is no problem whatsoever with the USA having a debt of $1 billion that's never repaid (or rather, continuously renewed).

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Such an amount is basically fractions of the change in the country's pocket, euphemistically speaking.

Let me put it another way, do you think that a national debt = to one FY's full GDP (roughly $20 trillion) is a small debt?

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Since the Federal Reserve can create US dollars at will, the United States cannot default on its debt, in the sense of "can't pay, won't pay." (If the Fed balks, Congress can amend or terminate the Federal Reserve Act as it sees fit.)

What is more likely is a devaluation, aka a "soft default".

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Yes, a devaluation is in a sense what I was referring to. However, there will be nothing soft about the USA's "soft default".

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We've raised and lowered tax rates all the time in the US: https://bradfordtaxinstitute.com/Free_Resources/Federal-Income-Tax-Rates.aspx

we've raised and lowered military size and budget several times:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/22/us/is-americas-military-big-enough.html

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"Tax rates go up more often than they go down." is a failed prediction. And one that required him to dismiss the Reagan tax cuts as being insignificant.

If he wrote this today, I wonder if he would say something like: 'It is easier to lower taxes than to raise taxes, so the the budget deficit will continue to grow.' Your theory should not be able to predict both increasing and decreasing taxes.

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I think this is a bit glib. The Reagan tax cuts, like the Bush tax cuts and the Trump tax cuts, were fueled by increased debt, which isn't sustainable over the long term. From a 10,000 foot view, it's basically correct to say that the trend in the US in the 20th century was towards a bigger government that spent more and more.

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This is an excellent review of a book which I read quite a few years ago, but just recently re-read earlier this year (oddly, a lot of the ACT book reviews are of books I have read recently). I agree completely with the summary, and I am impressed by the thoroughness of the review. I usually type up a brief recap of everything I read, but I am certainly going to add a link to this for future reference.

I too was frustrated by the authors choice of the three in-depth collapse examples. Rome was great, but the others were unfamiliar to me, and both lacked any written records to substantiate or at least "flesh out" the theory.

My take on the matter is that Tainter, like Olson before him, is highlighting a central tendency for organizations to suffer from declining marginal returns, rent seeking, bureaucratic growth and sclerosis. This makes them less adaptive to shocks which are inevitable over the long haul. Eventually they are probably going to collapse.

The only part of the review which lost me was in the final two paragraphs on the negotiating position or power of developed countries. I have no idea what this is referencing.

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Why would an increase in complexity in a civilization/country lead to it being less adaptive to shocks? From what I could gather from the review, an increase in complexity is itself a demonstration of superior adaptation skills (governments increasing taxes, which leads to corporations to find clever ways to evade taxes, which leads the government to formulate clever-er ways to collect said tax, ad infinitum). Perhaps being less adaptive is a result of too much complexity, which leads subunits that are in competition to finally "give up" trying to adapt to change?

Also, I don't know if this is super relevant to the topic at hand, but I'd be interested in book recommendations that you might have for the summer :)

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There is only so much potentially available surplus. If there is a ratchet effect for some interventions, then over a long enough time horizon you'll run out of headroom and you'll hit a shock that you can't overcome.

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Yes, the ratchet effect seems to capture the phenomenon of increasing complexity quite well.

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It isn’t complexity that gets them, it is declining marginal returns. This stretches them to the limits of growth (and internal rent seeking) and then a shock such as climate change, internal revolutions, barbarians or whatever hit and they are unable to respond. It’s like a balloon with everyone in society trying to gain as much space as they can until they reach the limits and it all pops.

For suggested books, I think a great place to start is the list of non finalist book reviews that Scott published a month or so ago. Some of my recent favorites are Heinrich's last two books. For an older one that I don’t remember being reviewed here I might suggest Beinhocker's Origins of Wealth.

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Perhaps the phenomenon that we're trying to capture can also be expressed with Game Theory, in which two competing subunits try to outmaneuver the other, increasing the complexity of the game, and thereby blinding each other to the actual enemy, whether it be an enemy at the gates or climate change. Of course the competing subunits could cooperate and mutually agree to withdraw, reducing complexity and friction (like the government deciding to freeze tax rates and the corporations agreeing to honor them). However, what ends up happening in reality is closer to an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, in which a useful working assumption is that the other side is only trying to outsmart you and that you should try your hardest to best them.

Thanks for the suggestions!

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Part of the ratchet effect with territorial acquisition, I suspect, is the desire of state elites to signal that the state can't be made to retreat by rebels. "No, we will bear INFINITE costs to beat you!" Of course that's not literally true, they'll leave after some point, but it seems clear to me that e.g. Soviet and American forces both stayed in Afghanistan longer than any economic benefit from Afghanistan *directly* would justify. But you can quite rationally write that off as a loss just to prevent rebels in other provinces from getting the wrong idea. The modern nation-state's sacralization of territory is of course a way of making even more of a credible commitment to this.

