We know that Balaji Srinivasan is an advocate. He links to a story in May that makes Google’s Larry Page sound like a fan. He also links to an October 3 interview with Marc Andreessen.
“I think there is going to be double, triple, quadruple countries in the coming years,” Andreessen told Sarah Lacy at Thursday night’s PandoMonthly in San Francisco.
It’s easy enough to see that competitive government would in general produce major improvements. However, won’t the weakest citizens inevitably be stranded as stronger citizens seek the best deal?
This is already happening. You’ve described the immigration strategy of several unique city-states like Dubai, Singapore, and Monaco. Corporations of course do this all the time, but if they don’t choose the best deal on offer, their competitors will. States and cities compete on taxes, services, regulations and amenities. ‘Strong and Weak’ citizens sort themselves into socioeconomically homogenous neighborhoods via the real estate market. Places with lots of strong people are likely to be too expensive for weak people, and places where weak people get abandoned (like Detroit) are therefore likely to become cheaper – so the adjustment in the local cost of living tends to mitigate the segregation.
‘Strong’ and ‘Weak’ (or ‘more productive’ and ‘less productive’) citizens need each other and can make many efficient commercial trades with each other. Strong people will need to be able to pay weak people enough to absorb the high local cost of living. But ‘strong’ people do not want to live in environments where the government is not empowered, authorized, or capable of doing whatever is necessary to preserve security and regulate anti-social behaviors amongst the ‘weak’ that amount to environmental externalities. Liberty is worth something, which means people would pay to get it, and would be willing to give it up if compensated sufficiently. Plenty of weak people will choose to live under such restrictive circumstances if it means a better overall quality of life. Competitive governance will allow for the existence of regimes which maximize the possibility of these sorts of mutually beneficial trades.
I agree it already happens. But how much and how fast matters. We have all grown up with markets working under conditions which provide significant friction. These conditions are disappearing very, very quickly, and we don’t know what the consequences will be.
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
It provides greater incentive for people to become better citizens.
I hesitate to go up against Marc on this point, but new nations haven’t exactly been sprouting up like weeds lately. The only 21st century examples that I’m aware of are South Sudan (split from Sudan in 2011), Montenegro (split from Serbia in 2006), and TImor-Leste (split from Indonesia in 2002), amounting to less than 2% of all states. The primary factors driving the creation of new nations before that were the result of one-time events: the breakup of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc in general (1980s and 1990s) and the 1950s-1970s wave of former colonies achieving independence (without for the most part changing their boundaries).
On the other side of the ledger, as far as I know no other countries in Africa seem to be in present danger of splitting up, the Kurdish areas of Iraq and Turkey are still part of those countries, Quebec is still part of Canada, the independence referendum in Scotland is polling at less than 30% support, Belgium is still one country despite extremely high levels of political polarization and dysfunction, and the possibility of any US states seceding seems pretty remote.
I suspect that the political and economic elite in almost all countries has a vested interest in keeping their country intact, since it increases their power and wealth: control of Kurdish oil fields in Iraq, control of North Sea oil in Scotland, control of the Brussels metropolitan region in Belgium, and so on. This dynamic exists in the US as well: Which red state politicians would want to lose the benefits of DoD and other Federal spending? Which politicians in rural California or New York would forgo the opportunity of spending the tax dollars and controlling the lives of the residents of SF and NYC?
I suspect it would take truly major political and social upheavals to overcome elite resistance to secession, and for the number of sovereign states to “double, triple, quadruple” would require that these upheavals be pretty much worldwide. Count me as skeptical. (But having said that, I’d still like to see Dr Kling write his proposed book on secession possibilities.)
+1 on would like to see the book.
A lot of it has to do with things that are hard to quantify/approach logically, like symbols and rituals of nationhood. For example I think abandoning NASA funding may have been a long-term miscalculation (and the Middle East wars just lack the meaning that can make people feel they belong together).