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The
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Consequences Of Radical Reform
Mar 9 178 704
The thread that runs from Edmund Burke to James Scott and Seeing Like A State goes:
systems that evolve organically are well-adapted to their purpose. Cultures, ancient
traditions, and long-lasting institutions contain irreplaceable wisdom. If some reformer or
technocrat who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room sweeps them aside and replaces
them with some clever theory he just came up with, he'll make everything much worse.
That's why collective farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses worked worse than ordinary
people doing ordinary things.

An alternative thread runs through the French Revolution, social activism, and modern
complaints about vetocracy. Its thesis: entrenched interests are constantly blocking
necessary change. If only there were some centralized authority powerful enough to sweep
them away and do all the changes we know we need, everything would be great. This was
the vibe I got from Gabriel Over The White House (sorry, subscriber-only post), the movie
exhorting FDR to become a fascist dictator. So many obviously good policies had built up
behind the veto point that we needed a Great Man to come in, sweep them away, and satisfy
the people's cries for justice. Obviously at its worst this thread can lead to authoritarianism.

These threads don't cleanly map to the modern left-right political spectrum. The first
contains Jane Jacobs and anti-colonialists coexisting uneasily alongside religious
fundamentalism and wisdom-of-repugnance-style arguments against homosexuality. The
second contains Lenin, Mussolini, the Equal Rights Amendment, and neoliberal reformers.
They don't even map cleanly to libertarianism vs. authoritarianism; the first has a
libertarian streak, but could presumably justify various monarchies and theocracies; the
second has clear authoritarian elements, but would also include extreme libertarians who
want to abolish the state and run everything on market principles.

Into this eternal battle comes The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French
Revolution, by Daron Acemoglu, Davide Cantoni, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson
(from 2009; h/t Rob B). Under Napoleon, the revolutionary French took over large swathes of
Europe. They abolished their client states' traditional systems, replacing them with the
Napoleonic Code and other "modern" legal systems. Europe at the time had so many tiny
duchies and principalities and so on that you can actually do a decent experiment on it - for
every principality Napoleon conquered and reformed, there was another one just down the
river which was basically identical but managed to escape conquest. So the authors ask: did
the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-their-traditions polities?

(admittedly, this is measured in GDP, urbanization, and other “legible” statistics - but pretty
broad ones, measured over decades from a distance of centuries, in a way that seems to
track very-long-term development and is hard to fake)

Take a second to make a prediction here - a real prediction, with a probability attached.

If you're really feeling bold, post a comment with your prediction before reading further.

Are you sure you want to keep reading now? You’ll never get another chance to predict this
from a position of ignorance!

...okay, fine. The study concludes:

The evidence suggests that areas that were occupied by the French and that underwent
radical institutional reform experienced more rapid urbanization and economic growth,
especially after 1850. There is no evidence of a negative effect of French invasion. Our
interpretation is that the Revolution destroyed (the institutional underpinnings of) the
power of oligarchies and elites opposed to economic change; combined with the arrival
of new economic and industrial opportunities in the second half of the 19th century, this
helped pave the way for future economic growth. The evidence does not provide any
support for several other views, most notably, that evolved institutions are inherently
superior to those 'designed'; that institutions must be 'appropriate' and cannot be
'transplanted'; and that the civil code and other French institutions have adverse
economic effects.

Notice how merciless the authors are - not only rejecting the superiority of evolved over
designed institutions, but equally skeptical of the superiority of local over foreign ones.
"The evidence," they say, "does not support the thesis that institutions are efficiently
adapted to the underlying characteristics of a society and that evolved institutions are
superior to those that are designed or externally imposed."

In fact, they think that when designed imposed institutions fail, it's probably because they
don't go far enough:

The success of the French reforms raises the question: why did they work when other
externally-imposed reforms often fail? Most likely this is because the reforms were much
 more radical than is typically the case. The French reformed simultaneously in many
dimensions and weakened the powers of local elites, making a return to the status quo
ante largely impossible. Even when some pre-revolution elites returned to power after
1815, there was a permanent change in the political equilibrium. This scope and
radicalism of the French reforms are common with the post-war reform experiences in
Germany and Japan and stand in contrast with many other reform experiences.

What should our concerns be about this paper?

First, this is from 2009 (I’m only just hearing about it, sorry). Normally I'd be inclined to
trust it; Daron Acemoglu is the most-cited economist of the past ten years, and I've never
heard anyone say a bad word about him. But I feel like concerns about spatial
autocorrelation in this kind of cross-country research have gotten much stronger over the
past decade, and I'm not sure 2009 economists knew how to take this problem seriously. Are
we sure it's not just something like "France invaded countries close to it, France is pretty
close to the economic core of Europe, so countries in the economic core of Europe did
better than countries elsewhere"? The authors note there was no tendency for French-
invaded countries to outperform their neighbors before the French invasion, but that could
just be because "economic core of Europe" only started being meaningful post-Industrial-
Revolution. I don't know enough about what safeguards you're supposed to have against
these kinds of things to know whether this paper had them.

Second, isn't it sort of weird that Britain, the country that got least invaded by Napoleon
and had some of the deepest-rooted institutions of all, was the one that really kicked off the
Industrial Revolution? I guess you would have to argue that one really exciting data point is
less interesting than the overall trend you get by doing statistics to dozens of countries over
decades.

Third, when you look at the actual French reforms involved, they're...kind of obviously
good. Things like breaking up guilds and letting anybody who wanted enter the market. You
could be forgiven for thinking that "free markets are better for economic growth than
walled-off guilds" isn't exactly a dizzying insight, and doesn't generally prove the
superiority of designed institutions to evolved ones. But then, isn't the whole point of Seeing
Like A State that things which seem obviously true sometimes aren't? So isn't it fair to show
an obviously true thing in fact being true as a rebuttal? Also, isn't it a good reminder that
when people talk about scary things like "a technocrat replacing evolved institutions with a
stroke of the pen", often this means common-sense good things like breaking up rent-
seeking guilds? I think my real concern here is that someone might use this paper to
support some sort of far-left reform, saying "come on, this shows that reforms work better
than leaving institutions in place", when an alternate lesson is "capitalism works better
than not-capitalism".

Scott primarily wrote about peasant communities, with some of his better-known critiques
(eg Brasilia) being extensions of what he learned about peasants. He condemned extractive
institutions that tried to change peasant communities. So you could argue that "actualy,
ending feudalism is Good" is very Scott-compatible, maybe the most Scott-compatible
thing. But then you would lose the right to apply Scott to most modern political debates,
where there are no peasants to be found, and everything is the weird mix of extractive and
altruistic typical of modern states.

I think these are some pretty powerful critiques, but for me a lot of the value of this paper
was in asking the question. See eg Making Beliefs Pay Rent In Anticipated Experiences. It's
easy to be intellectually dazzled by counterintuitive stories of modernizing reforms making
things worse. But then you have a paper in front of you saying "Imposing modernizing
reforms on countries either increased or decreased their GDP by a lot, you need to guess
which!" and it's like, @#$%, now I have to stop being intellectually dazzled and actually
make a prediction! And even before reading the results section, I realized that I had no
confidence at all that imposed reforms always make things worse, outside some book of
cherry-picked examples of imposed reforms making things worse.

Do I believe they have a tendency to generally make things better? I'm not sure. One thing
I'm still chewing over was a throwaway line in the paper saying that of course getting
conquered by a foreign enemy is good for economic growth, look at Japan and Germany
after WWII. The idea was that the occupying American forces couldn't care less about the
entrenched power structure and vetocracy in Germany and Japan, so they rammed through
whatever reforms seemed like good ideas at the time, and they were in fact mostly good
ideas. On the other hand, the Soviet Union tried the same thing in East Germany and that
went less well.

So maybe the moral of the story is something like - replacing stagnation and entrenched
interests with good reform is good, and with bad reform is bad. Which sounds obvious, but
I do think that considerations of "is this potentially challenging a carefully evolved system
of traditions?" is less important than I originally believed.

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178 704

Discussion
Write a comment…
Chronological

deleted Mar 9
deleted
Lambert Mar 9
This is my impression too: that England reformed gradually over the Stuart era (there
was also that one not so gradual bit in the middle but the most radical elements got
rolled back afterwards) whereas France did it all at once. Incrementalism vs Revolution.
Reply
Bullseye Mar 9
What prediction are you responding to? It got deleted.
Reply
Anomaly Mar 9
Registering my prediction in advance: I think on average there is no difference between the
reformed and non-reformed systems.
Reply
Kenny Easwaran Mar 9
That was my prediction as well.
Reply
Alex V Mar 9
This is what I went with, in large part due to hearing (as a kid, and neither confirmed nor
contradicted since in my non-history-based life) that many of the reforms were undone
afterwards, setting the legal system mostly "back to normal".
Obviously, I don't know with high probability how true this is, this is from the same
schooling that said things like Columbus was the first to know the world was round.
Reply
Alex Mar 10
This was my prediction as well, and I see it now as cowardice (on my own part, not
necessarily on yours or anyone else's).
 Reply
Sharur Mar 16
I thought the same
Reply
hiblick Writes Public/Private · Mar 9
0.6 on the side of the radical reformers
Reply
rictic Mar 9
This was my prediction as well. With 0.2 on no detectable change, and 0.2 on reform
made things worse.
Reply
Tejas Subramaniam Mar 15
This was exactly my prediction too!
Reply
Zacharius Mar 9
Traditional does better on average - 75%
Reply
Max Tolkoff Mar 9
I feel like for this to be true the benefits need to be much greater than 4x since the most
successful societies look nothing like they did 50 years ago, let alone something you
might call “traditional”
Reply
Leo Mar 10
I put 60% on the same. My thinking was that the conquerors would be insufficiently
incentivized to enforce policies beneficial to the conquered and that the conquerors
would potentially lack the cooperation of local power structures and the populace,
reducing the overall effectiveness of governance.
Reply
Serine Mar 12
I put 70% on the same. But my thinking was that the conquerors would not be able
to do better than reformers trying to reform their own countries, like Mao with the
Great Leap Forward. I guess I was wrong to think about all the times reform has
gone right – it does seem like "capitalist reform good" is more precise/accurate
than "reform good" or "reform bad".
Reply
Nicholas Weininger Writes Future More Perfect · Mar 9
Wasn't part of the leadup to the Industrial Revolution in Britain the enclosure of previously
commonly-owned peasant lands? That seems like both the archetypal sort of top-down-
imposed change to evolved institutions that James Scott types would decry (in fact I
remember some left-libertarians like Kevin Carson banging on a lot about the evils of
enclosure back in the day) and something that could plausibly have contributed to the Great
Enrichment by enabling more intensive economic exploitation of land.
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 9
Yep, 100%. Kirkpatrick Sale wrote one of the definitive takes on enclosure and the
consequent Luddite rebellion (in modern parlance the Luddites are accused of being
against technological progress, when the chief thing making them super mad was their
lands being taken away to feed industrial progress, cutting them out of any of the
benefits of technological progress)
https://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Against-Future-Industrial-Revolution/dp/0201407183
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 9
> and something that could plausibly have contributed to the Great Enrichment by
enabling more intensive economic exploitation of land.
I do have to disagree with this part though. There's no reason the factories could
have been built under a land-as-common property scheme that would have allowed
non-elites to share the wealth. As it was it was a great big handout by Big
Government to their favored cronies in England's famously stratified class system,
and the rebellions tell you exactly what the common people thought of it.
If you're against rent-seeking, private landownership (especially the kind that
requires the violent seizure of previously commonly held lands) is kind of the very
definition of it.
Obviously I'm outing myself as a Georgist with the above argument, so here's
Progress & Poverty:
http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm
Reply
Watchman Mar 9
You can't build on common land. That's the point of it really. But your point is
based on a wierd confusion of the agricultural revolution (where enclosure of
common land allowed specialisation more easily) and the industrial revolution.
Considering common land was never the majority of land in Britain and that it
tended to be the more marginal situations than the actual farmed lands, I'd
guess the majority of factories weren't built on former common land anyway.
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 9
 But you can! As Henry George said, “it is not necessary to confiscate
Land, it is only necessary to confiscate rent.”
You can retain some modern notions of private landownership without the
rent seeking negative externalities that benefit a few to the exclusion of
the many.
As for the rest of your comment I recommend you just read Sale’s account
Reply
The Nybbler Mar 10
George's scheme is exactly equivalent to the state owning all the land
and leasing it all to the highest bidder with the right of first refusal to
the existing leaseholder. This retains very little of private
landownership.
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 10
Whether or not I agree with that, my point was to address
Watchman's concern that "you can't build on common land."
Under George's scheme, you absolutely can. In fact, it's the very
point -- to encourage building.
Reply
Titanium Dragon Mar 9
This is simply false.
Ireland? The renters didn't own the property, and there was no need to
reimburse the renters for improvements they made. The result was that the
renters didn't improve the property, resulting in massive poverty in Ireland.
Native American reservations? The reason why these areas are so destitute is
because there is a lack of private property there. This means that you don't get
the value back that you spend on improving the land. As a result, Native
American reservations are grossly underdeveloped.
The same applies here.
The reason why private property is so important is because it creates an
incentive to invest in the property. Without that incentive, there is no reason to
invest.
This is one of the major reasons why socialism is such a failure as an ideology.
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 9
Georgism != Socialism
Georgism LOVES private property. What it detests is rent-seeking. Rent-
seeking landlords exploit BOTH capital AND labor.
And actually the reason for the Irish famine, which George goes into in
GREAT detail in Progress & Poverty, is absentee landlords who held both
the title to the land, and to whom all the improved value of the land would
accrue. The reason that the renters didn't improve the land was because
improving the land WOULD ONLY CAUSE THE RENTS TO INCREASE by at
least as much as the value of the improvements.
From Progress & Poverty:
> tenants... even if the rack-rents which they were forced to pay had
permitted them, did not dare to make improvements which would have
been but the signal for an increase of rent. Labor was thus applied in the
most inefficient and wasteful manner.
Further:
> For when her population was at its highest, Ireland was a food-exporting
country. Even during the famine, grain and meat and butter and cheese
were carted for exportation along roads lined with the starving and past
trenches in which the dead were piled.
>Expand
It wentfullnot as an exchange, but as a tribute – to pay the rent of absentee
comment
landlords;
Reply
a levy wrung from producers by those who in no wise
Titanium Dragon Mar 9
The fact that any improvement made on the property became the
property of the landlord is why they didn't invest in the land. Ulster
had tenant right, which obligated landlords to compensate tenants
for improvements on their land at the termination of the lease, which
resulted in greater stability (because the landlords didn't want to
have to pay for improvements) and greater prosperity. Ulster not
coincidentally ended up with a below-average rate of population loss
due to the famine.
Moreover, the whole "exporting food" thing is one of those Big Lies.
India tried to cut off all exports of food in 1943. Result? Millions of
people starved in Bengal. Why? Because no exports also meant no
imports. People starved because of lack of trade, as food couldn't be
sold to where it was needed most.
Ireland was a net importer of food during the time of the famine,
*not* a net exporter. More food came into Ireland than left it.
Moreover, the idea of it being "tribute" is simply false. The people
who were exporting food were *not* the people who were starving.
They were, in fact, the result of better off farmers with large amounts
of land being able to produce large amounts of food.
The people who starved were the tenant farmers who were on tiny
sublet plots of land. These plots were too small to really support
much
Expand
agriculture,
full comment
so they grew the most energy dense crop possible
potatoes and then would hire themselves out to do labor for
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 9
> The fact that any improvement made on the property became
the property of the landlord is why they didn't invest in the land.
So we agree! The problem is that the value of improvements
went to the absentee landlords whose ownership discouraged
the development of the land.
> And the whole "the value of land" thing is nonsense because
land has no fixed value. The reason why land is valuable is
almost always because it has been improved or is near improved
land. The value of the land goes up due to the improvements. It
is the person who is improving the land who gives it value.
Again we agree! And this is the problem. If you improve the land
next to mine, then I have an incentive to not develop my land
because I can soak up the benefits of you improving YOUR land.
I seriously recommend you read Progress & Poverty and see if
you still feel the same way. It directly addresses a lot of your
assertions.
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 9
> land has no fixed value. The reason why land is valuable is
almost always because it has been improved or is near
improved land
I will disagree in part with *THIS* however --- land with a
river next to it is clearly more valuable for industrialization in
the time in question because I can stick a water-wheel on it
and build a mill. Likewise fertile land is more valuable for
agriculture than land in the middle of the sahara.
Reply
Titanium Dragon Mar 9
The Spokane Reservation in Washington is located at
the intersection of two major rivers (the Columbia and
the Spokane).
 It has a population of 2000 people and is desperately
poor.
Spokane, Washington is a few dozen miles upriver
along the Spokane. People there made nearly twice as
much money per capita and were 30 percentage
points less likely to be unemployed as of 2016.
There's lots of places that could be developed that
simply aren't.
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 9
I think we've been talking past each other and
actually agree about many things.
First of all, I agree that Native American
reservations may well have land use policies that
lead to bad results like this! George has an entire
section in Progress & Poverty that argues against
various land reform schemes as either not helpful
or inadequate.
Second, the reference to a river was specifically
regarding the time period of the English industrial
revolution, not 21st century spokane washington.
You seem to be making the (correct) argument
that land does not have some magical fixed value,
but rather that it's value is tied up in its potentials
for being used by humans, and what they actually
use it for. This is correct!
If there's iron ore in a mountain, but I'm the only
one who lives there, the iron ore is worthless and
of no value until the land is developed.
That said, when development does come to a
nearby city, the fact that there's iron in that
mountain, among all its other possible uses, will
suddenly give it a lot of value, even if human labor
Expand full comment
Reply
2 replies
Titanium Dragon Mar 9
If people developing land nearby discouraged you from
improving your land, then cities wouldn't exist.
 In reality, nearby development encourages further
development. It's a positive feedback loop.
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 9
No ecosystem can support a population of 100%
parasites. There must be a productive substrate on
which to subsist. Plenty of people acquire land
intending to put it to the most productive use possible.
However, they are not the only ones in the market.
My argument is simply that the presence of parasitic
rent-seeking is why the rent keeps going up, and that it
doesn't have to be this way, not that cities are
impossible.
There is certainly a NIMBY population in San Francisco
that does not want anyone building, because it would
drive down the value of their land.
Reply
Titanium Dragon Mar 9
NIMBYism isn't as simple as mere rent-seeking; it
has many reasons. Indeed, the primary reason for
most NIMBYism is not even economic.
The single largest cause of NIMBYism is simply
that people don't like change and don't want to
give up what they have, even if it would be better
in the long term.
The solution to it is deregulation. Cut off people's
ability to oppose development at the knees.
There *will* be consequences, but that's the
solution. You won't solve it any other way,
because the opposition is rarely logical.
Reply
2 replies
Ryan W. Mar 10
Vine Deloria Jr., in his book "Custer Died for Your Sins," touches
on how privatization of native land parcels was combined with
land theft. Common areas were parceled out, then some portion
of the total land was confiscated.
There's lots of undeveloped land in the United States, even in
places where the law is basically the same as the most
 developed areas. Which makes me question assigning 100% of
the issue to legal frameworks. You know what they say about the
Three Laws of Real Estate, right?
Reply
Carl Pham Mar 9
Well, some Native American reservations are practically undevelopable. I
mean, the Navajo Nation is almost entirely Sonoran Desert, with a tiny
rainfall and strong temperature extremes, both diurnal and annual. About
all that's done there is sheep and goat herding, and mining sometimes.
Even the part that isn't reservation has pretty limited development.
Reply
dionysus Mar 10
Why would a 19th century industrialist risk everything to build a factory on