This just kicks the can back a step, though, because presumably you want to ask "why do states overacquire territory?" and I presume at least part of the answer is that in any effective imperial state state elites are involved in status competition to Serve The Glory Of The Empire, and acquiring new territory is the juciest way to do that. Military entrepreneurs have an incentive to misrepresent just how valuable the latest acquisition will be, for obvious reasons.

Something relevant to the living standards racket seems to be that modern populations who are used to living standards regularly increasing will see stagnation as an attack on their rights. (It's easy enough to see how this could be rational for the population, especially under situations of distrust.) The Mayan case didn't have to deal with this but it's easy to see how it can become a problem for modern economies.

Re: living standards, another ratchet that seems to be in place is standards for how often one should be working. We've seen some reduction of working hours in some countries, but less than I think would be optimal (a dangerous way to cast judgment, but I'm certainly not the only person with that intuition), especially if you buy some of the concerns raised here. Perhaps reduction of working hours for the average person would be a useful way to reduce the amount of effort spent on the highest-hanging fruit, while managing "real" decline in a way that allows people to feel like significant parts of their lives were still improving (because they would be!) But you'd need a different distribution of power for that, and I suspect power lock-in is another one of these things producing these smooth declining curves (absent favorable shocks.)

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Yeah, most of this rings true. Successful states probably have a tendency to be expansionistic and militaristic for a variety of reasons and to reward individuals who excel in those areas. And up to a point, that allows them to outcompete less expansionistic states because they can bring more resources to bear in competition with those states. But it's tough to turn back that expansionistic dial right on schedule. Rome did turn it off eventually, but it waited too long to do it.

Besides its commitments to other territories though, I think you miss one additional reason why unprofitable territories can be tough to give up, and it's that they will often have settlers or colonists from the imperial core in them who expect they will lose their homes if the empire abandons them, and they can easily represent an interest group that is a LOT more motivated to keep the colony in the empire than anyone else is motivated to kick it out. For a good modern example, look at French Algeria. Not a profitable colony by any measure, but it was tough to find a way to get rid of it because a lot of French lived there. When De Gaulle finally pulled the trigger, he was nearly assassinated for his trouble.

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Also, depending on the geography of the empire, financially unprofitable territories might act as valuable buffer regions for more profitable areas. Part of the reason why the Roman Mediterranean became so wealthy was that the barbarians were kept hundreds of miles away, so people didn't have to worry about enemy warbands coming along and destroying all their stuff; that would no longer have held true if the Romans had abandoned their German and Balkan provinces, bringing the frontier right next to their productive lands.

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On a related note, most corporate mergers appear to be economically inefficient:

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/hard-facts-mergers.html

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For the companies, but not for the management deciding the merge. It makes the power pyramid grow, which is the best way to increase wages (in the broad sense including all benefits) at the top. Each layer can not easily benefit more that a certain factor compared to the layer immediately under. So it's in the top layers advantage to multiply the layers, and for this growing is one of the solution (so is increased complexity). Thinking of it, it may be one strong reason for increased complexity leading to less global efficiency. Growth (size and complexity) is there to increase inequality amount actors and make the top positions more and more rewarding...

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Tainter's empirical evidence is consistently the first large, centralized civilization in that region. So it's unsurprising that we should see it struggle to figure out how to manage centralization and complexity: a first draft is rarely the last draft.

On the other hand, Tainter claims that his results are universal enough to apply to both Mayan city-states and modern America. So I would like to see Tainter present some temporal continuity: after Rome has undergone the growth-and-collapse cycle, its successor states should as well. After the Mayan city-states underwent the growth-and-collapse cycle, so should the Aztecs. (Obviously, the conquistadors screwed up that natural experiment.) Something something Chinese dynastic succession (the dynastic change is usually presented in a way that confirms Tainter's hypothesis, which makes it all the more concerning that Tainter instead ignores China). Without some sort of evidence that successor states find the same sorts of complexity-management problems intractable, I remain unconvinced that Tainter can tell us anything about modernity.

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For those that want a shorter version of Tainter's thesis, his paper 'Problem Solving: Complexity, History, Sustainability' (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.372.816&rep=rep1&type=pdf) touches on most of the same points. To quote a relevant paragraph:

"most of the time complexity works. It is a fundamental problem-solving tool. In its early phases, complexity can generate positive feedback and increasing returns. Confronted with challenges, we often respond by strategies such as developing more complex technologies, adding more elements to an institution (specialists, bureaucratic levels, controls, etc.), increasing organization or regulation of transactions, or gathering and processing more information. Each such action represents increasing complexity. Their effectiveness comes in part because changes in these dimensions can be enacted rapidly. While humans may be complexity averse when we personally bear the cost, our problem-solving institutions can be powerful complexity generators. All that is needed for growth of complexity is a problem that requires it. Since problems always arise, complexity seems to grow inexorably."

