Natural Selection of Government Systems
Historically, the evolution of government systems was mainly driven by violence, with invasions and revolutions being the principal agents of selection process. The rules of the game were predetermined by our environment—land was a limited resource, for which our ancestors had to compete, if only to ensure the survival of their descendants.
The 20th century introduced a game changer. As agricultural productivity in developed countries rose by orders of magnitude and natural population growth practically came to a halt, possessing a large territory stopped being a necessity. Countries with little arable land, ultra-high population density and no natural resources can now not only feed their population, but also achieve top living standards. These changes may open a fundamentally different route for societal evolution – one that would not be based on violence or compulsion.
A small thought experiment—imagine what would happen if central governments cede most powers to smaller territorial units:
The initial result will be political divergence—with less interference from central authorities, policies of local communities will inevitably move away from the political center. The divergence will further increase as people gradually relocate to communities whose laws closely reflect their own preferences.
Eventually, successes and failures of each community will clearly demonstrate the consequences of their policies, and the process of political divergence will be reversed. Local governments that fail to emulate the best examples will simply lose their population, who will vote against them with their feet. Just like natural selection promotes survival of the fittest, competition between different communities will promote policies that maximize human wellbeing.
In the end, it is likely that a significant difference between communities will persist (after all, even siblings have different tastes). However, peculiar policies of each community will be a voluntary choice of its residents, and people with different ideologies will no longer have to impose their views on each other.
Unfortunately, there are serious obstacles to the successful implementation of this idea:
It is not clear how central governments can be made to cede any of their powers. Even politicians elected on the platform of curtailing government power would be strongly tempted to renege on their promises.
Several countries in the past were organized along somewhat similar principles – the city-states of the Ancient Greece, Northern Italy during the Renaissance period and the Dutch Republic during its Golden Age. Each achieved spectacular economic, technological and cultural development, but in all cases either the country itself or its political system eventually fell as a result of external aggression. This threat is still relevant, as many nations have not yet reached the economic or mental stage when they are no longer interested in territorial conquests.
Most importantly, it is not clear how people from fundamentally different political camps (e.g., socialists and libertarians) can be convinced to work together for a common purpose.
Do you think these problems are solvable?
It’s a feature of bad governments that they don’t allow people to leave (e.g. North Korea, DDR, etc.).
Competition will promote policies that enable the community to survive. Maximizing human well-being is one possible strategy. Enslaving your neighbors is a great way to ensure that the drudge work gets done without inconveniencing your constituents. Even looking at evolution of species, we see a lot of different strategies employed. It’s dangerous to suppose that optimizing fitness will also optimize some other desired property, unless you introduce some constraint (say, a big central government banning unsavory practices).
Also, many otherwise-good governments don’t allow people to enter, or at least not many.
There are many other sources of “friction” that would slow, or even negate many of the benefits cleonid expects. Language and culture might outweigh government for most people as reasons to stay versus move. Pure geographical location, for example astride a major trade route, might do likewise. Of course, a spectacularly bad government usually provides strong enough incentive to outweigh those considerations. So this is a good way to limit spectacularly bad governments, provided that you can ensure that people can escape them.
Certainly. Essentially, this is a problem of incentives vs. costs. At present, high costs (such as language and culture barriers) prevent a socialist from Singapore and an economic conservative from Sweden from switching places. Likewise, a liberal from Huston and a conservative from San Francisco might stay put because of insufficiently high incentives (thanks to the central government the practical difference between living in Texas and California is not that big).
However, the situation is different when small territorial units within one mono-lingual country get real autonomy (e.g., the provinces of Holland and Zeland in the Dutch Republic). Then the competition for people becomes a real factor in their politics.
In the preindustrial societies, slavery could certainly be profitable. In the modern economies, mechanization generally made forced labor economically inefficient. This is why most countries like DDR are no more and North Korea has become an outlier. Obviously, aggressive regimes may still prevail even against far more advanced neighbors if the latter are disunited or do not have a comparable military force.
The question is whether a big central government is the only thing that can protect us from such threats. Would not it be possible, for instance, to limit central governments only to the tasks that cannot be handled locally (e.g., military defense)?
Although this may become true as automation becomes able to do more things more cheaply, China seems to be a very strong counterexample at our current/recent technological level. Prison slaves, Forced student labour is central to the Chinese economic miracle, Laogai or “reform through labor” programmes, etc. America’s prison labor system is also quite scary.
