Why are affluence and “state capacity” positively correlated? Bryan Caplan writes,
Perhaps rich societies have big governments because it takes a colossal host to sustain colossal parasitism.
Possibly related: Handle comments,
One thing we can observe is that, at least for a time, liberalism was more or less culturally self-sustaining, even during those periods of adversity you mentioned. It would take a while to explain why, but my position is that the self-sustaining social mechanism has run out of juice in the process of being replaced by a rival ideology, and so, despite our technologically-enabled economic prosperity, liberalism really is in more danger than in those dangerous times, and there is no longer any ‘soft’ (or coherent) way to implement ‘more liberalism’ solutions.
He might say that left-wing ideology is a parasite that is in the process of killing the host. It will suffice here to define left-wing ideology as the view that capitalism is inherently bad. By that definition, the parasite has already infected an awful lot of educated young people.
Small poor economies do it a lot. Conservatives do it. Inefficient government is a wide ranging symptom.
Maybe it is inherent in the concept government enforced property ownership.
Left leaning young people have been saying capitalism is bad for a while. What seems new and arguably more troubling to me is the new nationalistic and not particularly capitalist or fiscally conservative direction of the mainstream GOP.
+1
This.
Big gov’t “leftists” like fast, quick, simple solutions — via gov’t solutions.
In allowing Media / Academia / Gov’t Bureaucracies to all be partisan Democrats, “liberalism” is dooming itself.
Small hope in K-12 vouchers; competence exams instead of college (=Dem indoctrination) degree; alt-media / IDW; and more conservative Reps (tho too many GOPe).
Lower taxes work for making civilization better — but too many elites want to spend Other People’s Money too much. “To make the world better”. And if you object to making the world better, off to the gulags.
“… left-wing ideology is a parasite that is in the process of killing the host.”
According to leftist ideology, the “host” must be killed so that their ideal society can be built.
Marx’s evolution/revolution theory always seemed contradictory to me. On the one hand, he would never describe his socialist utopia because he believed that it must emerge spontaneously and it would be silly to try to predict the final form into which it would evolve. On the other hand, however, he believed that a revolution was necessary to bring socialism about. But revolution implies a sharp break from the status quo rather than an evolutionary change. Rather than allowing a new socio-economic order to emerge naturally, then, Marx wanted to forcibly install his new order over the ashes of the old – a new order that he refused to define because it had to emerge naturally.
Surely, what Marx was arguing was that the existing system was stable and self-reinforcing, so it must be torn down so that the new system can emerge organically – whatever that new system might be.
This seems internally consistent. Not very considerate of ruined lives, but internally consistent.
If so, then evolution is not an option and the would-be revolutionaries have to come up with a system to replace what they’re proposing to tear down. Marx refused to do this.
How does that follow?
If more than one system is viable, and there are others that are better than the present one, evolution is likely to discover one of the other (better) systems once the niche is no longer dominated by the present one.
Of course, what we’ve seen, time and again, is that evolution leads to something like a mixed economy.
Evolution works if it’s allowed to. Revolution short-circuits the process, however. Marx wanted both evolution and revolution. Pick one or the other, both aren’t possible.
Perhaps rich societies have big governments because it takes a colossal host to sustain colossal parasitism.
The biggest issue as a Left Center of all of Bryan Caplan’s work is he loves the Victorian society of 1860s.
1) In terms of power and economic growth, one variable that benefits both is population growth and long terms helps the economic elite to have population growth. (Again our economy is closer to the 1950s where the main variable holding economic growth back in 2018 is the slowdown of labor supply.)
2) In terms of point two is Bryan Caplan writing is “I hate the economic lower half” but “we must have more cheap labor in the economy.” Immigration has a place solution but it has limits to what is acceptable to domestic populations.
3) Bryan does not offer a religion for the masses. Religion was one aspect that equalized past societies more and helped local society run smoother. He offers nothing here. (And religion helped society control family formation.)
4) Bryan does not offer non-economic signals of good citizens. Our society had them in the past like military service or marriage with children.
Additionally without religion who is teaching non-economic values to young people outside of parents?
School teachers.
Interesting!
