From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Jan 08 2003 - 18:46:10 MST
Nathan's list started
> 1. High Encouragement of Individuality
> 2. Little Social Exclusion
> 3. Shared Social Value Complexes
> 4. Almost No limits of Information
and there was a suggested addition that I don't recall
exactly.
And then George adds
> >(My dominant societies theory may have just been a natural random occurrence
> >of creative thought? or was it a reaction to some environmental stimulus?)
>
> I think your thesis is an interesting one, and I strongly suggest you look
> up Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies."
Yes, the greatest book from which to begin all inquiries of this sort.
> He comes up with a number of theories that explain why some societies do
> better than others, including geography, access to resources, and most
> importantly, access to data. He shows quite convincingly that the most
> successful and creative societies in history were those that interacted
> regularly and openly with neighboring societies and exchanged information
> and technologies.
No less than three (3!) books recently and soon to be read
by my book discussion group emphasizes two additional
extremely important characteristics that separate prosperous
powerful societies from the non-functional:
1. High regard for and protection of individual rights
2. Reliable safeguards and legal rights protecting private property.
See "The Elusive Quest for Growth", by William Easterly,
"The Noblest Triumph", by Tom Bethell, and "Power and
Prosperity" by Mancur Olsen. Very perceptive and informative
books all.
Mancur Olsen writes, near the end of his book, speaking of
two conditions that he has spend 194 pages so far explaining,
"As we have seen, the first of these conditions is the paradoxical
condition of secure and well-defined individual rights. Rather
than being a luxury that only rich countries can afford,
individual rights are essential to obtaining the vast gains
from the sophisticated transactions described in Chapter 9...."
"The second condition required for a thriving market economy
is simply the absence of predation of any kind. Some predation,
such as that which occurs in the war of each against all in
a Hobbesian anarchy, or that undertaken when autocrats or
other governments abrogate the rights of their subjects by
confiscating property or repudiating contracts, is already
excluded if the rights hold that are emphasized here, so we
not need to list it separately.
"But one other kind of predation can and often does occur even
in societies with the best individual rights. This is predation
through lobbying that obtains special-interest legislation or
regulation and through cartelization or collusion to fix prices
or wages. As the argument outlined in Chapter 4 shows,
collective action to lobby or to fix prices generates a
benefit that goes to everyone in an industry, occupation,
or group, whether or not the individual or firm in question
has made a contribution to the lobbying or price fixing.
Because of this incentive to free ride, it takes a long time
for collecting action to emerge in most industries or groups,
so only societies that are stable for some time have many
coalitions for collective action."
Olson cites this process as crucial to explaining the
economic demise of the Soviet Union, which, when it was
young, had the ability (through purges, mainly) to
resist collusions occurring at many levels. But he
also presents a good case that our democracies also
are undergoing a very similar "sclerosis", with the
most discouraging prospects.
Lee
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