Complexity is not the right word for the initial process which is really a simplification that transforms the illegible environment into a legible system (legible in the James Scott sense). But this is a quibble.

A useful analogy is that of ‘software entropy’ - “A computer program that is used will be modified. When a program is modified, its complexity will increase, provided that one does not actively work against this.” You can substitute “program” in this definition with almost any “legible” construct (database, process, organisation structure, society etc) and the conclusion still holds. Control starts with simplifying an illegible, complex environment into something legible. This works for a while but the changes required to maintain the efficiency, productivity and stability of the system eventually makes the system complex and illegible again. The natural complexity is replaced in the long run with the complexity of the control process itself.

However, the result of too much complexity is just as likely to be stagnation/sclerosis as it is collapse.

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I haven't finished reading yet, but wanted to offer thoughts on standing armies vs professional armies.

Overall, the distinction between a standing army and a professional army is more of a spectrum than a binary choice. A city with a small hinterland, for instance early Rome or a classical Greek city, can field a highly skilled citizen army that is NOT a "standing" army. In fact, having a standing army is silly if most of your battles take place within a reasonable distance of home - it's obviously better to have your soldiers support themselves through farming rather than having to constantly confiscate resources. Farmers will also usually be in good physical condition for fighting, and group training can happen during the long parts of the year during which farmers have lots of free time.

What a standing army gets you, as a state, is not necessarily a superior fighting force, but rather the ability to project that fighting force at a greater distance for longer periods of time. Rome developed a standing army because the size of its empire made it less and less practical to recall its armies home after each campaign. A professional standing army means you can march out on campaign, overwinter in camp, and immediately resume fighting in spring. Later in Roman history though, it became common for large non-professional barbarian armies to smash professional Roman armies. Those large barbarian armies were mostly composed of farmers, with a small core of truly professional fighters at the center. But they were generally able to hold against a Roman legion man-for-man, because being a farmer still leaves you plenty of time to train to fight.

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Those are good thoughts -- I've never heard that statement about the barbarian armies. For all my reading on the classical world, one thing I realize I don't have a good sense of is how the lifestyle and social organization of the average inhabitant of, say, present-day Germany differed from 400 BC to 1 AD to 400 AD. We tend to present this "Here Be Dragons" model of European lands in pre-medieval times that were never conquered by Rome.

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<i>Later in Roman history though, it became common for large non-professional barbarian armies to smash professional Roman armies.</i>

I don't think it was quite like that. *On the battlefield*, the Roman army tended to outperform its opponents until pretty much the end of the Empire's history. The problem was that, by the late fourth century, Rome had become too corrupt and inefficient to support a big enough army to properly defend itself.

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I think a closer look at the historical record suggests that the Roman qualitative edge was really a factor in the explosive expansion of the late republic/early imperial period. After that point, Rome dominated its frontiers through brute numerical superiority.

The Roman army of the fourth century was the largest of any point in Roman history, but it ultimately wasn't enough. As state development proceeded in the "barbarian" lands beyond the frontier, barbarian kings started to achieve local military superiority in their zones of the frontier, and once this happened the professional Roman army was mostly powerless to stop them from crashing through and doing whatever they wanted. The decay of the Roman army came AFTER huge losses were inflicted upon them and key revenue-generating territories were either captured or pillaged.

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We don't actually have enough info to say that "The Roman army of the fourth century was the largest of any point in Roman history". There are historians who think that, but equally there are historians who think that the actual number of effective soldiers (as opposed to the paper strength of the army) was lower, or at least not noticeably bigger, than it had been in previous centuries. Personally I lean towards this position: if you read narratives of campaigns in the late fourth and fifth centuries, Romans commanders seem to have generally avoided pitched battles in favour of raiding, blockades, and other comparatively low-risk strategies, which makes more sense if they were short on manpower than if they had waves upon waves of men to throw at their enemies. Plus, there aren't that many records of big Roman defeats at the hands of barbarians: there was Adrianople, and the Vandals managed to win a (naval) battle against the Romans when the latter tried to retake Africa, but other than that, not a lot. I suppose the Huns did manage to win a few times against the Eastern Roman Empire, although they were exceptionally good at fighting (they managed to defeat many of Rome's Germanic enemies as well), so they're not a very representative sample.

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Didn't Rome increasingly rely upon (barbarian) mercenaries?

Stilicho is the first name to come to mind.

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> There’s a tax/regulation avoidance <-> compliance enforcement chain that only ever moves the taxation arm of the government in the direction of bloat.