I’m curious as to why this was downvoted? China is definitely at the industrial level and there appears to be strong evidence for forced labor driving parts of the economy, which seems a relevant counter to the suggestion that there’s not an economic incentive to enslave groups in the industrialized world.
Perhaps extracting forced labor from an internal group rather than captured neighbors is a more important distinction to some people?
I also had thoughts along these lines. I think that to make your idea complete you need the combination of local governments and a world government. The local governments will provide people the freedom to organize in the way they find best and produce a process of evolution as you describe. The world government will enforce cooperation between local governments in Prisoner Dilemma type situations and ensure the local governments don’t lock people in. See also the Archipelago.
Do you have ideas how to realize this in practice?
Also, could not a similar scheme work inside just one country? A central government would be responsible for all the tasks that cannot be handled by individual communities, but nothing more. This might be easier to realize than a world government, though still non-trivial.
To a certain extent, this is already the case. The different states of the US each have different policies and allow free migration of individuals. Most European Union countries allow open migration from and to other European Union countries. I do not get the impression that this puts pressure on the weaker governments to reform.
Also, there may be economies of scale to certain government policies.
One problem that causes in the US, is people moving from badly run states to well run states and voting for the bad policies that caused them to leave their original state in the first place.
Ahem. Scots in England. Ahem!
What’s going on there anyways, the English paying for the ?status? The Scots have a remarkably good deal in the UK, and it’s only going to get better after the separation vote.
You actually can play magic money tree politics..if somone else is paying.
Can you unpack that for me, I am slow. My question is, “what is the English angle on the UK, given that they seem to be willing to accept seemingly poor terms?”
The original English angle on the UK was that it was necessary to have a unified government, both because of divisive Scottish elements (Jacobitism, Covenanters, foreign invasion, etc) and because of the worry that a separate realm might strengthen the Crown too much. But that was more than 300 years ago. Most English people had long since ceased to think about it, use the words ‘British’ and ‘English’ interchangeably, and just considered the whole of Britain to be one nation. They didn’t care about the Barnett Formula (which is what I think you mean by the remarkably good Scottish deal) because the effect on the Exchequer is small, and the sense that if one region is poorer, then it’s only fair that it should have more public spending. In other words, the English angle on the UK was rather like the angle of the inhabitants of the 48 contiguous states on the USA.
However, the rise of a strident and hostile Scottish nationalism has changed that, and the past 30 years has seen the growth of an English feeling that just didn’t exist previously. This obviously culminated in the referendum. The mass of the English people are really only now considering for the first time the nature or terms of the Union. ‘What is the English angle on the UK’ is a question that is only now being answered, and so far it looks like the answer is not going to be nearly as favourable to Scotland as the previous one. I strongly disagree that the Scottish deal in the UK will only get better now the referendum is over—it is almost certain that, within the next ten years, we’ll see the Barnett formula abolished and Scottish MPs excluded from voting on English matters, and it is very likely that within twenty years Scotland will be told to live within its means.
Thanks!
English opinion is very very strongly in favor of Scotland staying (which of course implies whatever the reason is, the English will be willing to bargain for the stay). This I found both by looking at the polls, and anecdotally (I currently live in England). The question is, what is that reason. My conjecture is the reason is to be found in a certain wistfulness for the glorious past found in England.
Of course the UK government is broke, so they may well push the Scots to adapt a more austere position. But in these negotiations the ordinary English attitudes are a bargaining chip the Scots will use, not the English.
Scotland leaving the UK would be a disaster for everyone.
It’s not wistfulness for a glorious past, it’s a present sense of national unity. There is no sense in England that Scotland is a separate country in a relevant sense. The country is Britain, and Scotland is a region of it with a slightly different history. In particular, there is no sense that England is a component entity within the UK or that there is “a Union”; the UK, Britain and England are all basically the same thing and the terms are used interchangeably.
This is emphatically not the case in Scotland (although it used to be, kinda). Scottish people now see Scotland as being a distinctive component entity within a “Union” with the other home countries, which has the right to decide its own fate. They deeply resent the English attitude as described in the paragraph above. They see Scotland being in the UK as a contingent decision. The worst among them also blame England for all their problems—Scottish nationalism is a very ugly thing.
