To summarize, for anyone else reading this, the model proposed is essentially:
The most fundamental and primitive system for choosing a ruler/government is war, in which the strong win
Wars are very expensive, so all sides have an incentive to avoid them
However, if you setup some layer above the raw physical conflict to decide the winner, the loser has to calculate that resorting to war wouldn’t go well for them either. Therefore, the higher layer has to be legibly predictive of the lower layer.
Therefore, democracy arises when the number of people on a side is a good predictor of the outcome of a conflict, which is true under industrialized warfare that relies on massive production & large armies.
Of course, there’s a lot of lag in these things, so e.g. even though nuclear weapons change the above, they haven’t been used and systems have inertia. (Also, implicitly, Japan—the review’s main topic—had enough inertia from the samurai ruling class to current bureaucrats that real power still resides with them).
One story for why technocratic, elite-driven governance is becoming more common (but is it? see below) is that success in conflict would now rely more on the highly-educated, information control, and so forth
One story for the future trend is that offense becomes easier with drones etc., so assassination will become easier and easier, so victory in power struggles will come down to secrecy & ruling from the shadows, so MITI-style technocratic cabal governance might become even more common.
OTOH, some comments/questions that come to mind:
This is all effectively a story of internal selection within a country. However, times and places differ in the extent to which the main pressure on the political system is an internal or external threat. Now, winning wars against external adversaries is pretty similar to winning wars against internal ones, so with state-to-state competition in the industrial age. But was it internal or external competition that actually provided the bits of selection? (My guess is that in stable countries, it’s more the external selection that promotes democracies—e.g. the UK is just remarkably stable and an armed revolt of a losing political faction doesn’t seem like it’s been in the cards in the last few centuries) In general, this focus on internal rather than external competition seems like a very American focus, thanks to America’s geographic luck & (waning) hegemonic position.
What’s the relative importance of army size & mass production in military tech over time? E.g. are the Napoleonic Wars more like WW1 or more like feudal times, in terms of what it takes to win? If the latter, it seems like US & UK democratization can’t really be downstream.
Is part of this forward luck, rather than causation? E.g. you could tell a story where the UK & US democratized for circumstantial internal reasons, but then this made them more stable & effective internally, and helped them win externally. I.e. it’s not that countries drift towards the optimum, but that countries are at many different fitness points and do not even reliably drift towards higher fitness, but then selection prunes the ranks and rewards the fittest. In general, I think many explanations like this emphasize the causal chain more than the luck + selection.
Isn’t the growth of bureaucracy as a natural part of the lifecycle of institutions a more natural story for decreasing representativeness?
And, come to mention, are Western governments becoming less representative of the popular will over time at all? It seems like the best argument for this being true is that in the past few years, educational polarization means that elite & non-elite views on some issues (esp. immigration) are further apart than usual. But this is a very recent trend, and the elites are losing this one! In many ways, the elite held more leverage before the internet decentralized media. To the extent that Western governments are less able to deliver the goods that the population demands, this seems less because they’re taken over by elites with different interests to the voters, and more because of (1) broad demographic & economic trends, (2) voters having preferences that make these hard to fix (e.g. can’t raise retirement ages to fix #1; can’t increase immigration to mitigate the need to reduce the retirement age less; can’t build much nuclear power) and these voters very successfully forcing the political system to avoid taking elite-recommended actions (cf. French retirement age debate), and (3) general institutional & cultural decay and dysfunction. Now of course, part of #3 is bureaucratic capture etc., but a lot of the value capture is also by non-technocratic-elite groups (e.g. NIMBYs, pensioners, landlords).
Thanks, this was excellent!
To summarize, for anyone else reading this, the model proposed is essentially:
The most fundamental and primitive system for choosing a ruler/government is war, in which the strong win
Wars are very expensive, so all sides have an incentive to avoid them
However, if you setup some layer above the raw physical conflict to decide the winner, the loser has to calculate that resorting to war wouldn’t go well for them either. Therefore, the higher layer has to be legibly predictive of the lower layer.
Therefore, democracy arises when the number of people on a side is a good predictor of the outcome of a conflict, which is true under industrialized warfare that relies on massive production & large armies.
Of course, there’s a lot of lag in these things, so e.g. even though nuclear weapons change the above, they haven’t been used and systems have inertia. (Also, implicitly, Japan—the review’s main topic—had enough inertia from the samurai ruling class to current bureaucrats that real power still resides with them).
One story for why technocratic, elite-driven governance is becoming more common (but is it? see below) is that success in conflict would now rely more on the highly-educated, information control, and so forth
One story for the future trend is that offense becomes easier with drones etc., so assassination will become easier and easier, so victory in power struggles will come down to secrecy & ruling from the shadows, so MITI-style technocratic cabal governance might become even more common.
OTOH, some comments/questions that come to mind:
This is all effectively a story of internal selection within a country. However, times and places differ in the extent to which the main pressure on the political system is an internal or external threat. Now, winning wars against external adversaries is pretty similar to winning wars against internal ones, so with state-to-state competition in the industrial age. But was it internal or external competition that actually provided the bits of selection? (My guess is that in stable countries, it’s more the external selection that promotes democracies—e.g. the UK is just remarkably stable and an armed revolt of a losing political faction doesn’t seem like it’s been in the cards in the last few centuries) In general, this focus on internal rather than external competition seems like a very American focus, thanks to America’s geographic luck & (waning) hegemonic position.
What’s the relative importance of army size & mass production in military tech over time? E.g. are the Napoleonic Wars more like WW1 or more like feudal times, in terms of what it takes to win? If the latter, it seems like US & UK democratization can’t really be downstream.
Is part of this forward luck, rather than causation? E.g. you could tell a story where the UK & US democratized for circumstantial internal reasons, but then this made them more stable & effective internally, and helped them win externally. I.e. it’s not that countries drift towards the optimum, but that countries are at many different fitness points and do not even reliably drift towards higher fitness, but then selection prunes the ranks and rewards the fittest. In general, I think many explanations like this emphasize the causal chain more than the luck + selection.
Isn’t the growth of bureaucracy as a natural part of the lifecycle of institutions a more natural story for decreasing representativeness?
And, come to mention, are Western governments becoming less representative of the popular will over time at all? It seems like the best argument for this being true is that in the past few years, educational polarization means that elite & non-elite views on some issues (esp. immigration) are further apart than usual. But this is a very recent trend, and the elites are losing this one! In many ways, the elite held more leverage before the internet decentralized media. To the extent that Western governments are less able to deliver the goods that the population demands, this seems less because they’re taken over by elites with different interests to the voters, and more because of (1) broad demographic & economic trends, (2) voters having preferences that make these hard to fix (e.g. can’t raise retirement ages to fix #1; can’t increase immigration to mitigate the need to reduce the retirement age less; can’t build much nuclear power) and these voters very successfully forcing the political system to avoid taking elite-recommended actions (cf. French retirement age debate), and (3) general institutional & cultural decay and dysfunction. Now of course, part of #3 is bureaucratic capture etc., but a lot of the value capture is also by non-technocratic-elite groups (e.g. NIMBYs, pensioners, landlords).