1) The successful in NWE choose to have more kids and accept downward mobility for some of those kids. This isn't a given, lots of elites have chosen lower fertility as the price to maintain status for their descendants. The moment they run out of conquests and the pie is fixed they start restricting fertility.
2) The English and Dutch were the most equal societies out there. Noble Rights, Merchant Rights, Peasant Rights, violence as criminal rather than civil matter. The winners of the English Civil War were people who wanted Puritan consumption ethics and the Roundheads were proto-communists.
It's generally been the most equal societies that produce the technological advancement. Tsarist Russia, the Confederacy, the Spanish Empire, etc didn't.
Even really good unequal societies today (say Singapore or Hong Kong or Dubai) are good at being tax havens and finance hubs, but aren't producing frontier technological development. Denmark gave us GLP1s.
Oh and those super unequal societies have terrible fertility rates.
I would posit the following:
1) Having a slave caste is really bad for a society, because it makes exploiting the slave caste rather then being more productive the path for smart people to get rich.
2) I think you want your top X% to simultaneously feel safe and uncomfortable. Safe enough to have kids and take chances. Uncomfortable enough to feel like kind of a loser if you don't reach your potential.
Interesting ideas, and I agree with your final conclusions re slave castes and having a culture of striving, although I’m not sure I agree wholly with your path there.
1) I thought most of the examples of pre-birth-control lower elite fertility are special cases or definitional. Like Rome, for example - they had Silphium for bc, AND elite Roman men were only low fertility if you excluded all the children they kept begetting on their slaves, which was basically a definitional thing (only 2 high status Romans can generate another Roman). From an absolute fecundity standpoint, they had plenty of kids, and most of those kids had severe downward mobility in the sense they were destined to be literal slaves. And elite fertility in that sense was a problem way back, even at the time of Augustus when lots of the empire remained to still be conquered, so not really driven by shrunken horizons.
The main difference for the northwestern europeans was they seem to have been more likely to be monogamous and father more of those children within the direct marital bonds, which was no doubt helped by elites culturally no longer having 10+ comely house slaves around them at all times. But even then, young lords dallying with the maids and female staff seems to have been pretty common even in NWE?
This feels more like a cultural shift to me, and lower elite fertility globally today seems mostly driven by birth control, France getting in earlier than that notwithstanding.
2) Yes, I think this is important and true.
Countries where leadership is mainly about “taking” from the peasantry are moribund for the same reasons as the Han and Roman empires, and to have broad scale productivity increases, you need a freer legal and economic regime.
Still, it wasn’t “equal” at all in the wealth or income senses - certainly when we think of Victorian england we tend to focus on the tippy top people, but this is the same time period as Oliver Twist and Scrooge and all of that, too - the common people, ie ~80%+ of the population, did not live nice lives at all.
You point to Singapore and Dubai as non-innovators, but what about China? Income Gini of .5, massively unequal, aka “worse than Roman empire” inequality, and they innovate like you wouldn’t believe. They’ve pretty much singlehandedly been driving most small molecule and biologicals pharma innovations in the past few years, in true frontier development style. They’re world leaders in battery and EV technology, and you should see some of the capability * price points in vehicles BYD offers everywhere in the world but the US (because the US bans their cars within the US to block the $20k SUV’s that would eat the Big 3’s lunch. And at the top end, I’ve often wished I could buy a Yangwang U8 or U9 outside of China). They’ve proven themselves as adept as the Japanese in terms of scaling the manufacturing value chain to the “actual innovation” peaks, in my own opinion.
I think city states struggle with innovation for structural and broader ecosystem reasons, in addition to needing larger populations to generate enough overall people at various talent tiers to enable the clusters of concentrated talent that drive real innovation.
1) the Roman elite was replaced genetically by servile people from the east. The genetics of the empire were genuinely different than the republic. I think razib Kahn has something on this, but if not him it’s out there.
Fucking slave girls kind of is the definition of dysgenics. If your elite women aren’t breeding then you shredding half your genes every generation and replacing them with half slave genes.
I would say Rome had reached its boundaries by Augustus but that seems like a tangent.
1b) per Clark it was the fertility of successful yeomen farmers and merchants driving differential fertility, not lords. Just ordinary industrious people in successful fecund marriages.
You talking about the top 10-20%, but aristocrats were only like the top 1-2%.
2) I didn’t say NWE was communist, just there was more equality especially in the form of more human/legal rights than existed in the rest of the world.
3) China has 1.3 billion people with an average iq of 105. Glad to see they’re doing something with it finally. It’s not clear to me that their innovation rate is special on a per capita basis.