The issue isn’t the government being broke (although that never helps). The issue is that English people have noticed the (changed) Scottish attitude in paragraph 2, and they do not like it. Surprise is now giving way to resentment, and in reaction, the English attitude in paragraph 1 has changed and is changing. Consider, for example, the most day-to-day way that people express their national attitude and identity—sport. 50 years ago (footage of the 1966 World Cup final is a good example), an English crowd cheering on an English team would be waving Union Jacks (i.e. the British flag) - because that’s their national flag. That was typical at the time. Today, the crowd waves the George Cross (i.e. the specifically English flag). You’re right that most English people want to keep Scotland in the union, but the fact that ~20% of English people want to get rid of Scotland is the truly remarkable thing. 50 years ago it would have been 2% at best.
Ordinary English attitudes are not a bargaining chip that the Scottish can use, because attempting to use them can only further undermine those very attitudes. It’s like saying that a spouse feeling ambivalent about the marriage can get a better deal by using the feelings of the other spouse as a bargaining chip. No! Once you threaten to leave unless you get your way, and exposed your view of the marriage as a contingent one, you have poisoned their feelings towards you permanently. If you threaten to leave unless you get a new car, you are more likely to get your credit card cut off. Something broadly similar is happening in the UK. The more the Scottish ask what they can get out of the Union, the more English people demand that Scotland’s privileges get revoked. Voters now back abolishing the Barnett formula and preventing Scottish MPs voting on English matters (see for example here ), and I suspect there is more to come, because the process now seems to be self-reinforcing.
I actually rather suspect it would be a mild boon for the rest of the UK, and (eventually) a great success for Scotland.
By the English :-/
I bet a few Welsh, some Scots and a lot of (Northern) Irish feel differently :-D
The fact that Singapore ranks third in GDP per capita suggests that in government economies of scales are probably not that important.
But the fact that there are public healthcare systems considerably more efficient than the US one suggests scale us important. And wealthy microstates don’t have a solution that scales...if everywhere is a tax haven, nowhere is a tax haven.
To a certain extent, because the overarching government only allows variation within a certain window.
Indeed, rather, it’s evaporative cooling.
People decide to move when the advantages of moving outweigh the relocation costs. Sweden might be a better run country than Greece, but personal relocation costs are high (mainly due to the language barrier). In the US, the relocation costs are much smaller but moving from one state to another makes little practical difference for most people (compared to the central government the states have little actual power).
State and local governments in the US have primary responsibility over education, road construction, utilities, policing, the courts, licensing restrictions, zoning laws, and public transportation. The federal government can and does sometimes overrule them in these areas, but they are mostly left to themselves. Federal government action tends to be restricted towards various welfare programs, foreign policy, and the health care system. I would not describe state and local governments as having little power.
State and local governments may have significant spending power, but limited freedom of using it. The central government can very effectively pressure states to comply with its policies by providing or withdrawing federal subsidies (e.g., NCLB). It can also directly veto any politically controversial decision by a state on how to spend its money (e.g., California Proposition 187).
This graph would be more interesting and persuasive with a better caption.
If your political system requires no one in the world to defect, your political system is unworkable.
Naturally, political systems which require no one to defect are unworkable. But what makes you think that defection is an insolvable problem in this particular system? Just like individual people can act jointly against aggressive criminals, individual states/provinces/communities can act jointly against aggressive regimes.
My point is that you can’t simply rely on other countries having reached a “sufficiently advanced economic or mental stage” to stop defection. You do actually need to rely on force.
Sorry it was not sufficiently clear, but this is precisely the point I was trying to make in that paragraph. The real question was not whether the deterring force would be needed (obviously it would), but how to organize it effectively. In particular, how to solve the free rider problem which is intrinsic to all military coalitions?
This experiment has been tried several times, most recently in Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, with rather mixed results.
As a different example: The federal government in Belgium is increasingly ceding its power in favor of the (smaller) regions. On the other hand, the provinces (even smaller than the regions) have recently lost some power to the regions.
Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union did not simply cede most powers to smaller territorial units – they split into different nation states. People cannot freely migrate between the new republics due to linguistic and ethnic barriers as well as political borders.
There were no or very few linguistic issues to begin with, and people could migrate easily, for a while, until the internal and external tensions grew, which happened in most cases within a few years. But yes, the experiment is not as clean as one would hope for. Still, being able to experimentally test political and social ideas is a luxury, and this is one of them.
