Picture fixed. Thanks for spotting that.
It would take a large amount of research...
That’s the nature of illusion: If you research it there’s no illusion. If you just glance at it without much thinking, the illusion is there.
Is this true?
As far as I am aware, yes. At some point it was all about Africa. I recall complaints about that in the media back at the time.
Whether it’s a calque or a descriptive expression, I think the main problem is still that it addresses only one term. You encounter a term that has no good translation, invent your own translation, start using it and maybe it’ll eventually catch on. But then you have to do the entire dance again for the next term.
What I was thinking of was using the English terms. There are, obviously, problems with the declinations, transliteration to cyrilic or what not, but the main blocker, I think, is that using English terms is seen as ugly, un-literary and generally low status.
But that doesn’t have to be so: Consider the use of Latin phrases in Europe in XIX. century. It was, back then, seen as beautiful, literary and high-status. If the same could be achieved today with English, it would allow small language communities to break out of the language cage.
I think you are on the wrong track. Of course, in the end you can find the equivalent term that someone used somewhere.
But look at it from a different perspective.
Take a term that is used and understood in the rationalist community. Say “Moloch”.
Now try to write an opinion piece to The Washington Post. If you want to refer to the concept of “Moloch” you can either explain it, wasting your allotted 3000 characters quickly, or just say “Moloch” and hope someone would get it. In the latter case one or two people may get it and the rest would think you are a crackpot referring to the ancient Phoenician deity in a completely unrelated context.
The problem is that the rationalist community is too small for its terminology “to be in the Overton window”. Not so with economic terminology. That community is large enough and the terms like “economies of scale” are admissible in public discourse.
Now scale that down to a small language community. Suddenly, the rationalist community is so small that it, for all practical purposes, does not exist. The economists are now in the position that the rationalists were in in the anglosphere. There are few of them and their terminology is not widely understood and accepted.
In other words: In the US you can’t make an argument in public discussion involving rationalist concepts. But you can use economic terminology and get away with it. In Slovakia, you often can’t.
“Economies of scale” seems to be “úspory z rozsahu” (“saving from the extent”) - but that sounds really weird and I’ve never heard it being used. My guess is that the economics professors just use the English term.
As for “single point of failure” I am an engineer myself and I’ve never encountered any Slovak equivalent.
Fixed. Thanks!
I am reading Hirshmann’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty right now and it’s great. But it’s not about governance per se. Which book did you have in mind?
Some other stuff to look into:
Governance of Church. This may not seem like a big deal today, but in early medieval Europe, church probably had more capacity than states, so it mattered a lot. Also, catholic governance structures are quite different from protestant, from the structures in Judaism etc.
IETF has a pretty weird governance. The assumption is that anyone can join (or leave) at any moment, so the boundaries of the body politic are quite fuzzy. Thus, no voting, the stress on decision making by consensus, running code etc. Also, limited lifetime of the working groups seems to be designed to prevent concentration of power and bureacratizaton.
Open source governance models overall, from BDFL to Debian. Nadya Eghbal wrote a nice paper not 100% focused on the governance, but close.
Governance of common pool resources. Elinor Ostrom’s work is interesting here. Book review.
Governance structures in the organized crime.
Vast anthropological literature on the governance in traditional societies. (Clans, age groups etc.)
Swiss political system breaks the typical state governance patterns. Known mostly for direct democracy—but the real meat is: Any randomly assembled group of actors can get immediate political power by threatening to launch a binding, all-overriding referendum. Such groups are trpically consulted with and appeased.
I’ve tried to double check. Global production of wheat and exports by Russia and Ukraine, according to FAO:
2019, in 1000 tonnes, amounts to 6.9%, very much the same numbers as you’ve got.
Where does the 5%/90% statistic come from?
Russian troops refuse to go to Ukraine on grounds they do not have passports, so Russia fires them.
These were riot police. From the interview:
What motivates the National Guard for their refusal to participate in the “special operation”?
It’s very simple. People don’t want to kill and get killed. When they got a job, the contract said different things. In addition, OMON has a different mission. They don’t know how to use ground-to-air systems, they don’t drive tanks. How should they fight against a regular army? And with what—with a baton and a shield? Their job is to disperse the Navalny supporters and they did an excellent job at that. But this is something else.
