It occurs to me that from a system robustness perspective, luxury is actually great, because it implies surplus capacity (assuming society can and will divert luxury-production to essentials-production in a crisis).
From the perspective of the state, you want to tax that excess, and store as much of it as you can for lean times (at which point you do hand it back out to the people, to preserve the population). This was a major function of bronze age states. So yeah, it increases robustness, but the state still isn’t really incentivized to let people keep wealth (except for the key players, which the state has to make happy to avoid coups).
In Dictators Handbook, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita presents evidence that centralized authoritarian governments (like most bronze age governments) tend to avoid enriching their citizens if they can accumulate resources without doing so. In the other hand, if the people themselves are the only available source of wealth (ie if natural resources are scarce and a state’s economy must therefore rely on skilled labor and trade), the state will tend to become less authoritarian, I think.
It occurs to me that from a system robustness perspective, luxury is actually great, because it implies surplus capacity (assuming society can and will divert luxury-production to essentials-production in a crisis).
From the perspective of the state, you want to tax that excess, and store as much of it as you can for lean times (at which point you do hand it back out to the people, to preserve the population). This was a major function of bronze age states. So yeah, it increases robustness, but the state still isn’t really incentivized to let people keep wealth (except for the key players, which the state has to make happy to avoid coups).
In Dictators Handbook, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita presents evidence that centralized authoritarian governments (like most bronze age governments) tend to avoid enriching their citizens if they can accumulate resources without doing so. In the other hand, if the people themselves are the only available source of wealth (ie if natural resources are scarce and a state’s economy must therefore rely on skilled labor and trade), the state will tend to become less authoritarian, I think.