common land if he knew it was going to become common property? People
take big risks with their money because they hope for great rewards.
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 10
The factory would remain his private property because it is capital. But the
land belongs to the community. Specifically, the *value* of the land (not
the title) would be common property. The way to implement this is the
ground rent would be taxed but the value of the improvement (the factory)
would not be.
I'd like to point out that the peasants were ignored, who certainly took
"big risks" (many of them died, injured, or poisoned by the many negative
externalities of the industrialists) and received no rewards whatsoever
because they did not have the proper connections in government to get
free handouts backed up by military force.
I do agree that development is good and we should encourage it.
Industrialists are entitled to returns on their capital and labor, but not
entitled to taking the pre-existing gifts of nature exclusively for
themselves and denying them to others, especially when they had to
wrest them away by force.
Reply
Bahatur Mar 9
While I can accept this, the distinction seems overly fine: the thing making modern
luddites super mad is having their jobs taken away and replaced with automation or
outsourcing, cutting them out of any of the benefits of technological progress,
again.
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 9
My main point was just to point out that most dismissals of the historical
luddites ignores the fact that if you went back in time and asked them why they
were mad "they took our land!" would be right up there with "machines took
our jobs!"
And Henry George would argue that whether modern luddites realize it or not,
the underlying problems aren't so different from the classic variety. "Ground
rent" (rent attributable to just the land, not what's built on it) soaks up nearly
all the value that the community at large provides. This creates a whole host of
perverse incentives, but chief among them is that the community provides the
value but private interests capture the benefit AND turn around and extract all
that risen value on the community as a tax called rent.
Reply
Ghillie Dhu Mar 9
>"Ground rent" (rent attributable to just the land, not what's built on it)
soaks up nearly all the value that the community at large provides.
This seems to me the fatal flaw of the Single Tax; there's no principle by
which to attribute the rent to land v. improvements, especially because
neighboring improvements make land itself more valuable.
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 9
I think that's debatable, plenty of property tax assessments already
separate the ground rent assessment vs. the improvements. If
anything modern advances such as GIS and vast databases of comps
make this easier to assess now than in the past. You also don't have
to have a perfect 100% LVT to achieve some good effects.
Reply
Ghillie Dhu Mar 9
True; I get just such a breakdown with my annual property tax
notice. But the difference is, I have no reason to care how it's
distributed since they're both taxed at the same mill rate.
#inadequateequilibrium
Set the mill rate on improvements to zero and watch every single
owner fight tooth & nail to attribute as much of their total
assessed value as possible to the improvements.
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 9
I imagine they'll succeed to a certain extent; but we already
have these kind of incentives in the current system.
 What it will also do (if it replaces property taxes that tax
improvements) is just encourage people to build more stuff,
so the value of their property will go up. If there's any
empty lots right next door it should be easy enough to
judge the ground rent on that basis, and if whatever LVT
rate actually makes through is enough to get those holding
land out of use to drive the price up and stall development,
that's kind of mission accomplishment even if it's not
perfect.
Modern Georgists aren't all of one mind on the "single" part
of the single tax, for the record, given a lot's changed in
140 years. Some definitely do think it should be our only
tax, others think we could at best just offset some of what
we already have (they do tend to favor Pigouvian taxes --
taxes on negative externalities -- as a general rule
however).
Reply
Titanium Dragon Mar 9
Except the entire idea is false to begin with.
They aren't the ones who are creating it, and you have no right to your job -
your job is something you do for other people. You don't have the right to force
other people to pay you to do something for you.
Moreover, the idea that they "aren't benefitting" is false on the face of it -
everyone in society benefits from increased per capita productivity, as shown
by the fact that we live in vastly, vastly better conditions.
The luddites are trying to stand in the way of progress and are rent-seeking.
Reply
larsiusprime Mar 9
> You don't have the right to force other people to pay you to do
something for you.
It's great that we agree that landlords who charge rent for the improved
value of their lands that accrue not due to their own work or investment,
but that of their neighbors, is wrong!
Reply
Titanium Dragon Mar 9
Except they aren't forcing anyone to pay for anything. Renting their
space is optional.
Reply
Bahatur Mar 10
Everyone in society does not benefit; society as a whole benefits. This is
an important distinction; if the former were true, a person who loses their
job to automation would see an improvement in their conditions as a
consequence. That is not the case.
Reply
Titanium Dragon Mar 10
The person who loses their job will be much better off for other
people having lost their jobs to automation. Multiply this by a
hundred million, and you have modern day society, where everyone
has lost their job to automation many times over, and we're massively
better off. The poor are massively better off today than the middle
class were in the 1500s, and in most ways are better off than the rich
were back then as well.
For that to happen, people must lose their jobs to automation.
Thus, it is a net gain to live in a society where you sometimes lose
your job to automation, even if you do lose your job to automation.
Moreover, very few people who lose their jobs to automation don't
get new jobs. The overwhelming majority do so.
Reply
Bahatur Mar 10
It seems to me you are still conflating society as a whole with
individual people. Losing your job makes you worse off unless
you get a better one or on a track that results in better ones than
the old track; the overwhelming majority do not manage this
much. This dominates their beliefs; the ability for people to get
_any_ job is better then nothing but only actually _good_ from
society's point of view.
Since we were talking about what other people believe, it is
deeply weird to me that your baseline expectation seems to be
that they should be happy with losing their
jobs/houses/communities because this will somehow cause
people to be better off 500 years from now.
This suggests I am confused; that can't possibly be your claim.
Did you mistake me as being a luddite instead of describing
them perhaps? For clarity's sake, I do not oppose automation;
but I empathize with people that do.
Reply
Titanium Dragon Mar 10
You're better off living in a society where some people lose
their jobs to automation than in a society where no people
lose their jobs to automation.
This is true *even if you lose your job to automation*,
because the gains of living in a society where people lose
their jobs to automation is so large it outweighs the cost of
losing your job to automation.
Moreover, losing your job to automation is rarely a
permanent state of affairs; almost everyone who does so
goes on to get another job, so the loss is actually quite
modest in most cases to begin with.
It's the same reason why getting vaccinated is a good idea,
even if there's a small chance of having an adverse
reaction, because living in a society where everyone gets
vaccinated is better.
The fact that some people are irrational doesn't change
what is true.
Reply
Bahatur Mar 10
The first two sections are reasonable, but with the
third I disagree.
The data about people finding other jobs is not
relevant to whether people oppose automation
because they are measuring the wrong thing. What
matters is whether a person can maintain their way of
life.
I don't worry too much about losing my job in general
because there are a lot which are at least similar.
However, if I were replaced by automation than every
other job I could do at the same level is similarly under
threat, which means there is a too-high-for-comfort
chance my life will be destroyed. I would probably have
to take a much lower paying job, which would require
moving to a different place. This in turn would destroy
most of my family's social relationships.
This isn't *modest*, this is everything-except-physical-
danger. The standard you are working with is that the
overwhelming majority of people fail to die.
 While I see the logic, the vaccination comparison
doesn't
Expand
hold
full
here for the opposite reason: vaccines are
comment
good
Reply
for the individuals who get them even counting
Titanium Dragon Mar 11
The reason why Flint and Detroit declined had
nothing to do with automation. They declined
because of unions, politics, corruption, and crime.
The unions were extorting businesses for far
above fair wages, which caused these businesses
to suffer in the face of competition. The
corruption and bad politics were resulting in
increasing levels of waste and poor spending
practices. The crime made it unsafe to live and
work there.
The result is that businesses left and didn't come
back (either moving to other places or
declining/going out of business), fewer new
businesses moved in, and people didn't feel safe
living there so people with choices didn't.
Other parts of the country - particularly the West
Coast, the Southeast, and Southwest - all boomed
while the Rust Belt decayed.
The problem with Flint and Detroit wasn't
automation. It was the people who lived there, and
the choices they made and continued to make for
decade after decade.
Flint's
Expand water supply crisis wasn't a coincidence, it
full comment
Reply
3 replies
TGGP Mar 9
Pseudoerasmus (citing Pomeranz) claims that China was actually more "efficient" in
terms of enclosing common land than Europe:
https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/11/10/history-manifesto-errors/
England is treated as the exception.
Reply
The-Serene-Hudson-Bay Mar 9
My amateur reading of economic history is that the culture war flashpoint potential of the
enclosures leads people to overstate its causal impact on the industrial revolution.
Gregory Clark has a good synthesis where he lays out how early economic historians
overestimate the returns to enclosure by not adjusting for general rent inflation and that
people who enclosed land typically made subsequent capital investments. He thinks
enclosure didn't have a big impact either on agricultural productivity or income
distribution. But you know, I'm an amateur, its a paper from 98, beware the person of one
study and all that.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2566254?read-now=1&seq=28#page_scan_tab_contents
Reply
DJ Mar 9
Deirdre McCloskey argues that it ultimately derives from the Church of England and the
Reformation, which prioritized an individual relationship to God over top-down
Catholicism.
Reply
Randomstringofcharacters Mar 9
Would need to explain the long gap between the reformation and the industrial
revolution. And why it didn't equally happen in mainland European countries that
were protestant longer
Reply
Thom Prentice Mar 9
Would need to explain the long gap between planting seedlings and a mature
forest ...
Reply
DJ Mar 9
Well, she *did* write three books explaining it so...
Reply
TGGP Mar 9
Greg Clark had an explanation, which McCloskey rejected in a review
which revealed ignorance of how regression to the mean works.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/deirdre-
mccloskey-on-farewell-to-alms/
Reply
Elias Håkansson Mar 9
Yea, enclosure style property reforms is also what Britain imposed on Palestinians when
Zionists settled in Israel. European Jews who were familiar with Western legal systems
navigated the system frictionlessly relative to Palestinians, causing more Palestinians to
be displaced and the rest is history. Comparing Israel with surrounding nations, Israel
clearly has higher GDP.
Reply
Douglas Knight Mar 9
Here is a difference between breaking up guilds and enclosures.
The first created opportunities in the cities and pulled in peasants, whereas the latter
pushed peasants away from the farms. It broke down safety nets and immiserated
peasants. It made individuals fragile, even if it made the country anti-fragile. We should
ask such questions about the Napoleonic reforms.
Reply
Thom Prentice Mar 9
What is peasant did *not* want to be “pulled in” to city “opportunities” ...?
Reply
Warren Mar 9
I recall that the basic model of enclosure & productivity went something like this:
1. Enclosure allowed landowners to receive a larger share of the gains from their lands.
2. Higher profit potential encouraged investment in capital, improving farm productivity
and making farming less labor-intensive.
3. Lower demand for agricultural labor pushed many former farm laborers into the cities,
where they became the industrial workforce.
In this model, higher agricultural productivity and capital acting as a substitute for labor
are both necessary for industrialization. You have to be able to produce enough food for
all those non-farmers, and you also need enough labor to man the factories.
Reply
ad Mar 9
Any given enclosure would generally be the work of a local landowner buying usage
rights from poorer people by forced sale. Not so much top-down as middle-out.
Reply
Ryan W. Mar 10
I've come to question whether the Enclosure laws were actually a leadup to the Industrial
Revolution except to the extent that they made self sufficiency more difficult, thus
forcing people into the factories at lower wages. (There are other places where people
leave the farms voluntarily for a better life in the city, but in England people were
pushed.) In any case, a lot of intensively farmed common lands were turned into less
productive pasture after the enclosure laws. It's hard to make a good argument that the
land thefts led to increased productivity.
Reply
John Schilling Mar 10
 The Industrial Revolution began in Britain at about the time that the British were doing
enclosure, but the Industrial Revolution spread to Britain's geographic and cultural
neighbors without regard to whether there was anything like enclosure going on in those
places. The Industrial Revolution took off in America at a time when America was giving
free farmland (and the good stuff at that) to anyone who could be bothered to develop it.
So the theory that the Industrial Revolution required a government in collusion with the
capitalists, throwing the people off their land so they'd have no choice but to work in the
Dark Satanic Mills(TM), seems to be based on one data point's worth of correlation with
no evidence of causation.
Even when given the choice, even when offered free land via homestead, lots of people
seem to have preferred working in factories to working in fields.
Reply
Doctor Hammer Writes Doc Hammer's Anvil · Mar 11
Just going to throw this out there: Economics has no real idea what caused the industrial
revolution. Dierdre McCloskey probably has the best argument in that it was cultural
norms, but there is no solid agreement on that or any of the other often conflicting
claims. At this point Aliens man probably has a decent following.
Reply
Jumpinjacksplash Mar 11
Britain was also generally the most centrally controlled large country in Europe prior to
Louis XIV, going back to William the Conqueror or at least the Tudors. It also abolished
feudalism in the 17th Century (and in land-tenure terms, enclosure is a big part of this). It
was less autocratic due to having a parliament, but a system where oligarchs all meet in
one room is probably closer to absolutism than one in which various regional magnates
all have separate power-bases.
You could just about argue that the French Revolution was a cultural-evolution style
"copy the neighbouring tribe that's doing better than us" process, where the
neighbouring tribe was Britain (centralised assembly decides everything, state control of
the Church, one-size-fits-all conception of rights, largely free market). That could be
why it was more successful than, say, the USSR.
Reply
Michael Druggan Writes Metarational · Mar 9
60% confidence napoleon ones do better, not much confidence I know
Reply
Michael Druggan Writes Metarational · Mar 9
At least I was on the right side
Reply
Alternates.docx Mar 9
I predicted the same. Was not bold enough to put it here though.
 Reply
Downzorz Mar 9
Advance prediction: 70% confident that the radically-reformed areas on average
outperformed the control group.
Reply
Thomas Ambrose Mar 9
My advance prediction was the same.
Though interestingly, I spend a decent amount of time thinking about how radical
reforms are dangerous, and did not actually realize I had the belief motivating this
prediction until I thought about it.
I suspect some extra information crept in--the Rhineland, The Low Countries, and Po
Valley have a reputation for being wealthy and urbanized.
Reply
Babilfrenzo Mar 9
Yeah, I ended up doing 75% on the side that radically-reformed areas outperform the
others.
I was partially basing this on stuff I had read a while back that formerly colonized
countries tended to perform better today (GDP/capita) in proportion to how long they
were colonized. I recognize that only some of that effect was about structures imposed
from the outside being better than whatever came before, but it was a hint of which
direction to guess in.
Reply
Jason? Mar 9
Same.
Reply
TB Mar 9
Same here. Part of that is remembering what I learnt from the Revolutions Podcast, and
how massively fragmented everything was, where taking a cart of goods to the next
town over might have you pay multiple tariffs. Separate, overlapping layers, where two
towns might be groups together in the same bishopric but be separated on the trade
level.
Stuff like that would all get cleared away, so I was on the side of the reforms.
Reply
JoshuaE Mar 12
Yeah, that and the Age of Napoleon podcast biased me to know that it was more
successful than not but I still was low confidence.
Reply
Ben Pace Writes LessWrong · Mar 9
Here’s my comment with my prediction before reading on: 70% that the places that re-rolled
on governance got better.
I have been told that in general some of the best things for economic growth are wars and
natural disasters. (Indeed, I expect/hope to see something similar coming out of Covid.) On
many levels, razing the current system and letting a new one grow allows it to get into a
better equilibrium.
That said, if you do a big enough level of destruction (e.g. x-risk) everything is just dead and
there’s nothing good left. You can destroy the FDA and expect a better thing to rise up, but I
think just destroying the United States doesn’t get you a better United States.
My prediction here is that most of the places that got taken over and re-done got better. I’m
70% that was the outcome. Main reason why I’m wrong is if they didn’t get to do the things
that the people wanted and instead that the French made them all do the same top-down
things that the French wanted (e.g. losing a democracy and getting a totalitarian leader).
(One other reason why I’m wrong is that it turns out Scott wrote a fun, narratively twisty post
where the answer is “Gotcha, assigning a probability here is fundamentally confused” and
they got better in some ways and worse on others and it all comes down to whatever
philosophical assumptions you bring to the table. And then I will feel a little silly.)
Alright, that’s my prediction. 70% that the places that re-rolled on government improved.
Reply
DavesNotHere Mar 9
How long after razing the old does the break even point come?
Reply
Matt A Mar 9
Check out Schumpeter. I think "re-rolled" is an excellent characterization and is similar
to why my (not-pre-registered) guess was firmly that the places that got reformed would
do better.
FWIW, I always interpreted the criticism from "Seeing Like a State" to be that individual
people got totally rolled, not that reforms, in the long run, weren't good for things like
GDP. After all, GDP is the kind of thing a state can measure, so it makes sense that if
nothing else, their reforms would do well on that even if it ruined a bunch of other things.
Reply
Sniffnoy Mar 9
80% on Napoleonic reform, but I think I'd heard something about this case before, so that
might be tainted.
Reply
kjz Mar 9
Prediction: 80% chance Napoleonic reforms improved things (I probably mostly am basing
this on positive associations with the metric system)
Reply
orthonormal Mar 9
If only the metric calendar had caught on.
Reply
KimmoKM Mar 9
My thoughts exactly.
Reply
Carl Pham Mar 9
You know, as someone who has used both Imperial and SI systems extensively, they
each have their places. SI is far superior when working with complex units, moving
between fields, communicating between nations, and as long almost all your
computation is being done with computers or at least calculators.
But if you're working in some narrow little field, and doing a lot of the math in your head,
SI is the pits, and Imperial really shines. So if I'm doing professional work, and trying to
compute the polarizability of the H2 molecule and communicate it to someone else, SI it
is. But if I'm at home trying to do a little light carpentry -- install crown moulding or
something -- then Imperial is far easier. The units are more closely spaced and human-
sized -- a foot isn't that much bigger than an inch, a pound isn't that much more than an
ounce, while the gap between the cm and m, or between the g and kg, is uncomfortably
large. It's hard to glance at a piece of lumber and immediately intuit whether the amount
you have left is closer to 60 or 80 cm.
And you can divide measurements in your head more easily in base 12 (which has as
natural divisors the very commonly desired 2, 3, and 4) than base 10 (which only has 2
and 5, and dividing by 5 isn't often useful). If I need to cut an 8 ft board into three
pieces, that's easy to do in my head (8 x 4 = 32 in), but the equivalent in SI (244 cm ÷ 3)
needs a calculator or piece of paper to be confident I got it right.
Of course I'm sure people who never work in anything else find it perfectly natural, so it
might be a QWERTY v. Dvorak thing.
Reply
Doctor Hammer Writes Doc Hammer's Anvil · Mar 11
I think XKCD's look at temperature scales sums it up nicely. Fahrenheit works really
well for temperatures people actual experience: 0 degrees is really cold, 100 is
really hot, but at least in temperate zones that covers most of what you get. 0 in C is
really cold, 100 is dead. Kelvin, dead and dead.
Reply
Carl Pham Mar 12
 Actually what struck me about Fahrenheit's scale, when you read the history, is
that it was much more practical for fieldwork (Fahrenheit was a working
meterologist in the Baltic). He originally defined 0F as the temperature of an
equilibrium mix of water, salt, and ice, a which being on the Baltic was readily
available most times of the year, and 96F as body temperature, which, again, is
pretty available. *Furthermore* when you do it that way, the freezing point of
pure water becomes 32, and there are 32 degrees between your bottom and
middle mark, and 64 between your middle and your top. What's magical about
those two numbers are they are both powers of 2, which means you can
construct all your divisions pretty accurately just be subdividing the interval
with something as simple as a string, or straight edge and compass. In an era
when precision measuring instruments were scarce and expensive, this is a big
plus.
By contrast Celsius's scale is much less practical: the boiling point of water
(100C) varies significantly with weather and altitude (as Fahrenheit knew
because he was a weather guy), much more so than the freezing point (the
temperature of an equilibrium mix of salt, ice, and water does not vary with
pressure at all), and 100 divisions are more difficult to do accurately without
precision instruments. So in the 1700s it would have been more practical for
any random scientist to make an accurate Fahrenheit thermometer than
Celsius thermometer, and I rather wonder if that's what accounted for its much
greater use in that era.
It's kind of like the fact that we have a base-60 system for time, which at first
glance seems odd, but if you have to do a lot of math with it in your head, it's
Reply
Kenny Mar 15
Dang – didn't know about the details of Fahrenheit's scale. Those are
some engineer affordances he built in!
(I think the metric system is fine – it's effectively arbitrary, but a standard,
so useful if for no other reason. But if we're jettisoning all of the
'ergonomics' of the old 'folk' units, why stick with the glaringly obvious 10
bias still there? Obviously, given the importance of computing, we should
switch to a base of 2! Or if we want to _emphasize_ the arbitrariness, we
could use an irrational base, like or .)
𝒆 𝝅