1. My observation is that it is the left, as much as than the right, that is stuck in Victorianism – or worse. The latest manifestation is our rapid drift toward Victorianism with respect to sex and speech, with the left having pretty much decided that male sexuality is Evil, and driving us toward gender segregation and chaperoning. But, also, the persistence of an emphasis on trade unionism and organizing society’s benefits around a tiered structure of state-employers-employees (e.g., trying to squeeze gig work into an “employer/employee” structure and then impose state rules for employment on that) also speaks to a very dated view of the world – essentially, ironically, a feudal one.
2. I agree, the focus on economic growth through population growth is foolish. What’s important to human welfare, in any case, is wealth per capita, not total wealth – unless you’re a government trying to be more powerful, in which case total GDP matters. Of course, many macroeconomists are working for governments.
3. I also agree, the masses lack a “religion”, and, lacking one, are prone to being led astray by populist leaders. We used to believe in ideals like the country’s founding principles, or even the Superman Creed (“Truth, Justice, and the American Way”) but our society’s failure to live up to these ideals, as well as determined efforts by politicians to divide (and conquer) us through one form of identity politics or another, has undermined that sense of common values. I think Bryan does offer one – “Live and Let Live” would come close – but that’s never been especially motivating compared to the various forms of “Feel Bad? Hurt Someone!” (tax the rich, expel the immigrants, white and non-white identity politics, trade wars, real wars, etc.)
4. What would you suggest makes a good citizen? Good for whom – themselves, their neighbors, the state? You offer two signals, without explaining why they’re especially useful. To take one of them, if “marriage with children” required women to become chattel property of their husbands and surrender their independence, would a woman who rejected that be a bad citizen? In the current situation, where many states make a breadwinner the chattel property of the supported spouse, would a hard worker who rejected that be a bad citizen? What about someone who contributes much, but believes they would be unsuited to parenthood – bad citizens? Or, do you believe that military service is a sign of good citizenship, while turning up for work well before oh-dark-thirty every morning at the dry cleaner is not?
Thanks for the thoughts!
There’s a theory (I want to credit Peter Turchin, but don’t quote me on that) that when simple societies add a little management and complexity, it works wonderfully. Over time, societies go up to and well past the point of negative net returns on management; adding another administrator doesn’t create enough wealth to pay him. Since administrators make the decisions in society, they rarely decide that society needs fewer of themselves. They usually decide to add more administrators to handle the symptoms.
The bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy until eventually the peasants revolt.
After a period of anarchy and endemic warfare, some bright spark gets the idea that maybe he could organize things better. Second verse same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse.
It seems rather obvious that affluence is positively correlated to individual capacity, also. You might go so far as to say that affluence is a measure of certain types of capacity.
Today’s young left aren’t particularly animated by hostility to capitalism. Or it’s very much a junior partner in the culture wars / political economy venture.
This conversation goes too many places at once–too many competing directions.
BTW, the actual link (the one Prof. Arnold provided doesn’t seem to work) is this:
http://www.econlib.org/archives/2018/06/some_stuff_to_k.html
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A couple thoughts offhand.
1. One marker of state capacity is the ability to survive. Charles Tilly discusses this in his book on European states. It’s complex, because we have “state death” and also “state resurrection,” as seen in (for example) Poland and the Baltic States. The Baltic states exist because the Russian / Soviet Empire receded and the international system tends to believe in “Wilsonian national self-determination.” This is different from the way in which Switzerland exists–it’s off the beaten path and armed to the teeth
2. We need to distinguish between welfare states with some staying power (Sweden?) and strong minimalistic states such as UK ca. 1890.
3. I am reminded of Charles Murray’s assertion, in his recent libertarian polemic, that Mancur Olson was correct. Once you have a welfare state the only way to get rid of it is to lose a total war and start over from scratch. Presumably there are ratchets.
This also reminds me of Voegeli’s criticism of the American welfare state: _Never Enough_.
4. We need to think about the relationship between local communities and the state. Local communities can exist and endure while states come and go.
This reminds me of Turchin, also. A teaser at Isegoria:
http://www.isegoria.net/2016/07/imperial-overstretch/
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We need a name for the thing that we are discussing. “Social parasitism” probably will not work, as it was the label the Soviet state used for people who tried to resist the system. Joseph Brodsky, for example, was accused of “social parasitism” for attempting to be a self-reliant man-of-letters in the Soviet Union. Andrei Amalrik also discusses the term, methinks, in _Involuntary journey to Siberia_. IDK what the term is in Russian…
Sounds like Matt Ridley in “The Rational Optimist.” Also, didn’t someone once say that the trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money?