Historically, this is clearly untrue.

My favorite example is a Chinese emperor who announced a simultaneous tax increase and tax reform. Taxes were collected in kind (grain) and delivered to the capital by water transport. Things had gotten into such a state that the boats mostly arrived empty (!), with spoilage and rats having taken most of the taxes.

The reform had two major prongs:

- Collect more taxes in metal, less in kind.

- Get the boats going faster.

And this was so successful that the tax increase was canceled.

But more broadly, a common feature of historical taxation is wide-ranging permanent (generally inheritable) exemptions.

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I mean just in my own lifetime I've witnessed at least two times that (income) taxes have been cut significantly in the United States. Feels like we have this ongoing dance where Republicans cut taxes once every decade or so and then Democrats raise them back. General complexity has probably gone up but without digging into the stats directly it fees like taxes themselves kind of oscillate.

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Total government receipts (state, local, and other fed taxes) stick to 20% to 30% of GDP since WWII. Income tax is salient because you have to do it all at once and its a source of either a refund or large bill. But other federal taxes + state and local taxes seem to wash it out.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/government-current-receipts-and-expenditures

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Thanks for the chart!

I'm not quite clear on whether you meant to contradict or support my point, looking at the chart, I see this:

2000: 31%

2015: 20%

(It currently sits at 21% as of 2018)

That's a 35% drop, which doesn't feel like a minor perturbation to me, and seems totally in line with what I just said -- a drop in government receipts as a % of GDP by more than a third over 15 years. Although increases/decreases don't seem to line up super closely with Republicans=down, Democrats=up.

Were you trying to say something about the increases/decreases themselves, or just income tax in specific as a driver of that? This chart doesn't seem to support that there haven't been significant fluctuations in the tax rate, but it does support the case that flashy changes to income tax rates mask how much money the government actually takes in as taxes.

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It's not saying that taxes only go up, it's saying that the inefficiency of taxes always goes up (i.e. the amount of tax collectors and tax lawyers goes up). Sweeping reforms can negate this, but those are hard and especially hard when the need for them becomes obvious (i.e. when a government is on the ropes because it doesn't get enough tax income, it no longer has the slack to put in major reforms without overstretching and suffering rebellions).

This is true even to some extent for a modern democracy, as while the state has immense power to suppress a violent rebellion, all individual parties are incentivised against reforms with a payback longer than the election cycle.

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I read this around 15 years ago and it dominated my thinking about the world for some time. Couldn't get past seeing this increasing complexity and decreasing marginal returns for a while. I now think there are some interesting grains of truth but in general it's all over the place.

One thing that I realized since that I didn't grasp at all when I read it - the ever-increasing Mayan monuments (and Egyptian pyramids for that matter) don't have to be explained by the rules trying to achieve any sort of rational gain. They can also be explained by growing corruption / "regulatory capture" in a society. The first ruler builds a very small monument - this creates a demand for artisans. The artisans might then bribe an advisor to pitch a greater monument to the next ruler. Soon enough there is a whole caste of artisans, their suppliers, their servants, priests etc, and everyone is aligned to redirect more and more resources towards whatever they're doing, and it doesn't matter if it makes any rational sense at all from an abstract "society" perspective. This can cascade until you get to crazy situations where 30000 people are continuously building ever-larger pyramid-shaped tombs instead of doing something useful (Egypt). This also explains a lot of stuff in the modern world, e.g. some aspects of US defense spending, or why NASA stagnated building extremely expensive single-use rockets for 40 years with suppliers distributed across most US states (hint: they weren't actually exploring space, the whole space thing was a byproduct of capturing a resource stream).

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I think that it also explains the increase in the number of universities, which increases the number of degree seeking students, which further increases the number of universities ad infinitum. Although this too is not necessarily a rational change, I think that both this and your example are instances of "increase in complexity"

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The sad thing is, the number of universities hasn’t increased much in the USA. We just subsidize the demand like crazy without letting supply increase much.

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I have a notion that rules have constituencies. Just knowing the rules can give an advantage, so any effort to simplify rules will meet resistance.

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Rules also directly distribute power. We should expect "is powerful" and "is in favor of the current ruleset" to be correlated.

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I also wondered why he assumed marginal returns must diminish to the point of being negative rather than stopping at the equilibrium of 0. As you might guess, I tend to read more economics than anthropology.

https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the-collapse-of-complex-societies/

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"Standing armies rarely get smaller. "

That seems trivially untrue.

The absolute number of people in the british armed forces has dropped steadily since WW2

As a fraction of population this seems to be the general case:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/armed-forces-personnel-percent

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The British empire has also shrunk dramatically during that time period, no?

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But, as Tainter noted in his book (and I quoted in my review) the staff of their colonial office increased!

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