Reply
Tyrathalis Mar 9
Registered prediction:
60% chance the difference is surprisingly small to the point of irrelevancy, on general
principle that most interesting studies of politics-adjacent interventions don't turn up much.
In event there's a relevant distinction, 65% in favor of top-down innovation being better than
evolved wisdom. Mostly cause I suspect Europe around that time period leaned much more
towards parasitic entrenched methods than effective evolved ones.
Reply
Wilbur Hassenfus Mar 9
I predict the Napoleonized states probably did about the same.
But I’m always wrong.
Reply
Wilbur Hassenfus Mar 9
...as the non-Napoleonated states.
Reply
Wilbur Hassenfus Mar 9
But then you never answer the question!
All we know is they ended up more economically developed. That’s usually bad — it’s
ruining my city right now — but it’s not an unambiguous absolute evil. And it’s all we
learn.
My dad’s a retired economist. When I mentioned to him how badly Gen Z is screwed, he
told me that they had an incentive to be born earlier. Then he said, “but seriously, it’s
good for the economy.”
Reply
Azure Mar 9
70% confidence that radically reformed areas did better.
Reply
Azure Mar 9
Though 'great man' seems an unnecessary strawmanning. In our society there are a
bunch of pent-up reforms that would be the obvious outcomes if reforms to remove
entrenched minority control points (gerrymandering among them!) were pushed
through.
And England had piles of its own radical reforms and disruptions. Pre-revolutionary
France feels almost preactionary by contrast.
Reply
Nicholas Adams Mar 9
I noticed this, too. It feels like the presumption of a strongman reformer-king is just
smuggled in. Would this characterization apply to contemporary majoritarian
reforms like, for instance, filibuster abolition? It would be a dramatic and effectual
reform without requiring anything like an FDR/Huey Long/Lyndon Johnson/etc
figure.
Reply
Doctor Hammer Writes Doc Hammer's Anvil · Mar 11
Is filibuster reform majoritarian? I assume you mean removing the filibuster,
that is. The filibuster allows a minority to block voting on a bill, but can be
overridden by a sufficient number of votes. So with filibuster you need say 75%
to definitely vote on/pass a bill, without filibuster you need only 51% to pass a
bill. Is needing a smaller majority more majoritarian?
Reply
Nicholas Adams Mar 12
What? Yes, of course it is. The current cloture rules require a 3/5 vote, so
60 votes to end debate. This is empowers a minority to operate as a veto,
rather than a constructive partner in legislation. Super-majority
requirements, esp in a political environment where one faction does not
have a positive agenda, is a de facto tyranny of the minority.
Reply
Doctor Hammer Writes Doc Hammer's Anvil · Mar 12
You will note, however, that only requiring say 30% of votes for
something to pass would also allow for tyranny of the minority, no?
It is not enough to consider how many are needed for an action to
pass, but whether it is an action or prevention of an action. Needing a
smaller majority to pass a bill is not necessarily more majoritarian,
since needing a larger majority means that there has to be more
majority agreement. Or putting it another way, stopping tyranny is
largely a function of preventing a tyrant from doing what it wants to
everyone.
In other words, there is nothing magical about the 51% number.
There are times you want more, and times you want less. I would be
in favor of needing a super majority to pass legislation but a simple
minority to repeal, for example.
You also might consider whether you are incorrectly conflating "not
being able to make people do what we want" with being tyrannized.
Being prevented from forcing people to do X or Y is not the same as
forcing people to do X or Y.
Reply
Nicholas Adams Mar 12
Clearly 30% isn't a satisfactory executive percentage. 51% is
"magical" in this context because it represents the minimum
tranche of people to outnumber any other potential faction. It is
useful in that basically axiomatic way.
 Agreed re: states of exception, and thankfully, the founders of
the country contemplated those and enacted them. Re:
legislation, the filibuster was never an element of institutional
design, a simple majority was. Your favored legislature design, to
work, would require a fundamental restructuring of just about
every other aspect of our political system, given the incentives
built into our elections/factions.
To your final point, your point seems to reveal something of a
libertarian set of political priorities, to which I have to
unfortunately throw my hands up and declare that I prefer the
problems of action to the problems of stagnation. The mont
pelerine society be damned.
Reply
JonathanD Mar 9
Not just pre-revolutionary France, but the Holy Roman Empire, which was absolutely
creaky, especially in some of the tiny independent holdings.
Reply
nightpool Mar 9
better: 50-60% confidence
Reply
Moiis Mar 9
70% reform
Reply
Evelyn Mar 9
Fiiiiiine, I'll predict it from a position of ignorance. I have some vague memories of decimal
time being imposed by some French revolutionary government or other, which obviously did
not catch on. I have an even vaguer feeling that that was emblematic of all such programs,
but I don't know if that is a memory or a gut instinct. As such, my wild guess is a three-
quarters chance that the reformed polities did better than the others - simply because (no
probabilities attached to this part) they had the advantage of being welcomed within the
imperial trade network and protection, despite all of the terrible policies from on high they
now had to deal with.
Reply
Evelyn Mar 9
Well, looks like I was right for the wrong reasons. Such is life...annoyingly often.
Reply
Evelyn Mar 9
Oh, duh, Mx kjz is absolutely right that the metric system stuck around.
 Reply
Parrhesia Writes Parrhesia’s Newsletter · Mar 9
Change of institutions is not necessarily good or bad. What matters is what the revolution
changes society into and how that is done. Frequently, radical reforms involve trying to
impose grand political and social schemes on people which do not work because they are
coercive and unnatural. Less frequently, rapid institutional change is for the better. The
heuristic that rapidly sweeping away tradition and institutions for replacement is going to end
badly is a good one. However, there are counter examples which makes this heuristic not
perfect.
Reply
The original Mr. X Mar 9
Yes, exactly.
Basically, with a complex system such as a society, there are lots of ways things can go
wrong. On the other hand, if a societal practice has endured for a long time already,
that's generally an indication that it works at least tolerably well. Overturning a long-
standing practice is a high-risk, high-reward strategy -- you might get a more efficient
system producing higher economic growth, or you might get mass famine because it
turns out that farmers actually know more about farming than somebody whose main
expertise is in the writings of Karl Marx. So, unless you're very sure that your reforms will
have net-positive results (e.g., if the status quo is really so awful that almost any change
would be a change for the better, or if similar reforms have worked in similar situations
elsewhere), it's generally better to adopt a more cautious approach to minimise risk.
Reply
The-Serene-Hudson-Bay Mar 9
The heuristic that sweeping away traditions is bad needs to take into account the
continuity of the conditions under which these traditions evolved. This paper finds that
destroying feudal institutions on the eve of the industrial revolution was a positive in the
long run, so maybe the heuristic should be something about matching the rate of
institutional change to the rate of technological change?
Reply
beleester Mar 9
"Unnatural" is a really bad heuristic, because *anything* that deviates from the norm
gets called unnatural. Homosexuality gets called unnatural. In a monarchy, having a king
is natural and peasants who want to not be repressed are deviating from the natural
order.
The "coercive" part at least points to a specific error - revolutions seem to have a
common failure mode of "instead of helping people we ended up shooting them as
counter-revolutionaries" - but "unnatural" is the most abusable heuristic in the world,
and I'd pick pretty much anything else. "Untested," maybe?
Reply
 Parrhesia Writes Parrhesia’s Newsletter · Mar 9
That's a fair critique. I was thinking about how sometimes radical reformers try to
change human nature. For example, a Kibbutz that raises peoples' children for them
is undervaluing how much people want to spend time with their family. I do not
mean to say that unnatural means bad but only that unnatural social arrangements
might cause dysfunction. However, you are right that it is used for anything. Hitting
one's children could be seen as natural or cheating on one's spouse. It is too broad.
I think maybe I could just leave it at coercive. Untested wouldn't work well because
untested things could be good depending on what they are. I use coercive because
I am a libertarian and I believe that coercion causes the issues. Modeling the
economy is going to make things worse.
I should have put it like this: There is an ideal political arrangement and moving
toward it is good and moving away is bad. Sometimes moving itself causes
unexpected issues.
Reply
Thom Prentice Mar 9
Change of institutions is not necessarily good or bad. What matters is what the
revolution changes *conditions for ordinary people* and how that is done
Reply
jdnym Mar 9
Kind of like the tension between a competition/antifragility dynamic vs. slack/coordination. It's
tough to find a meta-rule to distinguish when to use which approach. Like, do we lean into
federalism to defuse political tension, letting states compete and experiment; or do we
abolish the filibuster and experiment nationally because of externalities and races-to-the-
bottom?
Reply
aoeuhtns Mar 9
Yeah! "At what level do you want antifragility?" is I think a tough question. I definitely
want my cells to take damage when it makes my body stronger. Do I want individual
people taking more risks to make communities stronger? States/cities taking damage to
make their nation stronger? Nations sacrificing to make the world stronger? Antifragility
says that the system is stronger when it's components are allowed to fail and be
replaced. But that can suck for those components, and I'm not sure which system/level
we want to prioritize.
Reply
Doug S. Mar 9
Well, I guess Napoleon was pretty good at reforming. As was pointed out, though,
Communists tended to suck at it. Was the British Empire any good at it?
It seems like lots of revolutions end up being taken over by the most radical and ruthless,
because radicals are more willing to start shooting other revolutionaries once the original
government is overthrown - see Stalin, Robespierre, Khomeini, Mao, etc.
Reply
Crimson Wool Mar 9
The ruthless are, sure, but was Stalin more radical than Trotsky? He aligned himself with
Bukharin against Zinoviev, and at the time Bukharin represented the right wing of the
Bolsheviks. Was Khomeini more radical than Tudeh? Was the Directory more radical than
Robespierre?
Being good at taking and holding power means... you are good at taking and holding
power. You might be a hardcore radical, you might be a calm, stoic moderate. If anything
I'd expect the moderates to tend to be better at taking and holding power, since "don't
change anything" is the classic way to co-opt preexisting power structures. (But only
just - history has plenty of revolutionaries doing the cold calculus necessary to take and
hold power, after all.)
Reply
DavesNotHere Mar 9
Hong Kong is one nice datapoint/cherry-pick in favor of British rule. But most of the rest
of the former empire went fir squishy social democracy. But so did Britain. Was
Cowperthwaite a genius or just lucky? What if Lord Keynes had been given that job
instead?
Reply
dorsophilia Mar 9
I am not convinced Hong Kong would have scaled up to all of China. India and China
would be a more fair comparison.
Reply
Big Worker Writes Big Worker’s Newsletter · Mar 9
That comparison makes Britain look very very bad
Reply
dionysus Mar 9
Not really. India had a bloody mutual genocide that killed a million people
after partition, but the Chinese Civil War killed several million. India
became a democracy that, despite ruling one of the most ethnically and
culturally diverse places on the planet, stayed intact and stable. China was
taken over by communists who killed tens of millions by famine in the
Great Leap Forward, destroyed the country's heritage in the Cultural
Revolution, and sent opponents to labor camps. It's only well after Deng
Xiaoping's opening up reforms in 1978 that China's quality of life started
to exceed India's, but if China wants credit for that, it has to take
responsibility for the decades of horror the communists inflicted. But in
recent years China's growth is slowing, and India's is picking up. Also,
even though India's democracy is backsliding, China is becoming even
more dictatorial with its concentration camps holding 1 million Uyghurs,
Xi's abolition of the 10 year presidential term limit, a renewed focus on
ideology, more censorship and more suppression of dissent.
Reply
Big Worker Writes Big Worker’s Newsletter · Mar 9
The whole article was premised on GDP comparison so that's the
metric I was thinking of - after being in pretty similar deindustrialized
states starting in the late 40s and going through everything you
described China has ended up with 4 times the GDP per capita India
has.
Looking at these life expectancy stats I think we have good reason to
think China's pulling ahead of India started at least as early as the
early 60s: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?
locations=IN-CN
Really the two countries look like this "radical reform vs evolved
institutions" debate writ large - China is lot more capable of radical
reform, meaning they got a lot more of both the good and bad
consequences. Famines and cultural chaos from trying to reform
agriculture and... regular culture culture, but they kept tinkering and
ultimately managed to engineer the greatest economic boom in world
history.
Reply
Matt A Mar 9
"One Child" can do wonders for your per-capita GDP, at least
over some time horizon.
Reply
dionysus Mar 9
I'm very skeptical of any statistics coming out of China,
especially from the Mao years. Also, comparing GDP per capita
alone is far more reasonable when the countries you're
comparing are all European liberal democracies, far less
reasonable when comparing China to India. But even taking GDP
per capita statistics at face value:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GDP_per_capita_of_Chi
na_and_India.svg
...India was ahead of China until 1978.
I disagree that the Chinese "ultimately managed to engineer the
greatest economic boom in world history". That may be true on
an absolute level, but not per capita. South Korea, Taiwan,
Singapore, and Hong Kong (all former colonies, by the way)
started from the same low level but transformed themselves into
developed countries/territories in a single generation, something
China has yet to do despite having decades longer to do it. I'd
say the economic boom of the UK during the Industrial
Revolution was also more impressive because they were pushing
the frontiers of science and technology, not just playing catch-
up.
Reply
Big Worker Writes Big Worker’s Newsletter · Mar 9
Looks like they are essentially tied GDP per capita-wise
until 1980 or so, at which point China starts to pull way
ahead. Meanwhile as you can see from my previous link
China's pulling ahead started a bit earlier when measured in
life expectancy rather than GDP. What that says to me is
that China consistently had a stronger centralized state
with more capacity implement major societal reforms than
India, which it first used to do things like reform (/create
almost from scratch) its public health system, and later to
implement economic reforms that resulted in its rapid GDP
per-capita growth.
Not sure what to make of your quibbling about my "greatest
economic boom in history" language - China's growth for
the past few decades has been literally the largest
economic boom in history, which clearly you see is what I
was referring to.
Reply
dionysus Mar 9
When judging the effectiveness of a country's
economic policy, the relevant metric is how much the
GDP per capita changes, not how much the GDP
changes. If China's GDP grows by 0.1%, its GDP goes
up much more than if the Vatican City grew by 100%.
That doesn't mean China has wiser economic policy
than the Vatican, just that it has many more people. In
GDP per capita terms, China's growth is far less than
that of South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Singapore.
Reply
 DavesNotHere Mar 9
Just because they are successful authoritarians doesn’t mean
they are brilliant top-down reformers. A book was published in
the nineties making the case that Deng's reforms consisted
mostly of not sending successful rule-breakers to the laogai.
While the CCP focused on a succession struggle after Mao's
death, farmers in some areas of the countryside began
“innovating” the collective farming system, allowing people to
cultivate some private plots. By the time Deng had decisively
defeated the Gang of Four for dominance, baochan daohu was
sort of a forest fire. Deng's great virtue was the wisdom to allow
this development rather than try to rev the cultural revolution
back up and imprison enough people to get collective farming
back within ideological boundaries. The author documents the
attitudes to the top leadership using official party documents,
which always toe the old line and reluctantly allow some
exceptions while scolding the crazy farmers.
How the Farmers Changed China, by Kate Xiao Zhou.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Farmers-Changed-China-
Transitions/dp/0813326826
Reply
Thom Prentice Mar 9
America is becoming even more dictatorial with its prisons holding
holding 2.3 million mostly Black, Latino and Native Americans, a
fragile and failing “democracy” in which the winner of the popular
vote has two times in this century not taken office as president in
addition to both Hillary and Trump claiming fraud, interference,
demanding recount Tx and that the rlection was ‘stolen’ from them, a
renewed focus on ideology on Netflix, in Hollywood and in the
corporate Wall Street Capitalist press which first launched and then
denounced Trump, more censorship especially with a new threatened
domestic patriot act and more suppression of dissent especially of
contrarian and Left Wing writers/sites like Glenn Greenwald ...
Look in the mirror, shall we ?
Reply
dionysus Mar 9
Sorry, but I'm not American.
Reply
Thom Prentice Mar 9
 Indeed. Try more objectivity then rather than knee jerk
denunciations, eh?
Reply
dorsophilia Mar 9
If you could choose a country to be born into tomorrow, would it be
India or China? Depends on if you are more into statistics on literacy
rate, infant mortality, life expectancy, infrastructure,
transportation...or you care about expressing your views or religion
somewhat more freely.
Reply
dionysus Mar 9
If I could choose a country to be born into tomorrow, I'd choose
China. If I could choose a country to be born into in 1960, I'd
choose India.
Reply
Thom Prentice Mar 9
Interesting. Not France?
Reply
Thom Prentice Mar 9
I’m not “into” statistics. I am “into” people.
Where are the lives of ordinary people best lived based on
access to the the resources needed for living life ... including
self-actualization?
Reply
dorsophilia Mar 10
I've noticed that when people are struggling with poverty,
health, access to clean water and shelter they tend to move
self actualization way down the priority list. It is also very
Euro centric to look at a country like China and assume that
most people feel oppressed, and would trade their material
wealth for more "self actualization."
Reply
NPC#1821633 Writes The Aristocrat's Letters · Mar 10
As an Indian, freedom of religion and expressing views openly is
not a thing in India. India has an extremely extensive hate
speech laws that can send you to jail for offending any other
religion on Facebook. In a way, this is needed because we are
always one word away from a deadly riot but in no way would I
 call this freedom of religion. For example, in the current
government muslims can't broadcast namaz early in the morning
since this tends to irritate Hindus and may lead to riots down the
line. In the previous government, Hindus couldnt celebrate
festivals like Ganesh Chaturthi (which requires a large
procession) because generally Muslims uses to get angry and it
led to large scale riots. Each government clearly supports one
religion and opposes the other (the hindutva party supports
Hinduism, the Congress supports Islam). Expressing views also,
you can express views as long as it doesn't instigate a riot which
is a very broad category, and as people have learnt gives the
government an easy time in arresting their opposition.
Reply
Jumpinjacksplash Mar 11
I mean, Britain (or at least, the people who ran the East India Company)
did pretty well out of it. It's not clear that "make India rich" was really what
they were going for.
Reply
DavesNotHere Mar 9
Which reforms/methods scale and which don’t?
Reply
a real dog Mar 9
Was Khomeini ruthless and willing to shoot people? He had to be basically begged to
return to the country and rule it, and I can imagine him disgusted at the way it all turned
out.
His supporters, on the other hand...
Reply
Destouches Mar 9
In colonial India there were areas under direct British rule and areas under indirect rule
with little direct British involvement (“native states”). The areas with indirect rule did
better economically and have better outcomes in health and education today.
Tyler Cowen wrote a column about this:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-04-11/legacy-of-british-rule-is-still-
holding-india-back
Reply
Ghillie Dhu Mar 9
Plausible confounder: was the decision by the British whether to directly or
indirectly rule driven by the competence & functionality of the existing authorities?
Reply
 InfiniteRand Mar 10
The British certainly made the claim in some cases that they were stepping in
due to the incompetence of the local rulers. And I think there is a grain of truth
here in that where a ruler had a well-established succession pattern and a firm
control over his kingdom, British preferred to make allies to making enemies (a
side-note here, while the princes often complained about the restrictions
Britain made on them during the independence movement, for the top-tier
princes British backing was often a pretty sweet deal. The Nizam of Hyderabad
for instance was one of the wealthiest people in the world).
But comparing princely states to direct British rule is a bit complex because
there was a range of influence through the British resident in the princely
states. In some cases the resident effectively ran things, but in others the
prince had the primary authority.
Reply
John Mar 9
The general rule for British colonies is that the quality of governance was inversely
proportional to how valuable the colony was.
Reply
Thom Prentice Mar 9
Brutal, genocidal, extractive, addicting conquest is, then, “a good thing” to quote
Martha Stewart ... ?
Reply
Kenny Easwaran Mar 9
Was Napoleon really good at reforming? He turned the Republic into an Empire, but
created Republican institutions in many other countries, while also installing monarchs in
many of them. He went back and forth on anti-clericalism and Catholicism. How much of
the good is attributable to Napoleon, and how much to the bureaucrats of the
Revolution? Perhaps his populism tempered some of the excesses of the Revolution, but
it's not obvious how much of the good came from him.
Reply
Eöl Mar 9
Taking the plunge here: I'm predicting that the states that had only their institutions (with a
side of land reform) overhauled involuntarily by the French did better than the ones that
didn't. The ones that felt a heavier revolutionary French hand, for whatever reason, I'm
predicting did less well, but probably still (at least) about as well as those that retained all
their indigenous features status quo ante. I doubt any of the unaffected states did better by a
considerable margin than any affected state.
I'm cheating a bit because I studied this partly in undergrad, and I know that even the states
that were defeated by but managed to retain the vast majority of their independence of the
French (Prussia, Austria) adopted many reforms that the French had implemented in the
Confederation of the Rhine, and certainly didn't roll them back in the lands they annexed or
re-annexed after the final victory of the "counter"-revolution. I know also that the economic
reforms, in particular, laid the groundwork for Germany's later economic boom in the second
half of the 19th century.
Reply
Eliezer Yudkowsky Mar 9
My predictions: 40% effects not very large, 35% conquered better, 25% conquered worse.
This includes savviness about which result Scott would write about, alas.
Reply
jakebd42 Mar 9
Prediction about what Scott would write about is why I didn't predict; what I thought he'd
highlight went contrary to my gut, and so I knew I'd be especially mad at myself if I was
wrong.
Reply
FeepingCreature Mar 9
This is late, I've already read the article, but my prediction was "good, because I've never
heard of Napoleon having skill failures in his command staff like Lysenko." I think picking
competence is self-reinforcing, and I'd guessed that Napoleon would be an "A-lister hiring A-
listers", as the saying goes.
Reply
Watchman Mar 9
You might want to check out how much less than A-list many of Napoleon's choices for
kings of his new territories were. Coincidentally a lot of them were his family members.
They were however probably better than many of the rulers they supplanted.
Reply
FeepingCreature Mar 9
So it's just regression to the mean?
Reply
Watchman Mar 9
I'd say rather they were less autocratic even if less competent. You can't really
regress to the mean after a proper revolution.
Reply
Chevalier Mal Fet Mar 9
Louis didn't do -terribly- in Holland, and Joseph was put in an impossible situation.
Murat was of course a terrible choice, but it's not like Napoleon's enemies did
better picking Marshals - Bernadotte hardly did a bang-up job in Sweden, after all.
 Reply
Daniel W Mar 9
Mostly ignorant prediction: conquered areas with culture closer to France’s did about the
same while more culturally independent areas were worse off. 65% confidence
Reply
Richard T. Mar 9
Another country that avoided getting conquered by Napoleon was Russia. Didn't do so well
over the ensuing 105 years.
But then, Russia is huge, which can make up for subpar institutions. The UK is not, so it
needed good institutions to survive the war, and it had them. (Being an island was useful too.)
Disclosure: I am from the UK, which is probably why I predicted that conquered states would
do less well.
Reply
Robert Levine Mar 9
Russia was not really "conquered" by Napoleon in the same way that, say, the Rhineland
was. He managed to invade it, but had to beat a very hasty (and incredibly bloody)
retreat before he could impose any reforms.
Reply
neuro morph Mar 9
Preregistering prediction: I think the reformed areas do worse for a while afterward, but then
end up doing better in the longer term (like 10 years after).
Reply
Chebky Mar 9
Registering prediction in advance: Radically reformed patients (sorry, I see everything in
terms of clinical trials now) performed slightly better in the short term (because backed by an
empire), slightly worse in the medium term while dealing with unforeseen patient-specific
consequences, and equally to slightly better in the long term.
Reply
Wand Thief Mar 9
Maybe this is because my politics are less libertarian than Scott's, but I struggle to
understand the appeal of trying to classify "reforms" generally, or even "reforms imposed
from outside," as good or bad. It seems like trying to classify "life events" as good or bad; it
just depends on the individual thing, and they are so different that trying to cast judgment on
them as a category doesn't reveal anything.
Reply
Parrhesia Writes Parrhesia’s Newsletter · Mar 9
I am largely in agreement with this. I believe Scott is trying to highlight an instance of a
deviation from tradition. Usually this is bad because the changes are more authoritarian
and disrupt people's way of life through coercion. But in some cases they fix
inefficiencies or problems. In those cases, it is preferable to have reform. Seems like this
heuristic is good usually but not in all cases. I think it's mostly that simple.
Reply
DavesNotHere Mar 9
Cancer is bad.
Reply
Adam Mar 9
Getting cancer is bad. Having it go into remission is good. Both are major life-
changing events.
Reply
Wouter Mar 9
Interestingly though it’s a known result that ‘huge life events dont end up changing your
happiness level very much’ regardless of the direction they were in. So there’s -
something - to say sometimes even with only ‘magnitude’ as a variable.
Reply
pozorvlak Mar 9
Turns out this is not true - see under "Hedonic adaptation and happiness" at
https://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/.
Reply
The-Serene-Hudson-Bay Mar 9
I think if you are a non-expert who can't judge the value of a particular reform its helpful
to have a prior about the relative value of evolved vs. designed systems. If your default
assumption is "often there are good but counterintuitive reasons for the status quo" it
raises the standard of evidence required to support a reform.
Reply
DavesNotHere Mar 10
Is it the system itself that is evolved, or the solutions? Common law is considered
evolutionary, but its skeleton consists of some fairly static principles. We’re those
deduced a priori, or discovered empirically? Does it matter, so long as the result
allows people to adapt to new circumstances?
Reply
Kenny Easwaran Mar 9
It might be better if you classify life events as "rationally chosen" (like marriage, moving,
taking a new job) vs "randomly imposed" (like being fired, disease, death of a family
member). The former class is the sort that are intended to be good, but we might
wonder whether they are actually good. Social reforms tend to be rationally chosen, and
 the question at hand is whether reformers are good at choosing reforms, or whether
they are neutral, or whether they are as bad as randomly imposed changes.
Reply
Erusian Mar 9
This reminds me of a lesson I got out of studying Japan. For those who don't know, prior to
the Meiji Restoration Japan was divided into about 300 mini-states. Unlike European feudal
duchies, they really were statelets: centralized organized territories with salaried
bureaucracies. This system kind of knew it was ending after the Opium War destroyed the
local geopolitical order. And it really knew it was going to end after 1853. But the actual war
didn't erupt until 1869. What happened in those intervening years? Well, each of these
statelets tried to strengthen itself in the face of these changes.
Some embraced radical westernization, adopting European style institutions and even
sending secret expeditions to study or cooperating with Europeans to smuggle in trade and
books. Others instead reformed along traditionalist lines, seeking to strengthen traditional
institutions and reform the state into earlier, superior forms. A few others took other paths. I
was fascinated by two that took opposite paths: one state emulated Great Britain and another
emulated Tang China. Both, of course, adapted it to their local conditions. Which fared
better?
They both hugely outperformed expectations. A westernized army and economy apparently
was about even with a modernized version of the Tang militia and economic system. The
states that did poorly were the ones that failed to reform. All the states that reformed in any
direction did pretty well, often in proportion to how much they could reform those institutions.
This made me consider that the capacity to reform and make a program work might be more
important than the actual contents of the program. And I often think this is an
underappreciated factor of analysis. Libertarianism is always the correct response to an
ineffective or incompetent government. If the government's an idiot, it's best the government
do as little as possible. It's only when the government is competent that we can debate
whether private or public options are better. For example, with healthcare, there are two
questions. Firstly, all the policy we actually talk about. Secondly, is the US government