Caplan is correct on “state capacity” and I’m glad someone of his stature is taking on the concept. And he’s also certainly right about colossal parasitism in big government.
But that’s not quite what I was getting at, or the point made in your summary.
Caplan’s parasitism is more like the idea that tape worms eat your food before you can digest it and so starve you and make you extra hungry to go get more for them. (I’m unsure if is actually true as a matter of biology, but it’s a widely used bit of imagery.) And yes, if there is no way to contain the expansion in the numbers or varaciousness of parasites, they will eventually debilitate the host, or, switching metaphors, kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. (An example could be the leaders of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez’s daughter Maria Gabriela is one of the richest women in the world, beneficiary of her father’s looting and utter destruction of the productive capacity of the nation.)
What I’m getting at is something different, and if we are going to stick to biological metaphors, I might say it’s something like “strategic immunosuppression” or “evolved extensive antibiotic resistence” like XDR-TB.
Diseases flourish when the immune system is compromised. Some attach the immune system directly, others evade, and others encyst and embed themselves into vital organs. Every attempt to attack them there is a suicide mission.
The point is, to the extent liberalism works, it does so in an social and institutional environment of meaningful constraints, checks and balances, and rival centers of power, just like capitalism works in markets with real competition and a tether to reality in terms of profit and loss absent subsidy or coercion. When the latter case goes bad, we say the inefficient outcome is ‘market failure’, and when the former case fails, it is an analogous ‘social failure’.
Another way of looking at it could be ‘socially anticompetitive practices’ in the case of an ideological monopoly that perpetuates its own existence.
What has happened is that, after a long evolution and trend in this direction, through subtle and continuous experimentation, and trial-and-error refinement of tactics, we have arrived at a spot in which most any attempts to compete in the marketplace of ideas are completely blocked off, as they will result in the futile martyrdom of anyone who gets too close to the fundamentals in their criticism. That means the current parasite will multiple and spread without limit, either eventually taking the host with it, or making life miserable.
What to do? That’s a bigger topic, but suffice it to say, and for better or worse, simply “more liberalism” is no longer in the space of the possibilities. It will require much more radical intervention and treatment than that.
One way to “treat” the problem may be to go after the regulatory state on the basis of:
1. The takings clause (e.g., regulations that reduce the value of property w/o
compensation)
2. Separation of powers (e.g., the fact that regulatory agencies wield legislative,
executive, and judicial powers)
Set up privately-funded organizations whose purpose is to relentlessly sue the government on these grounds – lawsuit by lawsuit.
The lawsuits won’t succeed unless the judges are sympathetic. Most law schools, especially the most prestigious, teach that such suits don’t have a leg to stand on. And judges care what prestigious law school professors teach.
A few don’t, and I gather President Trump is appointing some who think likewise, but right now those suits are pretty much hopeless.
That’s okay. Just keep banging away and publicizing the cases. Basic fairness is on our side. The good guys lost Kelo, but the reaction was swift and angry.
That is the notion proposed by Charles Murray–you could get insurance against government programs, and your insurance company goes to bat for you should a government agent appear and wish to disrupt your business.
_By the people: Rebuilding liberty without permission_.
“The Madison Fund” is the name Murray proposes for the insurance company.
It’s a provocative notion–I’m not sure how well it can be implemented.
A key facet of this idea is that the public doesn’t actually support many government enforcement agents for OSHA, EPA, etc. The small entrepreneur looks at the government’s “deep pockets” and crumbles. In addition, Murray hopes, the public’s sense of fair play is waiting to be aroused by egregious examples of government over-reach. Given enough bad publicity, excessive government enforcement can be rolled back at the margin.
Is there potential for such a thing? It’s an empirical question
The Christian religion, and the religious wars leading to Religious Toleration (Treaty of Westphalia), is the strong “free thinking” immunity system that atheistic liberalism is destroying.
“the current parasite will multiple and spread without limit,” (Tiny typo: >> multiply)
No. Socialism has limits.
Venezuela provides a clear end point towards where Democratic Party liberalism is leading. A previously successful, Christian capitalistic nation that became rich, destroyed by bad policies. Policies supported by a majority because of useful idiot elites.
The culture wars are significantly about the various anti-Christian alternatives, sort of the neo-religion of Political Correctness.
However, robot producers might well create a society where socialist economic production limits don’t cause collapse. The two, both true, Californias are a possible future, as well.