Google says they have a Gini of 0.46, which is less then the USA at 0.49.
There does seem to be some debate on th validity of chinas gini coefficient, though everyone seems to agree a major driver is people in the rural areas that can’t gain a legal right to move to the cities. If you just look at urban China gini goes down.
Singapore, Japan, and Taiwan all have ginis in the 0.3X range (genuinely surprised on Singapore, but perhaps shouldn’t be).
On China’s gini, I’m using Scheidel’s figures re China vs Rome vs America. China could have become more equal since 2016, but having done business there for years, I honestly doubt it, and suspect fiddling with the numbers. But yes, it’s a bit of a mess to compare Gini’s, because you need to be careful to compare income or wealth, use the same time period, use the same source, know whether it’s pre-or-post redistribution, and more.
On Singapore, it’s basically paradise - 90% of people own their own homes, old age spending is mandatorily saved throughout the career and put away to grow for decades (versus the maximally stupid US way, where you just immediately spend whatever you take in, and your dependencies and debt grow with time but not any contributions), greenery is rampant and public parks abundant, public transport is spotless and on time, there’s no traffic, health care is affordable, there’s no homeless people, disorder, or crime. If you set out to design any given system or political answer the smart way, that’s what they’re doing already. They basically get everything right. Except fertility.
Taiwan is like 80% as good as Singapore on all the civic measures, PLUS they have actually good food (and a noticeably more attractive average population than both China and Singapore, which I attribute to all the former Chinese elites having gone there after the civil war). Also some of the lowest fertility.
Enough people gush over Japan I’m not going to bother (I feel like nobody gushes over Singapore or Taiwan to the degree they really deserve), but obviously that’s for a lot of great reasons. Also losing mainly on fertility.
Much like when you live and work in a Tier 1 city and look around at the other high performers you know, the people you actually admire and wish there were more of in the world - all the smartest, most interesting, most poly-competent and coolest people you know? Largely opting out of kids! One if you’re lucky! Well, that’s all the nice asian countries writ large.
Wealth is hard to measure. It's certainly "real", but unrealized gains are speculation. Russia owned a ton of western assets. What did they end up being "worth"? East Asia similarly owns a ton of treasuries. But are we ever actually going to send real goods back to them in exchange for dollars?
The land under the imperial palace in Japan was "worth" all of California in the 1990s or something like that.
If Singapore suddenly tried to spend its sovereign wealth fund, what could it buy? What if all the East Asian sovereigns did the same? What could they trade those assets for if they flooded the market?
One reason I don't like considering wealth inequality is it's hard to measure. It also performs inversely to other positive indicators. If the stock market is up and unemployment is down "wealth inequality" has gotten worse.
Even physical assets are hard to value. It's good that China has a lot more apartments, but who's going to live in them if they have no children? What are those apartments "worth"?
Income/consumption inequality is "realized" and more measurable.
The history is interesting, but I don't buy the argument that the only two options are "maker" or "taker" as you laid them out. After all, for most of human history you could have said that there was no alternative to the taker model, yet here we are. Of course capitalism with billionaires is better than what came before, but we can also try to imagine better ways of doing things that don't produce as much inequality. And I say that as a squishy center-left liberal who is basically pro-capitalism in broad strokes.
I agree we can always try to imagine better ways, because “better” is an amorphous and moving target, and can differ significantly between polities.
But I disagree it will be in ways that won’t produce as much inequality - because as long as there’s peace and prosperity, there will be inequality, and it will rise, and that’s the dominant trend we’ve seen for thousands of years, across many diverse peoples and governments and ways of doing things, as Scheidel has shown.
Also, I’m curious on what other options besides “maker” and “taker” you’d point to, particularly historically. They seem like they pretty comprehensively cover the space to me, but that could certainly be a lack of imagination on my part. Perhaps you’re saying they’re not binary / exclusive at the person or society level? I agree there, any given person, regime, or society consists of a blend of both, but it’s pretty easy to discern a preponderance in one direction or the other to my eyes.
The Dissident Right is largely a wordcel revolt against makers and practical thinkers. Evola was a nebbish who hated industry and modernity because he couldn't picture gears in his head. This is not to deny that the modern elite is often worthless and gay, but that would be solved by fewer regulations and more competition, not some retarded 'Nietszchean aristocracy' (historical aristocrats were ugly and smelled bad btw).
The two interesting things to me are:
1) The successful in NWE choose to have more kids and accept downward mobility for some of those kids. This isn't a given, lots of elites have chosen lower fertility as the price to maintain status for their descendants. The moment they run out of conquests and the pie is fixed they start restricting fertility.