actually capable of getting it done? Think of the healthcare.gov website. That was just a
straight capacity failure. No one was sitting there debating the advantages or disadvantages
of having a functioning website. The government just couldn't get it done. And I think we
don't talk about that kind of thing enough.
Reply
Antioch Writes Antioch · Mar 9
Enjoyed your comment and just want to nitpick your last conclusion. My view of the basic
responsibilities of a state to its citizens isn’t mostly grounded in competence. (Ironically,
that logic also underpins far left beliefs like “we should abolish the police entirely
because the state can’t be trusted with their administration.”)
Even cases where the free market provides clear alternatives for some people (Kim
Kardashian’s private wildfire-fighter squad comes to mind) don’t absolve the state’s
obligations - it’s OK if the state does a crummier job then the best competitor as long as
it provides some sort of baseline. We can disagree on where that line of obligation is in
the first place, but I don’t think libertarianism is always the correct response to
government incompetence, because sometimes, I want the government to be less
incompetent, instead of alternatives gated to those who can afford them.
Reply
DavesNotHere Mar 9
Everyone wants the government to be less corrupt, in which case it would be good
for it to also exhibit competence. Extreme libertarians have given up on finding a
systematic solution to preventing government corruption, in favor of trying to solve
a similar problem of preventing competing governments from colluding. The
moderate ones hope to solve the problem by reducing government responsibilities
and rearranging them so that each relatively independent part has separate
oversight. I guess that means that progressives and conservatives must be some
sort of indifferent libertarians, as the only alternative seems to be the obvious straw
man of “democratic governments are never corrupt.”
Reply
Garrett Mar 9
It's entirely possible that the costs imposed to ensure there's no corruption
exceed those from the eliminated corruption. It's also possible that the anti-
corruption measures reduce the ability to be effective as well.
Reply
DavesNotHere Mar 10
Maybe it’s even worse. There is no person choosing on a margin who can
assure that benefits exceed costs, and the choices aren’t necessarily the
sort where if you spend a bit more you get a bit more. The only thing that
is clear is that the existing constitutional arrangement fails to constrain
the agents to please their principals. I suppose it is possible to hope that
reducing constraints will actually increase compliance, but I would find
that surprising. OTOH, politics is full of surprises. I would prefer that the
experiment be performed ethically with participation strictly voluntary
(and so excluding me).
Reply
Erusian Mar 9
You're smuggling the assumption an incompetent government can provide a
baseline version. There's a legitimate debate to be had between the free market
provisioning something unevenly but of superior quality vs the government
provisioning something more evenly but of poorer quality. But the state doesn't
 necessarily need to rise to that level of competence. The state could simply fail to
provide public goods in which case its attempts to do so are likely to be worse than
doing nothing at all. The police, as you say, are a good example. Police that fail to
provide public order can still fine and arrest people arbitrarily without doing
anything to help crime, in which case abolishing the police might be the right
response. I don't think it's where we are today in the US but it's a possible scenario.
My point is not that every government failure should lead to taking responsibility
away from the government. My point is a government that repeatedly fails and
makes things worse will create a libertarian response. And that's probably correct.
See how rural areas went from being bullish on big government and bastions of
progressivism to being libertarian basically for these reasons.
Reply
Aapje Mar 9
I've read once that the same is true for making changes to software development
processes. Basically, any change tends to improve things in the short term.
A major reason might be that systems work best if they are adaptive on a smaller scale,
where people don't blindly follow the rules, but instead use common sense, but that
inflexible bureaucrats that abhor common sense tend to accumulate power over time. If
you make reforms, the inflexible bureaucrats get pushed aside in favor of more flexible
people.
However, a better solution may then be to target the actual problem and figure out a way
to prevent the inflexible bureaucrats from gaining that power or to root them out, without
needing senseless reforms.
Reply
Garrett Mar 9
There are 2 major issues that need to be addressed by software development
processes: work distribution, and communication.
If you have a single developer working on a project for themselves, the process
used doesn't matter - the developer (hopefully) knows all of the ins-and-outs of the
project, and can adjust goals, design, etc., to fit their own needs.
Once you start having to distribute work, you start needing to be able to
communicate how things work, the architecture, and the vision for the product. This
requires process, if for no reason than to ensure sufficient documentation is
produced. Likewise to ensure that the code produced fulfills the design goals.
You also need to communicate how things are going. This is a legibility requirement
for various forms of management. People involved need to be able to synchronize
and prioritize the work which they are doing. Process exists to allow that
communication to occur.
 You absolutely can get short-term gains by getting rid of the locally-inefficient
process. But the costs are in long-term failures and systemic inefficiencies.
Reply
Erusian Mar 9
I do think "shaking things up" sometimes leads to good results regardless. But I'd
say that the content of the reforms does matter ultimately. However, if you're nimble
and adaptable then a bad reform becomes just a thing you tried rather than an
ossified rule that handicaps you forever. Whereas if you're so sluggish it's going to
be permanent or semi-permanent then you need to move with care. Not because
that's generally wise but because you're effectively the head of a diseased body.
Reply
None of the Above Mar 9
I think the evolved institutions are a kind of hill-climbing, and the top-down-
imposed institutions allow you to get off a local maximum, but they don't
guarantee that you'll end up better off in the end. When the radical change
imposed from above is the metric system and the Napoleonic code, things
work out a lot better than when the radical change imposed from above is
murdering all the educated people and declaring that uneducated peasants will
now be the doctors and engineers.
The good news about conqueror-imposed top-down changes is that they're
usually well-tested aspects of the conqueror's society; the bad news is that
you don't really know whether they'll translplant well to the new society they're
being imposed on until you run the experiment.
Reply
Erusian Mar 9
I did notice the examples were, one, Revolutionary France and, two, the
20th Century United States. It seems to completely ignore, for example,
colonialism, which certainly swept away local institutions and replaced
them with radically different ones. Not ones meant to benefit the locals
but if that's a limit, it's one they leave unstated. (And not one that
Napoleon could necessarily claim either.) Just because a specific change
is good doesn't mean all changes are good.
Reply
Alien H Mar 10
I think that the data shows that all systems become more Beurocratic and inflexible
as time passes. At least, I don't know of any counter examples.
Reply
Banananon Mar 9
> This made me consider that the capacity to reform and make a program work might be
more important than the actual contents of the program.
On a similar theme, the ability to stick to a diet has more predictive power for weight loss
than which type of diet one sticks to. I don't know if this is actually true rather than just a
truism, but the parallelism seemed strong to me.
Reply
Erusian Mar 9
I think this is a subspecies of execution is more important than ideas.
Reply
Cole Writes For All Souls · Mar 9
This reminds me of a Maxim of Descartes' found in the Discourse on the Method:
"My second maxim was to be as firm and decisive in my actions as I could, and to follow
even the most doubtful opinions, once I had adopted them, as constantly as if they had
been quite certain.
In this I would be imitating travellers who find themselves lost in a forest: rather than
wandering about in all directions or (even worse) staying in one place, they should keep
walking as straight as they can in one direction, not turning aside for slight reasons, even
if their choice of direction was a matter of mere chance in the first place; for even if this
doesn’t bring them to where they want to go it will at least bring them to somewhere that
is probably better for them than the middle of a forest.
Similarly, since in everyday life we often have to act without delay, it is a most certain
truth that when we can’t pick out the truest opinions we should follow the most probable
ones. And when no opinions appear more probable than any others, we should
nevertheless adopt some; and then we should regard those as being—from a practical
point of view—not doubtful but most true and certain, because the reason that made us
pick on them is itself true and certain.
This maxim could free me from all the regrets and remorse that usually trouble the
consciences of those weak and stumbling characters who set out on some supposedly
good course of action and then later, in their inconstancy, judge it to be bad."
To me, it seems like the states who either went neither radically traditional or radically
progressive in the face of changing times are like Descartes' "weak and stumbling
characters." Maybe your political point here works on the individual level as well.
Reply
John Slow Mar 9
I really enjoyed this comment!
Reply
Erusian Mar 9
 I think so. I'd add you need a goal or direction. But once you have that, even making
wrong moves confidently will get you there faster than planning it to death.
Reply
Randomstringofcharacters Mar 9
Healthcare.gov is always treated as this big symbolic thing. But ultimately what
happened was there were some bad news cycles when it was initially put in place as it
had teething problems, but since then the system has mostly worked and delivered a lot
of good outcomes
Reply
Erusian Mar 9
Honestly, I picked it not because I think healthcare.gov is uniquely bad or that the
AMA is indefensible. I picked it because it was simple and obvious and
uncontroversial. No one was stumping for a non-working website and there was no
vested interest in making the website not work (or at least none among people that
had input). The government just set a goal for itself and failed. It was an
organizational rather than ideological or political failure. Better management,
regardless of politics, could have overcome it.
Reply
Matt A Mar 9
But isn't it also, like, fine now? So it wasn't that the government didn't have the
capacity to build that thing, they just got it wrong the first time, and now it's
fine. Which, IDK, isn't uncommon for websites in general? And isn't that also
true about reforms? You don't always get it right the first time, but you can
keep iterating until you do? This doesn't seem to me like an argument against
attempting reform.
Reply
Erusian Mar 9
It became fine not because the government redoubled its efforts but
because they completely overhauled how they treated technology. In
short, they built capacity independently of the problem. Which is my
point: the ability of the government to do things well is important to
success regardless of the object level reform.
Reply
Mike H Mar 10
I'd say total collapse like that is very rare. In particular it never happens
with tech companies anymore. Healthcare.gov was an exception for
another reason: the way they rescued it was by bringing in some very
skilled but liberal Googlers who basically gave the government the sorry
of expertise it could not buy, simply due to the ultra high profile nature of
the failure and threat it posed to socialised healthcare in the USA.
 Reply
Vampyricon Writes Vampyricon’s Newsletter · Mar 9
I wonder how much work the "modernized" in "modernized Tang economy and military"
is doing.
Reply
Erusian Mar 9
Less than you'd think. It was mostly updates for modern technology or local
conditions. For example, they used a similar system to raise military forces but
organized them along 19th century warfare lines. It helped that the Tang were a
highly commercialized, industrial, and trading dynasty. So you had things like
industrial policy or trade law in there. There was even educational systems and the
like, to which the modernizing Japanese added subjects like science.
In fact, in some ways the Tang copy was just plain better. The Tang had, in their
three centuries, developed concepts about workers and peasants having rights.
They also had concepts of private and public manufacturing and procurements. So
the Tang copiers tended to focus on government supported industrialization and
commercialization. Meanwhile, the Europeanizers in the south copied sugar
plantations as a way to raise revenue, in some cases directly copying old slave
codes and applying them to peasants or criminals they worked to death in the
fields. They also just expropriated merchants or peasants to cram their reforms
through. As a result some of the reactionaries, counterintuitively, became more
industrialized.
Reply
Drethelin Mar 9
My prediction is they are probably about the same but will have some statistical differences
that are noticeable but not overwhelming.
Reply
Drethelin Mar 9
Huh, stronger difference than anticipated.
This further reinforces my point of view that where history really went wrong is not with
WW1 or Hitler but when Napoleon lost at Waterloo.
Reply
Whimsi Writes Whimsi · Mar 9
Andrew Robert's Napoleon biography pushed me further in this direction. But in a
world where Napoleon wins, I think WWI and WWII are replaced by a Soviet style
collapse of empire at the beginning of the 20th century.
Reply
Drethelin Mar 9
 Obviously it's hard to say but I would expect a collapse of a French Empire
after Napoleon had actually managed to rule for years or decades more in
relative peace and set-up and train heirs and systems would probably
resemble the collapse of the British empire more than the collapse of the
USSR.
Reply
TGGP Mar 9
The British empire was overseas. The colonies thus had less direct impact
on the home country. Some of this is related to "the gravity equation", but
it's also related to states wanting geographic buffers next to them (Britain,
as an island, has less need of this).
Reply
Jacob Manaker Mar 9
You mean like that time (http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/scholes_11_07/)
Hitler saved the Jews by sparking The War for Democratic Change?
(For all of you worried about my memories of Yad Vashem, the link is to an
alternate-history short story. It's a little heavy-handed at moments, but still
enjoyable.)
Reply
Chevalier Mal Fet Mar 9
I LOVED Robert's Napoleon biography. I'd always had a British-centric view of
the Tyrant of Europe before, but I came out much more sympathetic to
Bonaparte afterwards.
Reply
MM Mar 9
I love me some Napoleon, but he had no competent heirs.
So the empire would likely have run into the same problems as most empires (or
even most nouveaux riche), that of the second and third generation.
Reply
Randomstringofcharacters Mar 9
The only way would have been for him to put in place some kind of formalised
system to select successors that had popular legitimacy. Like how many
developing countries start with a "father of the nation" "president for life" who
sets up institutions for elected successors.
Reply
Chevalier Mal Fet Mar 9
I'm trying to think of how a Principate-style succession system would have
worked for the Napoleonic empire, but I'm struggling to come up with
 even worth non-dynastic heirs. The most competent Frenchmen I can
think of are either just skilled in the martial arena (Davout was a brilliant
general but would he have been a competent emperor?) or politically
totally impossible (Talleyrand).
I guess it's the same problem Augustus ran into - there's only one
Augustus, only one Napoleon.
Reply
Crimson Wool Mar 9
His loss at Waterloo is way too late. You're thinking of his invasion of Russia.
Reply
Chevalier Mal Fet Mar 9
Russia is way too late.
You're thinking of his invasion of Spain.
Reply
Bob Fett Mar 10
Sometimes I do wonder how much better off the world might have been if
somebody had just shot Napoleon in the head in 1806. He was doing so
much right up until then, for as much of a bastard as he was.
Reply
Devon Stork Writes Sequence Structure Function · Mar 9
70% that radical reforms did better.
Reply
gph Mar 9
I wonder how much of the positive changes came from the specific technocratic/policy
reforms the French enacted vs. just destroying the existing systems and letting new systems
blossom. Considering this all happened right around the start of the industrial revolution, it
was probably a good time for radical change no matter the political or ideological reforms that
were enacted.
To put it more bluntly it seems destruction forces progress, which will often lead to better
outcomes, but I doubt many people would want to have their entire communities and
livelihoods destroyed just because it'll improve economic conditions in the area fifty years
later.
Reply
Mr. Doolittle Mar 9
I suspect that the breaking up of existing systems was the bigger contributor, and as you
say especially with the timing around the Industrial Revolution.
Central Europe had become very ossified in those small principalities, and most
reasonable systems would have been better than what was in place by that point.
Reply
Gordon Tremeshko Mar 9
That's a good point. It's possible that the short duration of Napoleonic rule might have
had positive effects that allowed conquered places to, after Napoleon's abdication and
exile, kinda pick and choose what reforms they wanted to keep vs discard, whereas if
Napoleonic rule had lasted longer, things might not have looked so rosy. After all,
Napoleon treated conquered nations as vassal states which were forced to feed money
and men into the French war machine.
Reply
Gwern Branwen Writes Gwern.net Newsletter · Mar 9
Reading the paper, what comes to mind is Henrich. The authors note that some of the
destroyed reforms went even beyond 'guilds', and there was outright serfdom/slavery in
some of the principalities. These were really bad states, and it's not surprising that the
French modern synthesis Napoleon employed could appeal greatly to their inhabitants
and steamroll them. If I were a German noble, I'd definitely have concerns about
recruiting a huge serf army, training them in firearms and rapid march, augmented with
artillery, and emphasizing high-speed tactics and flexibility in remote army divisions with
considerable autonomy (plus an accompany ideology of egalitarianism & civil rights etc);
forced to choose between risking defeat by the atheist republicans on the other side of
the Rhine or the serfs...
So a synthesis of Scott's observations here is that we do not have here a
counterexample of the success of utopian high-modernist technocratic officials
imposing idealistic new policies by fiat and it turning out to be remarkably better than the
Cryptic Wisdom Of Tradition. Instead, we have cultural selection (of just the sort that
*created* the Wisdom of Tradition in the first place!): Napoleon didn't impose a bunch of
brand new policies, but policies which reflected the latest and most successful traditions
in France, which had proved their worth by enabling it to field these highly-effective
armies and stunningly defeat its combined enemies. Things like Justinian or Napoleon's
civil code aren't pulled out of thin air, but mostly *rationalize* and systematize all sorts of
de facto rules which had evolved to get around antiquated outdated patchworks of de
jure rules. Likewise, abolishing serfdom or guilds wasn't some dreamy new idea, but had
visibly worked in creating the huge citizen-armies and French economy powering it all.
And so on. Napoleon was installing a new Tradition which was superior, evolutionarily, to
the old one.
This is also similar to the Meiji or other examples. Overimitating a highly-successful
competitor, even when you're not sure which parts are the important parts (ties and
business suits: not important, but come in as part of the package deal anyway, sadly),
often works pretty well if you have the baseline capacity to reform at all. If you don't,
well, if the difference is big enough, you'll get reformed anyway, one way or another...
 Reply
Eric Johnson Mar 11
This seems a really good point. Wonder if a really good filter for "radical reforms"
being implemented on a national scale on a large nation would be "please point to
somewhere this has been successful elsewhere." Encourage new ideas to tried first
in smaller countries, in single states, or in test city zones.
Reply
Hadi Khan Writes Of Aurochs and Angels · Mar 9
Registering a prediction of 30% probability that the reformed areas did better. I'm counting a
case where they both did equally well as a "No" for resolution. Predicting relatively low since
the title of the post contains "consequences" which has a negative connotation thus biases
me towards expecting poor results in the reformed constituencies. No other factors went into
this prediction.
Reply
KLH Mar 9
Napoleonic does better by a relatively small margin. - 90%
Reply
saprmarks Mar 9
It seems likely that there's a strong selection effect in that the reforms studied were the
famous Napoleonic reforms and not some random radical reforms that went really badly and
no one thinks about anymore. After all, the anti-radical-reform argument isn't that it's
*impossible* for radical top-down reform to go well, just that such reforms don't *tend* to go
as well as evolved institutions. It seems like picking one of the most famous reforms in
history, which instituted the Napoleonic code that French law is *still based on*, is stacking
the deck a little.
(My prediction was that the occupied places did better (60%), despite my general skepticism
of radical reform. This was based on googling "Napoleonic code," seeing that it's famous and
still in use in modern France, and concluding that it must be pretty good since cultural
evolution kept it around this long.)
Reply
Dweomite Mar 9
Well, the reforms studied are "the aggregate of all reforms actually instituted by the
conquering emperor".
You could argue that the fact that the conquest was successful is selecting for positive
reforms, or maybe even that the choice of Napoleon rather than some other conquering
emperor is cherry-picking, but it's not like they isolated the effects of just *some* of the
reforms that Napoleon made.
Reply
Matthew Carlin Mar 9
Prediction: comparing principalities that were reformed or not reformed has the same
methodological problems as comparisons on any not-very-random sorting.
Reply
Matthew Carlin Mar 9
And, since this is an SSC/AST book review, the answer will be: "it's fraught, it's
complicated".
Reply
Steve Sailer Mar 9
"Daron Acemoglu is the most-cited economist of the past ten years, and I've never heard
anyone say a bad word about him"
For some skeptical words about Acemoglu's self-confidence in his own big picture analyses,
see:
https://www.unz.com/?s=Acemoglu&Action=Search&authors=steve-sailer&ptype=isteve
Reply
dionysus Mar 9
My prediction: the invaded countries do better, 70%
Reply
Mellow_Mizz Mar 9
Registering my prediction in advance: I predict that the non-reformed systems did at least 5%
better (on whatever metric the researchers used), and I am 60% confident in this prediction.
Reply
hnau Mar 9
> So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-
their-traditions polities?
My immediate reaction was "oh, come on, what do you mean by 'better'?"
And the paper makes clear that their measure was... urbanization rates. (They also looked at
GDP directly, but it sounds like their GDP data was so fuzzy and unreliable that they weren't
comfortable using it as a measure.)
I wish the post had given this more attention. "Radical reform increases urbanization rates" is
a) kind of unsurprising (modern ideas correlate strongly with urbanization for all kinds of
reasons), b) not a refutation of anything in Seeing Like a State (the author kind of hates cities,
right?), and c) not a sufficient basis for the kinds of value claims the post and the paper's
authors seem inclined to make.
In other words, this is framed as an objective qualitative argument against James Scott's
thesis, but it fails to convince because begs the question by reducing the problem to "legible"
statistics and values. You had one job!
Reply
Carl Pham Mar 9
On reflection I think there's a lot to be said about this. There are other measures than
economic which people factor into their quality of lives. If Napoleonic reforms were
focused on economic growth, and they did so, that's great, it means they were rational.
But that does *not* mean they were what the people on whom they got imposed wanted.
The Soviet Union experienced a tremendous growth in economic and military power from
1922 to 1980 -- but I think the life of the ordinary person became much less happy.
Obviously there's a limit to this, but people *do* value intangibles like liberty, stability,
community substantially, perhaps in some cases more than sheer material wealth.
I'm vaguely reminded of the fairly radical notion I've heard that the Agricultural
Revolution 10,000 or so years ago was, for most people, a disaster. To be sure, average
wealth skyrocketed -- but at the cost of a large increase in workloads, disease burden,
and existential anxiety, and a significant decrease in individual liberty. A hunter-gatherer
tribe tends to work fairly little -- only few hours a day -- does not catch diseases very
often, and tends to have high levels of individual liberty. After all, if you can live off the
land, you can always just walk away from a tribal situation that doesn't suit you. By
contrast a peasant in an early agricultural society has to work much harder, dawn to
dusk, because so much of his production is siphoned off for general social benefit (and
particularly for the wealthier classes). He is also unable to function as a unit, so he is
stuck where he is, at the mercy of the city-state being run well.
Reply
Roger Sweeny Mar 9
Average wealth did not skyrocket after the Agricultural Revolution. In fact, defining
wealth as "ability to realize your preferences", it went down. What went up was
population, and eventually traders and government. Which meant, at some point,
writing and art and civilization. But the fantastic increase in population means you
can't go back to hunting and gathering.
On the other hand, hunting and gathering should not be romanticized. It now looks
like significantly more than a few hours a day were needed to do all the work that
kept body and soul together. And hunter-gatherers are social. Cutting ties with your
band and just walking away is a much bigger deal than leaving Boston to take a job
in Seattle.
Since James C. Scott has come up a number of times, his recent <a
href=https://www.amazon.com/Against-Grain-History-Earliest-
States/dp/030024021X/ref=sr_1_2?
dchild=1&keywords=James+c.+scott&qid=1615303977&s=books&sr=1-2>Against
the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States</a> may be of interest.
Reply
Gordon Tremeshko Mar 9
Isn't the big downside of being a hunter-gatherer that your population sooner
or later hits the carrying capacity of your little patch of territory and you need
to either acquire new territory via conquest/annihilation or get a bunch of your
own guys killed in the attempt?
Reply
Ironic Age Protestant Mar 9
No. The downside of foraging is that agriculturalists can outcompete you
because they generate a surplus of food that can be locked up and used
to raise an army, and that army can force you to give up your land.
Reply
Roger Sweeny Mar 10
The third alternative is to control your population. Many people in the field
think that population was kept from increasing by long-term breastfeeding
(which suppresses ovulation) and, when times were tough, infanticide.
Reply
Igon Value Mar 9
<quote>"ability to realize your preferences", it went down. What went up was
population</quote>
In other words, agriculture favored the people for which having children was a
preference, and wealth increased for them by your own definition.
Reply
Carl Pham Mar 10
Yes, I agree that the "wealth" of the typical individual may well have gone
*down* -- that's the contrarian hypothesis to which I'm alluding. But people
have spoken of the Agricultural Revolution for almost as long as I've been alive
-- it was certainly a staple of my basic education 45 years ago -- as an
unalloyed good, because of the tremendous increase in disposable wealth, that
which enabled the building of cities and ships and pyramids. The idea that this
might have been for the typical person the inverse of Galbraith's famous
acerbic comment about the US ("private opulence and public squalor") -- i.e.
public magnifence but private misery -- had never occurred to me, and yet, I
think it's a question worth pondering.
Reply
Roger Sweeny Mar 10
I think that idea has become "conventional wisdom". A turning point may
have been Jared Diamond's 1999 popularization,
<href=https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-
mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race>The Worst Mistake in the
History of the Human Race</a>. His Guns, Germs, and Steel had been
published in 1997 and made him a celebrity intellectual, especially after it
 won a Pulitzer Prize the next year. (GGS has a few silly things in it but is
basically a very good book.)
Reply
Carl Pham Mar 10
I read GGS a long time ago and quite enjoyed it. Haven't read the
newer book but perhaps I will.
Reply
The-Serene-Hudson-Bay Mar 9
What would an objective argument using illegible statistics look like?
I don't think this is much of a referendum on "Seeing like a State" because its about a
temporary disruption of an evolved order not a permanent imposition of a designed one.
Napoleon was defeated in 1815 and the particular systems designed by high minded
French revolutionaries were replaced by a variety of Congress of Vienna created
governments. The future urbanization growth is not a consequence of the system
Napoleon imposed, but of whatever was allowed to evolve once the Feudal system was
burned away. If Napoleon wins Waterloo and keeps imposing top-down liberal reforms as
he ages maybe things work out differently.
Reply
Chrysophylax Mar 9
The systems that came after were heavily influenced by the Napoleonic reforms,
according to Wikipedia.
Reply
Kenny Easwaran Mar 9
But it's notable that the eventual result was the aftermath of an initial radical
liberal ideology (the initial revolution), tempered by an imperialist populist
takeover (Napoleon), and then replaced by a conservative monarchist attempt
at compromise (Congress of Vienna). We might not expect the same results if
we had just one or two of these layers.
Reply
nyc Mar 9
> In other words, this is framed as an objective qualitative argument against James
Scott's thesis, but it fails to convince because begs the question by reducing the
problem to "legible" statistics and values.
Not only that, it's doing it in ways that you would expect to have the legibility problem.
Suppose you introduce markets among other things. Now instead of spending $60 of
your own labor building a chair to use, you buy one in the market for $50. This is a $10
gain, but if you're measuring it based on legible metrics (i.e. amount of commerce) then
it gets put down as a $50 gain. If the same set of reforms also resulted in a separate $30
loss, the conclusion is inverted.
Plus, legible metrics are gamed. If reformers run around stamping out illegible activity
(e.g. penalizing informal barter as tax evasion) then the loss of the value from all the
prevented barter transactions is not measured but the potentially smaller gain from the
legible replacement transactions is.
Reply
demost_ Mar 9
I very much agree. I find it easy to believe that if you fix one objective function (like
economic growth), then drastic reforms can improve this objective function drastically.