The part I do understand: The European Union works by unanimous consent.
Depends on the area of interest. For some things it’s unanimous consent, for others it’s qualified majority (55% of the countries, 65% of the population).
The part I do not understand: Why everyone else can’t agree to do it anyway.
EU has a single internal market. Allowing imports to one country means allowing imports to all of them.
As for Galeev’s threads: As a person from the former Ostblok, where countries share similar dynamics, there was nothing there that made me call bullshit on the spot. I am not a Russian though so I can’t vouch for the particular details.
I am an EU citizen and I’ve realized that I have little understanding of what EU is, how it works and how it came about. While researching the topic I’ve stumbled over Jean Monnet.
I guess the general approach is: Look for a surprising development (e.g. Europe suddenly overcoming old enmities) and research it. If change happened, there were people involved. Some of them had more impact, some of them less and some of them have even wrote down their thoughts and experiences.
Here are some interesting people and developments that may or may not prove fruitful to research: Unification movements (German unification, Bismarck, Zollverein etc., Italian unification, US federation); Peace of Westphalia (liberal outcome from an extreme polarization—each side literally thought that the other side sides with the devil); Second International and its failure to prevent WWI; enlightened monarchs (Peter the Great, Friedrich the Great, Joseph II., Deng Xiaoping, Park Chung-Hee etc.); decolonization, why it led to chaos and why Botswana is an exception (Seretse Khama, maybe); Vergangenheitsbewältigung—why it succeeded in Germany, but not, say, in Turkey; creation of modern international organizations, e.g. International Criminal Court.
Thanks for sharing the story. I’ve done some research myself and stumbled over the fact that Vavilov’s favourite phrase was: “The life is short. One needs to hurry.”
It expresses the same sentiment as Nick Bostrom’s “Why did we start so late? ” but I personally like it much better.
If the above is true, an interesting consequence would be that social progress may slow down as the average length of life increases.
The thing you are missing, I think, is the nature of common knowedge which underpins the society. Thanks to how it works, people can’t achieve moral/societal progress individually. If you live in a violent society you can’t get less violent by yourself. If you do, you’d get killed. If you live in a corrupt society you can’t get less corrupt all by yourself. If you do, you’d be in disadvantage to all the corrupt people. The society can progress only as a whole, thus the limit on the speed of progress is determined by the speed in which the majority is able to change their attitude (get less violent, corrupt etc.) And given how unlikely an average person is to change their attitude the social progress may move one funeral at a time.
I would say there were two distinct “progressive” worldwiews in the 19th century. The symbol of the bourgeois progressivism may be Exposition Universelle of 1889, the symbol of the proletarian progressivism the Paris Commune. Two events, same place, 18 years apart. The former with all the wonderful machines etc., the latter with the barricades and soldiers shooting the survivors. The two worldviews, being that distinct and held by different people, it’s not clear to me whether the failures of the social progress school led to the souring towards the technical progress.
I haven’t seen the latest book, but the older ones I’ve seen were written in the traditional anthropological way, mostly as collections of anecdata. That’s not an objection specifically against Graeber. Anthropology was always done that way. But rigor-wise it doesn’t compare to more modern stuff, like, say, Joe Henrich.
I was thinking about this the other day, but from a slightly different perspective. Consider trust in the society. If a country goes through a civil war, or maybe a period of a state collapse, the people are—based on their experience—less trusting of strangers and maybe even willing to take advantage of a defenseless stranger. The prospects for cooperation (and therefore societal progress) are not great. One is likely to see clique formation, tribal thinking, corruption.
Now, new generation doesn’t have the civil war experience (or a street gang experience, or whatever). It is generally more trusting. They are able to cooperate on a higher level, but the old generation is distrustful, considers the youngsters to be dangerously naive and throws a wrench into the machine. And the longer the average length of life is, the slower the process of moving away from zero-sum games to positive-sum games becomes.
The interesting observations are:
Solutions like “retire at 350” are not going to work—you can’t retire a person from the society.
The “old guard” problem could be, in theory, solved if the old generation would learn to change their mind, to adjust to the changed conditions on the ground. However, I am not sure how realistic is the unlearning the civil war experience, unlearning of not trusting the people around you.