The way labor availability doesn't actually help most peasant families if they don't have land to use it on. And when land is locked up by Big Men or temples or aristocrats, the system traps excess labor in a way that looks inefficient, but is actually great for those doing the extracting
People make mistake assuming that system is the same inefficient and exploitive for everyone. The owners and rule makers have everything in abundance, service providers from construction to healthcare queue at their doorstep. You might hear the owners and rule makers complaining about the reality and economy but it's something completely different from what you think.
A reminder unemployment and underemployment and labour displacement existed in Roman times, and could be inferred to have carried into post Roman serfdom and the age of kings. It might not be the best choice for a peasant normally but walking off the land did happen. There are court records seeking the return of successful townspeople provably off their lords domain, and similar documents around marriage and land inheritance.
Peasant revolts would be fights for retained rights, even if informal - not just new rights, if at all about new rights.
Labour mobility predates the modern era.
This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.
You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent
Hierarchies and funnelling behavior seems to be emergent from people desiring more, and some securing it.
But but ... i thought it ought to "tricky down" ?
There is in one sense the king and the pawn are similar. Pawns are many, kings are few. If one pawn sacrifices itself to sacrifice the king, then kings ought to fear pawns and not take undue advantage.
Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives.
I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "expert" in any given field to spread propaganda favourable to them.
The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.
One day society will collapse and in the chaos people will come together to create a new constitution. The people who find themselves in a position to write that constitution will not have time to read up on psychology and systemantics and cryptography and voting theory and AI, etc, etc. There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
Has anyone tried to write a constitution based on all this? Not with the expectation that it will actually be used, but as a way to teach these important theories and give a good example of how they can be applied to law?
Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.
> There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
I'm not certain.
Both the US Constitution and the first French Constitution, for instance, were the produce of one century of thinking ideas through. Each successive French Constitution has been redesigned to avoid the problems that led to the fall of the previous one.
I'm less familiar with other examples.
Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.
File this under Lies Engineers Believe About Political Science.
Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on the part of moneyed individuals.
Suppose we allow only short published stump speeches and nothing else.
What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote?
Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.
Are stump speeches not propaganda? I don't see why the election system should privilege candidates whose political views are most compellingly expressed in quick little text blurbs.
That is how the system already works. Tv and social media soundbites are king, rather than substance.
> Banning campaigning would go a long way.
With tongue in cheek, that qualifies you as the "people like Stalin" category. Not a good idea.
And allowing for infinite money to pay for propaganda is somehow not Stalinist?
If you're happy to accept almost literally everyone as Stalinist I suppose so. But if the word is going to mean anything then no, spending a lot on propaganda isn't Stalinist. It is routine governance. If you intend to organise people politically it is going to take a lot of propaganda.
I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants are the cause of all our issues and the media will be full of crimes by illegal immigrants, etc.
Being able to give a good speech is merit when the goal is to select a leader.
Initial debates usually feature all serious candidates anyhow. Advertisement aka propaganda draws a line for me.
The problem is that whatever system we come up with in theory, will have to be built in practice out of people, and there is never any shortage of people who will happily abuse the system and fellow people out of greed or delusion. That's why an AI overlord arising and taking over is not a threat, it's our only hope /s
> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics.
There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found useful, from a (leftist) video essay:
> See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...]
> Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of the things we do in our day-to-day lives can be justified by either one, we don't often notice the contradiction between them, and it's easy to imagine whichever one tends to be our default is everyone else's default as well. [...]
> Your conservative friend thinks you're naive for thinking the system even can be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation [...] Many conservatives assume liberals [...] know The Hierarchy is eternal, that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them. [...]
> > that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them.
They're right... when the other is someone like them.
And they have a blind spot for an other who is not like them.
Meanwhile, what is the blind spot of the people who are not like that (i.e., who believe in equality)?
Is their blind spot that they can't imagine so many people who are trying to gain advantage, and being deceitful about it?
This analysis is highly muddled. "making things equal" != democracy. Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies. The concepts of democracy and capitalism have a far greater reach than the current US political climate where both are malfunctioning. The US is a superpower attempting to become a third world country and corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.
There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should not have it comes to have it. This is what every system so far has succumbed to. We need a truly equal system where all concentration of power is avoided unless absolutely necessary for the functioning of society to avoid an eventual collapse of the system.
The basic mechanism you’re describing is essentially accurate, however:
> As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship.
This doesn’t logically follow. The existence of a power differential doesn’t necessitate the differential being exploited to increase the differential. If we assume individuals are maximally selfish, this might hold, but that isn’t the case; people do altruistic things all the time, and there’s good reason to think most people are hardwired for it. The problem of liberal democracy is how you design a system to address those who are hardwired towards malicious selfishness; it isn’t clear that you truly can.