But often that comes at a cost. People have all different kind of objective functions. Like,
a lot of people have the objective function "I personally want to stay alive and not be
hungry in the next year, and I don't care whether GDP takes off like crazy in 35 years,
thank you very much". I also find it easy to believe that grown systems often (not always)
do a fair job of taking a lot of these objectives into account.
Is it obvious that "breaking up guilds" is a good thing? For economic growth yes,
absolutely. But was it the best for people living in these countries at that time? Perhaps
still yes, but I think this is *way* less obvious. 20 years after being invaded, would a lot of
people have said that it was a good thing? Or if they are too dumb to recognize, does
GDP growth mean on some "objective" level that it was a good thing for these people?
Perhaps yes, perhaps no. In any case, it seems to be a case where cost might be harder
to quantify than benefits.
For our days, we face the same problem. GDP has grown a lot with globalisation. And
yet, a significant amount of people does not express utmost gratitude about
globalisation. This could either mean that these people are happier with globalisation
than they would be without globalisation, but that they do not recognize it. (I mean it,
that IS a possibility.) But it could also be that globalization inflicts costs on these people
that are not captured well by the usual economic measures, and that globalisation is a
net negative for them in their own personal objective function, even after accounting for
their new shiny smartphones. In this case, we (as most of us are supporters of
globalisation here) should acknowledge that the policy we want to enforce makes their
lifes worse, and that they have every reason to fight it (e.g., by electing Trump). Of
course, the optimal solution would be to find compromises and compensations, and so
on (not just financial compensation, this requires making a true effort on finding out how
the outcome can be improved in their individual objective functions). But the first step is
to acknowledge that such a policy can cause bad losses for some people, and that the
*sane and objectively best strategy* for them might be to elect Trump in order to put a
stop to the policy.
Reply
Mr. Doolittle Mar 10
 A former boss of mine told me about a job he had in the early 80s, making tires. It
sounded like pretty menial work in a factory, without much/any automation. He
never went to college, and was able to do that work right out of high school with no
special training. He made $12/hour in 1982. Plugging that into an inflation calculator,
and that's about $70,000/year in today's money. As a single guy in his early 20s, he
was making a good living, and bought whatever he wanted.
Fast forward to the 2000s, and he's making the same or less money after inflation.
It looks like he's making more than double his previous income, but the cost of
everything went up and he can't "get ahead." His job in management requires a
significant understanding of regulatory rules and how to run a business. He can no
longer afford to live beyond the means of a typical person in his age group (he lived
at a fairly modest level for a guy with a family, house, kids).
No, he didn't have a smartphone, or probably any computer, and was much more
limited on things like clothing, exotic foods, whatever. But he didn't know he was
"missing" any of those things, because his mind had no concept of them. GDP went
up significantly during that time frame, but not for him. He lost money, in terms of
relative wealth, being able to purchase the things he wanted, and so on.
Personally, I think the high paying industrial core of the US during the 70s and 80s
was more of an aberration than something to be expected, but I can't blame
someone in his position for looking back on what he had before longingly. I don't
know if he voted for Trump, but I could certainly see the incentive if he did.
Reply
Notjosephconrad Mar 9
Would it really kill economists to stick some reference to effect size in the abstracts of these
things? If this were a clinical trial, and the authors were like "hey, good news, napoleolimumab
increases modernization, now FDA-approved for your unsightly problems with Prussian
stagnation" they'd have the common decency to say "10 years of french reforms increases
the primary endpoint of urbanization in 1900 by 9% from 41% to 50%" But instead i had to
hunt through the text for it like a goddamn animal (page 23, if you care. They also have a
point estimate of 36% GDP increase.
But now that they forced me to go through the paper, some not-terribly informed thoughts:
1. I have the usual concerns about econ research -- were any of these analyses pre-
specified? How many different analyses were tried before they went with this one, etc.
2. If I am reading this correctly, by 1850 no changes are seen. So all the positive effect of the
new institutions is from 1850-1900. Interesting.
3. Riffing on '2' -- maybe this can be spun as another example of "industrialization changes
everything" or "conservatism is a better default in the absence of massive
scientific/technological change." Blowing up institutions in 700 AD does you no good,
because there's no innovation to take advantage of, you just get chaos. Blowing up
institutions in 1800 AD helps, because it enables social shifts to take advantage of new
modes of production.
4. And just for honesty: my prediction was "can't discern an obvious effect" (which in
retrospect was idiotic given that if it were a null effect it never would have been published)
Reply
MM Mar 9
re: item 2. Generally when you give a physical system a kick, it responds immediately
and the effect dampens out from there.
But if this paper (and your reading) is correct, the kick lasted from roughly 1804 to 1815,
but the actual effect slumbered for at least 35 years before making a difference for the
succeeding 50?
Something else is going on here. The explanation that comes to mind is that the reforms
made no difference under the economics of the early 1800s and only kicked in when
other things changed - and yet nothing nudged the systems back in those 35 years. Not
sure I believe it.
Reply
Notjosephconrad Mar 9
This was my first thought too. Further consideration got me to: "I guess a lag in
effect on something like institutional reform is not implausible."
Reply
Zach Mar 9
please, they aren't estimating any effects. the stats is all window dressing for their
'plausible' story. 1. is a lol. the measurement noise, model misspecification, etc. if
accurately (impossible ofc) represented would make the bounds on the effects to large
to write a paper about. but it is all a dog and pony show anyway.
Reply
Notjosephconrad Mar 9
I am ambivalent. The attempt to quantify and measure is admirable. It's one way to
prevent yourself from spinning comforting stories that accord with your
preconceptions. But, as you say, unless you're careful you end up with another story
with the added prestige of 'studies show...' Acemoglu's a well known institutionalist,
so it's not surprising that his studies show dramatic effects of institutional change.
But of course, the arrow of causation can run in both directions -- I am sure
Acemoglu would say he is an institutionalist *because* of the data, not that he
interprets the data according to pre-existing biases. We all tend to believe this
about our own beliefs, of course, and I am no different!
Reply
Zach Mar 9
 the degrees of freedom in the analysis make it largely the same as "spinning
comforting stories"
Reply
Notjosephconrad Mar 9
Pre-specification is the way!
Reply
Muat Mar 9
Prediction: 80% that the reformed states surpassed the non-reformed states, but only for a
short (no more than a decade) time period before competition forced the other states to
adapt.
Reply
Konstantin Mar 9
Keep in mind that WWII era Germany and Japan went through radical reforms in the late 19th
century, so I doubt they can be described as organically evolved societies.
Reply
smm Mar 9
The problem with this is a limited metric being used to derive a conclusion about a complex
whole. If your measure of "better or worse" is simply aggregate economic growth this is an
unsurprising result, even to many on the "traditionalist/evolved institutions" side. The trads
(including me, and Burke) would argue, though, that there is a lot more to the health of a
society, human happiness, and the common good than GDP.
Reply
MasteringTheClassics Mar 9
So the state looked at a legible system (the conquered villages) and an illegible system (the
unconquered villages), compared then according to its metrics (GDP, economic growth, etc.)
and decided the legible system did better? Color me unimpressed. Almost every such reform
looks better from the state's POV - that's the whole point of _Seeing Like a State_.
Reply
Steve Sailer Mar 9
As Burke said, "The Revolution did not make France free, it made France formidable."
Bonapartism offered a sort of cautious version of the French Revolution, a hard-headed
military man's version of rational modernization. It remained highly influential around the
world for more than a century, such as in Bolivarism in Latin America, Kemalism in Turkey, and
Nasserism in the Middle East.
Reply
Handsome Mar 9
Was gonna say 80% that radical (but well-intended) revolutions make matters worse short
term (10 years) and 60% that they make room for necessary but impracticable in current
system reforms. But then it dawned on me that "better-or-worse" is too heavily depended on
the deciding criteria to form a meaningful opinion. China does just great economy-wise, but
human rights and pollution are better left unsaid.
Reply
R Dana Mar 9
This paradigm bothers me. It seems implausible that there is some general, usually-
applicable rule that entrenched institutions/traditions are either better or worse than systems
imposed through radical reforms. Surely, an entrenched institution can be effective and
efficient or ossified and redundant. And just as surely, a radical reform can be well-conceived
or foolishly overconfident.
If that's right, then at best the paper here proves either that the French Revolution's reforms
were well-devised or that the systems they replaced were weak, or both. Since the old
systems were typically similar, and the reforms were all in the same direction if not literally the
same, it suggests that *in this case* the reforms were an improvement. I don't see how we
can possibly generalize from that result. Isn't the issue always case-specific?
Reply
Parrhesia Writes Parrhesia’s Newsletter · Mar 9
Yes, I think this is correct. I would say that the heuristic that big changes usually end
poorly is probably a good one normally. Communist and authoritarian overhauls of
society seem more common than good major reforms. However, you must look on a
case-by-case basis to determine. You can't say with certainty that all large reforms will
be bad.
Reply
Randomstringofcharacters Mar 9
I'd agree it's difficult to have a general rule, but the context of this is in response to
people asserong the general rule that evolved institutions are better
Reply
Joel Long Mar 9
My immediate thought when asked to make a prediction was "on what metric?" That basically
sums up my frustration with this topic in general.
Evolved systems will, by nature, optimize, but there's no reason to think they will optimize on
the metric that "we" want to optimize. In that sense, the problem with Brazilia wasn't poor
optimization, it was misalignment between the metrics of the designers and the populace.
The same problem faces most modern reforms. We have broad disagreements about the
different metrics Even if we totally agree about what a reform would do, different people will
feel differently about it due to their different metrics. No policy is positive on all reasonable
metrics, so no policy is universally agreed to be good.
That isn't to say agreeing on what the effects a reform will have is trivial. Even as a non-
economist, I'm comfortable saying today's global economic system is a lot more complicated
than that of pre-industrial France.
Reply
Zach Mar 9
on what planet can we meaningfully say that the feudal system of europe "evolved." it
evolved no more than Napoleon evolved his armies into those same places
Reply
Joel Long Mar 9
I'm not sure what your objection is. What term would you use to describe how
Europe arrived at the feudal system it had at the time of Napoleon's invasion? It
hadn't existed forever, it developed over time...don't we typically call that
"evolution"?
Reply
Zach Mar 10
what i'm objecting to is calling one "natural." the process of arriving at the
governments napoleon displaced was in many cases abrupt and violent.
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Carl Pham Mar 9
Prediction at the point of dare, before reading the rest: the reformed zones did initially better,
but over 10-30 years returned to baseline, and no statistically significant difference is
observed. More or less based on the idea that people are stimulated by New And Different
and everyone tries harder, followed by Reversion To The Mean -- over a modest time (like 25
years) people fall into whatever rut suits their nature. (Long-term change only comes from
technological or environmental changes.)
Now to read the rest...
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Luke G Mar 9
I feel like there's a good analogy with software systems. As large code bases grow, they tend
to get messy: early architectural decisions are in conflict with new requirements; hacks and
shortcuts never get fixed and snowball into monstrosities. So then there's always the
question: do we rewrite from scratch and make it better this time?
The conventional advice is never rewrite from scratch
(https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/). Sure,
you'll design it better the second time, but it's going to take a long time before you work out
all the kinks and replicate all the features in the old code.
Instead, the conventional advice is to always be refactoring opportunistically. Refactoring
means you're not working from scratch: you're taking what exists and re-architecting it into
something better. You might rewrite a chunk of code, but since it's a small piece, it's easier to
be sure you're not missing functionality that already exists.
Although the opportunistic refactoring tends to be the superior approach, setting up
incentives to make it happen is tricky. With pressure to meet deadlines and little recognition
for it, refactoring often doesn't get done. When it comes to government, I think we see the
same effect: the news doesn't cover small changes and politicians don't get a lot of credit for
it, so there's not much "refactoring" of laws or institutions that gets done. Cruft accumulates,
inefficient processes ossify, and eventually we get so fed up we want to do a "rewrite".
Reply
a real dog Mar 9
Code does not actively defend itself from being refactored.
Reply
Carl Pham Mar 9
Yet
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Randomstringofcharacters Mar 9
Code also runs automatically in the background retaining its original structure.
Social institutions require continuous buy in from participants and are vulnerable to
drift
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Mike H Mar 10
You've clearly never tried to refactor an awful codebase, lol!
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Zarraha Mar 9
75% reform. I think a lot of this is based this off the most salient data point in my mind: Japan,
which shouldn't necessarily generalize to all forms of foreign-imposed reform. But it's clearly
a good example that such a thing is possible and often overlooked.
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mjharding Mar 9
Two hundred years of historical changes (in France, no less) summarized in one blog post
and I'm supposed to come to some kind of conclusion about our culture?
Reply
Kris Mar 9
Yup, definitely just filed this post into my brain under "interesting anecdotes that may
not even be true"
Reply
Steve Sailer Mar 9
The (so-called) Glorious Revolution of 1688 made England more economically dynamic by
introducing modern practices from Amsterdam such as corporations.
The Republican Revolution of 1861, made possible by Southern Democrats walking away from
their Senate majority, allowed the passage of many modernizing pieces of legislation that
forward-thinking pro-business politicians like Henry Clay had been talking about since
sometimes as long ago as 1812.
18th Century Enlightened Despotism in Central and Eastern Europe, carried out by pragmatic
conservatives, was fairly successful as well.
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Dan L Mar 9
>So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-
their-traditions polities?
I'd guess the results would be dependent both on how long after the "conquer and reform"
we look, and on a metric I don't really have a better name for than 'core v. periphery'.
Conquest is inherently destructive, and the transition period is unlikely to create prosperity
out of thin air whereas it can definitely do the opposite. On the other hand, I'd absolutely
expect it to lead to massive gains in the medium-to-long term as the new philosophies both
have greater freedom to adapt to new circumstances and simply because they're guaranteed
to be replacing something that has failed in at least one key metric. I'd expect it to look
something like an accelerated industrialization, which might be difficult to disentangle
because if we're talking Napoleonic it'd be happening at the same time as 'conventional'
industrialization. The destructive effects might be a little weaker at peripheral regions but the
positive significantly less as well.
Hard to put a probability on something I'm guessing is going to vary in both space and time,
but to take a swing at it: 80% of significant improvement in the 'core' regions on a timespan
of up to a century. Comparatively little change on the periphery, maybe 60% chance of
improvement in the same time scale with a preceding decline?
Reply
Steve Sailer Mar 9
One thing to keep in mind about Edmund Burke was that, while he had a practical side, he
also had a Romantic side. He was talented at romanticizing what was in the interests of the
rich and powerful. Rationalists tend to be out of touch with the Romantic movement that
arose from the mid-18th Century to the mid-19th Century in reaction to 18th Century
Enlightenment Rationalism, although it led to some of the greatest works of art of all time.
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Michael John Mar 9
Guessing the reforms were good, mostly because countries are still described as having
"Napoleonic" civil law at the present time.
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Anaxagoras Mar 9
I would hazard a guess that the radically reformed places did better, but I'm pretty unsure
about this. Maybe 60%? That said, there definitely do seem like some confounding factors.
Napoleon's empire didn't last forever, and when it was falling apart, maybe that affected
places in it differently? Could be that the chaos hit there worse, could be that they started
invading neighbors to recapture some of that early expansionary spirit. And when people
were fighting against Napoleon, they'd probably treat the areas he conquered differently from
the places downriver that weren't. Maybe?
My uncertainty stems from radical reform seeming dangerous, but the status quo being not
ideal either, and my general ignorance of European history.
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Matthew Mar 9
I feel like the call for predictions needs to be amended with dimensions... Like better on what
axis? Wealth? Infant mortality?
I would say the reformed ones became slightly wealthier, but that may be tempered by the
economic losses of being conquered and the associated destruction.
Also, I know almost nothing about Napoleonic legal codes.
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Theternalone Mar 9
I think what I got most strongly out of Seeing Like a State was the language of legibility and
how that drives State reform. (J. C.) Scott selects certain schemes to increase legibility that
fail catastrophically, of course, as the subtitle makes explicit, but the deeper concern I see
from him is over _what gets lost_, which is illegible, and therefore never can be counted as a
loss (which this study, of course, cannot account for, looking as it does at the exact same
legible metrics that Napoleon was looking for). Of course, his examples are double-bounded,
because they have to be _both_ examples of catastrophic failure _and_ examples which we
can look back on legibly now and say 'oh yeah, shit... that was a terrible idea.' Which also
means (and J.C. Scott is explicitly concerned about this) that those examples are poor
examples anymore because we know so much more now and can avoid the mistakes...
In this respect, (J.C.) Scott seems similar to McIntyre (who, remember, was a diehard Marxist
before he became a Thomist and Catholic–and I think it shows) and his After Virtue. You lose
things, many of them perhaps permanently, with radical reform and centralization, you even
lose the language in which to express and, finally, understand what has been lost and why it
matters.
Samzdat's read of Seeing Like A State grapples more directly with this, as does most of Lou's
writing there.
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Eöl Mar 9
I think I disagree with Scott's initial sorting. Placing evolved institutions on one hand and
complaints about vetocracy on the other strikes me as not wrong exactly, but incomplete. I
think it's pretty clear that both threads have their answers to vetocracy, and I think they both
recognize the problem. Vetocracy, after all, frequently prevents organic evolution of
communities, societies, and institutions. Granted, I'd agree that erring on the side of evolution
is more likely to result in the rise of vetocracies than centralized systems (since a vetocracy
can be an organic evolution in the first place, but then prevents evolution).
I think this is borne out by the remainder of the essay. Scott points out the counter-example
to the trend identified by Acemoglu as being the UK, the font of all modern organic evolution
ideology and one that proves it can produce outcomes as good or better than any other
system. I agree.
The difference is that the organic evolution in the UK tended (for reasons that are probably
impossibly complex) to minimize or at least control the growth of vetocracy and the other
malefic consequences of organic reform. The ossified German states that escaped the table-
flip of the French Revolution had not just been entirely captured by the malefic side of
evolution, but their ruling elites saw the maintenance of such as existential (even when their
neighbors and social equals down the river and across the border did better in the long run
and often in the short, too). As a result, and given the complete capture of political,
economic, religious, and (frequently, but not always) cultural power in those small states and
estates, the organic evolution that produced that elite class killed evolution.
And yes, of course, the clear liberalism of revolutionary French institutional reform is fairly
obviously good from a standpoint of promoting human thriving (probably showing my bias
here,
Expandbut
full the massive growth of surplus and the the rapid reduction of poverty and all other
comment
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Michael M Mar 9
From a position of ignorance, I would guess that the ones receiving the Napoleonic code were
~70% likely to do better. It seems like codes of laws that stuck were mostly centralised and
European principalities weren't small enough to benefit from the effect of being a small
community where everyone knows each other.
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Michael M Mar 9
Having read the article, I think we're just trying too hard to impose grand patterns on the
world when local specifics matter – though of course (James) Scott would argue that the
state functions to impose grand patterns when they previously weren't there.
But 'grassroots' systems can just as easily be products of one local man's or family's
whims or influece, and can be just as irrational. Maybe it's the case that good policies
like 'having individual rights' work best when they come organically, which you could
argue happened in England, but the second-best case is to impose them externally.
Sometimes things just need a shakeup because they're ossified, sometimes a shakeup
breaks things that were working.
I'm not convinced small European principalities were small enough to be considered
traditionalist, grassroots societies – maybe they're better seen as a collection of little
 Prussias imposing their own orders, and Napoleon simply had better ones.
One could argue that the sprawling suburbs of Phoenix and the vast, unorganised urban
townships of Nairobi or Lagos are the products of organic growth – can anyone say
they're better than places with stronger central planning? NIMBYism is a fundamentally
grassroots, traditionalist movement. It is often better when the state can build a subway
line when it needs to.
I think 'sometimes centralised radical reform is good, sometimes bad, it depends on both
the intended reforms and expecially on the execution' is not a very interesting take but a
true one. To reach the kinds of conclusions we talk about here, we'd need a large scale
study of _representative sample_ of radical reform, and even then I don't think a
meaningful conclusion could be reached.
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Phil Writes Lindy Letters · Mar 9
Radical reformers improved legible metrics like GDP per capita, lumber per acre farmed, and
taxes collected. However, other metrics like quality of life, lifespan, and subjective happiness
decreased. The length of time that the radical political was in effect did not last longer than
the amount of time it was implemented (using Napolean's exile as 0 on the time axis).
65%?
Reply
Shaked Koplewitz Mar 9
My guess was 74% that the radical reforms would be net positive. In retrospect I think this
was mostly a failure; given what I knew, I should have been able to be more confident in this.
Re the more general debate between radical reformers and traditionalism, I kind of like the
analogy I made of society as a damped harmonic oscillator, which is probably the most
stereotypically rationalist thing I've ever written
https://shakeddown.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/modeling-society-as-a-damped-harmonic-
oscillator/
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Randomstringofcharacters Mar 9
Same. In retrospect the only reason I had for not giving it 90+% confidence was that
Scott was asking the question in a blog post, so it was more likely to have the
counterintuitive conclusion. As part of a more general phenomenon. Eg if someone were
to ask me out of the blue "do you think oaks are a type of tree?" the mere fact they are
asking would make me think it wasn't the obvious answer (and that there was some
technicality in the botanical definition of tree I missed, or whatever.)
Though in this case that heuristic took me in the wring direction. I guess Scott had given
more credence to the conservative arguments than I thought
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Whimsi Writes Whimsi · Mar 9
I think the discussion gets muddled by trying to compare such materially different places as
Brasilia and Napoleonic France, especially in light of the stark differences between their
stated goals. Comparing England's process of industrialization with that of the USSR and
Communist china might be more fruitful, especially considering that Mao's revolution and
later reforms were all (ostensibly) done to benefit a peasant class that existed under a very
old-school feudal system.
But if all the successful instances of rapidly 'reforming' longstanding systems(post-war
Japan, Napoleonic France, Germany etc) all basically neoliberal , then that tells us much more
about neoliberalism than technocracy itself.
My take away is that the question "should my priors favor evolved systems over designed
ones" is kind of silly, because a given policy's origins are completely incidental to its results.
Reply
Steve Sailer Mar 9
Acemoglu measures the current status of conquered lands in 1850, 35 years after Waterloo,
which was, apparently, long enough for the bad effects of the breaking things and killing
people to recede.
Some of the shorter term effects of the Napoleonic Wars were dire. For example, the chaos
caused by Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia in 1812 led to the breakdown of government
wolf control efforts across Eastern Europe, which led to wolf packs running amok for a few
decades until they could be brought under control again.
The Napoleonic Wars had the good side effect of being so bad that they discouraged
Europeans from going to war with each other all that often from 1815-1913. They had the bad
side effect of entrenching Reaction in control of much of Europe, discouraging British-style
cautious democratic reforms until the second half of the 19th Century.
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Eöl Mar 9
I think Russia is not the right counter-example. Unlike virtually every other power in
continental Europe during the wars, it retained 100% of its independence from France.
Certainly the revolutionary French never (truly) administered any of its territory, and
instead only fought an incredibly destructive war on said territory.
That makes me curious about what happened in Portugal, which was also a battleground
and whose politics were never very subservient to France. Indeed, to avoid a revolution,
the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil. By some measures, they traded subservience
to France for subservience to the UK, their traditional ally. Perhaps some good parallels
could be drawn with Russia.
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Adrian E. Mar 9
In Switzerland, most historians probably agree that the reforms imposed by Napoleon had an
overall beneficial long-term effect. To some degree, elites the French drove away from power
managed to return in some parts of Switzerland, but a return to the outdated political system
was impossible and beneficial compromises were found. I suppose that apart from
Switzerland, other areas profited in a similar way.
But I think we should be careful to extrapolate from this. One important point is, of course,
that France was culturally very close to the European countries it modernized, and the French
people who took an active role had intimate knowledge of these countries. I would suppose
that the track record for imposed reforms („nation building“ etc.) with a much greated cultural
distance is much worse. Sometimes, it can go well, but in many cases, it does not.
The other important point, which is also emphasized in the text, is that the reforms
conducted under Napoleon were actually rather moderate, as far as their content was
concerned. They did not aim at some far-fetched utopian goals. They may have been more
radical than comparable cases in how much energy they put into removing old elites and
outdated structures, but what they replaced it with looks rather moderate from today‘s
perspective and probably also from a contemporary perspective.
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Walter Sobchak, Esq. Mar 9
Well Switzerland won that round. North of the Danube, the experience was poisonous.
Clausewitz was a Prussian General. Napoleon taught Prussia everything he knew. They
created a military machine from which sprang the most catastrophic wars in human
history. Yes, they industrialized, but the world would have been a better happier place if
they had stuck to potatoes, beer, and wurst.
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Walter Sobchak, Esq. Mar 9
"The evidence suggests that areas that were occupied by the French and that underwent
radical institutional reform experienced more rapid urbanization and economic growth,
especially after 1850. There is no evidence of a negative effect of French invasion. "
Let us see. The Franco-Prussian War, World War I, The Russian revolution, World War II, The
Holocaust, the Iron Curtain. The Collapse of the Soviet Union. The butcher's bill, say on the
order of 100 million.
Napoleon should have stayed home.
That is a hard pass.
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Stephen Pimentel Mar 9
Rather than looking simply formally at "reform or not," it's important to look at the substance
