Local governments that fail to emulate the best examples will simply lose their population, who will vote against them with their feet.
It’s a feature of bad governments that they don’t allow people to leave (e.g. North Korea, DDR, etc.).
Just like natural selection promotes survival of the fittest, competition between different communities will promote policies that maximize human wellbeing.
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).
It’s a feature of bad governments that they don’t allow people to leave (e.g. North Korea, DDR, etc.).
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.
Language and culture might outweigh government for most people as reasons to stay versus move.
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.
Enslaving your neighbors is a great way to ensure that the drudge work gets done without inconveniencing your constituents.
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)?
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?
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?