I would say that over a long enough period of time it's unavoidable that a selfish person will use the power to gain more. Selfish people are more likely to seek positions of power, so even if most people are altruistic, the people that seek power are more likely to be selfish.
I’ve come to basically the same conclusion. Attempts to engineer perfect political systems that are immune to this sort of infiltration is like trying to build a structure that will never need to be repaired—you can expend a lot of resources and effort on it upfront, but on a long enough timeline there will be failure modes you didn’t foresee.
This is nonsense. Most/all democracies have laws that only certified doctors can practice medicine. This makes doctors unequal from other people. Is this incompatible with democracy?
Depends on what the doctor can do with that inequality. If it means the doctor gets paid 20 times more than others then yes that is incompatible with democracy, as over time that wealth difference will be used to increase the inequality. But if the power is limited to only decisions about health, which is necessary for healthcare to function, then it should be acceptable. You'd still have to make sure that even that level of power is not used to gain more power, though.
One can argue whether 20 times more is too much or too little but I would say that it is correct that a doctor gets paid quite a bit more than unskilled labor. Some people who become doctors might still go through with it if it were not but most (sane) people would not go through the lengthy and very demanding path that is medical school and residency if it was not a better paid than a job that very many people could do. I can tell you here and now that I don't think I personally would have had the stamina to become a medical doctor.
Sure, I can agree with that. There does need to be some kind of incentive to do jobs that enough people don't naturally want to do. But the differences in rewards should be kept as small as possible and created only as a last resort. As I said, power concentration should only be allowed if absolutely necessary. If no one wants to become a doctor, then I'd consider it absolutely necessary to increase the incentives of doing so bit by bit until we have enough doctors while keeping in mind the risk that comes with the power differentials created. At some point an extra doctor might not be worth the extra risk of power concentration.
> Is this incompatible with democracy?
Yes. This is why every society of note limited the franchise prior to the 1900s. You can only have debates among equals among people who are equal. The sort of equality communists imagine requires that you either radically re-engineer the human pysche or implement Harrison-Bergeron-style handicaps on exceptional people.
Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal". In a democracy, the people have the power to decide and anyone has the power to elect, be elected and to voice his opinion freely.
> Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal".
His point is that democratic systems are subverted if absolute equality is not enforced. It’s a crude argument but basically correct. The only way you prevent usurpation is by making sure one individual doesn’t have any obvious means of scaling his influence to the point that he can challenge the democratic militia.
If things are not equal, then the voice of some people is louder than the voice of others, and that is no longer a true democracy.
>that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them
That's true even in the most leftist and forcefully egalitarian regimes like communism. There are a few taking the ultimate decisions and there are some that benefit.
Our current regime lies through their teeth daily. Like obvious, completely made up lies. Every. Day. It's not a misunderstanding. One side is pushing for authoritarianism, one is not. One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence. I'm so fuckin tired of pretending there is just some kind of misunderstanding between both "sides".
No, the video makes the point that it's not really a misunderstanding, there are fundamentally different values in tension. If you believe in and value hierarchy then authoritarianism is natural and desirable, the lies are just for assuaging your less committed or more sensitive allies and befuddling your enemies.
But people do not value hierarchy for its own sake. They value hierarchy when they're on top of it, or at least in the top half. There are not actually fundamentally different values, but different interests.
It's a mistake to assume that it's just about advantage or greed.
People even relatively far down may believe The Hierarchy offers predictability and stability—even if I think their belief is incorrect.
Authoritarians tend to be fearful, and it offers a partial answer to those fears.
>One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence.
Violence like shooting political opponents for voicing their opinions?
I don't think those at the top of the social hierarchy would condone the 'better system'.
We can at the very least tweak existing systems to be meaningfully better.
For example we could phase out all marketing and advertising. We could simplify and automate accounting and many other jobs. We could reduce the work week to 30 hours. We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job. Make moving down on a career ladder or switching careers entirely a common and non-humiliating occurrence, etc.
The most pertinent question to ask is - why haven't any of these already happened? What kinds of people prevent these changes from occurring and what should be done about it? Do you know any of these people - are some of them your family members. Are you one of them? Why does no one seem to ask these questions and seek answers? :)
> We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job.
Most of your comment I agree with but I take issue with this part.
Some time in recent history education became a means to an end: getting a decent job. This is not strictly speaking the point. Learning for the sake of learning still has tangible value that cannot be substituted by requisite training for entry level jobs.
I'm not really sure what caused this shift (but I definitely understand and respect it) but it's heavily misguided. If only we could all be so lucky as to be highly educated in a mundane job.
I don't want to live in a world where we only learn what we need to know in order to do our job. Do you?
>I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
That would work in MMO games,not in reality. If the system is not naturally evolving, it will produce tragedies. Look at communism. It was supposed to produce "a better" society but resulted in tens of millions of deaths, loss of freedom and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
This blog series by Bret Devraux keeps bringing me back to the black death, and how that reformed labor relations.