of a reform. The Napoleonic Code was strongly influenced by the Justinian Code of the 6th
century AD, itself a codification of older Roman Law. So while the Napoleonic Code may have
been "new" to the little duchies outside of France upon which it was imposed, it was hardly
radical from the perspective of Western legal tradition. Perhaps the only lesson here is that,
as legal codes go, the Napoleonic Code was pretty good. This would also accord with the
non-correlation of Great Britain, which already had a good legal system.
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Walter Sobchak, Esq. Mar 9
European legists used the Corpus Juris Civilis (which included Justinian's Code) as the
raw material from which they created both the Canon Law of the Roman Church and the
civil law of Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Europe. During that era, the civil
law, known as jus commune, was in effect throughout Western and Central Europe
(including Scotland) except in England and Wales. The Napoleonic Code was a
codification, and rationalization of the jus commune. Adopting it was not disruptive. The
one legal field that was disrupted was marriage and divorce which had been under the
jurisdiction of the Church.
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rrt Mar 9
The first thread ("institutions have evolved to something like a time tested optimum and
reform is hubristic, etc etc.") suggests an essentialism that plagues a lot of conservative
philosophy. As if "work ethic" and "value" and "character" and economic outcomes were
perfectly fixed features of physical reality and not dynamically shifting systems interacting
and changing each other. There's no reason that the territory or the agents within it can't shift
and mutate and render what worked however long ago obsolete. An organism can be
perfectly evolved into its niche until one day a random amino acid gets swapped in a virus
genome then suddenly that organism's time-tested mating ritual spreads a new deadly
illness. This seems to be more or less what happened with anti-maskers and covid, the notion
that something could shift so radically in the environment and suddenly make a lot of indoor
commerce dangerous is not just unthinkable but *laughably* ridiculous to some people.
I think about this whenever I hear Lincoln Project conservatives like Tom Nichols smugly
dismiss younger generations as entitled and whiny. As if it were like a cosmological constant
that x units of Hard Work = housing/a car/stability or whatever and there are no larger forces
reshaping the relationships of people to capital.
A personal pet peeve of mine is the assumption that unintended consequences and perverse
incentives, the things that are supposed to render reform and central government action
unworkable, are exclusive to reform. For example the very notion of "private property" seems
to work very differently in theory compared to practice. In the libertarian ideal, in theory
there'd be some sort of maximal respectful non-interference with the property of others
barring extreme externalities, etc. In practice homeowners aggressively leverage whatever
government power they can muster to shut down the construction of more housing on other
lots of private property anywhere near them. In practice the idea of property in peoples'
heads seems to be something like: "This property is my investment, I can and must do
whatever is necessary to protect its appreciation, including restricting the supply of nearby
housing through government force." Nimbyism is bipartisan but its especially ironic that many
of these people consider themselves ardent capitalists.
Reply
Roger Sweeny Mar 10
Even more ironic is that they use socialist arguments, "People should not be able to do
whatever they want with their property. They should be forced to use it in the public
interest." Which in practice favors the already well-off (which is ironic, or perhaps a
stronger word).
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TGGP Mar 9
Unfortunately, I cannot guess in advance because I'd already blogged about the paper.
Multiple times, in fact!
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/chris-coyne-sort-of-responds-to-
acemoglu/
Early on I was keen on Acemoglu as someone digging into the questions Mencius Moldbug
was interested in, and even recommended his work to Moldbug. Later, around the time of
Why Nations Fail, I became much more skeptical of his work (and Johnson's).
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/stephen-broadberrys-accounting-for-
the-great-divergence/
I can't find the post where I made this critique now (it might have been in the comments) but I
recall them supposedly teasing out the effects of colonialism... by using malaria as a proxy for
certain kinds of colonial institutions, rather than comparing Ethiopia & Thailand to neighbors
or even considering the possibility that malaria's direct effect was confounding their results. If
you trace back the links on that Coyne post though, I do note that the Acemoglu paper is in
the tradition of Mancur Olson, who was also writing after Germany & Japan surged after WW2
(and in contrast to someone like James Scott). Greg Cochran would say that's because
places with high human capital can rather easily recover from destroyed physical capital.
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TGGP Mar 9
I forgot to note that other studies have shown that lands included in the Habsburg
empire appear to be better off than ones just across Habsburg borders. With the irony
being that the Habsburg's are as good a representation of the ancien regime the French
revolution was against as you'll find.
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Marginalia Mar 9
I predicted the non-reformed areas would do better. Looks like I was wrong, but how wrong.
I have some unformed ideas about the difference between being conquered by an external
force and having a reforming faction win from within the existing society. As the review points
out, post-conquering, if the new system is "good" it will work well and if not it won't. The
given examples (Germany, Japan after WWII) are external-force examples and I suppose the
Napoleon examples are external-force as well, though some of the same duchies were
probably once under the control of Charlemagne, so maybe more of a high-water mark of
French expansion than external-force per se.
Contractors seem to do well after and during military action. There are things to rebuild and
replace. I don't know how to quantify "GDP due to replacing what was destroyed" versus
"really new growth."
Civil wars to institute "reform" seem to go differently (even the French revolution came apart
after a few decades, hence Napoleon). When a different societal faction becomes dominant,
the now-subordinate faction will potentially not cease to exist after all and there may be ?a
greater tendency to authoritarian dynamics to keep the new social order in place, which might
stifle growth as well. The status quo ante may be closer after a civil war.
Good food for thought.
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Harald Mar 9
People who keep mentioning Brasilia: try working for a month in Rio.
Reply
Steve Sailer Mar 9
The French Revolution wiped away a lot of the remnants of feudalism, a system that had
emerged 1000 years before to provide local security against raids by Vikings and other
Roving Bandits by allowing Stationary Bandits to set up to defend local turf. It worked pretty
well under the conditions of the late Dark Ages (e.g., terrible roads). But by the 18th Century,
feudalism was obviously outdated, as the more recent Absolute Monarchs insisted.
And the feudal system of layering complex bargains on top of other complex bargains and so
forth and so on for a thousand years had made getting much done legally awfully
complicated. The British had a system of allowing judges to creatively misread the legal
record of the common law, but more conscientious Continentals tend to be bogged down by
the weight of the past. So, the streamlined Code Napoleon was welcome. But keep in mind
that the Code Napoleon wasn't all that radical. It reflected the neoclassical feelings of the
age, that this is what the wisest Romans would have done if they were around today.
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Candide III Mar 9
Exactly. I've recently finished the first volume of Taine's Origins of Contemporary France
(1875), which is about the ancien regime. Taine, no progressive or liberal even by XIX
century standards, shows two things in this volume: first, that the mass of feudal rights
and obligations that constituted the ancien regime was rational and salutary when it was
growing up in early to high Middle Ages, and second, that by late XVII and even more so
by XVIII century these same structures had outlived their usefulness and were causing
great harm to France. Conditions in most European nations to the east of France were
 almost certainly similar. It is thus no great discovery that a "sovereign bankruptcy" and a
thorough restructuring improved things. Incidentally, one of the harms Taine mentions -
perhaps the greatest one - was the degeneration of the French nobility into a network of
coteries that passed their time in putting on mythological theater pieces, philosophical
speculation, and unrestrained dalliance, and whose contact with reality on the ground
was minimal. By the time they had, under the influence of Enlightenment philosophes,
woken up to the condition of France, they were too feeble to conduct the necessary
reforms, or to control the country after their initial stabs at liberalization had opened the
floodgates. In nations that engaged in what Acemoglu et al. call "defensive
modernization", the nobility wasn't quite so useless, and thus the Prussian, Austrian and
Meiji Japan reforms were successful. As for England, Taine himself uses it as a point of
comparison, describing how despite having reformed away much of the outworn feudal
structure earlier than France (French philosophes having been in fact largely inspired by
the English example), English nobility took up new duties, kept in touch with its
constituents and its former feudal subordinates, and in consequence was capable of
governing the country themselves rather than foist the nasty and disagreeable task onto
the bureaucracy of King's intendants and sub-delegates. English nobles didn't need to
read XVIII century equivalents of "Hillbilly Elegy" and "Deer Hunting with Jesus" in
Reply
Steve Sailer Mar 11
Thanks.
Reply
Alex Mennen Mar 9
My primary worry about the radical reform paper, which you touched on but didn't state
explicitly, is that if these places had similar pre-existing institutions and economic
circumstances, and France enacted the same reforms in all of them, then of course there was
a consistent pattern, and this is kind of like having a sample size of 1.
Their claim that reform failures can be blamed on not being radical enough seems absurd. All
the most famous examples of top-down reforms gone catastrophically wrong were pretty
radical, no? Or was the problem with the Great Leap Forward that Mao wasn't thinking big
enough?
I settled on the prediction that the French-invaded places were equally likely to have gotten
better as worse. Once I saw the answer, part of my brain was very insistent that I was really
leaning towards the reformed places doing better all along. Dammit, brain.
Reply
TGGP Mar 9
They also complained about South African reforms not going far enough. Which made
me think of Zimbabwe:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/why-a-nation-that-fails-to-be-a-
nation-fails-or-does-it/
 Reply
Titanium Dragon Mar 9
I mean, the problem with all of that is that the simplest answer is also the correct
one.
Lemme quote the question they ask at the end of it:
> "It is interesting that the German state after World War II, though devastated by
the war and de-Nazification, was still able by the 1960s to largely re-build the
infrastructure which the Allies had pulverized in the closing stages of the war. In
contrast, the South African state has been unable in the same amount of time to get
the poor people, who fought for the end of Apartheid and voted for it, out of shacks
and shanty towns."
The answer to why this is is that the Germans had already built an advanced
civilization. This had never happened in South Africa.
People are often confused about what caused the colonization of Africa. People
love to think that colonization made Africa poor. But Africa was already very poor. In
fact, it has become much better since colonization in every way.
Colonization didn't make Africa poor; Poverty is what created the conditions for
colonization. The extreme poverty of Africa made it ripe for conquest by the
advanced European powers.
Taking away colonization didn't make these countries rich because the problem
wasn't colonization, colonization was an effect of poverty, as they lacked the power,
organization, and technology to keep the Europeans at bay.
Reply
TGGP Mar 9
Yeah, Timur Kuran also made that point about colonization when attempting to
explain "The Long Divergence".
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Matthew Mar 9
You need to read Scott's other book. "The Art of Not Being Governed." Seriously, with what's
going on in Burma... it is important to understand why the Burmese state is having so much
difficulty and the highland polities he talks about.
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melee_warhead Mar 9
"So maybe the moral of the story is something like - replacing stagnation and entrenched
interests with good reform is good, and with bad reform is bad. Which sounds obvious, but I
do think that considerations of "is this potentially challenging a carefully evolved system of
traditions?" is less important than I originally believed."
Isn't that a subset of the belief "life is complicated"? I'm being mildly facetious, but only
mildly. The world when stacked end to end is full of disagreements. However, a lot of it boils
down to "doing good things is good" & "doing bad things is bad", and then the rest becomes
finding ways to make it easier to do good things, and harder to do bad things, and easier to
reverse mistakenly doing bad things.
I know that sounds very over-simplistic, but there's a lot of muddling in the middle that makes
sense, even if you have enough brainpower to chew on the big ideas.
Reply
Randomstringofcharacters Mar 9
Yes, but as a reply to the claim "evolved institutions are better" the answer "it depends"
is still meaningful
Reply
melee_warhead Mar 9
Not disagreeing. But I feel like many people have ONE big theory when "it's
complicated" is more likely to be true. The more educated one is, the more fleshed
out their model of how "it's complicated" may be, but if the trend is to put a lot of
things as "it's complicated", then finding another "complicated" thing isn't really
shocking.
In fact, the shocking things are finding very simple but true things. (which do exist
because society is garbage at processing information in many occasions)
Reply
Eudai Writes the good ape life · Mar 9
Prediction before reading: 60% that the radically reformed polities did better.
> Second, isn't it sort of weird that Britain, the country that got least invaded by Napoleon
and had some of the deepest-rooted institutions of all, was the one that really kicked off the
Industrial Revolution?
My low-confidence understanding of this is that Industrial Revolution <= steam engine <=
innovation spurred by having to get coal out of the ground <= deforestation leading the
British to investigate costlier alternatives. So you could say the cause is material. But I've also
heard that Britain emerged from the mercantilist era with the largest 'innovator / merchant'
class – I believe it saw the greatest conversions of the aristocracy into an entrepreneurial
class of the European nations.
Reply
mordy Mar 9
75% reform, because Doylistically, you wouldn’t be posting about this paper if it didn’t
contradict Scott.
Reply
Handsome Mar 9
This sounds a lot like survivorship bias: if the revolution lead to a huge improvement (define
improvement...), then the researches give it some attention and include in the study, but how
many revolutions there have been that didn't really change anything?
Reply
Florian Grosberg Mar 9
No significant effect/no difference made by Napoleonic laws. 0.65
Reply
vorkosigan1 Mar 9
Doesn't the presumption that these systems "evolved" misstate how evolution works? Pre-
some kind of phase change, like revolution, what you have is a system that is extremely well
adapted to those who have held power, but is not particularly robust in the face of any
significant change in circumstances--either from an internal or an external force. For it to be
evolution, you'd have to have some kind of driver for fitness, which I would argue effectively
doesn't or only minimally exists in monarchies/dictatorships. The argument that monarchical
systems which have built up over time because they've existed for a long time are somehow
evolved takes a horribly cramped view of what drives evolution.
As for the UK driving the Industrial Revolution, the UK had already had its revolution--in the
English Civil War, and in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. So it's not surprising, if were using
revolution-driven "evolution" as an indicator, that the Industrial Revolution started in the UK.
Reply
DavesNotHere Mar 9
And the Dutch? My history is weak but weren’t they always getting invaded?
Reply
Aapje Mar 9
'Always' is a bit of an exaggeration.
Reply
DavesNotHere Mar 9
Yes, it is.
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Randomstringofcharacters Mar 9
The driving force for selection would be things like conflicts between states. Fukuyama
talks about this in the Political Order books. States that were in military competition with
their neighbours tended to develop efficient meritocratic bureaucracies, becuase
otherwise they'd have been conquered, and out compete others despite their starting
positions (Prussia being the textbook example). Whereas states in more peaceful
circumstances had enough slack that they could develop corruption and patronage in
the system. You could make an analogy with private companies as well, with monopolies
inevitably declining in quality
Reply
 None of the Above Mar 9
They were good at surviving, which isn't the same as providing for human flourishing,
but isn't nothing.
Reply
MaksIM Mar 9
Conquered better: 80%
Conquered worse: 15%
Inconclusive/other: 5%
Reply
MaksIM Mar 9
Though I do wonder if this is not at least partially due to the conquered territories simply
becoming in effect part of "French economic zone" (as distinct from "economic core of
Europe"), thus increasing interoperability - mobility of people, goods, and innovations.
That it is, maybe it was not that the French imposed a better system, but that the French
imposed _the same_ system in all of them, which was also not worse (as opposed to e.g.
the one imposed by the Soviets in the Warsaw pact countries, where any potential
standardization effects were offset by the shortcomings of the system).
Reply
Robert McIntyre Mar 9
Prediction: 80% the ones taken over by Napoleon did better. Reason: feudal system is trash
and so the bar is already pretty low. By destroying the existing power structures you're mostly
removing assholes that are making things worse.
Reply
DavesNotHere Mar 9
I may be in danger of making the hypothesis untestable, but what hypotheses exactly are we
comparing? The French-occupied lands are counted as instances of top-down design, and
others are considered bottom-up? The post points out that some of the French reforms
actually made things more bottom-up. Was Roman law completely eliminated from the French
reforms, or just the parts that seemed not to fit?
I'm also going back and forth on using GDP as the measure. What other confounding factors
might influence that? What measure would I use, if I could use anything at all? Utils? How long
does it take the higher growth rate to amortize the blood and treasure spent to put the French
in power? Is it possible to get the top-down reforms without paying the blood and treasure?
Might there be less costly ways of destabilizing bad equilibria? Yes, I think I have a bias
showing.
It seems possible to me that a poorly governed city might still have advantages for growth
compared to the countryside, while coming out behind a comparable well governed city. If the
laws are clear, stable, and fairly administered that might matter more than their origin, unless
we think top-down/bottom-up delivers advantages in clarity and honesty.
Even good ideas can be implemented badly. I think what matters is whether people can
innovate and adapt. Have I learned something new, or just moved the goalpost?
Reply
Sergei Mar 9
My advanced guess was that there is no significant correlation. But yeah, at least someone
asked a testable question, and tried to answer it instead of logic about it, the pitfall LW-
infused rats and postrats tend to succumb to.
Reply
Ian Mar 9
Scott: in the future, would you consider leaving a top-level comment to which everybody who
wanted to leave a prediction could reply, in order to collect and contain the predictions?
My prediction was 70% of conquered territories would do better.
Reply
Randomstringofcharacters Mar 9
A poll would also be good. If that's not possible natively in substack could easily be a link
to another site
Reply
Kris Mar 9
I admittedly have read the entire article, but I did register a prediction (to myself) that the
replaced systems would do better. My (no expertise) gut reasoning is that lots of economic
things work better at bigger scales, and that the benefits of having a common legal/economic
system "gifted" to you by a larger power probably has positive effects, regardless of the
actual merit of those systems.
Reply
Byrel Mitchell Mar 9
Preregistered prediction: Napolean-affected areas did better on average. 80% confidence.
Reply
Peter Robinson Mar 9
>>Are you sure you want to keep reading now? You’ll never get another chance to predict this
from a position of ignorance!<<
Aarggh!
I truly don't know the answer.
In my youth I would have sided with the reformers. I had lots of solutions for the ills of the
world. I still have solutions, but now I'm much more cautious about imposing them.
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Ratufa Mar 9
This is something I struggle with in my professional life, though on a vastly less grand scale.
The best solution I've been able to come up with is that you should trust tradition more when
1) it's exposed to competitive discipline and 2) in areas where technology is relatively static. If
95% of firms in a highly competitive industry do things a certain way: that's often because it
gives an advantage over firms that don't. Conversely, rapid technological changes often
erode the rationale for tradition.
Reply
Jason Crawford Writes Jason's Reading List · Mar 9
I am going to predict that the radically-reformed polities did better… not because of any
philosophic leaning but because of what little I know about Napoleon's reforms
Reply
Jason Crawford Writes Jason's Reading List · Mar 9
OK, I was right. I am bad at predictions so I forgot to give a probability. Anyway.
I think Scott is right that this is just a case of “the reforms were good”. Yes, breaking up
the guilds was good. There are also some relevant passages towards the end of
Margaret Jacob's *Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West*—I don't
remember the details, but basically pre-Revolution France was very hierarchical and had
this small cadre of authorities who controlled all industrial projects.
Britain didn't need this because they didn't have this problem and they solved the
problem of guilds, etc. in their own way.
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Mo Nastri Writes Mo’s Reads · Mar 9
I honestly thought you were going to say "...but because I'm Jason 'Roots of Progress'
Crawford". I love your essays on progress studies by the way; they're fantastically
quotable.
Reply
Jason Crawford Writes Jason's Reading List · Mar 9
Ha, thanks!
Reply
Peter Robinson Mar 9
>>The idea was that the occupying American forces couldn't care less about the entrenched
power structure and vetocracy in Germany and Japan, so they rammed through whatever
reforms seemed like good ideas at the time, and they were in fact mostly good ideas. On the
other hand, the Soviet Union tried the same thing in East Germany and that went less well.<<
It is reasonable to presume that what you are imposing matters. In this case capitalism is
better than collectivism, at least as measured by economic growth.
Reply
 None of the Above Mar 9
Everyone talks about the huge success the allies had imposing a better government on
Germany after WW2, but nobody talks about the utter clusterfuck the allies left behind in
Germany and the remnants of Austria-Hungary, which gave us Nazism (with some
reasonably high chance we'd get Communism in Germany instead) and led to the
second world war. A reasonable guess here is that imposing a new government from
above is pretty hard to get right.
Reply
ragnarrahl Mar 9
After WWI, the allies were actively trying to leave a clusterfuck behind.
Reply
Carl Pham Mar 10
Well the French certainly were, and Wilson had perhaps already had a stroke
and couldn't focus what was left of his brain on anything other than his magical
League of Nations. One wonders what 20th century European history would
look like if the leadership of the US at the end of *both* world wars hadn't been
suddenly crippled.
Reply
Igon Value Mar 9
Germany wasn't even occupied in WWI. If France/Britain/US had imposed a
government then, it would have made it clear that Germany had lost. At the very
least it would have removed the Nazi argument about a "knife in the back". The fact
that the Germans never felt they had lost the war may have been the biggest factor
in the rise of Nazism.
Reply
Guy Tipton Mar 10
Hum... if by allies you include Communist Russia that might work. The case could be
made (margin problem) that Nazism was the reaction to the International
Communism, a form of Communist Russia colonialism?
Reply
Joseph Hertzlinger Mar 9
Theory: Being conquered for a short period can be helpful but only if the conqueror
withdraws after breaking up the local monopolies.
Reply
Mr. Doolittle Mar 9
As far as theories easily explained that may also be correct, this sounds accurate on first
reading. History has these happen quite rarely compared to 1) conquests where the
conqueror stays and 2) conquests where the conqueror is expelled without breaking up
the local monopolies.
 It's quite rare to have a conqueror with the power and longevity to change local power
structures who goes away within a limited timeframe. You would need a more altruistic
approach (US with Japan and Germany) or for a third party to defeat the conqueror
(Napoleon by the British).
Reply
Ben Eisenpress Mar 9
I think Seeing Like A State only applies to complex systems, which resolves some of the
apparent contradictions here. Complex systems have many interacting components. Cities
and agricultural systems, profiled in Seeing Like A State, are good examples. Top-down
reform doesn't work in complex systems because they are inherently difficult to model.
Breaking up oligarchies isn't in the same category. Economists can confidently recommend
breaking up extractive institutions because the first order effects are so good. The second
order impacts are just a rounding error. In contrast, a city is a complex system that is all about
second and third order impacts. Evolved institutions can be irreplaceable in complex systems,
but aren't necessarily better in other settings.
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Peter Robinson Mar 9
So can we find an analogous situation if we examine the effect of imposing Roman Law?
Reply
Zach Mar 9
i think this comparison sort of highlights how this is a ridiculous question. it would
depend almost entirely on what system was imposed, how it was imposed, surrounding
conditions, nature of the place it was imposed on, and how you chose to measure what
changes occurred, and what change you consider good.
Reply
Markk116 Mar 9
Originally 0.7 on conquered dutchies outperforming non conquered ones but flipped my
prediction after misremembering the title of this post to be "The Cost Of Radical Reform".
Reply
Robert Stadler Mar 9
If we think of this as analogous to searching for a global minimum when one is currently stuck
at a local minimum, then the question of whether radical reform is a good idea can be
rephrased as asking whether we should try a large jump or a small one. There is no fully
general solution to this problem, but we do have some heuristics.
One heuristic is, "How bad is our current equilibrium? Is it more or less ok, or are people really
miserable?" This lets us distinguish between the cases of a healthy neighborhood where
Robert Moses wants to build a highway and a crappy principality full of oppressed peasants.
Another, similar heuristic would be, "Are the people resisting change a small elite or a large
underclass?" A small elite may just be trying to hold on to their rents, but broad support
suggests that the current system is actually working reasonably well and shouldn't be lightly
discarded.
Reply
Natalie Mar 9
I'm not very good at thinking about probabilities for my beliefs, but I'm thinking something
like:
20% the radical reforms fared much better
60% the radical reforms fared slightly better
20% the traditional systems fared slightly better
Reply
TheRadicalModerate Mar 9
Another hypothesis: Bottom-up evolutionary changes work better when the
social/political/economic environment is changing fairly slowly, but top-down revolutionary
changes work better when the environment has changed enough to render the current
systems dysfunctional. Seems like this hypothesis is consistent with the findings: Napoleonic
Europe wasn't exactly the most functional environment, so maybe the places that had French
soldiers marching through had the advantage of clearing the dysfunction quicker.
Another observation: Napoleonic France had a wealth of examples of Things Not To Do in the
ten years preceding the Coup of 18 Brumaire. (Example #1: The French Republican Calendar,
where "Brumaire" was a thing.) So maybe the Napoleonic code had the advantage of a
revolutionary framework, with most of the revolutionary rookie mistakes having already been
made.
Reply
darawk Mar 9
60% confidence that the reformed lands do better. However, I think this moment in history
was somewhat unique, as it was on the eve of the industrial revolution. Going into the
industrial revolution, it would have been uniquely beneficial to have a common legal system
with one of the most powerful economic actors in Europe. So, while I think it's likely the
reformed countries did better, I think we have to be a little careful about abstracting too much
from it.
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The Time Mar 9
Feelings Bold - 60% that being conquered by Napoleon is positively correlated with GDP in
the present day. Let's say, 10% better on average.
Going back to the post now.
Reply
The Time Mar 9
 Ok seem I did fine, though the paper wasn't really about the modern day, so I'll not give
myself XP over this.
Reply
Edelritter Mar 9
0.5 that conquered and reformed states did significantly better.
0.3 that they did only slightly better.
0.2 that they did worse.
Reply
The original Mr. X Mar 9
Might be worth pointing out that Napoleon already represented a step back from the most
radical excesses of the French Revolution (no "rational" ten-day weeks or temples of
Reason).
<i>Europe at the time had so many tiny duchies and principalities and so on that you can
actually do a decent experiment on it - for every principality Napoleon conquered and
reformed, there was another one just down the river which was basically identical but
managed to escape conquest.</i>
I don't think this is accurate -- if you look at the map of Napoleon's conquests (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_French_Empire#/media/File:French_Empire_(1812).svg ),
pretty much all the tiny little duchies ended up as part of Napoleon's empire.
Also, the German Confederation (basically the post-Napoleonic equivalent of the Holy Roman
Empire) passed various economic reforms, most notably the customs union of 1834, which
would have disproportionately benefitted the smaller German states -- states which, due to
their size, had also proved easier for the French to conquer. I guess you could say that this
was indirectly due to Napoleon, insofar as the German Confederation wouldn't have existed