There was almost no private housing in the soviet cities, and to move to another city you needed government authorization. After the collapse of the USSR there was a huge unemployment, and finding a job in the new place was nearly impossible. Ethnic tensions were also extremely high.
Public choice theory studies such questions, and if this question really interests you, I suggest digging around. As you might expect, there are researchers who have devoted years of their lives to such questions. The Calculus of Consent is a very good starting point (and something to come back to later; it’s very deep). The Tiebout model might interest you.
“How governments work” and “how to make governments work well” are questions people have been very interested in for a long time, and any serious attempt at an answer would have to begin by familiarizing oneself with the literature.
I am not persuaded by your history of the 20th century, by the way. Why should war have ever been necessary? Trade exists. Surely your own cited example of the Dutch success in the 17th century is one such example.
In nature, when habitat’s population exceeds the carrying capacity, animals can either starve or try to invade the neighboring habitats. Before industrial revolution the human choices were no different.
It’s cynicism o’clock!
The idea isn’t monumentally bad by necessity, but it’s not based on a sufficiently accurate model of what humans would do once they get in such a situation.
1) People migrating to the best governments available. Probably a textbook example of the kind of “theory” that looks good only “on paper”. People don’t migrate much on the basis of good governance, per se; oh, sure, they migrate because of one of the spillover effects of good governance, which is the attraction of wealth and of opportunities to get rich. There’s a lot of inertia involved in people’s decisions of where to move to, and most of it is for social reasons. Moving to a geographically different location usually implies severing or weakening some social ties that exist by virtue of seeing those people on a regular basis. People just want to be close to their family and friends. No designer of political system and policies should overlook this simple fact. When it comes to choosing a roommate or a neighbor, you wouldn’t trade your much-loved but slightly-too-conservative father for a random stranger with whom you have nothing in common save for an uncanny similarity in your political outlook.
Besides, moving out is a hassle. Putting all your stuff in boxes. Having transportation firms move your furniture, maybe gift you with a scratch or two in a highly visible spot on your coffeetable. Feeling that pang of sadness when you leave your old home behind. What if the old kitchen furniture doesn’t fit into the new kitchen? If you think that’s not one heckuva lot weightier consideration for the random person on the street than something big “on paper” like, oh I don’t know, the choice between common and civil law, or the presence or absence of a death penalty, I beg of you to think again.
These concerns are overridden only by large disparities in wages or individual freedom between countries. People migrate to escape a murderous government, or to add an extra digit to their income. Otherwise, not much.
2) The stability of decentralization. Even granting that you could manage large-scale decentralization, this state of affairs may not persist for too long. You’re probably not a deliriously power-hungry guy, and that may be why lots of mini-states or city-states once part of the same nation-state doesn’t look to you like a massive untapped opportunity. Shortly after you implement the decentralization, you’re going to see a lot of talk about “uniting with our brothers over there” spring up. People are more easily swayed to support centralization rather than decentralization; heck, I come from a country where the biggest and happiest events in the history books consist of unifications of provinces.
3) Successful states despite tiny territory and no resources. Their existence wouldn’t be sustainable if there weren’t for lots of states that are very much not that. After all, someone has to farm the wheat and grow the bananas. City-states and the like exist because they can make crazy amounts of money in very space-efficient trades that eliminate the need for sprawling. Which money they spend on imported food.
4) Obtaining decentralization in the first place. Institutions whose members act as one, for the same common purpose (the best interests of the institution), and are given the freedom to pursue their goals from other, bigger institutions, don’t cede power. That’s stupid. No one does. The central government won’t do it unless the people in the decision-making bodies of the central government, personally, would find themselves in much more comfortable places as the big fishes in small ponds. If being a local baron pays off more than being one of the many rulers of the entire country, that’s when you’ll start seeing decentralization.
Survey your co-workers for political opinions. You tell me.
Political ideologies occupy, in actuality, a very small niche that usually doesn’t get in the way of getting business done. Not at the microeconomic production level, and not in the parliament. (A politician is a very different thing from an ideologue, and usually being an ideologue prevents one from being very efficient at politics.) Socialists, capitalists, liberals, conservatives, all are alike in that they respond to incentives. Heck, you get your occasional anarchist who, after seeing that all the bartending jobs in the local anti-establishment pub scene are already taken, sucks it up, shaves off that green mohawk, and begrudgingly prepares for an interview with some large and faceless money-grubbing corporation. He might grit his teeth and bitch and moan about it all along. But he does it nonetheless. Because humans respond to incentives.
