In "Decline of the West" Spengler akins countries to living organisms that go through phases of growth, maturity, and decline. This may help if you have a tree in your yard, err--I mean, you have a country, and want see where that country is and therefore what likely events are to befall it. Assuming Spengler's story is true and there are enough data points for there to be good guesses of the options and that nothing new or usual happens. Problems arise should you try to map Spengler's system to, say, technology, where we can see the growth, maturity, and decline of various softwares or protocols--ram doublers, FTP, IRC considered as an Egyption dynasty doing the "I'm not dead, yet!" routine--but it may be difficult to map the centuries Spengler uses for repeated civilizations to the nanosecond frenzy of, say, JavaScript frameworks du jour. Maybe with more data?

Toynbee (I cheated and studied only the abridgement) also follows Spengler, and points to out-of-touch elites who get rolled by barbarians of some stripe. This is also descriptive--how do we know when the elites are out of touch (Intel's tick-tock-thud cycle?) who are the barbarians (some new startup?) and how do you account for regime changes where not-so-barbarian folks take over (the French revolution). Halley's comet, maybe?

Boix: Political Order And Inequality

"Political Order and Inequality" by Carles Boix is a rather good book; it posits a simple game whereby agents can produce or loot. If someone is good at producing, then it makes sense for others to loot from them. This has much relevance to high technology, where it makes sense for those not in the knows to loot from those who are; looting knowledge is much easier than the many hours and much reading and experimentation it takes to figure out how these computer things work. Therefore, help vampires. Digital goods on account of their ease of storage will also be prone to looting.

Another important point is the inequality in invention, or more likely, inequality of the productive application of invention: it is not productive (for society) to invent the printing press if you then shelve it to work on the next cool thing. Some people are rather less goal-oriented than others; Ken Thompson comes to mind. He says so himself!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o

One could also contrast Steve "hack on cool things" Wozniak with Steve "run a megacorp" Jobs.

And then even in a democracy those who are more equal then others will pragmatically flee (if their assets are mobile) should the tax burden become too high for them (America did somehow sustain a 90% tax on the rich, not too long ago) or if their assets are not mobile they may support an autocrat who may let them keep more wealth than the democrats would tax away (or the autocrat might send them flying from a window). On the other hand, excess inequality might put political stability at risk, which is the polite way to say "plutocrats get fed feet first to a wood chipper". Hey, life ain't easy.

Another point is that modern warfare requires professionals due to its complexity. In technology, the modern web likewise requires professionals to wrangle it. Simpler protocols may be more equalizing as folks with lower skill levels can better get up to speed and innovate with them. "All 1,400 Google Chrome CLI flags" is trending on Hacker News right now. And then there is--danger! bloat!--the following HTML specification:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/

I did warn you, for folks who followed that link.

However, web software can be produced for lower skill folks to leverage (WordPress and whatnot) so it may not be certain that other protocols will allow better innovation--provided suitable tools are made available on the web while the high priests at Google keep the sacred VM afloat, more or less without too many security faults. Big things also tend towards authoritarianism...

And, one might possibly anticipate political disruptions due to the recent rise of computer technology, which may point to times being more interesting to live in than one otherwise might desire.

Uh. I may have wandered a bit there. Anyways, Boix book good. Much food-thought. Read! (or die)

Criticisms

Boix calls a life of foraging "nasty, brutish, and short" and claims that health was "rather similar" across agricultural and foraging societies. Other accounts indicate that foraging took rather less work than agriculture, and granted rather more liesure than moderns enjoy--European moderns, anyways; wage-adoring Americans certainly earn little by way of vacation--and one can find indications that early agriculture had a not so good impact on health, especially for those towards the slave end of the stick. But this is a pretty weak criticism...

tags #politics