without him, but still, the appropriate conclusion wouldn't be "Radical, top-down reform is
inherently good," but "Free trade is better for the economy than a series of tiny, protectionist
micro-states."
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The original Mr. X Mar 9
And this would also explain why the effect was apparently most pronounced after 1850 -
- the reforms take place a few decades after Napoleon, and it would presumably take a
few years for their effects to become fully evident.
Reply
mrkun Mar 9
Prediction comment:
I want to hedge and say that in short-ish term unreformed were better and in long-ish term
reformed win; 0.7 for either of those in separation.
Reply
Phil Getz Mar 9
"So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-
their-traditions polities? ... If you're really feeling bold, post a comment with your prediction
before reading further."
To predict which will do better, I'd need to know how the authors will measure "better". I
predict that the areas brought into the larger state with a unified legal system and
government will do better economically, partly because the Code Napoleon was a pretty good
code, but mostly because it's a lot easier to do business with people who have the same laws
as you, and where you know how or whether law and contracts will be enforced.
But when I've read about various people living under Napoleon's occupying forces, they
generally came to hate the French. So I'd guess that those areas were less happy.
I am, however, skeptical that the experiment can actually be run as described, because I've
never heard anything about there being unoccupied pockets within French-held territory. And
if there were, there must have been something unusual about those pockets, such as being
too remote, inaccessible, or poor to bother with. That would wreck the experiment.
Reply
JBV Mar 9
70% confidence that reform outperforms tradition.
Reply
Wouter Mar 9
prediction: Napoleonic reforms / modernisations improve things drastically in the longer run -
80%
Reply
Wouter Mar 9
SPOILERS
After reading on: yay! But I agree with the rest, that it’s hard to tell what broader
conclusions one can draw from this. Was it because the reforms were radical, and thus,
‘radical reform = good’, or because they were, well good, so, ‘good reform = good’.
Reply
BeingEarnest Mar 9
I predicted 80% conquered areas do better.
Integration into the empire's economy, language & market were my considerations (over the
non-immediate term).
Relatedly, on colonialism there's evidence (from another paper by Acemoglu et al., though
they tell a different narrative, and maybe other papers) that, in the long term, countries never
colonized do worse than those colonized. I think being conquered over land where your
population is integrated into the broader system is beneficial (e.g. Russia in Siberia, or
Napoleon) whereas being exploited by a handful of officials (e.g. Congo, Hispaniola) is
certainly less beneficial, maybe even detrimental.
Reply
Eyebrows Mar 9
Yeah well, you addressed the key concern in your writeup. Here's another prediction for you
to make: suppose you successfully spread the meme that "radical reforms" are good, and
"designed systems are better than evolved ones." This is true because "there was a study."
Do you think more free markets are likely to come of that?
Reply
Bart S Mar 9
This makes sense. I think Scott would agree that the larger "local knowledge gap" is not
between one nation state and its neighbor, but between the hyperlocal community and the
nation state it belongs to.
Maybe national governments are say 95% interchangable with their neighbors, and if the
French policies were already proving their worth back home (compared to their old system),
they would be quite likely to do better than their neighbor's old systems too.
Reply
Bart S Mar 9
Also, it seems the French policies mostly INCREASED the power and freedom of the local
community members, instead of sweeping away and imposing new, maladaptive laws
and practices on them.
I suspect even James Scott would correctly predict the findings of this paper.
Reply
Pablo Villalobos Mar 9
Prediction: reformed is only slightly better on average (60%), and has lower variance (ie both
the best and worst systems are traditional) (70%)
Reply
Guy Mar 9
Did they measure any social outcomes? GDP growth doesn't give a conclusive answer on
whether it was a desirable outcome, and urbanization is not inherently good. Cities are
dysgenic fertility shredders, so in the long run when all of Europe has either adopted these
reforms or they've become irrelevant, then earlier urbanization should have negative effects.
Reply
Hoopdawg Mar 9
Was too immensed in reading to think of a number, but I was pretty certain the invaded
looked better. Retroactively, I'd rate myself at around 80%. It's in fact perfectly consistent
with my priors. Authority structures ossify to serve the people on top, overthrowing them
makes way for progress. Obviously.
I think the problem with contrasting economic accounts with Scott is that they're concerned
with different things. Meaning, not mutually contradictory. Economists study "legible" data
like GDP, Scott looks at the wellbeing of the downtrodden. It can simultaneously be true that
the business is booming and that the people are immiserated, and the texbook example of
this is precisely the (England's) Industrial Revolution. (Which we do have legible data for.
People were shorter, their lives were shorter.)
The takeaway from Scott is not to cease progress, but to watch for the little men that get
trampled by it. The two views can be reconciled by not trampling the little men in the first
place. To be more precise, by carefully rejecting easily-ossifiable and exploitable structures
of authority so that the little men don't have to carefully weave their lives around their
idiosyncracies only to get them thrown into disarray by a sudden disruptive wave of
necessary but careless top-down reforms. Scott himself is an anarchist, which, obviously.
(Needless to say, so am I.)
(To extend a hand to the pro-capitalist libertarians which make up like a half of the readership
here, I commend you for sharing the above intuition. You just need to stop refusing to accept
that capitalism does not solve this problem, in fact, it's itself easily-ossifiable and
exploitable.)
Reply
eleventhkey Mar 9
I predict that radically-reformed areas perform better, 70% confident.
Reply
a real dog Mar 9
In a time of rapid technological change, destruction of the old order will usually be a net
good.
Soviets are a special case. In their homeland they replaced a +/- feudal system with a quasi-
modern one, which had some beneficial effects. In the states they invaded, they replaced an
emerging modern free-market system with a planned economy, with disastrous effects.
So, it depends if you're upgrading or downgrading the social system, I guess, and you have
no way to tell if both are recent.
Reply
orthonormal Mar 9
My probability was .7 that the reformed ones did better, for essentially the same reasons of
legal cruft and rent-seeking.
Reply
dorsophilia Mar 9
Perhaps big picture changes, like opening up markets, work well when externally imposed.
But small scale bureaucratic changes are also necessary, and these work best when there is
time and flexibility for them to evolve to fit the local cultural norms. Just look at how
democracy ( a great idea) didn't work well in Arab Spring countries.
Reply
Josh Mar 9
Ok I'll bite: Before reading past the "prediction pause", I predict 60-40 that Napoleon's
radical reforms did worse than the traditional ones.
My reasoning? I mostly buy the Seeing Like A State-style arguments for bottom-up, illegible
policies; on the other hand, much of what I've heard about Napoleonic reforms--including
driving on one side of the road only--seem very good to me. But back on the first hand again,
I might expect hear about the best Napoleonic reforms and not to hear about all the missteps.
So, 60-40 against radical reforms.
(Also, I'm a physicist with little background in history, so my confidence is not much better
than 50-50.)
Reply
Josh Mar 9
Oopsie doopsie, but at least I accepted my own lack of confidence in my conclusion ex
ante.
Reply
Thiago Ribeiro (Banned) Mar 9
Actually, despite systematic anti-Brazilian propaganda being dispensed through the world for
unconfessable reasons, Brasília is widely considered "a singular artistic achievement, a prime
creation of the human genius" and, accordingly, was chosen as a UNESCO World Heritage
site.
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/445/ .
Reply
ragnarrahl Mar 9
I get the impression most critics of Brasilia aren't criticizing it as art, but rather, as a
place to live.
Reply
Thiago Ribeiro (Banned) Mar 9
Maybe it is better than Rio de Janeiro's slums or Compton.
Reply
Aapje Mar 9
I wonder to what extent this is an artifact of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. To explain, some
Dutch history:
From the latter part of the 17th century, a group of wealthy merchant families were able to
mostly reserve Dutch government offices to themselves, resulting in a ruling class of
'regents,' who served their own interests. The result was dissatisfaction among the middle
class, who revolted twice during the 18th century. The second revolt was put down by
Prussian intervention. At this time, The Netherlands was a client state of the English and the
Prussians, with immense debts, which were paid for with extreme austerity and high
regressive taxes, while an elite was extremely wealthy. In 1794/5, Napoleon managed to
conquer the country, helped by revolts against the regents. This resulted in The Netherlands
becoming a client state of the French. It was not really ruled by the French, but nevertheless
instituted huge reforms, like forming a unitary state, adopting some democracy, adopting
(progressive) income and wealth taxes, etc.
Napoleon's main interest in The Netherlands was to get money to fuel his wars, military
support and a place to launch attacks on Britain from. The Dutch pushed back against this,
eventually making Napoleon so angry that he forced the Dutch to accept his brother as king:
Louis Bonaparte.
However, Louis turned out to have ambitions of his own: to be a good king who served the
interests of the Dutch. He adopted the Dutch nationality and demanded the same from his
ministers. He did his best to learn Dutch and made Dutch the official language of the court.
He didn't crack down on smugglers that evaded the Napoleonic economic blockade of
Britain, which helped the Dutch economy a lot & he refused to institute conscription. He also
refused to write off 2/3rds of Dutch loans to the French.
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orthonormal Mar 9
Meta-comment: a surprising number of commenters (including me) picked *exactly* 70% in
favor of reform.
I chose it because it seems right for "strong intuitions, but epistemic humility because this
topic is complicated". Perhaps others thought alike.
A histogram of peoples' prediction values would be interesting.
Reply
Carl Pham Mar 10
It would be even more interesting to compel people to do it in a variety of bases, i.e. in
addition to percent, choose on a scale of 1 to 12, or 1 to 5, or even -5 to +5, and see if
the numbers match up mathematically. I am guessing they would *not* because I think
too much psychosocial associations with the specific number creeps in.
Reply
Jay Mar 9
I said "Napoleonic code is way better, 80%". I should have said 90%.
Reply
LGS Mar 9
Napoleon-conquered did better, 70%
Reply
Xerambela Mar 9
I think some way to integrate those kinds of predictions into the post itself would be really
interesting. Some widget to make a prediction on a (pre-defined) question after the
introduction, and some summary of the community predictions at the end. I am not sure if the
LW Style prediction widget would suffice already, my gut feeling is that only seeing the
community predictions at the end of the post would be better, but the LW style widget might
already provide some interesting insight, without spoiling the rest of the post. It could
obviously be gamed, but you aren't really cheating anyone but yourself, so that doesn't seem
like that much of a problem.
Reply
Gabriele Mar 9
I have not read the paper, but considering that:
- Napoleon fell in 1815
- 1848 was a famous year of revolutions
- In 1861 Italy was unified and 1871 Germany was unified
I wonder how the paper could claim that everything good was just because of the French
invasion rather than the a general revolutionary spirit or pressure to change.
As a comparison, the modern success of Japan is usually due to the fact that foreign powers
colonized/influenced their neighbours, while they escaped conquest.
Reply
Candide III Mar 9
"Usually due to the fact"?
Japan wasn't forcibly Westernized. XIX century colonial powers weren't interested in
modernizing their colonies, and their Far Eastern colonialism was pretty thin on the
ground. China wasn't modernized by the British, and Japan wasn't modernized by
Americans and the French. Both nations had unequal treaties forced onto them, obliged
to open ports for foreign trade, accept Western residents, and to grant extraterritoriality
to Western subjects, making the latter a sort of super-nobility, but there was not
anything like e.g. the British presence in Egypt, where Lord Cromer was ruler in all but
name. The difference between Bakumatsu Japan and Qing China is that Japan found
resources within itself to modernize of their own accord, whereas Qing China was both
too weak in state capacity and too conceited to learn from barbarians.
Reply
Gabriele Mar 9
> "Usually due to the fact"?
It is typo, it should have been something like "it is usually attributed to the fact".
My point is that it is a common opinion that Japan did better than their neighbors
because it was less influenced by foreign powers. China was also invaded by Japan,
so it did not really escape foreign influence.
 So, I was offering a counter-example (i.e., the success of Japan) to the claim of the
paper.
Reply
Candide III Mar 9
China was invaded by Japan after Japan had spent the four decades after 1854
efficiently modernizing, while China, having had its rude awakening in 1839, 15
years before Japan, but apparently having missed its importance, had spent
the interval thrashing about. As for being influenced by foreign powers, the
extent of direct foreign influence in China and in Japan in mid-XIX century was
small: in neither country was there anything like the colonial systems the British
had in India or later in Egypt. Arguably, Japan had a better start in
modernization than China because indirectly it was _more_ influenced by
foreign powers, through the large numbers of rangaku students, who provided
much of the cadre necessary for modernization. The Qing emperor had an
office for barbarian intelligence, but IIRC Platt writes that the bureaucrats
considered it a nasty and disagreeable appointment.
Reply
The-Serene-Hudson-Bay Mar 9
The deference shown to a "carefully evolved system of traditions" needs to consider whether
the conditions under which the system evolved still hold. The early 1800s is around the time
when a graph of GDP per capita throughout human history curves from essentially a flat line
to a vertical one. Waterloo was in 1815 and the paper discusses growth post 1850, so it is
likely that value of a French invasion is not the particular designed system they imposed, but
the weakening of constraints on future adaptation.
I don't think it makes sense to have a fixed prior about the relative value of evolved vs.
designed systems across all time and space without taking into account particular contexts.
Reply
Ozryela Mar 9
> "The early 1800s is around the time when a graph of GDP per capita throughout
human history curves from essentially a flat line to a vertical one."
Counterpoint. Historic GDP per capita of The Netherlands in 1990 dollars:
in 1500: $761
in 1700: $2130
in 1900: $3329
So per capita GDP growth was bigger from 1500 to 1700 then from 1700 to 1900.
Admittedly, this is an extremely cherrypicked example. The Netherlands was the richest
country in the world in the 16th and 17th century, but underwent significant stagnation in
the 18th century (GDP per capita was lower in 1820 than in 1700!). Nevertheless, the
 claim that GDP per capita was flat until 1800 clearly does not hold up. Though GDP
growth did speed up around the 1800s, and even moreso in the 20th century.
Reply
Ozryela Mar 9
My prediction was that areas conquered by Napoleon would have done much better. But
honestly this wasn't much of a prediction, I spent most of my time trying to remember which
areas Napoleon conquered. This includes most of the currently richest areas of Europe,
making the answer kinda obvious.
Reply
Ironic Age Protestant Mar 9
"But then, isn't the whole point of Seeing Like A State that things which seem obviously true
sometimes aren't?"
No, the point is that a top-down view misses local, tacit and embodied understandings. It only
seems "obviously true" that rectangular grid squares are superior if you have a preference for
rectangular grid squares. Very different things are "obviously true" from a local and embodied
perspective.
"But then you would lose the right to apply Scott to most modern political debates, where
there are no peasants to be found, and everything is the weird mix of extractive and altruistic
typical of modern states."
Have you considered (the conflict theory perspective) that these "altruistic" policies are not
altruistic? People get in a position of power and redistribute value from their opponents to
their clients. Also, this is top-down imposed order. Some guys can obviously afford to pay
taxes, other people are obviously too poor, lets put them in boxes according to how I evaluate
their needs and surpluses.
You may find it relevant that GDP is an imperfect estimate of economic productivity. It seems
easy to see why imposing a top-down system of legibility would result in a measured increase
in GDP, for two reasons. You're moving value from illegible areas to legible areas, and you're
requiring that that value be traded or documented somehow (whereas before value remained
in the local illegible sphere).
Reply
N J Krishnan Mar 9
0.7 radical reform worked
Reply
Lambert Mar 9
Thoughts: It's said the Polish peasants weren't really bothered by the Partitions. They were
just under new management.
The Congo and India and the Soviet Occupation Zone were set up as extractive colonies,
whereas the Americans understood that a strong Japan and West Germany were the keys to
containing Communism. The DDR did later become better supported, but the damage had
been done.
Reply
betulaster Mar 9
"Daron Acemoglu is the most-cited economist of the past ten years, and I've never heard
anyone say a bad word about him"
I'm not - really - an economist, and from what I know Acemoglu is far from being
incompetent, but his "Why Nations Fail" was really weird to me in that it very clearly split
historical periods and personalities into good (inclusive) and bad (extractive). He also seems
to jump to the conclusion that democracy is always definitely better for inclusive institutions,
and IDK how much I believe that.
But in general, I kind of agree with the idea about radical reform failing when it doesn't go far
enough.
Reply
Zach Mar 9
that paper and book are trash
Reply
jnlb Mar 9
Prediction: most likely (~80 %) no significant difference or somewhat mixed.
Reply
jnlb Mar 9
Whoopsie
Reply
Frank Black Mar 9
Regarding why Britain kick ass during the Industrial Revolution, it's worth reading Anton
Howes' substack, since Britain certainly wouldn't seem to be the betting favourite before it all
kicked off.
https://antonhowes.substack.com/
Reply
Kerani Mar 9
The reform principalities did somewhat better than the traditional ones, at about 65% sure.
Lots of confounders and I am not sure how I would qualify 'better' - wealth is about the only
objective measure.
Reply
Akhôrahil Mar 9
Isn't the obvious explanation here that radical change comes with inherent problems, but that
if the existing system is bad enough, it's still fairly possible to make large improvements? The
French revolution swept aside feudal structures that were centuries behind their expiration
date, and the Russian revolution might have worked out well if power hadn't ended up with
people who were literally the worst (and even _those_ people managed to improve
dramatically on industrial production).
Meanwhile, the combination of democracy, capitalism, science and markets mean that
Western society seems fairly proof against that kind of ossification. In these cases, the
problems with radical reforms would almost certainly outweigh the benefits.
Reply
Emrah Dincer Mar 9
I'm boldly saying, before reading, that the duchies Napoleon conquered did better. Now back
to reading.
Reply
Emrah Dincer Mar 9
I didn't even have to think about, it was so hundred percenty obvious. One of the reason
why it worked is that the French are culturally not so much different than the European
duchies they invaded, so what worked for the French also worked for them. For a
comparison (not a one-to-one comparison but still) even though French wanted to make
it a full state, French reforms didn't work as well in Algeria. Another reason it worked is
that the changes were made in good faith to bring there a working system since they
would be client states to Napoleonic France. Compare to for example Belgian Congo.
Re: Britain, there's a case that can be made about the Industrial Revolution really getting
kicked off in Belgium and spreading to Britain, but in any case Britain became the
flagbearer of Industrial Revolution anyway so I cannot dispute this a lot.
One last point which I know nobody here will like: The communist revolution in Russia is
also a great example for this. Hate them as you like; those reforms transformed one of
the poorest, most backward and technologically lagging countries in Europe to a fully
electrified and industrialized superpower with extensively educated citizens in the matter
of a few decades.
Reply
Emrah Dincer Mar 9
By the way my first paragraph also explains why communist reforms didn't work in
East Germany, it wasn't made in good faith but to create a satellite state that was
dependent on USSR, somewhat like how Belgian Congo worked. On the other hand,
USA was trying to create a self sufficient West Germany that can hold its own at
least for a while if the cold war turned hot, so made their reforms in good faith
(better faith than the Soviets in East Germany).
For examples of the other kind, well USA also installed some reforms in bad faith for
example in Chile or Panama.
Reply
Neal Zupancic Writes Implications · Mar 9
"Does radical reform help or hurt" is a very, very different question than "would the
implementation of modern legal systems including the Napoleonic Code raise GDP and
urbanization vs. traditional legal systems in European polities."
For the record, my prediction as to the first question is "I have no earthly idea". I wouldn't
even know how what to include in a data set to try to build a prediction off of, nor would I be
able to quantify a value judgment as to whether the outcomes of reforms were "good" or
"bad".
My prediction as to the second question is "yes, probably." I'm still not really willing to put a
number on "probably" without knowing more specifics. Low confidence, though - maybe
60% - but part of that is admittedly because I expect to see counterintuitive results
presented in this forum.
However, I think framing the question this way kind of gives away the answer. I mean, we
know that "modern" legal systems are at least correlated with greater urbanization, so it
would be kind of surprising if someone found that modernizing and standardizing legal codes
resulted in decreased urbanization. We also have a plausible mechanism as to why and how
modern, standard legal codes facilitate people living in larger cities in which they are more
likely to have dealings with lots of strangers.
Also, in terms of the object question, I think you can see a clear mechanism where having
standardized legal codes might facilitate trade (this even shows up now, in things like the US
not importing foreign medications, and supply chain problems stemming from Brexit). So I
think it's reasonable to predict that this would increase GDP.
After reading the results, I see that my interpretation of the question didn't exactly match the
study, since
Expand full the authors seem to be talking about destroying the institutional power of elites -
comment
Reply
Zach Mar 9
he chose metrics based on what he could estimate (albeit poorly). much of economics
seems to be people looking around for "interesting" data and then seeing how sweeping
a claim they can get away with making based on it.
Reply
Nathan Cook Writes Novum Lumen · Mar 9
Prediction: Frenchies did well on whatever metrics the authors select. This is based on two
things: one, Napoleon as a "make the trains run on time" sort of guy, two, we say "metrics" in
this context, not "measures" – I presume there's a good reason the French word won out. Or,
to summarize both of those things: seeing like a state actually works, in that a strong state
with a powerful executive organ can actually get things done. 80%.
Reply
Nathan Cook Writes Novum Lumen · Mar 9
 (Yes, I'm aware "measure" is French too – it's in Piers Plowman, OK? Norman not
Napoleonic.)
This was a fun game, thanks Scott. To expand on my answer:
The way we think was shaped by the collapse of feudalism and "birth of modernity" that
was essentially completed (in Western Europe) by the Napoleonic wars. The institution of
pervasive systems of measurement marked this turn of the page. If something falls short
on the metrics, it's "objectively inferior" and that's all there is to say about it. Sorry,
Freigraf! Better get those numbers up. Also, don't you think it's about time you had a
proper staff? Here's a list of guys. Yes, they're not exactly men of quality, but don't
worry, they're not *peasants*…
If there's anything good outside of this, comme on dit, "metric system", it's going to be
really, really hard to see from 2021.
Actually, rather than Napoleon vs the feudal lords or whatever, with Napoleon considered
as a sort of prototypical Mussolini or Hitler, I think it'd be more interesting to talk about
Napoleon vs von Metternich. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemens_von_Metternich
Reply
Jacob Manaker Mar 9
The reformed places did better. (85%)
If nothing else, I know from history that a lot of places (especially in Germany) did not undo
the reforms after Napoleon was defeated, and other unconquered places tried to imitate
them. So this suggests that what Napoleon did was valuable.
On a theoretical level, we should expect the politic system a society adopts to depend on the
rate of material change within that society. If your society changes less over time, you can
have more veto points, because the slow leakage of ideas through the system matches the
input. If your society is constantly varying, you should see fewer veto points, because folks
are constantly inventing new carriages/methods of piracy/articles of clothing/siege strategies
etc., and you can't afford to wait to respond to them. And the Napoleonic conquests happen
to occur right about when the Industrial Revolution hit Continental Europe. So we should
expect the ancien regimes to be adapted to the slow hierarchically-constrained change
discussed at https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-
cancelled/ and https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2010/08/notes-on-dynamics-of-human-
civilization.html. Conversely, Napoleonic codes better match the pace of factory innovations.
Now I'm going to go read the rest of the article.
Reply
Mike Stop Continues Writes Mike Stop Continues · Mar 9
Another worthwhile question is whether the states able to fend off Napolean were already
healthier than those he conquered. Perhaps they already had the kind of anti-fragility
Napolean introduced in conquered states, albeit likely not capitalist antifragility.
Reply
 None of the Above Mar 9
You could also have places that had better natural barriers or more insular and united
local populations that made them harder to invade, which could confound your results
either way,
Reply
Chrysophylax Mar 9
My prediction was 70% confidence that the French reforms were beneficial. Obviously getting
conquered isn't great, but textbook growth theory says that good institutions are the most
important driver of economic growth and I had the unfair advantage (relative to people at the
time) of knowing that the Napoleonic Code is still in use two hundred years later.
Reply
Deiseach Mar 9
Ah yes, the French Revolution - so extraordinarily innovative that they ended up being too
weak to fend off a clever popular strongman who eventually made himself Emperor self-
crowned in the presence of the Pope in the cathedral of Notre Dame
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_of_Napoleon_I Yep, that sure kicked out all those old
dusty monarchical and imperial traditions! 😁
There's a reason you mention the Code Napoleon as the new legal code imported by the
French into the occupied areas, and not the Code Robespierre or the Code Révolutionnaire,
and it is because that after the fervour, ferment, and degradation of the Revolution into the
Terror, it was easier for France and French institutions to slip back into the older, more stable,
tradtional models. Yes, they did a lot of changes and reforms, but it wasn't feasible in the long
run to be constantly and continually pulling down, sweeping away, and imposing hither,
thither and yon.
Did the authors of this look at French colonial possessions alongside "yeah we had the
French here for a while but then they left" in regards to how successful they were in the long
run? (I am open to the argument that post-colonisation French possessions did better, but
since most of Africa was colonised by everyone in the times of the Scramble
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa , we can't really find a "this state was never
colonised or occupied by outsiders" to be a control sample. Here, have a collaborative music
video between Malian and French-Spanish musicians https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=J43T8rEOg-I). Small duchies and principalities such as Liechtenstein, Monaco and
Luxembourg managed to survive to this day.
The point about "being invaded and occupied isn't so bad, why your economy will get a
boost!" has me wincing. Germany was a developed European country at the time, the
occupying powers didn't do much meddling apart from "no more Nazis" and pouring in
Expand full comment
Reply
J.J.B. Mar 9
My guess: it won't change anything with a 50% certainty, and largely because to be in Europe
in this revolutionary age means changing eventually.
Subsidiary is that it'll make things better at 20% because, if I remember properly, the
Nepoleonic reforms were fairly standard stuff like 'let people work wherever they want' and
'peasants can wear whatever colors they want', and the reforms didn't touch the dangerous
stuff, like family and religion (at least the Napoleonic reforms didn't, not after the terror).
30% it makes things worse largely on my general supposition that breaking apart institutions
sucks and that being invaded sucks.
Reply
Pontifex Minimus 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Writes Pontifex Minimus · Mar 9
My prediction was that the Napoleon-reformed states gained a small but significant increase,
of the order of around 10% of GDP. My reasoning was that having lots of incompatible
weights and measures plus lots of fees and internal customs duties, cannot have helped
trade.
Reply
James S Mar 9
I predict the reformed states did slightly better on average with lower variance. Although I'm
dubious that this is measurable.
Reply
Yoav Ravid Mar 9
My prediction was 70% that traditional polities did better.
Reply
Evanescence Mar 9
Prediction: 65% chance Napoleon made things better.
Reply
Losna1 Mar 9
How about positive effects from a bigger market? Created by unifying the conquered areas.
Less obstacles to trade, lower barriers for entry, simply better capitalism...
Reply
Lambert Mar 9
You see that a lot in the mess that was early 19th c. Germany. Napoleon mediatized the
Germanies into medium-sized states. Then the states formed various customs unions
before the emergence of the Kaiserreich. (being as much political maneuvering between
Austria, Prussia and the smaller states as it was a general trend towards greater
economic efficnecy)
Reply
CascadingContingencies Mar 9