2) The English and Dutch were the most equal societies out there. Noble Rights, Merchant Rights, Peasant Rights, violence as criminal rather than civil matter. The winners of the English Civil War were people who wanted Puritan consumption ethics and the Roundheads were proto-communists.
It's generally been the most equal societies that produce the technological advancement. Tsarist Russia, the Confederacy, the Spanish Empire, etc didn't.
Even really good unequal societies today (say Singapore or Hong Kong or Dubai) are good at being tax havens and finance hubs, but aren't producing frontier technological development. Denmark gave us GLP1s.
Oh and those super unequal societies have terrible fertility rates.
I would posit the following:
1) Having a slave caste is really bad for a society, because it makes exploiting the slave caste rather then being more productive the path for smart people to get rich.
2) I think you want your top X% to simultaneously feel safe and uncomfortable. Safe enough to have kids and take chances. Uncomfortable enough to feel like kind of a loser if you don't reach your potential.
Interesting ideas, and I agree with your final conclusions re slave castes and having a culture of striving, although I’m not sure I agree wholly with your path there.
1) I thought most of the examples of pre-birth-control lower elite fertility are special cases or definitional. Like Rome, for example - they had Silphium for bc, AND elite Roman men were only low fertility if you excluded all the children they kept begetting on their slaves, which was basically a definitional thing (only 2 high status Romans can generate another Roman). From an absolute fecundity standpoint, they had plenty of kids, and most of those kids had severe downward mobility in the sense they were destined to be literal slaves. And elite fertility in that sense was a problem way back, even at the time of Augustus when lots of the empire remained to still be conquered, so not really driven by shrunken horizons.
The main difference for the northwestern europeans was they seem to have been more likely to be monogamous and father more of those children within the direct marital bonds, which was no doubt helped by elites culturally no longer having 10+ comely house slaves around them at all times. But even then, young lords dallying with the maids and female staff seems to have been pretty common even in NWE?
This feels more like a cultural shift to me, and lower elite fertility globally today seems mostly driven by birth control, France getting in earlier than that notwithstanding.
2) Yes, I think this is important and true.
Countries where leadership is mainly about “taking” from the peasantry are moribund for the same reasons as the Han and Roman empires, and to have broad scale productivity increases, you need a freer legal and economic regime.
Still, it wasn’t “equal” at all in the wealth or income senses - certainly when we think of Victorian england we tend to focus on the tippy top people, but this is the same time period as Oliver Twist and Scrooge and all of that, too - the common people, ie ~80%+ of the population, did not live nice lives at all.
You point to Singapore and Dubai as non-innovators, but what about China? Income Gini of .5, massively unequal, aka “worse than Roman empire” inequality, and they innovate like you wouldn’t believe. They’ve pretty much singlehandedly been driving most small molecule and biologicals pharma innovations in the past few years, in true frontier development style. They’re world leaders in battery and EV technology, and you should see some of the capability * price points in vehicles BYD offers everywhere in the world but the US (because the US bans their cars within the US to block the $20k SUV’s that would eat the Big 3’s lunch. And at the top end, I’ve often wished I could buy a Yangwang U8 or U9 outside of China). They’ve proven themselves as adept as the Japanese in terms of scaling the manufacturing value chain to the “actual innovation” peaks, in my own opinion.
I think city states struggle with innovation for structural and broader ecosystem reasons, in addition to needing larger populations to generate enough overall people at various talent tiers to enable the clusters of concentrated talent that drive real innovation.
1) the Roman elite was replaced genetically by servile people from the east. The genetics of the empire were genuinely different than the republic. I think razib Kahn has something on this, but if not him it’s out there.
Fucking slave girls kind of is the definition of dysgenics. If your elite women aren’t breeding then you shredding half your genes every generation and replacing them with half slave genes.
I would say Rome had reached its boundaries by Augustus but that seems like a tangent.
1b) per Clark it was the fertility of successful yeomen farmers and merchants driving differential fertility, not lords. Just ordinary industrious people in successful fecund marriages.
You talking about the top 10-20%, but aristocrats were only like the top 1-2%.
2) I didn’t say NWE was communist, just there was more equality especially in the form of more human/legal rights than existed in the rest of the world.
3) China has 1.3 billion people with an average iq of 105. Glad to see they’re doing something with it finally. It’s not clear to me that their innovation rate is special on a per capita basis.
Google says they have a Gini of 0.46, which is less then the USA at 0.49.