That, um, very much depends. Compare, e.g. Washington, DC in 2015 (where it’s mostly true) to, say, St.Petersburg, Russia in 1917 (where it’s not true at all). Or, say, Donetsk, Ukraine in 2015 if you want a contemporary example.
Political ideology doesn’t matter only where politics don’t matter (usually because they are stable, inoffensive, and the society has a general consensus on how things should be done). Otherwise all bets are off—look e.g. at your own point 2.
I said usually. Of course there are some events in which ideology plays a big part that are going to go down in history. (Strange how the most salient ones, to me at least, seem to come from the totalitarian side of the spectrum.) The quote I was responding to expressed doubts about the possibility of people with different ideologies to work together at all.
The point is, “some events in which ideology plays a big part” often turn out to be hugely consequential, while the state of “politics don’t matter” frequently turns out to be just a temporary holding pattern. Nassim Taleb in particular is very fond of pointing out that extreme black swan events actually account for much of observed variation in many fields.
As to the totalitarian side of the spectrum, it’s just the bloodiest side in recent history...
About one million people emigrated from Canada to the US.
Not in peaceful times. Take present-day Europe as an example.
In terms of evolution, the problem with foot voting is that it isn’t a very precise selective pressure. When you leave government A (GovA) for government B (GovB)… GovA doesn’t know why you exited and GovB doesn’t know why you entered. In economic terms… the bundles are huge. In programming terms… the mechanism is monolithic.
If neither GovA nor GovB knows whether you foot voted because you wanted to get away from your crazy ex or because you preferred GovB’s public school system… then the rate of evolution is going to be super slow. The selective pressure is way too vague.
Foot voting should always be an option, but if the goal is to improve governments sooner rather than later, then you need a mechanism which doesn’t force you to throw the baby (good traits) out with the bath water (bad traits). In economic terms… you need to unbundle government. In programming terms… government has to be more modular.
“economy” already mentioned Tiebout model… Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is also relevant.
This is true for individual migrants. In case of large migration waves (e.g., East Germany to West Germany), the reasons are usually obvious.
I’m not necessarily sure we can attribute the improvements of boycotted governments to mass exodus / brain drain. Many people left China when Mao Zedong took control. But after Deng Xiaoping took control and improved China… I’m not sure if it was because so many people left or because so many of the surrounding countries were prospering while China was suffering. Now that so many of the brains have returned to China… I can’t help but wonder how much this increases China’s chances of further improvements.
But even if you’re correct… my point still stands regarding the rate of improvement. Right now everybody in the world dislikes one or more of their government’s policies. So why doesn’t everybody leave? Clearly it’s because the benefits (ie their family, friends, favorite restaurant, etc.) outweigh the costs. As a result, the bad traits continue to persist. We’d improve at a much faster rate if it was easy for people to boycott/divest from the bad traits without having to boycott/divest from all the traits in the geographical area.
When I left cable for Netflix… I left one bundle of content for another bundle of content. Obviously I do not prefer the components of the bundles equally. Neither cable nor Netflix knows which of their components I prefer more and which I prefer less. In the absence of this important information… they have to make these uniformed guesses. Improvements can be made… but improvements would be made a lot faster if they had a lot more accurate information regarding my preferences and everybody else’s preferences.
Maybe rating movies on Netflix helps provide information regarding people’s preferences? Well… if rating is an effective mechanism for communicating preferences… then couldn’t we say the same thing about voting?
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not claiming migration is the only thing that can make governments improve. In case of China there were certainly other reasons (though the successful examples of emigrant Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore may have played an important part).
There are several important differences.
1) When you choose to emigrate (or switch to Netflix) you make a personal choice and do not force other people to follow. 2) Emigrating would directly affect your life, so you are likely to consider it seriously. Voting does not (one vote never decided a major election), so you are free to make a purely emotional choice.
Imagine what would happen if only one cable company was allowed to operate in each country (just like the government). Regardless of how accurate is their information regarding your preferences, it is virtually certain that their services would deteriorate. This is an inevitable consequence of a monopoly system.