I'll predict that the conquered regions did better, but only because I've heard that after
Napoleon was defeated, merchants in the liberated regions lobbied to keep Napoleonic law,
arguing it was better for trade.
Reply
magic9mushroom Mar 9
"is this potentially challenging a carefully evolved system of traditions?"
Interesting wording, which actually differentiates between these cases to a reasonable extent.
Peasants, after all, have had a lot longer to evolve good farming traditions than guilds had had
to evolve good industrial traditions (Napoleon being, y'know, right in the middle of the
Industrial Revolution). Peasants have had a lot longer to evolve good farming traditions than
*anybody* has had to do *anything*, except maybe societal fabric traditions.
(Social traditions are a lot harder to nail down when and whether there has been this kind of
paradigm shift. Of course, in the case of societal fabric the state of theory on what makes for
good cohesion and effectiveness is kind of *notoriously terrible*, so it's hard to actually point
to many cases of people trying to use theory (Social Justice, the Cultural Revolution and
psychiatry probably count, but I can't think of much else).
Reply
Nancy Lebovitz Writes Input Junkie · Mar 9
What counts as societal fabric traditions? I'd say definitely language. Religion? Music?
On the first pass, I thought you meant literal fabric.
Reply
magic9mushroom Mar 11
What is permitted, what is forbidden, what is expected in how people interact with
each other. Leviticus/Deuteronomy is one of the most explicit examples, but it's
frequently largely implicit. Established religion is definitely part of this, of course,
but the "established" is more important than the "religion"; gnosis-based
spirituality is pretty much irrelevant here, while established non-religious
philosophies (e.g. Confucianism) definitely are part of it.
While the stated aims of these traditions are usually random and made-up
(evolution never knows what it's wrought, only that it works), the effects selected
for here are things like "raise the birth rate", "foster community spirit", and "stop
epidemics".
Reply
arrow63 Mar 9
65% Napoleon was a net positive.
Reply
Candide III Mar 9
@SSC: comments are a mess: substantive comments drown in a sea of one-liner predictions.
I suggest that when you call for predictions in a post not exclusively devoted to a call for
predictions, make a comment thread specifically for predictions.
Reply
 Edward Scizorhands Mar 9
Yeah, this didn't work well, but I'm still glad Scott tried something new. A root comment
for predictions would be good, or even an entirely separate post.
Reply
Watchman Mar 9
Where to start on this? Perhaps with a confession: I didn't make a prediction because as a
still-practising historian it feels wrong to guess the answer to a historical question rather than
look at some evidence and hypothesis. If had done I would have probably got the answer
wrong though because I have a deep- seated aversion to modernist reforms, which would
likely skew any other priors. This may be relevant to the critique that follows.
I would be concerned on the underlying methodology of this work, simply because I'm slightly
stumped as to where you would find accurate comparable measures for GDP, urbanisation or
anything else that would suit such an analysis in pre-Napoleonic Europe (it's not as if weights,
measurements or even clocks and calendars were in any way standardised, so actual
measurable economic measuresare expectedto be reconstructable?). These sort of statistics
are only gathered by modern states not small feudal societies. So in this case they must have
been invented, probably using existing data (comparability unknown) and some level of
assumption. A twentieth/twenty-first-century creation of an eighteenth-century GDP for a
small Rhineland duchy is not the same as a twentieth-century GDP measure for a Rhineland
town, which is a serious methodological issue. Just because you want to compare something
doesn't mean you can: the assumption you can do so is perhaps a sign that you are inclined
to believe that states are quantifiable and manageable, which is likely to skew your
conclusions. This is why professional historians tend not to produce theories like this: their
reputation can survive most things, but being known for mishandling data to reach a
conclusion is a serious problem akin to being a pseudo-historian.
I'd also note that the UK is not an outlier here, but rather was ahead of the curve. Whereas
much of Europe had a new liberal order imposed by conquest around 1800, the English and
Scots had forged theirs in the wars of the seventeenth-century, where absolutism was
defeated
Expand full and the commons asserted their authority over the aristocracy (you could argue
comment
Reply
MrMind Mar 9
Since I've no way to determine whether or not French reforms would improve things, I'd just
wager that they increased fungibility of the state-machine. 11/9 odds that they improved the
status quo
Reply
Silver_Swift Mar 9
> If you're really feeling bold, post a comment with your prediction before reading further.
I am feeling bold, so 60% on the reformed systems performing at least somewhat better
(expecting to be proven wrong, though, given the title and what I expect Scotts take on this to
be).
Reply
Silver_Swift Mar 9
Ok, so yeah, replacing things with better things is good, replacing things with worse
things is bad, got it.
If true, that is actually very good news, because it means when we want to fix things we
"only" have to compare the current system to the improvements we want to make and
not worry too much about accidentally breaking some poorly understood miracle
functionality of the old system.
Also wow, there are a lot of people at around the same level of confidence (and in the
same direction). I had not anticipated that.
Reply
david roberts Mar 9
2/3rds that the non-conquered did better.
Reply
david roberts Mar 9
I guess sometimes a useless fence is just a useless fence.
Reply
Metacelsus Writes De Novo · Mar 9
70% chance that the French-reformed areas did better. I vaguely remember reading
something about the influences of French-imposed legal reforms in my AP European History
class.
Reply
Thomas Kehrenberg Mar 9
My conclusion from this debate of technocracy vs tradition is then that in order to predict
which one will be better, you have to have economic theory (or whatever theory is
appropriate). If you know that markets typically work better, then it's possible to predict that
pro-market reform will likely improve things.
I suspect that modern urban design theory could also have predicted that Brasilia was a bad
idea.
Reply
Akidderz Writes E Pluribus Unum · Mar 9
Prediction: probably depends on the reforms, but Napoleonic (being mostly good and
modern) will be positive.
Reply
Grant Gould Mar 9
Call this the _The Mouse that Roared_ hypothesis.
(You could even cast Peter Sellers as Napoleon if he weren't dead)
Reply
Matt Parker Mar 9
I think traditional does better on average, with a 65% probability. (TL;DR: I am reading Seeing
Like A State)
Reply
autantonym Mar 9
Requested prediction: my gut says that the conquered people did better along objectively
measurable dimensions in the short term (greater production in monetary terms, fewer
deaths by starvation?), but worse on squishier dimensions (lower subjective well-being,
possibly higher rates of alcoholism and depression).
Reply
autantonym Mar 9
So the article makes it sound like occupation was a slam dunk, but so far only uses
metrics of urbanization and economic growth. It does that "there is no evidence of a
negative effect of French invasion", but in the absence of evidence specifically related to
non-economic well-being of the conquered people, I'm not going to fully agree with the
"all good, no bad" perspective (though I do adjust my assumptions significantly towards
"it was good on the whole" and away from "a trade-off, possibly worse along some
dimensions and better on others")
Reply
Aristides Mar 9
Prediction: reforms dramatically increased urbanization, since prerevolutionary Europe had
systems that discouraged urbanization. Post industrial revolution, urbanized areas exploded
in GDP, so I believe GDP would have gone up proportional to urbanization, but not any higher
than can be explained by urbanization. Politically I'm conservative.
Reply
Aristides Mar 9
I was right on Urbanization, and it is unclear if the higher GDP was caused solely by
urbanization, not free market reform. Wish we had other metrics as well
Reply
timunderwood9 Mar 9
Oooh: Advanced prediction. For me the same as the top one I see. No substantial difference.
Gears type explanation: They are both part of European culture which is the primary
economic driver.
Possible confounder would be that the states reformed by France probably are on average
physically closer to England, and thus the primary point from which industrial development
diffused.
Reply
Mark P Xu Neyer (apxhard) Mar 9
Pre-read predictions:
I think the places that underwent radical reform should exhibit much wider variance in
outcome than places which didn’t undergo change. I’m 80% confident here.
I think at least some places that underwent radical reform should have performed better than
they used to: I’m 70% confident here.
I think that at least 20% of the places that underwent radical reform should have performed
worse than they used to. I’m 70% confident here.
I think there’s going to be a bunch of questions around metholodgy that will difficult to know
or tell how much some places did or didn’t improve. I’m 90% confident these questions will
exist and 80% confident they’ll be Enough to make it very difficult to concretely say much
here besides “sometimes it works well, sometimes it really doesn’t,” with a slightly higher
weight towards the “it doesn’t” end of the distribution.
Reply
Anteros Mar 9
Isn’t it the case that it’s the least successful entrenched systems that tend to get radically
revolutionised? Well functioning successful ones less so - and are more likely to be the ones
imposing revolutionary change on others.
I think if that’s true, it’s going to skew how likely it is that radical revolutions result in
functional improvements
Reply
Nancy Lebovitz Writes Input Junkie · Mar 9
I didn't have the nerve to make a prediction, but I wondered if immigration/emigration would
be a good test for which places had gotten better or worse.
Reply
Radu Floricica Mar 9
I remember visiting the big castle in Salzburg and hearing the guide talk about all the
improvements and new walls being built and wondering why on earth they keep building walls
when it already looks impossible to take. So remember my reaction when I heard how it fell:
Napoleon was moving through the area with his army, without any intention of going towards
the city. So the city rulers hurried to send messengers after him to surrender.
Napoleon isn't exactly your average ruler - it's the kind of guy apparently you want to be
conquered by. On the other hand I finished reading Conquest and Cultures, and a common
pattern is that conquered people do A LOT better than their freer neighbors. And yet, east
germany did (much) worse under the soviets. Why?
Well, one explanation is that being conquered exposes you to a higher level of civilization -
after all, they managed to conquer you so they must be doing something better. And also
bring you in a market of technology and exchange that is usually a lot better than you
previous single country level. In East Germany's case it just happened that being conquered
by Russia was just objectively worse than being conquered by the West - worse market,
worse tech, (much) worse ideologies. After all, the betters conquering the worse is just an
average tendency, not a rule. And Germany was once the kind of country that tried to
conquer the world. So them losing that battle and getting divided up like a big pie is not the
same phenomenon as a lone country getting gobbled up by an empire.
Reply
John Mar 9
When writing about modern development, economists often talk about moving peasants off
the land and into more productive work, e.g., factories. It strikes me that old European
systems like common land allowed a lot of very marginal peasants to hang on in the
countryside, where their inconsistent labor was of course not very productive. When the
commons were abolished and the system rationalized, they could no longer feed themselves
and moved to the cities. So it was easier for factory owners to find workers in places where
the countryside had been de-feudalized, and industry grew faster. This makes perfect sense
at an Econ 101 level. On the other hand the mechanism by which this was achieved was
cleansing millions of people off the land, using the threat of starvation, and forcing them to
move to places where by this argument their descendants did not really benefit until 50 years
later. The time scale makes this data useless for talking about modern reforms, since nobody
is going to wait 50 years for good results. Heck, the radical reforms in Russia may turn out in
a century to have been great. Who cares?
Reply
Jason Mar 9
65% that reformed principalities do better
Reply
CB Mar 9
I used to work in factory automation. When I first started somebody explained to me
something about how bottom-up evolution interacts with top-down redesign:
Him: We're going to go to [place] and do major upgrades to a 20-year-old [assembly line].
Me: They'll be happy - the new [robotics gear] is way more efficient.
Him: No, it never goes that way. We design and install this new system that is obviously
better. Then the client complains that their operation is less productive.
Me: How? The [robotics gear] is way faster than what we're replacing it with. And the
[operator interfaces] aren't cobbled together out of old circuit boards and TV screens.
Him: It's the operators. They get *really good* at operating the line. They know all it's quirks.
They do little hacks to make things work more smoothly, or they'll figure out a way to run
[different product] through the line when it's otherwise idle.
Me: So they'll get more productive on this line, but not until they've worked on it for a while?
Him: Yeah, they'll be way ahead of where they were eventually. But they'll hate every moment
of it, and curse us engineers for swooping in and disrupting their system that was working
great.
---
Can we reconcile the top-down planning vs. bottom-up evolution in a similar way? Big
reforms change which landscape you're on (for better or worse) and accumulation of metis
moves you toward its highest point?
Reply
Andrew Clough Mar 9
Whenever I recommend someone read Seeing Like a State I also recommend they read The
Ghost Map or some other book where top down reform worked out very well. Sometimes
coordination problems are hard and some order needs to be imposed.
But with regards to Britain specifically it wasn't so traditional as all that. There was enclosure,
toll pikes, and all sorts of changes. But Britain had Parliament where different interests could
bargain and change things in a way that incorporated some degree of bottom up knowledge.
Pure autocracies can't do that and have to rely on tradition to a greater extent.
Reply
Njnnja Mar 9
You will find that to be an important lesson as you try to run a business. When you have to
judge each proposal as “good, let’s do it” or “bad, let’s not”, you should carefully consider the
devil’s advocate position to make sure you aren’t missing something, but you have to hold in
check the intellectual urge to give extra weight to counterintuitive arguments just because
they are cool. A good idea is a good idea.
Reply
Dave Lewis Mar 9
My prediction before reading is a bimodal distribution. Radically reformed small entities will
60% have done better and 40% have done worse. So in particular, the variance of outcomes
will be higher.
Reply
Hyperborealis Mar 9
Ok, prediction. Napoleonic conquest marginally positive, where disrupted communities
relatively more open to subsequent urbanization and industrialization. And also to
nationalism, state bureuacracy, and eventually EU. 60% confidence. Null case: Weber's iron
cage enforces most of this anyway, so Napoleonic conquest not very significant.
Reply
Ninety-Three Mar 9
I predicted "no effect" from radical reform, as I see a lot of commenters did, but most people
aren't explaining their reasons so I will: I metagamed it. The fact that you're bothering to ask
the question implies it has an interesting answer, and the most interesting answer after you
set up the reasons to believe both pro and con is "haha, trick question, it doesn't matter!"
Reply
Dallas DIngle Mar 9
Just finished Joseph Henrich's "The Weirdest People in the World". He suggests it was a
cultural psychology that changed due to first the Catholic church limiting cousin marriages
among other things and then after due to Protestants promoting individualism,learning to
read and friendly behavior to people other than your relatives. Lots more detail in the book of
course and but super well researched. We are "WEIRD" (Western,Educated, Industrious,Rich
Democracies)!
Reply
Dallas DIngle Mar 9
Here's a review of the "The Weirdest People in the World" with more info:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-henrich-weird-
people/615496/
Reply
Max Tolkoff Mar 9
Part of me wonders if the answer is democracy. You do those things which seem intuitive
(popular) if they work great, if they don’t then you vote the people out and do something else.
It’s not perfect (good ideas implemented poorly go away) and it’s not like an authoritarian like
Napoleon can’t get it right by accident, but it is probably why democracies are so much richer
than non-democracies.
Reply
Big Worker Writes Big Worker’s Newsletter · Mar 9
The weakness of the "evolved institutions" side of things for me has ways been that the only
thing institutions are evolving to maximize is longevity. There's a good reason to think a
system that has lasted a long time will last a lot longer, no reason to think that system is more
beneficial than the alternatives.
In a peasant context, or any other individual or small community context, we can imagine that
systems will evolve towards being useful to those carrying them out. In a larger societal
context though where people can exploit each other and have divergent interests the system
can easily be long lasting based on its benefits to some, even as it harms most.
Reply
The original Mr. X Mar 9
<i>The weakness of the "evolved institutions" side of things for me has ways been that
the only thing institutions are evolving to maximize is longevity. There's a good reason to
think a system that has lasted a long time will last a lot longer, no reason to think that
system is more beneficial than the alternatives.</i>
 Generally speaking, though, really awful systems fall pretty quickly, simply because
they're so awful. A long-lasting system might not be *optimal*, but it's at least going to
be *tolerable*, whereas you don't know beforehand whether your plan to move
everybody out of their home villages and move them into evenly-sized rectangular grids
in your capital is going to create a wondrous futuristic techno-state or a hellish dystopia.
Reply
korak Mar 9
60% that "traditional" ones did better
Reply
Krazy Kat Mar 9
> Take a second to make a prediction here - a real prediction, with a probability attached.
I predict that 2/3 of the radically reformed polities did better than their left-to-their-traditions
polities. I'm generally sympathetic to the Seeing Like a State argument, but my gut sense is
that the polities in 19th century Europe were saddled with too much dead-weight tradition. So
on balance, they needed some shaking up.
Reply
Thomas Payne Mar 9
On “getting conquered by a foreign enemy is good for economic growth.” This is one of
Sowell’s findings across lots of different groups far beyond Japan and Germany in Wealth,
Poverty, and Politics.
But his argument was that it was isolation that kills and cultural exchange, regardless of
whether it is forced, that creates prosperity.
Reply
galaga Mar 9
A selection effect that's possibly worth pondering on when thinking about the French
invasions: being invaded probably selects for not being powerful enough to resist invasion,
which probably correlates with having a less effective economic/political system in place,
which correlates with a higher probability that installing a new system causes general
improvement.
Reply
Bullseye Mar 9
Conquered areas didn't just do better than they had done before - they did better than
unconquered areas. If unconquered areas had better institutions to begin with, that
makes the contrast even more striking.
Reply
galaga Mar 9
Ah right of course! That does make it more striking.
Reply
PM Mar 9
Ok I'll bite and make a prediction without reading past the break...
The areas conquered by Napoleon did better in long term progress indicators on average,
70% confidence.
A) These areas would have been on average more impacted by the wars and therefore
stronger postwar catch-up growth (think post WW2 growth on a smaller scale).
B) The reforms that survived the process of 10-15 years of reform followed by a reaction
could be some of the more effective.
The 30% goes to the many potential confounders, me overestimating A, me underestimating
the downsides of B, or just missing something entirely.
Reply
Kyle M Mar 9
0.7 makes things better. 0.5 it makes it better in a way that also creates some meaningful
costs (more inequality or social strife or something like that).
Reply
Elias Håkansson Mar 9
Prediction: Since Daron Acemoglu is the author I'm guessing that authoritarian imposition of
pro-democratic institutions are good, and since this is the case they brought up that's
probably what happened here. In the wake of Napoleon, principalities were turned into
polities with on average slightly more democratic institutions than before and they were
better off for it.
Reply
Elias Håkansson Mar 9
Ahh, nice. Granted, only reason I got this somewhat right was because I already knew
what Acemoglu would be likely to say..
Reply
mimi Mar 9
> Take a second to make a prediction here
61% in favor of radically-reformed polities
thought process:
It's a binary question, so without considering any evidence I should start at 50%. What kind
of evidence can I consider? For one thing, the Napoleonic Code is even in this post called
"modern", so it has at least endured, which is a point in it's favour- it's at least not so much
worse that it's been abolished everywhere. It's been so socially ingrained that I even have
trouble imagining not having a family name for people, so it's definitely been successful in the
sense that it's enduring.
I'd think that the reformed policies make the principalities more legible compared to the
unconquered ones, which should have an impact. I also think the reforms should take energy
that would otherwise be used productively elsewhere, so I'm expecting at least an initial dip,
which could possibly have a sustained impact through compound returns?
On the whole I personally just don't have enough background knowledge to be very certain,
so I'll stay close to my starting point. Still, I think this is moderate evidence to positive impact,
so I'll move a couple of decibans towards positive.
let's say 61% probability that the radically-reformed polities do better than the left-to-their-
traditions polities.
Reply
mimi Mar 9
Let's see how I do.
Reply
DJ Mar 9
To me it seemed obviously true that Napoleon’s interventions were an improvement. That is
often the case with empires because they have to standardize trade and law in order to scale.
Rome had a similar impact, as did the British empire.
Reply
Jordan R Mar 9
Traditional does better at first, but then Reform catches up and surpasses. Probability 65%.
Reply
Ant Mar 9
Before reading, the reformer did better around 80% of the time, because traditionally,
monarchy are really bad for the economy. They don't want train because they allow easier
revolt, they don't care about progress because the powerful don't have any risk of becoming
poor, and the way to become powerful is to suck up other powerful people
Reply
i’m a taco Mar 9
Predicting that the reformed polities did modestly better overall, with 65% confidence.
Reply
Edward Scizorhands Mar 9
Prediction: there will be a bell-curve of outcomes, centered around slight improvements. Even
though the reforms were top-down, they were made by people with similar cultures who had
absorbed many of the improvements.
Reply
bagel Mar 9
You psyched me out! I predicted that the kingdoms were sclerotic and inefficient and so with
75% confidence Napoleon’s reforms increased measurable qualities ... eventually. But I
consciously factored in my belief about why you were asking and that overrode my small
knowledge of history.
As to why the Industrial Revolution started in Britain and not France, Britain had a several
hundred year lead on reforming their monarchy. The Magna Carta was a different sort of
reform, but it began the diffusion of power from a narrow aristocracy to wider elite class, who
went on to have lots of first sons who ran family businesses and third sons who had lots of
free time to seek clout by inventing stuff.
I think the same thread runs through why Communism failed, and it’s a point Nassim Taleb
makes in economic contexts; you can be brilliant and see five years into the future, or just
some guy if you keep your options open because in five years the answer may be obvious.
Command economies - like kingdoms but also communism - are fragile to planning problems.
The Soviets accidentally killed tens of millions of their own people with farming edicts and
missed the boat on computers. And as long as the guy in power refused to get it, the right
thing might never evolve.
Of course, a diffusion of power can also experience the fragility of planning problem, if the
big players collude. Revolutionary reform may be effective at breaking up those cozy
relationships, and may endure if it thoughtfully distributes power instead of consolidating it.
Reply
i’m a taco Mar 9
I think the answer is some combination of “energy is required to leave some local maxima and
reach a new, higher maxima” and “most random paths away from a local maxima do not lead
higher on net.” Meaning, I wonder if 19th century Western Europe was particularly ripe for this
in a way that other attempts at reform were not. And that the incoming reforms had a
sufficient degree of objective betterness that most of the work was done in smashing up
inert, entrenched power structures and less in railroading cultural shifts.
In other words I am a Scott, except when I’m not.
Reply
MJH Mar 9
Perhaps there is a distinction to be drawn between frameworks that enable valuable organic
developments to be rewarded and reinforced (e.g., the rule of law, or, more specifically,
intellectual property law) versus frameworks privileging entrenched interests. The Napoleonic
Code was a quantum advance over "what the king or prince or whatever says is the law is the
law," and of course the development of the common law, well before the NC, was one of the
major factors in priming Britain for its era of hegemony.
Reply
Aurelien Mar 9
OK, from the perspective of someone who has lived in France for a long time and been
involved with the country for forty years.
First, Napoleon and the Revolution are not the same thing, and the Revolution itself went
through various stages. It's often forgotten that the original Revolution was just the kind of
high-level imposition of new ideas on France itself that Scott talks about, and was often
deeply and violently resented. Some of the really wacky ideas (decimal days and years for
example) never really caught on. Even the metric system only really became accepted in the
last century everywhere, and, even today, if you buy half a kilo (500 gm) of apples in the
market, you generally ask for "une livre", the old, pre-revolutionary measure equating to the
English pound.
Second, what matters is the objective. Scott's agricultural examples, also in his book "Against
the Grain", refer to a system that had evolved over a very long period of time and reached a
kind of stasis. The judgement about whether they worked is essentially technical. So-called
"modern" systems, alleged to give a better result technically, did not do so. Indeed, in Europe
at least, so-called "permaculture" systems are now coming into fashion. But political and
economic change is very different, and hard to evaluate objectively. What is true is that the
French invasions gave a helpful shove to a process which was anyway inevitable - the
construction of larger political and economic units based on popular sovereignty rather than
inherited royal prerogative. But this was coming anyway, and in certain countries, like
England, it came more slowly and peacefully, since the English ruling classes took fright at
the prospect of a revolution there. (Even today, though, much of the British political system is
distinctly less "modern" than the French, to the point where one historian memorably desired
Britain as "the last functioning medieval state in Europe." ) The same was true, incidentally, of
Japan: they modernised in their own way and at their own pace, taking what was needed from
outside. Japan was already a modern state before WW2, and the "changes" much talked
about as a result of the US occupation were largely cosmetic. Essentially, the Japanese
carried on as before. But this was because the balance of power was different (the Japanese
had a highly literate and well-educated society with lots of social capital, and hardly any
USians spoke Japanese). What happens today is that foreigners descend on a society, like
some in Africa, where little is written down and much of life is regulated by custom, and
replace (as I've seen) traditional practices in the market with a new code of commercial law,
literally translated from German, or whatever, which requires an infrastructure of literate
tradespeople, inspectors, lawyers and judges to enforce it, none of which exist.
Reply
Carl Pham Mar 10
The last part sounds a bit like E. F. Schumacher
Reply
John Mar 9
I find it pretty funny that most people guessed the areas reformed by the French would do
worse. I guessed they would do better, but I had enough historical knowledge that it wasn't
much of a guess. Something a lot of commenters missed is that the both the reformed and
non-reformed areas were invaded by France. The non-reformed areas were just left under the
control of their previous owner. That means you shouldn't expect one side to be more
negativity affected by the Napoleonic wars than the other.
Reply
Titanium Dragon Mar 9
If being conquered was good, the Roman Empire falling shouldn't have led to massive
decreases in standard of living.
But it did.
Likewise, if you look at Eastern Europe vs Western Europe post World War II, Western Europe
did vastly better than Eastern Europe. Why? Because Eastern Europe was controlled by the
USSR.
Colonized countries generally did better than non-colonized countries - unless the colonized
country was developed, in which case, the developed country did better.
There are an enormous number of examples of these things.
The main differentiator seems to be the quality of the culture that won out/conquered them.
The idea that organic systems are inherently good is obviously deeply flawed. That is why
Chesterton's Fence is such an important heuristic.
Reply
The original Mr. X Mar 9
<i>If being conquered was good, the Roman Empire falling shouldn't have led to massive
decreases in standard of living.
But it did.</i>
I don't know where you're getting this idea from. In terms of population density,
urbanisation, literacy, and long-distance trade, every part of the old Western Empire
showed a long-term decline after the Empire's fall.
Reply
Titanium Dragon Mar 9
Uh, that's exactly what I said.
The Western Roman Empire fell apart because parts of it were conquered by various
local tribes and groups. This resulted in a decline in standard of living.
Reply
The original Mr. X Mar 10
Sorry, I missed the word "falling" and read that as "The Roman Empire
shouldn't have led to massive decreases..."
Reply
Algon33 Mar 9
Chance the reforms were destructive: 99%
 Well, I can safely say that I made the worst prediction. Lessons for myself: think whether you
accounted for all the relevant information, are answering the right question and are not
spouting complete insanity.
Reply
broblawsky Mar 9
Prediction: net GDP growth for reformed polities is higher than for non- reformed polities up
to 1900, 70% confidence. Not going to bet on the effect size, though.
Reply
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