I have heard about that a few times now. But this series really emphasizes how much surplus labor the rich could extract. And hence shows how much social impact it had when that labor reduced, and could suddenly negotiate.
I wonder if the black death, and subsequent social change, might have been the best thing to happen to the peasant class.
I wonder what would happen given today’s demographic if mass migration was shut down. There may be similar change. But ruling class is hard at work to avoid that.
The modern UK leasehold system is, in many ways, rooted in the feudal landholding arrangements. In the UK, when buying a house, the buyer sometimes leases the land rather than owning it outright, and must pay ground rent to the landlord. A lease is usually bought for 80 years or more, but occasionally properties are sold with only a few years remaining. If the lease is not renewed, the homeowner risks losing the property to the landlord. The right to renew is not a given and comes with premium costs. Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to restrict or abolish this system but it continues to persist.
Vast majority of houses are not leasehold. It’s 125 years at lease, and aside from a couple of decades the ground rent was always a peppercorn (actual ground rents started in the 90s and have now finished)
Just a point to say leasehold is very rare in Scotland. I remember being told about this when I was looking at places near London and being surprised.
In UK and most of the rich EU, one doesn't even have to get indebted to be in precarious position. The land owning and tenancy alone make it, any person at any time is one letter away from being homeless or from at least months long legal battle.
It's a fitting title to describe life today for most people.
The series actually talks about this in detail, in particular the (incorrect) trope that medieval peasants worked a lot less than we do.
Is that a trope?
Wtf? Ok I guess so. I would have never guessed.
It is really great that Snopes was around in medieval times and can confirm or deny! /S
The thing is, no one knows what medieval peasants were doing, cos we weren't there. We have this or that piece of evidence, but evidence can be misinterpreted.
The majority of people today don't work as hard as the farmers of today. It is completely implausible that they work harder than the farmers of the middle ages, who almost certainly had to work harder than modern farmers (thanks to no mechanization).
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism provides a good description
When you get to the end, remember that's how many to most black people lived until very recently until they were expelled from the land with nothing, due to the rise of more efficient farming techniques. The very few who owned their own land were more slowly pushed out when they were denied farm loans. Black people owned about 15 million acres of land in 1910, now they own about 1 million.
The idea that "efficiency" alone caused it glosses over how policy and power structures actively shaped who got to benefit from modern agriculture and who got left out (or pushed out).
I can recommend reading ACOUP to any technically minded person even if it's about history.
I haven't had the time to read this series yet but I can recommend for example his articles about the industrial revolution, making of iron and steel or sieges in the Lord of the Rings compares to read world tactics.
He has a knack for analyzing society from a systems level perspective and going into the right amount of depth for somebody who wants to understand the principles without having any background in history.
Very good series on of all things, making bread.
If you enjoy even a smidge of this, please look at other articles/series on their blog, ACOUP is absolutely phenomenal and I've not seen many writers (here also historian and tenured professor) both be so accessible and graspable while having a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation AND providing ample sources.
10/10 couldn't recommend more.
I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoyed the one on iron.
I found the one for Sparta too emotionally charged for my interest. But I really really endorse most of the other ones especially ones touching in economics and logistics of ancient world.
(Btw he's not a tenured professor, much to his chagrin, he's an adjunct professor. This is exactly why he wrote A LOT about broken academia system too.)
That's an oddly specific thing to point out
There is a vast gap in how academia treats adjunct vs tenure track professors, a difference the author of this blog has spent a decent amount of words explaining and complaining about.
It's just funny since his blog is the entire reason I learned about the difference of adjunct and tenured professor, and why a big problem in academia is that they tenure less and less and rely on lots of adjunct professors instead.
> their blog
_his_ blog. It’s all written by one man. But I agree that it’s a remarkable blog, so fascinating and freely given.
While I’m in grumpy-old-man-shakes-fist-at-newfangled-grammar mode, I can _almost_ accept that people writing in the “historical present” is unavoidable these days since TV historians have made it so trendy, but it’s especially jarring when he changes tense in the middle of a sentence (emphasis mine):
> These settlers _were_ remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings _are_ trying to do is…
I've enjoyed Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond recently. If you have read it, how does it compare?
It's a problematic work. From what I remember from my time on /r/askhistorians, they really did not like it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wd6jt/what_d...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210619035356/http://www.columb...
My impression is that it is correct enough the look good on surface. Like learning Freud, you see his points, it makes sense, but the details are wrong and so you spend most of your time learning why he wasn't exactly right.
It's been awhile since I've read it, but it does offer a similar approach in the sense that it's an easy read. Bret does a good job of making the various topics fun and interesting, even in areas I normally wouldn't be interested in.
As a side note, I've read some interesting critiques on Diamond's theories. But I did find the whole book to be an interesting perspective, even just thinking about things North America lacked such as animal husbandry that may have drastically changed the way it developed.