In several ways you’re really preaching to the choir. You might be interested in my recent post here… Is Pragmatarianism (Tax Choice) Less Wrong
Violence exists not out of necessity, but basically because we like it. It is a harsh way to put it, but true. Dat power trip. Well sourced material: http://www.warandgender.com/wgmaleag.htm
Essentially, when a king wanted to conquer a province, he largely did it for the power trip feeling. Also called “glory”.
A good example today is how this spirit lives on in sports, see: http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/spirit/english/e_spirit
From a European angle, the ceding power is unlikely because nationalism. It is different from American patriotism where principles matter more than borders and the government is not conflated with society. Here, the territory, territorial integrity, and governmental structure of France matters so much in the group identity of French people that ceding power lower sounds unlikely. Ceding up (EU) is more likely because countries can still members of this higher unit as a whole. So they keep their integrity and identity. Ceding low means fracturing a country, and people will not like that, because they reify and essentialize their country/government (nationalism).
Unless a clever person can figure out a way to keep current governments as romantic emotional symbolical figureheads and cede power down in a hidden, no-fanfare way.
This is similar to sex and reproduction. Animals reproduce not because they consciously want offspring, but because they enjoy the process itself. Likewise, violence is often enjoyed for its own sake, rather than for its material rewards. However, for humans the invention of contraceptives made it possible to decouple reproduction from sex. Similarly, once violence becomes unnecessary people will still find it enjoyable, but it may be possible to replace the actual violence with surrogates (e.g., sport contests or computer games).
This is certainly a problem, but are you convinced that it is unsolvable? In Europe, many countries already have strong separatist movements (for instance, Lega Nord in Italy). I am not aware of any popular political movements with the opposite goal (making their countries more centralized).
The allocation of land is, as far as I’m aware, a bit of an unsolved problem in schemes like this, and it is assuredly something you need to solve. Others have pointed out that voting with one’s feet is not necessarily going to put pressure on a government to change. In fact, with territory size kept constant, many of the people in positions of power might welcome emigration for the increase in land availability. The enforcing body of natural selection needs to take deliberate steps to ensure that dissatisfying nations actually go away eventually, and by sturgeons law, unless their borders are shrinking, pick any section of land at random, and there will be a 90% chance that the government tasked with optimizing its use for the maximization of human flourishing is shit.
Any solution to the allocation of land will have to deal with constantly shifting borders.
Neighboring governments will have to find ways to agree to border movement.
Anyone on the border ends up being faced with a choice between moving to a neighboring country or losing their home to it. Since the event of a border advancing over one’s home will usually go in lockstep with population decreases somewhere else in your nation, a government will often be able to set up some kind of exchange deal, though this will not be a complete solution. The land vacated by malcontented emmigrants/exiles is rarely going to be as valuable as the land being forbidden from a contented citizen who liked their place in the nation well enough to stay.
If you allocate land in proportion to the number of people in each nation, you lock in a certain way of life, precluding potentially valuable experimentation in the feasibility of lifestyles in dense populations or in the joy of lifestyles in sparse settlements. Maybe nations that optimize the joy of a few are, in total, preferable to nations with denser, merely satisfied people? Is it the place of the stewards of national selection to say? Maybe. I’d guess the LW community has probably thought about that moral question quite a lot, did we ever turn up an answer?
It does seem like it would be easiest to just allocate each nation total_habitable_land*(nation_population/total_population)*desired_proportion_of_natural_reserves. Though that does make overpopulation pretty much impossible to deal with. Reproduction booms becomes a problem for neighboring states, and the world at large, but leads to expansion for the states doing it. All the while no state has the authority to do anything about it.
This is true for undeveloped countries where arable land and natural resources are still main economic assets.
There is an old tradition of trying to settle territorial disputes based on general idealistic principles. “Legitimacy” was a very popular concept after the Congress of Vienna. “Self-determination” and “national sovereignty” are just as popular today. In practice, statesmen always interpret these principles in a way that serves their own interests.
In my opinion, any abstract solution to the problem of the land division, no matter how just and perfect in theory, has no real chance of working (at least in the foreseeable future). In most cases it would probably be better to work with the currently existing borders – for instance, by giving full internal autonomy to states or provinces within one country.