There does seem to be some debate on th validity of chinas gini coefficient, though everyone seems to agree a major driver is people in the rural areas that can’t gain a legal right to move to the cities. If you just look at urban China gini goes down.
Singapore, Japan, and Taiwan all have ginis in the 0.3X range (genuinely surprised on Singapore, but perhaps shouldn’t be).
Yeah, all fair points.
On China’s gini, I’m using Scheidel’s figures re China vs Rome vs America. China could have become more equal since 2016, but having done business there for years, I honestly doubt it, and suspect fiddling with the numbers. But yes, it’s a bit of a mess to compare Gini’s, because you need to be careful to compare income or wealth, use the same time period, use the same source, know whether it’s pre-or-post redistribution, and more.
On Singapore, it’s basically paradise - 90% of people own their own homes, old age spending is mandatorily saved throughout the career and put away to grow for decades (versus the maximally stupid US way, where you just immediately spend whatever you take in, and your dependencies and debt grow with time but not any contributions), greenery is rampant and public parks abundant, public transport is spotless and on time, there’s no traffic, health care is affordable, there’s no homeless people, disorder, or crime. If you set out to design any given system or political answer the smart way, that’s what they’re doing already. They basically get everything right. Except fertility.
Taiwan is like 80% as good as Singapore on all the civic measures, PLUS they have actually good food (and a noticeably more attractive average population than both China and Singapore, which I attribute to all the former Chinese elites having gone there after the civil war). Also some of the lowest fertility.
Enough people gush over Japan I’m not going to bother (I feel like nobody gushes over Singapore or Taiwan to the degree they really deserve), but obviously that’s for a lot of great reasons. Also losing mainly on fertility.
Much like when you live and work in a Tier 1 city and look around at the other high performers you know, the people you actually admire and wish there were more of in the world - all the smartest, most interesting, most poly-competent and coolest people you know? Largely opting out of kids! One if you’re lucky! Well, that’s all the nice asian countries writ large.
Wealth is hard to measure. It's certainly "real", but unrealized gains are speculation. Russia owned a ton of western assets. What did they end up being "worth"? East Asia similarly owns a ton of treasuries. But are we ever actually going to send real goods back to them in exchange for dollars?
The land under the imperial palace in Japan was "worth" all of California in the 1990s or something like that.
If Singapore suddenly tried to spend its sovereign wealth fund, what could it buy? What if all the East Asian sovereigns did the same? What could they trade those assets for if they flooded the market?
One reason I don't like considering wealth inequality is it's hard to measure. It also performs inversely to other positive indicators. If the stock market is up and unemployment is down "wealth inequality" has gotten worse.
Even physical assets are hard to value. It's good that China has a lot more apartments, but who's going to live in them if they have no children? What are those apartments "worth"?
Income/consumption inequality is "realized" and more measurable.
Btw, obviously I don’t mean equality as “we give unlimited shit welfare to the underclass”. I find most of the modern welfare state repulsive.
The history is interesting, but I don't buy the argument that the only two options are "maker" or "taker" as you laid them out. After all, for most of human history you could have said that there was no alternative to the taker model, yet here we are. Of course capitalism with billionaires is better than what came before, but we can also try to imagine better ways of doing things that don't produce as much inequality. And I say that as a squishy center-left liberal who is basically pro-capitalism in broad strokes.
I agree we can always try to imagine better ways, because “better” is an amorphous and moving target, and can differ significantly between polities.
But I disagree it will be in ways that won’t produce as much inequality - because as long as there’s peace and prosperity, there will be inequality, and it will rise, and that’s the dominant trend we’ve seen for thousands of years, across many diverse peoples and governments and ways of doing things, as Scheidel has shown.
Also, I’m curious on what other options besides “maker” and “taker” you’d point to, particularly historically. They seem like they pretty comprehensively cover the space to me, but that could certainly be a lack of imagination on my part. Perhaps you’re saying they’re not binary / exclusive at the person or society level? I agree there, any given person, regime, or society consists of a blend of both, but it’s pretty easy to discern a preponderance in one direction or the other to my eyes.
I am incredibly interested in reading this guy. Which book would you recommend first?
I found Escape to be more interesting by a fair margin, but I’ve always been an “empires” history nerd.
The Dissident Right is largely a wordcel revolt against makers and practical thinkers. Evola was a nebbish who hated industry and modernity because he couldn't picture gears in his head. This is not to deny that the modern elite is often worthless and gay, but that would be solved by fewer regulations and more competition, not some retarded 'Nietszchean aristocracy' (historical aristocrats were ugly and smelled bad btw).