This was a great post, interesting topic and tons of relevant facts.
One criticism: it seems to slice the world along socially salient lines rather than causal mediators. For instance, a bunch of stuff gets glommed into “freedom”, much of which doesn’t seem very related—“freedom” seems like an unnatural category for purposes of this discussion. That makes claims like “freedom causes poverty” kinda tough to interpret.
If we’re asking “what causes hierarchy?”, then I’d expect the root answer to be “large-scale coordination problems with low communication requirements”, followed by various conditions which tend to induce those kinds of problems. For instance:
large demand for capital-intensive goods (e.g. irrigation, roads, other infrastructure)
natural monopolies (including military)
large heavily-mixed populations, which tend to induce low trust/high defection, messing up market coordination mechanisms
increasing social connectedness
increasing economic specialization
The various case-studies mentioned in the post sound like they offer a lot of evidence about which conditions are more/less relevant to hierarchy formation. But the discussion doesn’t really slice it like that, so we’re left without even knowing which way the causal arrows point.
If we’re asking “what causes hierarchy?”, then I’d expect the root answer to be “large-scale coordination problems with low communication requirements”
Nicely put. David Manheim has an interesting post on the need for legible structure when scaling from a startup to a large organisation.
This was a great post, interesting topic and tons of relevant facts.
One criticism: it seems to slice the world along socially salient lines rather than causal mediators. For instance, a bunch of stuff gets glommed into “freedom”, much of which doesn’t seem very related—“freedom” seems like an unnatural category for purposes of this discussion. That makes claims like “freedom causes poverty” kinda tough to interpret.
If we’re asking “what causes hierarchy?”, then I’d expect the root answer to be “large-scale coordination problems with low communication requirements”, followed by various conditions which tend to induce those kinds of problems. For instance:
large demand for capital-intensive goods (e.g. irrigation, roads, other infrastructure)
natural monopolies (including military)
large heavily-mixed populations, which tend to induce low trust/high defection, messing up market coordination mechanisms
increasing social connectedness
increasing economic specialization
The various case-studies mentioned in the post sound like they offer a lot of evidence about which conditions are more/less relevant to hierarchy formation. But the discussion doesn’t really slice it like that, so we’re left without even knowing which way the causal arrows point.
Nicely put. David Manheim has an interesting post on the need for legible structure when scaling from a startup to a large organisation.