Unless you’ve chosen a poor sample of the evidence you’re familiar with, your opinion is not going to stop anyone from following their fatuous curiosity, here. The historical cases you refer to seem a couple orders of magnitude more fraught with the spooks of subjective indignation than anything anyone in this community would propose. When an analytic philosopher looks at these things they don’t see decision procedures that should have worked in theory but failed, they don’t see decision procedures at all, they see disagreements in waiting.
I agree that any morally loaded criterion for deciding land reallocations is going to trip over the subjectivity of morality as we know it, especially in a system that’s explicitly designed to support the sovereignty of diverse groups. I believe we can at least come up with a negotiation procedure that returns immediate, unambiguous results that do a pretty okay job of cleaning up vacated territories.
I’ll call this one Simultaneous Haggle Reallocation.
Let’s say that in each term, each state must submit a preference ordering on the areas just outside their border, in neighboring states, and an ordering on the areas just inside their border. The outside list describes the places they’ll take if their population increases in proportion to their neighbors, the inside list is the places they’ll lose if their population decreases, all in order of their desire to hold them. The top elements of the inside list will be the areas the state most wants to keep. The top of the outside list will be the areas they most want to take. If there is a mutually agreeable way forward to be made, an area they’re happy to lose that their neighbor very much wants, or an area they wont part with for cultural reasons that their neighbor doesn’t share, that is the trade that will be made.
Kind of unfortunate though.. Above, I provided a formula that assumes an objective(or at least shared) measure of what constitutes habitable land, or, in a more sophisticated implementation; a measure of the value of the land per acre. The more the archipelago agrees on the relative value of land, the more often the states’ preference orderings will mirror each other. Much of the time, then, Simplistic Simultanious Haggling as I’ve defined it would just revert “reallocate at the borders at random(possibly with smoothing) since there’s clearly no mutually agreeable way to settle this”.
It would be fun to run some simulations of this and see what kind of games emerge.
You are assuming that there is a desire for experimentation that is being stifled by government. But only a small minority of politics wonks is really interested in experimentation for its own sake. People who are in a state that is doing OK don’t want to face the consequences of a failed experiment...experimentation is great when someone else is doing it. And people. in a state that is not doing OK want to switch to a tried and tested alternative.
Where does the clarity come from? There isn’t consensus on what works and what doesn’t, because there is disagreement about what counts as success …is Singapore a glowing example of capitalism, or a terrible example of a police state? , Additionally politidal systems co exist with many confounders …physicalngeography, natural resources, religion, ethnicity, external aggressors, etc, which give plenty of scope for arguing that a state did not fail because of its political system. Are you saying more variation will settle these issues objectively? Even the value judgements?
There is no need to force anyone to experiment – it will occur naturally. In virtually every country people with different political opinions are unevenly distributed. For example, in the US right-wingers are more common in Texas and left-wingers in California. If each state is given full autonomy in how to solve its internal problems (taxes, social policies etc.), the US will have data from 50 different experiments (or even more if internal autonomy is given on lower levels). Policies leading to best results can be copied by other states.
No, I think all people should be allowed to use their own subjective opinion. That is precisely why delegating most powers to local governments might be a good solution. If you think “Singapore is a glowing example of capitalism”, you would be able to migrate to a community that is organized like Singapore. If you think it is “a terrible example of a police state”, you would have plenty of other options to choose from.
I dont thinkl your distinction between the Experimental and the Natural answers. It isnt in the interests of most people to be involved i a deliberate experiment that results in bankrupty, or tyranny...but then it wouldn’t be in their interests to be involved in any natural drift that results in the same ends. People who don’t want to end up in the New Confedaracy, or the Socialist Republic of the Pacific, wouldnt vote for increased independence.
I think this analysis ignores a lot of relevant complexity. We will likely never have a state where all decisions will be made on a global level or all decisions be made on a completely local level.
On the other hand we do have many political issues where power can shift to be more globalized or more localized.
At the moment there’s debate about TTIP. It would disempower local governments by providing corporations with means to sue governments in Investor-State-Dispute-Settlement (ISDS) proceedings.
This article presupposes that history is not a factor in the selection of government by a people. The colonial history of Africa, Russia and South America make the populaces in said regions more likely to accept a strong central leader or dictator rather than a true democracy. This is because the herd population is historically used to—and thus expects—the same because of the group’s psychological predisposition to said leaders.
Where does it presuppose that?